Reaching Out - From Hostility to Hospitality

Last week we started a series of sermons on the spiritual life and I introduced Henri Nouwen’s idea that there are three movements in that life.

The movement from loneliness to solitude (reaching out to yourself), the movement from hostility to hospitality (reaching out to others) and the movement from illusion to prayer (reaching out to God).

But I realised that I didn’t say much about Nouwen himself and why he's someone worth listening to.

Nouwen was a Dutch Priest and academic who had a very successful career, teaching at both Yale and Harvard, speaking all over the world and writing over 40 books. But as he reflected on his life he realised that he didn’t like the person he was becoming in that rarified environment.

So quite late on in life he responded to an invitation to join a movement called L’Arche; an initiative setting up care homes where folk with profound disabilities could live in community with their assistants. He moved to France and became a member of the first L’Arche community, of which there are now 100 worldwide.

It changed his life, and in his later years he wrote a great deal about the gifts that disabled people bring into our lives; how they help us re-connect with what’s truly important in being human.

Nouwen tells a story of how, as a priest, he’d often be called on to lead services in l’Arche and say blessings over the residents. One day one of the residents called Johnny came up and said “Henri – I want a blessing” – so Nouwen made the sign of the cross over him and said “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” – that’s what he’d always done and that’s what was expected of him in that tradition. And Johnny said – "Henri – that doesn’t work. I want a real blessing!"

Later that day there was a service. Johnny came up to him again and said “Henri – I want a blessing." But this time the wee man stood in front of him and wrapped his arms around him and put his head on his chest. And Nouwen realised that what Johnny needed more than anything was just to be held and to have good things spoken over him in God’s name. So that’s what Nouwen did – he wrapped his arms around Johnny, almost hiding him in his clerical robes – and he said “Johnny - you are the beloved of God. You are chosen and special. You have good gifts to share with all of us. We in this community love you, not because you do great things, but because God loves you just as you are.”

And Johnny detached himself with a big smile and sat down saying “That’s right, Henri! That’s right”. And after that, all the disabled folk wanted that kind of blessing. And so did some of the assistants!

What was the difference?

Well in that second form of blessing, Nouwen created a space where good things could be shared in a way that was unhurried, attentive and deeply personal. And it seems to me that there we have the very essence of hospitality.

“Practice hospitality” – the word says.

That doesn’t just mean have folk round for a bite to eat, though it certainly does mean that.
It means practicing a way of life with friend and stranger that’s generous with your time and your attention. It means making space that’s not rushed; where you’re really present; where you’re receptive and open to the other, while still being yourself. Where you choose to see the potential in the stranger, rather than the threat.

For many of us, that attitude won’t come easily. God will need to teach us to be more hospitable.

There’s something in us that’s naturally defensive and private. John Donne said that no man is an island, but in terms of skin and flesh and bone that’s exactly what we are. We’re all self-contained little units and to be honest, we quite like it that way. Within the limited range of family and a few close friends, we’re secure, but going beyond that takes us out of our comfort zones. We’re not hostile to others, to use Nouwen’s phrase. But we are guarded; closed off. We give very little away. We need to move from hostility towards hospitality

I wonder how much of our hostility is about fear? Fear of causing offence, or taking offence. Fear of the unknown. Fear of folk knowing our business. Fear of being found wanting. Here’s a story you know well which flags this up.

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

If hospitality means "making space where good things can be shared in a way that’s unhurried, attentive and deeply personal. A space where you’re present and receptive to the other"
then for all that Martha's invited Jesus and his entourage into her home, is she exercising hospitality of that kind?

No! She’s rushing, she’s overbusy, she’s inattentive, she’s not present to them.

Why?

I think it’s because she’s afraid. She’s afraid of not living up to expectations. Hostesses are supposed to do this and this and this and if I don’t do it, then I’m a failure. Word will get round that I’m a poor hostess! I have a reputation to maintain!

And Jesus looks at her with kindness and says “Martha, Martha. You are worried and upset about many things. Put down your pots and pans. Come and sit here with us. I don’t want your food right this moment. I want your company”.

I wonder how many of us are crippled by the fear of not living up to expectations. We miss the opportunity to act hospitably because we feel the pressure of the things that must be done.

I can’t have those people round. The house is a mess.

I can’t see you that evening, I’ve got too much on.

I’ll put off that phonecall ‘til I’ve got the time.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve kicked myself because I’ve realised, with hindsight, that I’ve been in too much of a rush; expectations have dragged me away or kept me away and I’ve missed a real opportunity to be with someone in a meaningful way.

So here’s an exercise we could all try this week. Force yourself to linger with someone. Don’t run away to whatever it is you have to run away to; take a deep breath and stay, and ask God to redeem the time. Make that hospitable space where good things can happen

But there's another story I want to bring into this:

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.

All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a ‘sinner.’ ”

But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”

There’s a lovely irony in this story and I don’t know if you’ve noticed it before this morning. It’s Zacchaeus’ house they go to, but it’s Jesus who’s offering hospitality.

Let’s look at our definition again:

Hospitality means making space where good things can be shared in a way that’s unhurried, attentive and deeply personal. A space where you’re present and receptive to the other. And thats' exactly what Jesus does here.

Look at what he does. He stops what he’s doing – he was on his way somewhere, but he stops. He calls Zacchaeus down by name and opens up a space where they can spend time together: “I must stay at your house today”. And he did all this in the face of a crowd who hated Zacchaeus because he’d colluded with the Romans to rip them off. They’d banished him. He was an outcast in his own village.

But Christ chose to see the potential in the stranger, not the threat. He was bigger than that. More sure of himself and his God.

And that one hospitable exchange, in the face of years of hostility, was enough to completely turn Zacchaeus’ life around.

