Today I begin with a confession. (Sorry, nothing juicy.)
Last week I gave you this set of questions to prepare for today’s sermon.
(Slide 1)
1. How do times of distress affect my prayer life?
2. How fervent am I in prayer when life is going well?
3. How does distress re-orient my thinking toward God?
4. Is the power of prayer found in my sincerity, my persistence, or God’s grace?
(Source: Dr. Reed Lessing. © 2010 by Creative Communications for the Parish.)
Well… it was the wrong set of questions!
(Slide 2) Here is the correct set for today.
1. How is the power of God’s word exhibited in the action of the fish?
2. Why does God stick with Jonah?
3. From your knowledge of the entire book, can you recall the three other times when God provides for Jonah?
4. What do God’s provisions for this prodigal prophet tell you?
(Source: Dr. Reed Lessing. © 2010 by Creative Communications for the Parish. www. creativecommunications.com )
(Slide 2a) Out of those four questions, these two caught my attention
2. Why does God stick with Jonah?
4. What do God’s provisions for this prodigal prophet tell you?
Now I am going to outline some responses to these two questions for a few moments as we prepare for communion and I begin with this first question, “Why does God stick with Jonah?”
We read in Proverbs 18:24, “There are “friends” who destroy each other, but a real friend sticks closer than a brother.” (NLT)
How many here can recall a childhood friend that, either verbally or just by that inner sense between close friends, vowed that you would be friends forever?
For how many of us is that person still a part of our lives today?
When I was in seminary, I heard an illustration that has stuck with me over the years. It began with a question, “Whose holding your trampoline?”
The image there is of a group a people stationed around the sides of the trampoline to keep you from falling off.
The purpose of the question was to have you think about your support network and it went like this: (my memory is a bit fuzzy on the details)
Suppose you ended up in the emergency room or a crisis situation. What 8 to 10 people would you want there with you or you would want to know of your situation?
Write them down. Family included.
(For some of us extroverts, the hospital or wherever we were, would probably not be big enough to hold everybody. For some of us introverts, two may be two, too many!)
Let me ask it this way, which friend or friends would you want at your side in a crisis?
Well do I remember when two members of a church that I had served showed up at my dad’s funeral. It was a six hour drive one way and was totally unexpected.
One of the things that I pray for people who are about to receive visitors at a funeral home visitation is that they would experience God’s grace in the faces and voices of those who come to pay their respects.
Why should God stick with Jonah after he failed to obey God? Why did he not find another prophet to do His work?
Jonah, in his complaint in Jonah 4, gives us a hint: “I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love.”
Over in Lamentations chapter 3 we read these wonderful words: “The unfailing love of the Lord never ends! By his mercies we have been kept from complete destruction. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each day…For the Lord does not abandon anyone forever. Though he brings grief, he also shows compassion according to the greatness of his unfailing love. For he does not enjoy hurting people or causing them sorrow.”
This past Wednesday I delivered the Lenten meditation at the community Lenten service and I spoke from Luke 22:47-48 where Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss as a mob comes to arrest Jesus.
Betrayal is a very, very painful thing, isn’t it?
In a sense Jonah betrayed God with his disobedient jaunt toward Tarshish. God had called him to go to Nineveh and he did the exact opposite.
But the Lord did not give up on Jonah. Our main text makes that point in a unique way:
Now the Lord had arranged for a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was inside the fish for three days and three nights. Jonah 1:17 (NLT)
Sometimes I have wrestled with the question of, “How can God still love me, even want me, after all I have done and said that is wrong and just plain sinful?” I often have trouble believing Romans 8:38-39:
“And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from his love. Death can’t, and life can’t. The angels can’t, and the demons can’t. Our fears for today, our worries about tomorrow, and even the powers of hell can’t keep God’s love away. Whether we are high above the sky or in the deepest ocean, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Then late Henri Nouwen wrote these words that answered my question:
We often confuse unconditional love with unconditional
approval. God loves us without conditions but does not
approve of every human behavior. God doesn't approve of
betrayal, violence, hatred, suspicion, and all other
expressions of evil, because they all contradict the love
God wants to instill in the human heart. Evil is the absence
of God's love. Evil does not belong to God.
God's unconditional love means that God continues to love us
even when we say or think evil things. God continues to wait
for us as a loving parent waits for the return of a lost
child. It is important for us to hold on to the truth that
God never gives up loving us even when God is saddened by
what we do. That truth will help us to return to God's
ever-present love.
(Source: February 6, 2010 daily meditation by Henri Nouwen from www.nouwen.org)
The reason that God stuck with Jonah was because He loved Jonah and He loved the people of Nineveh and He waited for Jonah to come, like the prodigal son, “to his senses” and return to Him.
Have you ever wondered why God still sticks with you? Because He loves you with a love that is present even when you choose to intentionally or unintentionally misbehave.
And because He still loves us even when we are intentionally running away from Him, He makes provisions to give us a chance to come home… provisions like… a large fish.
How unorthodox of God, how unusual for Him to act this way! But I want us to think about this right now:
God acted in accordance with who He is and the circumstance that Jonah was in at that moment.
I have no doubt that if I stopped and asked you how God provided for you even when you were running from Him, we would hear some wonderful and perhaps, amazing things!
God provides for us when we are obedient to Him (though sometimes we get a little impatient, right?)
Well, then He also provides for us when we are running from Him either intentionally or unintentionally. Why? To help us turn around and come back to Him!
Think of the prodigal son for a moment. He willfully took off from home to party it up without giving a thought to the implications and consequences of his actions.
But, he had food to eat, not home cookin’ by any means, but he had food to eat. He had a job, not something that he would normally do, feeding those unclean pigs, but he had some employment.
God provided for this dirty and soon feeling awfully guilty son so that “when he came to senses” he would return to his father. And we know the rest of the story.
Jonah had a boat and a very helpful crew to assist him into the water where this large fish was waiting to take him back to shore… eventually.
When God provides for us when we are not where we need to be, sometimes it is a quiet kind of provision, like a cave Elijah had to gain his faith and sanity back, or the belly of a fish, cramped, chemically intense, smelly, and totally foreign to your experience, or like Peter, a return to familiar settings like a boat, a net, and a lake where for a time you do something that you can do.
Well will I remember the statement of a co-worker while working in a wonderful department store for a while, ‘What are you doing here?’ when she found out what I used to do. To me that was part of God’s provision reminding me that I was not where He wanted me to be. That was a circumstantial provision to me because God knew where I was, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally and he used another person to speak to me the truth that He was sticking with me. (And providing a series of jobs as well.)
For you, perhaps it was in a chance encounter with someone that provided you with information that you needed just at time. And then you looked back and saw that was God.
So as we prepare for communion, I ask you this morning, where are you at? Are you where God needs you to be? Have you been running from God and now the Holy Spirit is saying to you, “Hey! Come home!” and you have realized that you have drifted, farther than you have realized.
Maybe you are running from God… intentionally. I ask this morning with all due respect, “How’s it going for ya?”
The questions that I gave last week are for next week, seriously they are.
But to conclude I want to have you write down for a moment or two your answer to this statement:
(Slide 3) “As I look back, I can see how God provided for me even when I was not where I needed to be in relationship with Him when He…”
(Allow for time to write)
I told those gathered on Wednesday noon that God still sticks with us… again and again and again… because He loves us and wants us. He wants us back even when we disobey and run the other way; even when we betray Him as well.
(Slide 4) Look at your answers, I’ll bet that you have many things to be grateful for today, right?
Let’s take that gratitude, as well as our confession, into our preparation for communion. Amen.
