Introduction
One of my earliest
childhood memories is of my first holiday abroad in San Remo, Italy. I was
about 4 years’ old. My younger brother and I were paddling in the water and mum
had told us to be careful because the shallow water dipped dramatically a few
feet into the sea.
Of course, we didn’t
ever pay a blind bit of notice to anything our mum ever said and both of us
started to sink as the sea bed under our feet suddenly disappeared. I remember
looking up, my mouth starting to fill with water, and seeing two hands plunging
into the sea - to my dismay - pulling my brother to safety,
while I was abandoned and just left to die. And of course, she pulled
me out immediately afterwards, but it seemed, from my perspective, to take her
all day.
I totally understand
why, for many people, the fear of drowning is the greatest fear of them all.
The sense of panic and anxiety as all your airways fill with water is really
quite terrifying.
Background
For the last two weeks,
we’ve been thinking about the story of Jonah, this children’s favourite from
the Bible about a man who tries to run away from God and ends up in a watery
grave.
Why does he run away?
Because God calls him to go on a mission trip to a city, many miles from home,
called Nineveh. But would you run away from that? What could be better?
The glamour of global
travel, a chance to discover the world, to sample the delights of international
cuisine, to see the sights and come home with some souvenirs…
Like Jonah, the Church
has been given a message, but often today, it isn’t preaching it. Our message
is simple. Here it is. God loves you so much that he gave his one and only Son,
that whoever believes in him shall not eternally perish but eternal live.
He calls everyone here
to respond to that by turning away from a me-first life, and towards a
God-first life, following Jesus.
Following Jesus can be
costly. Jesus himself said it would be. But it’s the key to life in all its
fullness. And that’s what Annie and Nick did today is all about.
For Jonah, the issue is
that Nineveh, the place God calls him to go, is a tough gig. It’s the town we
now call Mosul, in Iraq. It's been in the news this past year. The people
living there then were the direct ancestors of IS and the Taliban. They
routinely impale and flay alive anyone they don’t like.
God’s call to Jonah
would be like someone saying to you, “I want you go to the Middle East
with an ‘I Love Jesus’ tee shirt, a truck full of Bible leaflets and a portable
PA, then I want you to set up in the town square and tell everyone they’re
doing it all wrong.” How many of you would say, “Sounds great”?
Jonah doesn’t fancy
that any more than you would, so he buys a ticket and boards a ship heading as
far as it is possible to go in the opposite direction. While he’s on the ship,
God sends an almighty storm, and Jonah gets thrown overboard into the raging sea.
Prayer in Times of
Crisis
Tony Bullimore was one
of Britain’s most experienced transatlantic yachtsmen. He died in July this
year. On 5 January 1997 his sixty-foot sailing boat, Exide Challenger, capsized
in the icy waters between Australia and Antarctica, two months into the Vendée
Globe single-handed round-the-world yacht race. The keel snapped off in
fifty-foot waves, rendering the boat unstable so it turned over, upside
down.
For four days, he was
stuck in a dark, noisy, wet, upside-down world with massive waves and a
temperature just above freezing. All his food supplies were lost except one bar
of chocolate. He suffered terribly from seasickness and had to draw breath from
only a few feet of air between the water level and the floor of his upturned
boat.
He was more than a
thousand miles from the nearest land. As his air supply slowly diminished he
began to pray that he would be rescued. The Royal Australian Navy’s satellite
surveillance pinpointed the position of all the yachts, and noticed his wasn’t
advancing, so they sent out a rescue team. Four days after capsizing, he heard
a tapping sound on the side of his boat.
His first words when he
emerged were, “Thank God, it’s a miracle. I feel like I have been born all over
again. I feel like a new man. I feel I have been brought back to life again.”
I tell that story,
because Jonah, like Tony Bullimore, faced with almost certain death, also
turned to prayer as his chances of survival looked hopeless.
People pray in a crisis
like that. Almost everyone does. Sometimes it takes a crisis to get them
to pray.
And Jonah 2, what we
had read earlier, is the words of a man Who is face to face with certain death.
It includes parts from about a dozen different Psalms in the Bible. It’s
amazing how scriptures or words of a hymn often come to mind and can carry you
through in times of distress.
Jonah’s prayer is the
language of a drowning man. It’s the cry of a man who has stared into the abyss
and accepted that his time is up. He’s resigned to the inevitable. He’s been
hurled into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, he says.
“Waves and breakers
sweep over me again and again.” His head bobs up and down until the waters
finally engulf him and he feels himself sinking Dow, down, down, then the
sensation of brushing against seaweed and touching the sea bed.
And as Jonah gives up
the fight to stay alive, he describes what goes though his mind. He really
thinks, “this is it, I am going to die.” He feels that he has been cast out
from God's presence and it’s all his fault.