It isn’t always as dramatic as that, of course. But the principle still holds true. It’s hospitality that overcomes the strangeness of the stranger and creates the possibility of their becoming friends.

I wonder who the strangers are in our midst? Chances are they don’t come from a different country or speak a different language. More likely they’re people who work in the same company; or live in the same street; or sit five pews ahead of us. Or maybe they’re folk from within our own extended family.

And their strangeness - or stranger-liness - isn’t about differences in culture or religion. It’s just about the fact that we haven’t ever got to know one another, or we lost touch with one another a long time ago.

Who’s coming to mind just now as I speak? Is there someone you feel you should be making more of an effort with just now? What could you do to open up an hospitable space for them this week?

There’s so much more we could say on this, but if you’ve heard the central message this morning, that’s enough. Hospitality’s not getting the best china out and serving up a great meal; not just that, anyway. It’s an approach to life. An approach to the people we come across on our journey that’s generous, unhurried and open.

It’s Henri Nouwen opening his arms and making a space for blessing; It’s Martha putting down the pots and pans for a while and finding a space on the floor beside Jesus; it’s Jesus making space for the one person that nobody else could be bothered with.

And the more you read about Jesus, the more you see how that hospitable approach coloured almost everything he did.

He ate with Pharisees and prostitutes; preached love for enemies; healed untouchables; praised Gentiles for their faith; found time for individuals in the midst of the crowd. He made space to visit and chat and teach and heal. He made time to play with the children. He never allowed himself to be driven on by others’ expectations when something good was unfolding right then and there.

He kept solitude, drank deep of his Father’s love for the world, and returned to the crowds replenished and ready to give.

And like Henry Nouwen, he opened his arms in blessing on the cross, and encircled not one beloved individual, but the whole beloved world.

"Practice hospitality" the Scriptures say. Are you beginning to see just what that means?

The movement from hostility to hospitality, Nouwen writes “is the movement in which we become less and less fearful and defensive and more and more open to the other and his world, even when it leads, as it did with Christ, to suffering and death”

May God bless us with souls deep and wide enough to be truly hospitable.

Amen

Reaching Out - From Loneliness to Solitude

We were looking forward to lots of things when we got back home from holiday last week, but one of the things I was dreading was seeing what had happened to the vegetable patch in the fortnight we were away.

I’ve been working hard at my wee patch this year with some good results, but keeping the weeds down is a constant battle. I’d given it a good going over before we left, but I might as well not have bothered because they’ve taken over and it’s going to take a good couple of afternoons to get things looking half-decent again.

Gardens need constant tending, I’m discovering. And our inner life - our soul, our character - is just the same.

The author Brian McLaren writes “in a wild world like ours, your character, left untended, will become a stale room, an obnoxious child, a vacant lot filled with thorns, weeds and broken bottles. Your deepest channels will silt in and you will feel yourself shallowing. You’ll become a presence neither you nor others will enjoy, and you and they will spend more and more time and energy trying to be anywhere else.

Well tended, your character will be a fragrant garden, an artist’s home, with walls and halls full of memories and beauty, a party with live music and good jokes and pleasant conversations in every corner. You’ll be good and deep company for others and yourself.

That’s why, through the ages, people have tried to find ways to tend themselves; to do for their souls what exercise does for their bodies or study for their minds.

That’s what the spiritual life’s really about; it’s not about rules and regulations and rituals. It’s about taking time out with God to reflect on what kind of person you really are, and what kind of person you’re becoming. Doing the work of tending what’s been given to you by God. And it’s hard work.

Over the years, lots of people have tried to put words to their experience as they’ve begun to take better care of their inner life. And I’ve always found the work of the Dutch Priest Henri Nouwen especially helpful on this.

In his book “Reaching Out”, Nowen describes the Spiritual life as having three movements – the movement from Loneliness to Solitude (reaching out to yourself). The movement from Hostility to Hospitality (reaching out to others), The movement from Illusion to Prayer (reaching out to God). Over the next three weeks I’m going to be look at each of those movements in turn.

So this week it’s the movement from Loneliness to Solitude.

Which of these people is lonely? (Slide with 4 images of people, alone and in crowds)

The right answer of course is that we can’t tell. Loneliness isn’t about where your body’s at. It’s about where your heart’s at.

It’s all too easy to be lonely in a crowd, lonely in a marriage, lonely at a party, lonely in a church.

I was down at the General Assembly in May and on the Sunday I took myself off to a church I’d never been to in Edinburgh. Sat through the service and they’d invited folk to stay behind for tea, so once it was over I went wandering off looking for the hall only to discover that tea and coffee were served in the church.

So I went back in, five minutes late, and sat down with my coffee hoping that someone might notice me. But by that time everyone was already in their little groups chatting away, and short of lurking awkwardly on the fringes of their conversations like a weirdo I couldn’t think of any way to break in. So after five minutes of feeling excruciatingly awkward and alone, I decided it was best to just get up and go. I literally couldn’t take it any more.

(Note to congregation. Don’t let that happen in this church, And don’t assume someone else will take the initiative with the visitor. If you spot them, it’s your responsibility to do something about it. If this church is your home, then that makes you the host, and hosts have certain responsibilities to their guests – not least to be welcoming.)

But I digress.

What was going on within me as I sat in that pew? Well if you could have heard my inner monologue it would have sounded something like this: “Please notice me. Please affirm my worth as a human being by smiling at me and inviting me into your conversation. It’s very hard sitting here wanting to connect but not knowing anyone.”

It’s the voice of loneliness and it’s a voice that we all know from time to time. We have a profound need to connect – to have meaningful interaction with other people. But sometimes that need’s just not met, and it feels awful.

You know what that’s like if you’ve been the new mum at the school gates and everyone's ignored you, or the new person on the team and no-ones made the introductions, or the friend of a friend of a friend who’s ended up at the party where everyone else seems to know each other.

