Some years ago, early in my ministry, a friend
of mine one day asked how things were going. It had been one of those weeks that became very busy with
everything but what I had planned to do.
I am a compulsive list maker, and at the beginning of each week I make a
list of my goals, tasks, meetings, and all the other things I have to do for
the week. That particular week I
had not checked many items off my list so I remarked that I could get some ministry done if it weren’t for all of the
interruptions. That was
probably not the best way to phrase what I was feeling at the moment, but it is
what I said. In his wisdom he
offered me a really great response, saying Dave,
maybe the interruptions are the ministry. That was a great response, even though the truth of it stung
me at the time. In the years
since, I have never allowed myself to forget those words, and I have tried to
live with the knowledge that much of ministry is not planned, but comes to us
in the moment, moments we sometimes think of as interruptions, because they
crash into our otherwise carefully planned schedules and lives.
As we continue our study of Jonah this morning
we come to the most familiar part of the story, where Jonah is swallowed by the
great fish and spends three days in the belly of the fish before being expelled
(that’s a more polite word than the one the Bible uses) back onto dry land. This part of the story was a great
interruption in the life of Jonah, and it was a much-needed interruption because
he has some important lessons to learn.
Follow along as I read our Scripture text for
this morning, which is Jonah 2:1-10, and then we will talk about a few of those
lessons –
1 From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord
his God.
2 He said: “In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered
me.
From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you
listened to my cry.
3 You hurled me into the depths, into
the very heart of the seas,
and the currents swirled about me;
all your waves
and breakers swept over me.
4 I said, ‘I have been banished
from your
sight;
yet I will look again toward your holy temple.’
5 The engulfing waters threatened me, the
deep surrounded me;
seaweed was wrapped around my head.
6 To the roots of the mountains I sank
down; the earth beneath barred me in forever.
But you, Lord my
God, brought my life up from the pit.
7 “When my life was ebbing away,
I remembered
you, Lord,
and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple.
8 “Those who cling to worthless idols turn
away from God’s love for them.
9 But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will
sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the
Lord.’”
10 And the Lord commanded the fish, and it
vomited Jonah onto dry land.
That ends on a rather picturesque
image, doesn’t it?
Allow me to ask you two questions
this morning to set the tone for my message. I hope you will think about them. I hope you will ponder them. I hope you will let them sink deep into your heart. First, how many interruptions have you experienced in life? By interruption, I mean
some event or experience that triggered a time of questioning, perhaps a moment
of suffering or difficulty, or perhaps a moment of conflict. Perhaps it was
recent, perhaps a long time ago. It
was a moment that interrupted your otherwise planned out schedule at that
moment in your life. And second,
did you see that interruption as an opportunity for ministry? Those interruptions that we experience
in life, those interruptions that we do not welcome and do not want, can
become, in God’s hands, what we call a teachable
moment. They are teachable
moments because they are opportunities that God can use to bring us to a moment
when we can step into a time of ministry, a ministry that can make a tremendous
difference in our lives and the lives of others.
I don’t know what was going on in
his life when God called Jonah to go to Nineveh, but going to Nineveh was obviously
not a part of Jonah’s plan. Here
is the thing about God’s interruptions in our lives – they are often moments we
would do not welcome and are moments we would avoid if at all possible, but
still they come our way, and they can become opportunities to learn something
God desires to teach us.
Jonah had some things he needed to
learn in his time of interruption, and the first one is –
1. Jonah needed to learn his love for others was too limited.
My father was a steelworker.
As he began his work in the mill he moved up to increasingly better
jobs, moving from cleaning blast furnaces to eventually a job in the lab. His job in the lab was to analyze the
purity of the steel. He would test
to see not only if the steel was impure, but how impure it was, because those
impurities weakened the steel.
Wouldn’t it be great if we had such a test for love? Wouldn’t it be great if we could
perform a test that would tell us how pure our love is and how Christ-like our
love is? A test that would tell us what are the impurities that weaken our
love. Our love is, frankly, never
as expansive as it needs to be.
Our love is, quite frankly, limited because of the many things in life
that keep us from seeing others and loving others as God intends. It is, unfortunately, a truth about our
love that we must acknowledge, and that is that it is never as pure as it needs
to be.
The story of Jonah dates to the time when the people of Israel were
coming back to their homeland after decades of captivity in Babylon. Upon their
return to their homeland they found the Babylonians had populated it with a
variety of nationalities and ethnicities, and the returning people did not at
all approve of the presence of these people in their land. Their love was not at all the pure love
that God desired it to be. They
were distrustful of those who were not like them. They were distrustful of people of other nationalities and
people of other ethnicities. They
became more tribal in their thinking and this caused them to believe that God
confined his love and grace only to them.
