Turning Back to God (Jonah 2.1-10)

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

Running Away from God (Jonah 1.1-3)

Introduction

We’re starting a five-part series on the Book of Jonah today. Do you know, I wasn’t sure when it was the last time I preached on this book so I checked my records with a computer and I found, to my amazement, that I have never preached on Jonah before. That’s 834 sermons in English, and 465 in French. Some of you are thinking, “all that practice, and he’s still useless…”

Jonah is, of course, one of the best-known stories in the Old Testament. It’s right up there with Noah’s Ark, Samson and Delilah, David and Goliath, and Daniel in the Lion’s Den. Many of us will know it from childhood.

So, this is a first for me. And yet Jonah is a preacher’s dream; it’s got action, adventure, plot twists and humour. It’s only four chapters long, so you can cover it in a month. And to top it all, there’s a clear link to Jesus, as we’ll see.

Jonah is also the subject of many funny stories and jokes.

There’s a Gary Larson “Far Side” cartoon I once saw showing a bearded man standing at his front door, dripping wet, with his clothes in tatters. His wife opens the door, takes one look at her dishevelled husband and says, “For crying out loud, Jonah! Three days late, covered with slime and smelling like fish. What tall story do I have to swallow this time?”

Well, there’s plenty of comedy in Jonah; it’s almost slapstick at times, there’s a Monty Python absurdity about it, and it’s full of irony too for those with a drier sense of humour.

Summary

You’ll find Jonah in the middle of the minor prophets, but it is quite unlike any of the other 14 prophetic books in the Bible. It’s not a collection of dire predictions and warnings. It’s a short story about the adventures of a reluctant preacher.

And the story is, I hardly need to remind you, about a man who tries to run away from the God who calls him to preach in the great city of Nineveh. Most preachers warm to the idea of addressing a great crowd but, in this case, it’s an unpalatable message to an already hostile congregation.

So, he boards a ship which sails into a raging storm. The superstitious sailors draw lots to determine whose fault it is, find out Jonah is to blame and throw him, with barely a whimper of protest, into the sea. Whereupon Jonah gets swallowed by a large fish that later vomits him up on a beach.

Again, God calls him to Nineveh and, this time, he goes. Amazingly, Nineveh responds with mass repentance, so God relents and does not bring about the destruction he had threatened.

Jonah then goes into a sulk and says to God, “I knew you’d do that! I knew you’d forgive them! Well, I’ve had enough. I want to die.”

Then there’s a bizarre epilogue. God provides a plant to give him shade - and Jonah’s happy about it - but he forgets to thank God. Then God sends a worm to eat the plant, removing the shade. Jonah gets sunburnt, and he complains. And it ends abruptly with God saying, “You know what Jonah? You need to take one hard look in the mirror! You care more about your comfort of a bit of shade from the sun than about the lives of 120,000 people and their animals.

And that’s it. The book ends hanging in the air with a rhetorical question from God. The end. That’s the story.

Background

Since early times people have wondered what kind of book God has given us here.

Some people, of course, write it off as pure fiction; a tall tale or fairy story, much like Jack and the Beanstalk or Cinderella. Many treat the book of Jonah as worthy of ridicule.

Others, some Christians among them, see it as true, but in the same way that the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan are true. So, they would classify the book of Jonah as a parable; an earthly story with a heavenly point. And the point is that God calls us to reach the entire world, not to stay in our comfortable, holy huddle.

Others, and this is a view popular with Jews, see it more as an allegory, where each detail of the story has a deeper meaning. Like Animal Farm.

So Jonah represents Israel, the large fish is the Babylonian power that swallows Israel up, the response of Nineveh is the hoped-for conversion of the Gentiles, and Jonah’s complaint at the end is about the Jewish objection to opening up their religion to non-Jews. So, they would see it as a kind of satirical story.

Approaches 2 and 3 see Jonah as a story that somebody wrote, not with the intention of deceiving people but actually helping them to see something that they were spiritually blind to.

Others take Jonah at face value; perhaps stylised, but basically a factual account of real, miraculous events that actually happened. And they do for three reasons.