You know what that’s like if you live on your own, and find yourself wishing every now and again that you had someone to come home to.

You know what that’s like if you’re living with someone but your relationship’s got to the stage where days and weeks go by without a word or a touch of genuine intimacy.

You know what it’s like when the phone doesn’t ring, and no-one calls round, and no-one asks how you’ve been and no-one misses you when you’re not there.

You know loneliness. We all do. We all have this profound need to be seen and known and valued by others; and it hurts when that doesn’t happen.

And that’s why we spend a good deal of our lives trying to bury our loneliness. We can’t bear to face it and ask what it means, so we do our level best to pretend it isn’t there.

We bury it under mountains of work; piles of possessions; hours of entertainment. Fed up with the disappointments of human interaction, we spend more and more time gazing at screens; screens that become ever more small and more portable so we’re never without them and never have to contemplate the possibility of spending a moment alone with our own thoughts.

Some try to bury their loneliness by raiding the fridge, or hitting the bottle, or surfing for pornography, but it always surfaces again. We can’t escape our essential aloneness says Nouwen. It’s right there at the heart of who we are, and no friendship nor love nor community can ever fully take that loneliness away.

So we have only two choices, Nouwen argues. We can try to bury our loneliness, or we can befriend it and change it into something better. And that's where Solitude comes in.

If loneliness is the experience of being alone and anxious, solitude’s the experience of being alone and at peace. And that’s something that most of us will have to cultivate because our lives are just so full-on we’ve forgotten how to do it.

Think about your life for a moment. When did you last sit in your own company for half an hour without a screen or a phone or another person as a distraction?

When did you last take half an hour to sit down and process what’s been going on in your life? To try and get some perspective on things?

We need that kind of time to manage the garden of our lives. Because living is messy, and if we don’t tend our souls they get overrun and unmanageable.

Jesus teaches us this. One of the constant refrains of the gospel writers is that Jesus took himself off to a solitary place. He had periods of intense activity, but he always punctuated them with spells of intentional rest.

In this morning’s reading, the disciples have returned after their first assignment and they’re full of stories about what’s happened to them. But so much is happening round about that they don’t even have time to eat! So Jesus intervenes. “Let’s go off by ourselves to some place where we will be alone and you can rest for a while” he says. So they set out in a boat by themselves to find a solitary place.

A solitary place. A place where your aloneness stops being a worry and starts being a blessing. Where the chatter of other peoples’ lives is stilled long enough so you can listen more closely to what’s going on in your own life. A place where some of what’s broken within us begins to mend and find its strength again.

I had a friend once who helped me find a solitary place when I really needed one. I found it between here and here (indicate ears), sitting in a comfortable chair with the telly off for about 15 minutes every evening. And I visited that place pretty consistently for about 6 months until it became like home. And I'm still a regular visitor in that place today. I get homesick when I haven't been there for a while.

“You’re too busy”. She had said. “And you’re running on empty. Get some time alone and just keep company with God. Don’t say anything at first, don’t try to pray; make your companionship and your attention the substance of your prayer”.

I found that so hard! It took me about a week before I could sit still for any more than a couple of minutes without all kinds of stuff flooding through my mind. But it got easier. And in time it became a blessing, because in that place I began to get God’s perspective on my life, and God’s strengthening to help me live it. I became more at home with myself. And I returned from those times of solitude with more to give of myself to the folk around me.

I discovered that creating space for solitude in your day actually makes you more available for other people. It’s a paradox, but it’s 100% true.

The disciples in this morning’s story didn’t get the rest they needed. They went off to that quiet place with Jesus, but when they got there, the crowds had followed them.

Now if I’d been Jesus I’d have been pretty hacked off at that. But what does Mark tell us? He says that when Jesus got out of the boat and saw the large crowd, his heart was filled with compassion for them. He didn’t see them as an inconvenience, a pain in the neck. His soul was larger than that. Better tended. So strengthened by his own spells of solitude he understood that his real work was often in the interruptions. I could do with some of that wisdom in my life; and I’m guessing you could too.

The beginning of a spiritual life is the realisation that we have a soul and that it needs looking after. Loneliness is one of the things that wakens us up to the painful reality of our soul’s need. Solitude is the place where those needs are understood, befriended and put in perspective. Where we keep company with God for a while and let him show us what needs tended, and what needs planted within us.

This is the way to grow, it seems. And there are no shortcuts to maturity. Brian McLaren says you can’t take an epidural to ease the pain of giving birth to character.

But character, Christian character, is what will be birthed in us if we make the choice not to bury our loneliness in activity or amusement, but let it bed down in the womb of a creative solitude where the truth of who we are and who God is can gradually emerge.

Jonah Chapter 4 - Anger

No stars. No Hollywood ending. And the girl has to die.

Words from Robert Altman’s 1992 film “The Player” which follows the ups and downs of Studio Executive Griffin Milne who holds the company purse-strings. At one point, a young British writer secures 2 minutes of Griffin’s time to pitch his idea for a movie called Habeus Corpus.

It’s a thriller with a tragic finale – a potential Oscar winner - and the writer’s adamant about how he wants things done. No stars. No Hollywood ending. And the girl has to die. Griffin likes what he hears and the movie goes into production.

Much later on in Altman’s film, long after we’ve forgotten the pitch, we finally get to see the closing scenes of Habeus Corpus. And it’s full of stars, has a Hollywood ending, and the girl doesn’t die. The writer’s sold out – the lure of success and money was just too great to resist.

The Hollywood ending for the story of Jonah comes at the end of chapter 3. Nineveh’s repented, disaster’s been averted and everything seems to be fine. But just as we’re gathering our coats and making our way to the exit, Jonah bursts through the screen kicking and screaming. This thing isn’t over yet. There is no Hollywood ending.