When you read the pages of Scripture we find God is, time after
time, seeking to stretch people’s hearts and minds to be accepting and loving of
others. In the Gospels we find
Jesus trying to open the hearts and minds of people to love others. In the letters of Paul we find him
encouraging the churches not reject the Gentile people. This is the lesson God sought to teach
to Jonah, a lesson Jonah was not open to learning.
And here we are today, in our modern age, still suffering from the
same deficiency of heart and mind and the same impurity of love. For all of our supposed openness today,
so many hearts and minds remain closed to others. It’s not just one group of people who suffer from this
deficiency and impurity of heart and mind, but all kinds. People of all manner of perspectives
gather in their groups and in various ways assert their pride in their belief
that they are favored by God over all others or that God loves them more than
he loves others.
When Jesus calls us to love others, he really means it. Jesus called us to love our
neighbors. And when he said to love your neighbor as yourself (Luke
10:27) one of the teachers of the law asked and
who is my neighbor? (Luke 10:29)
I hear a great deal of smugness and arrogance in his voice as he asked
Jesus that question. He was, I
believe, seeking to excuse himself from who he was called to love. It’s tough to love other people. Some people seem to work really hard to
make themselves unlovable, don’t they?
But we are called to love them anyway. The Ninevites were people. They weren’t enemies of God, but his children. Jonah could not see this. He had erected a border beyond which he
did not want to go in terms of loving others. Is it possible that we erect borders? Is there a limit beyond which we will
not go when it comes to loving others?
2. Jonah needed to learn that God is relentless in pursuing all
people with his love.
C. S. Lewis spoke of God’s relentless pursuit of him. He wrote that I had a notion that somehow, besides questing, I was being
pursued…night after night, feeling whenever my mind lifted even for a second
from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly
desired not to meet. I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and
prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of
England.
Lewis fought against the love of God. He didn’t believe. He didn’t want to believe, but he came
to understand God’s love and grace and received it, even though he was, at
first, reluctant. God is relentless
in his pursuit of us, and of all people.
The time in the great fish was a time of reflection and reorientation
for Jonah. His dire circumstances,
as is often the case, grabbed his attention. Unfortunately, his attention quickly reverted to his old
prejudices as soon as he was back on dry land. It’s hard to maintain the sense of conviction that often
accompanies our times of struggle, but it is imperative that we learn from
those moments. Richard Rohr says, we seldom go freely into the belly of the
beast. Unless we face a major
disaster like the death of a friend or spouse or loss of a marriage or job, we
usually will not go there. As a
culture, we have to be taught the language of descent. That is the great language of
religion. It teaches us to enter
willingly, trustingly into the dark periods of life. These dark periods are good teachers. Jonah’s experience in the great fish
was a great teacher, but he turned out to be a poor student, quickly forgetting
what he had learned in his time of adversity.
3. Jonah needed a lesson in grace.
The sad part of the story of Jonah is this – it
wasn’t just his mission that bothered him, but the idea that his mission might
succeed. Jonah did not want to see
the Ninevites repent; he wanted to see them destroyed. Jonah, unfortunately, had no sense of
grace for the Ninevites.
There are a lot of interruptions in our world,
and some of them are to get our attention, just like God sought to get the
attention of Jonah. Interestingly,
however, it’s not always our interruptions he uses to get our attention, but also
the interruptions that come in the lives of others. Those interruptions are reminders that we are called to step
into the lives of others and bring God’s grace to them. We now have a date for the arrival of a
refugee family that our church will help to settle. They are a Burmese family, currently in the country of
Malaysia, and the family is comprised of the parents and six children – 4
daughters and 2 sons – ages 3 to 19.
When I think about that family – and the many others like them – I
wonder what would it be like to live in a refugee camp? Some of those families live in the
camps not just for weeks and months, but for years. There are some families who have lived in refugee camps for
as long as ten years! What would
that be like? Imagine that kind of
interruption in life. Imagine
trying to provide for your children and trying to keep them safe from the
violence, the war, the rape and the other weapons used against those who are so
vulnerable.
Here is what is important to remember about
interruptions – it is not just the interruptions in our lives we must be
concerned about, but also the interruptions in the lives of others. We live in a world where millions have
seen their lives interrupted by war, by famine, by oppression, and by so many
other difficulties. We are called
to minister to those lives, just as Jonah was called to minister to the
Ninevites.
What are the interruptions in your life? What might God be trying to teach you
with those interruptions? And what
about the interruptions in the lives of others? What might God be asking us to do to provide ministry in
those interruptions? Remember,
don’t see them as interruptions, but as opportunities!
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