But crucially, this is
the moment he decides to stop running, and turn back. This is his turning
point, his moment of surrender. He comes to senses. I was going one way,
running away from the presence of God. I’m going to stop doing that and go the
right way, even if it’s the last thing I do.
The Bible says,
“Salvation comes from the Lord.” That moment of insight Jonah had was actually
a gift from God. It’s not that Jonah pulls himself up by his bootstraps and
turns himself around. It is when Jonah says “I am in the pit and utterly
helpless” that God steps in and lifts him out.
As we know, the story
goes that he was swallowed up and was in the belly of a great fish for three
days. An extended period of claustrophobic darkness in a fish. That probably won’t
happen to you.
But your “belly of the fish experience” can be just as traumatic and dark. It can be dealing with failure. It can be living with a chronic illness that God has not yet healed. It can be the anxiety of crushing financial worries. It can be the prolonged and deep sorrow of bereavement. It can be fighting to recover happiness in a marriage gone stale. It can be unwanted singleness. It can be an assault on your reputation by someone determined to discredit you. (We’ve had a bit of that as a church just this week in fact).
Jesus said, “blessed
are you when people hate you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you
because of me.” When, not if. As a Christian you can expect it. The thing is
this; God will never keep you in the belly of whatever fish you’re in longer
than you need. And the Bible says that in every test you endure, God provides a
way of salvation.
People often think that
we know we’re children of God if everything is going great and all our problems
are sorted. But that is not how it works. The book of Hebrews says that we know
we are children of God because he takes us through times of chastening and
discipline. That’s how you know you’re a child of God.
Resurrection
Some people believe
that it was a miracle that this man stayed alive for three days and three
nights in a fish with little or no air to breathe, to say nothing of his
exposure to digestive juices.
But I don’t think Jonah
was alive in the fish. When you read this chapter carefully, you see that the
water overwhelms him and he sinks to the seabed. You can’t descend to the
bottom of the Mediterranean in one breath.
“When my life was
fading away, I remembered the Lord…” he says. He talks about finding himself
deep in the realm of the departed.
No, I think it says here
that Jonah is already dead before he hits the bottom of the sea and is
swallowed lifeless.
When he was 24 in 1980,
atheist New Zealander Ian McCormack got stung by a box jellyfish on a diving
holiday in Mauritius. The box jellyfish is one of the most venomous creatures
in the world and death from its stings can occur within minutes. Ian was rushed
to hospital, and they tried to save him, but after a while his ECG line went
flat and he was pronounced dead.
15-20 minutes later, to
the astonishment of the medical staff there, his heart monitor started again.
And Ian describes being conscious during that time when his heart had stopped,
in a dreamy state in which his life flashed before him and in which he felt
detached from his body.
He says he met with God
and promised to turn the direction of his life around. Only later did he
discover that his mum, a devout Christian, was praying for him in New Zealand
at that exact time, not knowing of the grave danger he was in.
Well, I’ll let you
decide whether you believe that story. Look it up online; there's plenty of
information about it. But it reminds me of what Jonah went through.
People came to Jesus
once and said, “Give us a sign to prove you are the Son of God.” And he
replied, “The only sign you’ll get is the sign of Jonah. He came out of a fish
with the marks of death, and so will I from the grave.”
Several people have
tried to rubbish the resurrection of Jesus by researching it and writing a book
to explain how it was a big misunderstanding or a fabrication. Oxford Professor
Gilbert West did it in 1747. Lawyer Frank Morison did it in 1930. Investigative
journalist Lee Strobel did it in 1998.
All three began as
atheists. All three meticulously sifted the evidence. All three changed their
minds during the course of their research. All three became Christians. And all
three wrote a completely different book than the one they had planned,
defending the Bible’s assertion that Jesus rose from the dead and is alive
today.
Ending
Annie and Nick have
gone down into the waters today and come up again afterwards as a visual
testimony of what has happened in their lives.
The old life they lived
before they encountered Jesus Christ with all its values and ideas has been
left at the bottom of that pool, and as they’ve come up out of the water,
they’ve started to breathe again. A whole new life has started.
I’ve told this story
before, so apologies if you’ve heard it already but I like it. Following the
sinking of the Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912, the ship’s owners,
the White Star Line, placed two noticeboards outside its offices. They were
marked “Known to be saved” and “Known to be lost.”
And as the fate of each
passenger was confirmed, their name was added to one or other of the boards.
People would wait and watch to see if their loved ones’ names would go on the
“saved” or “lost” board.
The thing is, you had
to be either one or the other; saved or lost. The same is true spiritually for
a world drifting from God and drowning in sin: either your name is in the Book
of Life (known to be saved) or it is not (in which case you're known to be
lost).
Which board is your
name on? Do you know? And could this be the day for you, like Jonah, when you
turn round and start again?
Let’s pray…
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 16 September 2018
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