Jonah, the GNB tells us, was ‘very unhappy’ with what had happened, And that translation, fails to do justice to the measure of his anger. The Hebrew says that what God had done in sparing Nineveh seemed “evil to Jonah – a great evil”. He wasn’t unhappy. He was spitting feathers.

And as he vents his spleen to God, we finally discover why it was he ran off to Spain. You can read it in verse 2:

“Lord, didn't I say before I left home that this is just what you would do? That's why I did my best to run away to Spain! I knew that you are a loving and merciful God, always patient, always kind, and always ready to change your mind and not punish. Now, Lord, let me die. I am better off dead than alive.”

Jonah headed for Spain not because he was petrified of going to Nineveh, but because in his heart of hearts he loathed the idea of God showing the Ninevites mercy.

And yet he knew fine well that God is merciful. Israel had always known that.

Generations earlier, when Moses was camped out on Sinai, he asked to see God’s face, and was told in no uncertain terms that no-one could see God’s face and live. But as God’s glory passed over the mountain, Moses was given a glimpse of his back, and he heard the voice of God proclaiming his own name: “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin”.

That is who God has always been and will always be. That’s who we hope and expect God to be for us. Compassionate; gracious; slow to anger; loving; faithful. Jonah’s problem is that he doesn’t want God to be like that for others. He would rather die than see Nineveh forgiven, or spend one more day in the service of a God who was prepared to forgive them.

And that’s the irony of Jonah Chapter 4. Jonah, who’s benefited in the most remarkable way from God’s patience and mercy, is enraged because God has the temerity to extend the same patience and mercy to Nineveh.

We can see the irony in that. But in his anger, Jonah can’t. That’s one of the things about getting angry. Perspective goes out the window.

So God gets straight to the point. “What right have you to be angry?” he asks Jonah.

And Jonah gives no reply. Maybe he knew how lame his reasons would sound in the cold light of day. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to even talk to God.

So he takes himself off and decamps to some scrubland on the east of the city, builds himself a bit of shelter and waits there in the hope that God will finally see sense and come round to his way of thinking. And when the fireworks begin, he wants to make sure he’s got the ringside seat.
That wall we spoke about a few weeks ago, the wall Jonah had built in his heart against the Ninevites – was taller than ever. Nothing had changed it. Not the storm, nor the whale, nor the journey, nor the preaching.

He was told to go and preach that in 40 days Nineveh would be overthrown, and that’s what he really wanted. He wanted it destroyed. But the Hebrew word for ‘overthrow’ can also mean ‘turn around’, and that’s exactly what happened. Nineveh wasn’t torched, it was ‘turned around’.

And any other prophet would have been happy with that outcome. He’d preached, and people had responded. But in Jonah’s walled-in, angry little world, that wasn’t good enough.

So in one last roll of the dice, God has a plant grow up to give him additional shelter from the sun. And then, just as quickly, he takes it away from him. An object lesson via the medium of horticulture. And Jonah’s livid. Once again, he wishes he was dead. Once again, God says “What right have you to be angry?”

But this time, Jonah lets rip. “I have every right to be angry – angry enough to die!”

“Do you?”, inquires God. “You didn’t cultivate this plant. You didn’t plant it or tend it or water it. And here you are mourning its passing, while at the very same time you sit here like a vulture waiting for me to wipe out 120,000 human beings in Nineveh.

Jonah, is it right that you’re upset about this plant, but don’t care tuppence for the people in this city?

And with that exchange, the story finishes. Definitely not a Hollywood ending. No neat conclusions or morals. And a lot of unresolved anger. Six times that word’s used in chapter 4, and it seems to me that the last lessons we’re to glean from the story of Jonah are about anger.

The Bible’s very realistic about anger. It accepts it as a given – something we can’t avoid, either within ourselves or in others. Being a Christian doesn’t mean never becoming angry; but it does mean that when we are angry, we try to control it and understand where it’s coming from.

Eugene Peterson puts it this way: “Anger is a useful diagnostic tool. When anger erupts in us, it’s a signal that something’s wrong. Something isn’t working right. There is evil or incompetence or stupidity lurking about. Anger is our sixth sense for sniffing out wrong in the neighbourhood. When we’re angry we know we are on to something that matters; that really counts."

“What anger fails to do, though, is tell us whether the wrong is outside or inside us. We usually begin by assuming that the wrong is outside us – our spouse or our child or our God has done something wrong, and we are angry. That is what Jonah did, and he quarrelled with God. But when we track the anger carefully, we often find it leads to a wrong within us – wrong information, inadequate understanding, underdeveloped heart. If we admit and face that, we are pulled out of our quarrel” and into something larger and potentially life-giving.

There’s something in that, isn’t there? So often the anger we feel says more about us than the other person.

The Christian psychologist Dr Larry Crabb gives a perfect, everyday example of that in his book ‘Inside-Out’.

“Some time ago my wife and I were on our way to our favourite pizza restaurant. In the back seat of the car was another couple, good friends. I was at the wheel, feeling quite confident in my ability not only to drive the car competently but also to find the restaurant. I’d been there many times before.

I eased the car into the left hand lane, stopped because the light was red, and pressed the left-hand turn signal. After a few moments the light turned green. Before I had a chance to move off, my wife said “take a left here, honey”.

Five simple words – take a left here honey – and I felt furious. I jerked my head towards her, snapped “I know” and stepped on the gas. I felt angry; far more so than my wife’s apparent lack of confidence in my navigational skills seemed to justify

Under my capable direction, we drove down Second Avenue until we saw the huge, well-lit sign that announced “Pizza”. Just as I prepared to turn, my wife pointed and said “Here it is”. My rage doubled. Why?