Firstly, 2 Kings 14.25 presents Jonah as a real historical figure, not a made up one like Harry Potter or Miss Marple. Jonah, son of Amittai. Same name, same father’s name. He lived and prophesied in the reign of the evil king Jeroboam II.

Secondly, the book seems to be presented as history. Not only is the central character a real person, the places are real too; there’s no Lilliput or Middle Earth. Joppa and Tarshish were both busy trading ports with ships. Nineveh actually existed as a city.

And thirdly, Jesus referred to the book of Jonah on at least two occasions and seems each time to have accepted it, as it stands, as a historical account.

As we’ll see over the next few weeks, Jesus makes two main points from the story of Jonah; a comparison and a contrast.

Firstly, a comparison: just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. In other words, Jonah’s being swallowed up is a foreshadowing of Jesus being in the tomb three days before rising again.

And secondly, a contrast: unlike the Ninevites, who humble themselves and repent when Jonah points them to God, Jesus said that the people of his generation don’t listen to him and will go on to reject him.

Incidentally, that is a very, very powerful point right there. Those who refuse Christ now, Jesus says, will one day meet the people of Nineveh at the last judgement, who will look at them and say, “We repented even before Jesus came when Jonah spoke to us. But you refuse to listen even after hearing the words of Jesus himself.”

So – fairy story, parable, allegory or history? What do you think? I think it does talk about Israel’s reluctance to be a light to the Gentiles and I think there are lessons about not staying in our comfort zone. But it seems clear that Jesus spoke of Jonah as a real historical figure and he treated the story as factual. And that’s decisive for me. I’m not going to stand here and tell you the Son of God was naive or mistaken.

Hearing from God

Well, that’s a very long introduction, but I hope it sets the scene and will help you get to grips with the whole book. Now let’s get into the text.

“The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.’”

God calls. God speaks. We’re not told how Jonah heard from God. We’re not told where, or when, but Jonah must have heard God’s voice distinctly and clearly because in v3 he runs away.

How do you hear from God? Obviously, he speaks primarily through the Bible. This is God’s word for all places and all times for all people. I hope you’ll never complain to me that God is silent if your Bible is always closed.

But God’s word to Jonah was a specific call found nowhere in Scripture. How do you hear from God about your work, your relationships, your home, your money, your ministry? How do you hear from God for others?

God speaks through circumstances (because he opens doors and closes them). He speaks through the peace we have in prayer – or the lack of it. He speaks through the counsel of mature believers. He speaks through dreams and visions. And there is a prophetic gift that some have in greater measure than others, where God speaks through a clear, inner impression.

I shared a story in August, but many of you were away, so I’ll tell it again.

At New Wine Inspire a speaker from York, told an amazing story from his time as a vicar in training three or four years' ago. He was in a pretty boring lecture all about clergy tax and expenses, and he was struggling to concentrate when, out of the blue, he had a strange impression that someone was standing on a street corner outside the college and that he should go up to them and invite them to become a Christian. He put it to the back of his mind, but about ten minutes later the thought returned. 'There's a woman standing on the corner of Ridley Hall Road. She hasn't seen her son in ten years. Go and speak to her and invite her to become a Christian.' Should he leave the lecture and go or should he stay? He stayed.

But a bit later a third thought entered his mind with even more detail. 'There's a woman standing on the corner of Ridley Hall Road. She hasn't seen her son in ten years. She is meeting up with him tomorrow. Go and tell her it's going to be OK and then invite her to become a Christian.' So he thought, 'Right, I'm going.' 

He went out the college gates, walked up to the corner of the road he had seen in his mind's eye and... there was a woman standing on the corner, all alone. He went up to her and introduced himself. Then he told her that he thought God just told him that she hadn't seen her son in 10 years. She burst into tears. He told her that she would see him tomorrow and that it would be OK. She confirmed that they had indeed agreed to meet up for the first time in a decade the very next day.

He then invited her to become a Christian. Understandably, she wanted to know what that was about so he took her into the College common room, made her a cup of tea and explained. It turned out that she was a witch, into the occult. But she gave her heart to Christ that day and has been walking as a new-born Christian ever since.