A host of questions, some a bit threatening, emerges from this rather ordinary incident:

What does the intensity of my anger say about my level of maturity?

Was my wife really not sure I knew where I was going, or was she acting out of casual habit and a real desire to be helpful?

How should I deal with angry emotions towards my wife? Discuss them later? Try to forget them? Spew it all out in the name of honesty?

And lastly, and most importantly perhaps, What do I deeply desire that was not provided in that interaction with her?

Following that last line of questioning led Crabb to understand that his deep desire was to be respected and thought of as competent. His wife, unwittingly, had touched that raw nerve and his overly-angry reponse said much more about him than about her.

Jonah is angry at Nineveh and angry at God. And God’s advice to him is simple: “Consider your anger” one translation puts it. “Consider your anger”.

It’s a good phrase; and a good phrase for us to reflect on too.

What does your anger say about you? Have you followed the threads all the way back to see where it comes from? Are you prepared to engage with God about it, or have you taken yourself off to a makeshift shelter to sulk for a while? What do you need to do to deal with your anger before it takes root and begins to devour you the way it devoured Jonah?

Paul give us some good practical advice in Ephesians. he says “Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbour, for we are all members of one body. “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold”.

Jonah is a book of many ironies – the prophet runs from God, the pagans seek him out; the prophet’s prayerless, initially, the pagans are prayerful. The prophet’s unrepentant, the pagans are penitent.

And the last irony is this – God, who has every right to be angry, finds it within himself to set anger aside. Jonah, who has no right to be angry, can’t seem to let go of it. He clings to it like a worthless idol.

And so the story ends. It’s not a Hollywood ending.

The camera pans back, showing Jonah, prone and skeletal, lying in the doorway of his dessicated little hut; walled in by hatred and anger. Beyond him, Nineveh comes into shot, glowing orange in the low evening sun; basking in her newfound grace. And disappearing into the distance we catch a glimpse of the back of God. And if we listen, we can hear his words, spoken as a benediction over the story of Jonah; over all our fleeing and disobedience and building of walls and nursing of anger. He is

"The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin”.

This is our God – the God of the whole world. And this is how we, who take his name, must choose to be.

Jonah Chapter 3 - Walls

Something a bit strange happened this week as I was preparing for today.

I started off thinking about whales and ended up thinking about walls. Not an immediately obvious connection, I know, but hopefully by the end of the sermon you’ll see where I’m going

In particular I was remembering a poem by Robert Frost called “Mending Wall” which I’d like to read to you.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

I’m guessing that those of you with land and beasts to manage will find yourselves agreeing with Frost’s neighbour, and I don’t mean to decry the value of a good sturdy wall. Walls demarcate and protect and defend and we need them for all those reasons.

The walls I’m interested in this morning aren’t physical. They’re the walls we construct within our hearts and minds.

Frost says: “something there is that doesn’t love a wall”. I want to argue that within the human heart the very opposite is true. There’s something within us that loves a wall, because our walls let us know who’s in and who’s out; who’s right and who’s wrong; who’s one of us, and who’s one of them.

Growing up in Northern Ireland, I’m all too familiar with walls. The grey barricades of Belfast’s so-called peace line, and the murals adorning the gable ends of terraced houses are a visible manifestation of the ancient divide that runs through the heart and soul of the province I was born in.

My best friends when I was growing up were two wee Catholic lads who stayed just down the street from me. We were virtually inseparable for years. But we always knew that we were different.

And I remember us being in stiches one day because my wee brother didn’t know there was a difference between Catholics and Protestants. If you’d asked us what that difference was, we couldn’t have told you. We just knew there was a difference. There was a wall between us.

I didn’t ask for that wall to be there within me. It just was. And it ran right through me, even though our family are about as moderate as it comes in the Province.

Dangerous things, walls. If you build them high enough you can even forget what the person on the other side looks like and then it becomes terribly easy to stereotype, or even demonise them. That’s when the bullets and the petrol bombs start flying.

I don’t know how high that wall would be now, if I’d stayed. But I know that travel and education knocked some lumps out of that particular edifice and I’m more than happy with that outcome.

Years ago I did a gap year working in a church in Glasgow and went on outreach work to Spain and Morocco. Travelling through Morocco remains, to this day, one of the most stressful experiences I’ve ever had, spiritually and culturally. And I remember returning to Spain, sitting in the Catholic Church in San Roque, a wee Ulster Proddy, looking up at Christ on the cross and thinking “I’m back home now”.

I still struggle with the veneration of Mary, prayer to the saints, transubstantiation, papal infallibility and all that stuff. But it’s the same guy on the cross, taking away the sin of the world. It’s Father, Son and Holy Spirit that we both worship. We’re not as far apart as our walls would lead us to believe.

And yet how many times across the world have we seen the same thing played out? How many walls are built and defended to the death over differences of hair-splitting proportions? Taking the whole world into consideration with all its cultural variety, is there really much difference between Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda? Sunni and Shia in Iraq? Free Church and Free Church Continuing in the Western Isles!

We love our walls. But I’m not so sure God does.

And the story of Jonah is one of the reasons I’m prepared to say that today.

Let me ask you a couple of questions – not hypothetical.

If you define wickedness as turning your back on God and going your own way, then who’s wicked in this story? (Both Jonah and the Ninevites)

And who does God love in this story? Who does he pity and have compassion on? (Both Jonah and the Ninevites)

And have either Jonah or the Ninevites done anything to merit God’s love?

The Ninevites repent, sure, but God’s love was already on them. He loved them enough to send Jonah not once but twice to bring them the message that was going to save their lives.

Can you see what’s happening? All his life Jonah’s been working with a worldview that says “people on my side of the wall are fine with God, people on the other side of the wall are fuel for the fires of hell.” “People on my side of the wall are loved. People on the other side of the wall are hated”.

And God’s saying – “That wall needs to come down, Jonah. You don’t set the boundaries of my goodness or my grace. I love all that I’ve made and I want to see it made right. Don’t assume you or your people are better just because you’ve been chosen. You’ve been chosen for service, not for privilege. The nations are depending on your witness. So don’t get above yourself. You have a job to do, and up to now you’ve been making a pretty poor fist of it”.

And so, standing there on the shore, still rubbing his salt sore eyes, Jonah’s commissioned for the second time – “Go to Nineveh, that great city’ – words that in the Hebrew almost convey a sense of admiration for the human endeavour that put Nineveh together. “Go, and proclaim to the people the message I have given you”.

And in contrast to Chapter 1 – Jonah follows the instructions to the letter. He gets up, he goes and he proclaims what is quite possibly the shortest sermon ever preached – 5 words in the Hebrew. Would that any of us could preach for so little time to such great effect!
Wholesale repentance, we’re told, and God relenting of his plans for destruction. Why such a profound response? We’re simply not told.

But here’s the rub. Has Jonah really changed as a result of all this? Has his wall come down? Or is he going through the motions, doing what he’s been ordered to do, but still harbouring hate in his heart? Piling stone on stone to build his beloved wall higher? I think you already know the answer to that, but we’ll find out for sure in chapter 4.

But more importantly, what about us this morning? What walls have we raised to keep others at arm’s length?

Who are we avoiding just now? Who are we giving short shrift to?

Who are we closing down on – and giving nothing away to?

What prejudices do we carry around within us which stop us seeing that person or those people, however misguided, as God’s beloved?

Are there walls you’ve built so high that you’ve lost sight of the person behind them? Does it comfort you to live with your caricature of them, rather than dealing with the complexity of the real person?

Is the wall you’ve constructed actually designed to keep God at a safe distance?

The story of Jonah isn’t really about whales. It’s about walls.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall and maybe, when it comes to the human heart, that Something is nothing less than God himself.

Pastor Bill Carter sums up chapter 3 of Jonah beautifully when he says:

When are we going to get it straight that the love of God is for all people? That the judgment of God is laid upon every human heart? That the mercy of God can forgive every sin and give second chances to every person? When are we going to get it into our heads and our hearts that the Creator in heaven wants nothing more than to stand face to face with every creature beginning with us, but not ending there.

God is willing to love anybody. Even Jonah. Even you and me. The difficulty is not in telling ourselves this is true. The difficulty is believing it's true for everybody else.

Jonah Chapter 2 - Prayer

“There’s nothing left to do but pray.”

I wonder how many times you’ve heard folk say those words.

When all hope seems gone, when all the practical options have been exhausted, then we turn to prayer. When we come to the end of ourselves, we realise that there’s nowhere left to go but God.

The passage we read together just now is introduced as the prayer that Jonah prayed while he was inside the belly of the fish, and without rehearsing the discussion we had a few weeks ago about whether this is history or myth, I want to make two brief observations about the nature of Jonah’s prayer.

The first thing I want you to notice is when he prays.

God speaks to him in Chapter 1 and tells him to go and preach against Nineveh. Does he pray then? No

He goes down to Joppa, boards a boat heading in the opposite direction and before long finds himself in the throes of a storm that threatens to sink them all. Does he pray then? No

The pagan sailors cry out to their gods in desperation and the captain marches downstairs to rouse Jonah from his sleep and get him to join in. Does he pray then? No.

Lots are cast to see who’s to blame for the storm, and it falls to Jonah. He admits that he’s been running away from God. Does he pray then? No.

Jonah tells them the only way they’re going to survive is if they throw him over the side. They try to row ashore, but the storm gets worse. There’s no escape unless they get rid of Jonah, so the sailors pray and ask God’s forgiveness for what they have to do . But does Jonah pray? No.

So they throw him in; and with his mouth clamped shut as much against God as the seawater, he’s pulled under, slipping down, down down into the dark, silent recesses of the deep, and the downward spiral that began in chapter 1 draws to a close.

Down to Joppa, down into the ship, down into deep sleep, down into the sea, and now down into the cold arms of death.

But something happens in those frigid waters that finally brings him to his senses.

And in his distress, he finally prays:

V2 - “In my distress, O Lord, I called to you and you answered me. From deep in the world of the dead I cried for help, and you heard me”.

V7 – “When I felt my life slipping away , then O Lord, I prayed to you”.

It’s only when Jonah gets to the end of himself that he’s finally willing to pray.

Why are we like that? Why do even those of us who profess faith find it so hard to pray?

The answer to that’s pretty simple, I think, and we find it way way back at the start of the story. Not Jonah’s story – the human story.

When the serpent tempts Eve to eat from the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, it says: “when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God”.

You will be like God. And since time immemorial, that’s exactly what we’ve all wanted. We all want to be god in our own lives, to stay in control, to make all the key choices. And we can get a long way in life thinking that way. But eventually, whether now or in the afterlife, there comes a time when we realise we are not god and we’re not in control.

And it’s in those times that prayer begins.

When we sit beside the incubator, looking at the wee scrap of life that’s been born three months early, and feel utterly powerless to help.

When we look at the X-rays, and see the shadow the doctor’s pointing out to us, and know fine well what it means, even though she hasn’t said the word yet.

When we peer out of the trench and wonder how much longer we can evade an enemy bullet.

When we look at that person, or those people we’d tried to guide, and find them doing the exact opposite of what we’d hoped.

When we look in the mirror and catch a glimpse of something that reminds us of our mortality; and reflect for a moment that none of us can add a moment to our lifespan by the exercise of our will.

It’s in those times that we realise just how illusory this notion of our being in control is.

Prayer begins when we come to the end of ourselves, and the sooner that happens the better. Because when we die to our pretence to be god, we can come alive to God.