It says in the Bible, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets!” There’s an aspiration in Scripture that hearing from God in this way might be common. Do you want to hear from him more? Ask. Keep asking. It may be a gift he wants to give you. But like that man, and unlike Jonah, you will have to be ready to take risks.

Reluctance 

Hands up please if you have heard of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs. (Keep them up; we Anglicans need the practice) … It’s basically about the sorts of needs we all have. We all have to satisfy basic survival needs at the bottom of the pyramid first before we can work up the scale towards finding happiness and ultimate purpose and meaning.

A lot of people have heard of that. But how many of you know that Abraham Maslow also came up with something he called “the Jonah Complex”? Well, he did. To have a Jonah Complex is to evade your destiny. Maslow used to speak about it as “the fear of standing alone.”

Some of us here are paralysed by the fear having to stand alone. Maybe at work. Maybe in the family. It’s natural – few people like standing alone. But don’t miss out on what God wants to give you because of fear. Why did Jonah run from God? Because he didn’t want bad people to be forgiven (as we’ll see in Chapter 4) but first of all because he was not prepared to stand alone.

Truth is Anti- and Pro-

God said, “Preach against that great city.” People don’t like preaching that is “against” anything. People want preachers to say nice, uplifting, affirming things. People want to be entertained and walk away with a nice warm glow.

The American Presbyterian theologian R. C. Sproul, who died last year, once said, “For every truth there is a corresponding falsehood. Christians are known not only by what they believe or affirm, but also by what they reject and deny.” [Quote modified for inclusive language].

Paul said, “If I was still trying to please people I would not belong to Jesus Christ.”

False prophets only tell you what you want to hear. True prophets tell you what you need to hear. 

Jesus didn’t shrink from saying hard things. In Matthew 23 he made a sustained and devastating outburst against hypocrisy and legalism. Seven times he said, “Woe to you if...” People don’t want a Jesus like that messing up their church. But it is part of who he is.

But he also preached in Matthew 5, “Blessed are you…” and next to his 7 woes he spoke 8 blessings over those who listened to him. He spoke more blessings than woes, but he spoke both. And ministers of his gospel are required to refute error as well as commend sound teaching.

Running Away from God and Avoiding Church

So v3 says, “He ran away from the Lord,” and “he sailed for Tarshish to flee the Lord.” Did he honestly think he could get away from God? He will have known Psalm 139 written several hundred years beforehand.

“Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

If I go up to the heavens, you are there;

if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn,

if I settle on the far side of the sea,

even there… your right hand will hold me fast.”

In fact, the form of words in v3 “to flee from the Lord” in the original Hebrew usually refers to avoiding the Lord’s presence by staying away from the temple.

Whenever Christians walk in disobedience or rebellion against God, the last place they want to be is near is a church. We suddenly find it easy to be busy. We go missing for weeks. We get distracted and find all sorts of other interesting things to do on a Sunday.

So Jonah goes down to Joppa to get a ship to Tarshish. Tarshish is about as far west as Nineveh is east. Donna Levin was saying to me last week that she remembers a talk from her childhood about Jonah going down, down, down, down… down to Joppa, down in the ship’s hold, down into the sea. That’s where running away from God takes you; down, down, down… She has never forgotten it.

·         As Jonah travelled to Joppa, what was going through his mind? 

·         As he queued up to buy a ticket, was there a tug on his conscience? 

·         As he said, “Ticket to Tarshish please” did his voice crack?  

·         When the man said “Return ticket?” how long did it take him to say, “No, just a single”?

·         As he opened his wallet, and counted off the banknotes, was there a second thought in his mind?

·         As he boarded the ship and looked around to see no one from God’s people aboard, just a bunch of hard-swearing sailors, did he really feel at home?

Ending

And are you thinking you might run away from God? Throw your tickets in the bin. Get off that ship before it sails. Turn around and come home because God has something better for you. His will for your life is good, pleasing and perfect.

Let’s pray…


Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 2 September 2018