That’s a big part of what it means to be a Christian. Coming to a point in your life when you stop trying to be God.

Where are you on that one this morning – are you still playing God to yourself, or have you seen that for the nonsense it really is?

So when does Jonah pray? When he comes to the end of himself. He could have saved himself a lot of hassle if he’d let it happen sooner.

But there’s a second question I want us to think about for a moment, this morning and it’s to do with how Jonah prays.

For hundreds of years, scholars have looked at Chapter 2 and scratched their heads.

“This doesn’t make sense” they say. Surely if Jonah managed to put some words together in the belly of the whale it would have been a lament or a plea to be rescued – not a Psalm of thankfulness.

And yet, that’s exactly what it is.

We don’t need to hold that these were the exact words he used at the time – it’s quite possible that he strung them together later as he was recalling the story, trying to express what was going on in his head.

But they’re definitely words of thankfulness. And that shouldn’t surprise us. If Jonah’s come to his senses and uttered a desperate prayer on his way down into the depths, then any deliverance – even deliverance into the warm reek of a whale’s stomach – is better than death.

“But what about the content of the prayer” say the scholars. “Sure it’s all lifted from the Psalms. It looks like someone’s just stitched it all together at home and put it on Jonah’s lips. He couldn’t possibly have been thinking that way if he were inside the whale”.

And in one sense they’re quite correct. Almost every line Jonah utters is lifted from a Psalm. But that doesn’t make it inauthentic. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Many of you will remember the story of Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy, who was taken prisoner by Islamic Extremists in 1987 and held in solitary confinement for 4 years before being released in 1991. A Jonah experience if ever there was one. And this is what he writes:

"As a boy in church, sitting in the choir - Sunday by Sunday - I thought often I was bored.”

"I didn't think I was learning anything but, years later in captivity, the language came back. I had no books, no prayer book, but I could remember the services of the church: they were there.

"I reverted to the prayers that I had learned through the prayer book, which were simple, straightforward and balanced and, in that way, I was able to find some inner peace amidst the conflict raging all around. That was a great and wonderful gift."

As Waite was steeped in the Anglican prayer book, so Jonah was steeped in the prayer book of his day – the book of the Psalms. And when the chips were down, and he had few words of his own to draw on, it was snatches of the Psalms that came to his mind.

In that sense at least, prayer is like physical training. Regular practice and exercise builds capacity that we can draw on when the going gets tough.

This is a face you might know (projected image of our friend Tracey Sahraie)

This is Tracey Sahraie whom some of you might know from Ythan Opticians. Up until about 5 years ago Tracey hadn’t done much training at all, but she set to it with a vengeance and she’s now representing Great Britain in the World Triathlon Championships in Edinburgh. Last year she completed an Iron Man competition in Switzerland, which is a 2.4mile swim, 112 mile bike ride and a 26.2 mile run one after the other. It’s the sustained training throughout the year that gives her the capacity to endure over those kinds of distances.

Training and practice, builds capacity. How could Terry Waite survive all those years in captivity, or Jonah his days in the whale? Because long before they were tested, they had trained in prayer. They had a bank of spiritual muscle memory to draw on that saw them through the most difficult of times.

Deep roots in prayer breed a deep confidence in the goodness of God, even when, for a time, the signs of that goodness seem to be few and far between.

Some words that have stayed with me for many years were found inscribed on a dormitory wall in Auschwitz by a Jewish captive.

I believe in the sun, even when I can’t see it shining.
I believe in love even when I can’t feel it.
I believe in God, even when he seems to be silent.

That’s the voice of someone who’s come to the end of themselves, but has deep enough roots in God to still believe. It’s the voice of someone who knows what it is to pray.

To this day, when Jewish folk celebrate Yom Kippur the Story of Jonah is always read, and the people, gathered in worship, respond in the liturgy with the words “we are Jonah”.

We are Jonah. Needing to pray, but reluctant to pray. Pursued by God, but doing our best to evade him much of the time.

And that will be our story ‘til we come to the end of ourselves, by choice or by circumstance. And at the end of our own wilfulness, prayer, and faith, will begin.

Jonah Chapter 1 - Flight

Last week I introduced the idea that stories don’t just draw us in, they draw us out; they make us question our view of the world.

The film ‘Crash’ which won several Oscars a few years back is a good example of great storytelling. The movie follows the interlacing strands of several people’s lives one evening in Los Angeles.

Early in the movie a wealthy black couple are fooling around as they drive home, and they’re pulled over by a couple of cops. The black woman gets mouthy, and one of the policemen starts to get heavy with them. He’s had a bad day. He forces them up against the side of the car and then molests the woman in full view of her husband who feels powerless to defend her. After all, these are cops.

Later in the movie the same woman is in a terrible car crash and gets trapped in her vehicle as petrol spills out all around her. A police car arrives and one of the cops rushes over to help her out of the smashed car. It’s the guy who molested her. But by now we see him in a different light. We know a little of his story, and our view of him changes even more when he risks his own life to save hers.

The writers of Crash played beautifully with our preconceptions, and so does the writer of the book of Jonah.

This is how it begins:

1 One day the Lord spoke to Jonah son of Amittai. He said, “Go to Nineveh, that great city, and speak out against it; I am aware how wicked its people are.”

So who’s the good guy? Jonah, clearly. The prophet of God. And who are the baddies? The Ninevites. They’re the big power in the middle east. They’re the folk who walk in and plunder your home, empty your fields, rape your women and steal your children.

So far so conventional. But by verse 3, the narrator is already starting to mess with our heads:

3 Jonah, however, set out in the opposite direction in order to get away from the Lord. He went to Joppa, where he found a ship about to go to Spain. He paid his fare and went aboard with the crew to sail to Spain, where he would be away from the Lord.

So Jonah, the prophet of God, the one who’s supposed to have an intimate relationship to the Almighty, a direct line to thoughts of God, sticks his fingers in his ears and does the exact opposite of what he’s supposed to be doing. And we’re not told why.

People often assume he resisted out of fear, but that’s not the case. We’ll find out the true reason later. But whatever the reason – he runs. But you can’t run from God for too long.

4 But the Lord sent a strong wind on the sea, and the storm was so violent that the ship was in danger of breaking up. 5 The sailors were terrified and cried out for help, each one to his own god. Then, in order to lessen the danger, they threw the cargo overboard. Meanwhile, Jonah had gone below and was lying in the ship's hold, sound asleep.

So in this crisis, who turns to prayer? The pagan sailors! And what’s Jonah doing? He’s snoozing.

There’s a theme in the Hebrew which can get a little lost in translation and it’s around the word ‘down’. Jonah goes down to Joppa, down into the hold of the ship, now down into the depths of sleep.

He’s doing his level best to hide from God, while the sailors are doing their best to be heard by their gods! The business of tossing the cargo over the side might be seen a sacrifice to angry gods rather than a purely practical measure. And they can’t believe that Jonah’s not helping out, so the captain goes below decks to see what’s happening with him:

6 The captain found him there and said to him, “What are you doing asleep? Get up and pray to your god for help. Maybe he will feel sorry for us and spare our lives.”

And there’s the irony – how can you pray to a God you’re trying to run away from?

And does Jonah pray? No. The prophet of God is prayerless.

Meanwhile:

7 The sailors said to one another, “Let's draw lots and find out who is to blame for getting us into this danger.” They did so, and Jonah's name was drawn. 8 So they said to him: “Now then, tell us! Who is to blame for this? What are you doing here? What country do you come from? What is your nationality?” (did you pack your bags yourself? Did you leave them unattended at any point?!)

9 “I am a Hebrew,” Jonah answered. “I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made land and sea.” 10 Jonah went on to tell them that he was running away from the Lord.

And again – there’s an irony there that wouldn’t have been lost on the hearers. In those days people associated gods with particular places – there were mountain gods, and forest gods, and river gods and sea Gods.

Who does Jonah worship? The God of heaven who made land and sea. The God who is everywhere. And what’s he trying to do? Run away from him. Kind of an Irish thing to do. And I can say that as an Irishman.

The sailors were terrified, and said to him, “That was an awful thing to do!” The storm was getting worse all the time, so the sailors asked him, “What should we do to you to stop the storm?”

12 Jonah answered, “Throw me into the sea, and it will calm down. I know it is my fault that you are caught in this violent storm.”

Now I wonder how he says those lines in verse 12?

Is this an act of self-sacrifice for Jonah? Is he giving himself up so that others can be saved?

Or is it one last act of defiance against God – is this Jonah’s ultimate ‘No’ to God’s command to go to Nineveh?

Either way, the sailors don’t want to know….

13 Instead, the sailors tried to get the ship to shore, rowing with all their might. But the storm was getting worse and worse, and they got nowhere. 14 So they cried out to the Lord, “O Lord, we pray, don't punish us with death for taking this man's life! You, O Lord, are responsible for all this; it is your doing.” 15 Then they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea, and it calmed down at once. 16 This made the sailors so afraid of the Lord that they offered a sacrifice and promised to serve him.

So at the end of this section of the story, who’s seeking God? Who’s in prayer? Who’s promising God their service? These pagan sailors.

And who’s given up on God? Who’s prayerless? Who’s needing saved? Jonah – the prophet of God.

All the old categories we think we know are being broken down in this story; and the point the narrator wants us to get is that the world isn’t as black and white as we’d like to believe. Things are more complicated than we’d thought.

Now let me offer just a couple of reflections on what we’ve heard to earth this story a little for us.

I wonder how you feel when you read verses like verse 1 – ‘One day the Lord spoke to Jonah’. Maybe you’ve just skimmed over that in the past without thinking about it.

I can’t hear those words without feeling a strange mixture of longing, inadequacy and scepticism. I wish I could hear as clearly from God. I wonder if I’m even capable of hearing him speak above the din of my life. And I wonder why God should speak so clearly to some people then when he doesn’t seem to do the same now.

That’s a months-worth of sermons right there.

But let me make this one point. Maybe we ought to be thankful that we don’t hear God’s voice as often as we’d like. Because more often than not, when God’s voice comes to someone in that dramatic way, it’s asking them to do something that’s difficult and completely counter-intuitive.

“Abraham” - says God. “I’m choosing you to be the Father nations. Your descendants will be numberless as the stars. Now go and circumcise yourself and get ready to sacrifice that son you’ve been waiting for your whole life.”

“Moses” – says God. “I have heard my people’s cries. I know you’re on the run, and there’s a death sentence on your head, and that you can’t string two words together without stuttering, and that Pharaoh’s invincible, but get back to Egypt and set my people free.”

“Hannah” – says God. “I know you’re desperate for a child, and I’m going to bless you with a son. But when he’s old enough, still a young boy, you’re to dedicate him to my service and send him to live in the temple. For the rest of his days, that’s going to be his home. You’ll see him once a year.”

“Mary” – says God. “You are highly honoured. You’ve been chosen from among all women to bear my son. You’ll get pregnant before you’re properly married, the man you love will want to divorce you, the town will scorn you, and what they do to the child you bear will break your heart.”

“Jesus” – says God. “You are my beloved son, the Messiah. The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And you will be misunderstood, pursued, threatened and betrayed throughout your ministry. And you will die the cruellest, most tortured death possible for wrongs you haven’t committed.”

“Jonah” – says God. “You are my prophet. I entrust you with my words. So leave your comfortable existence and go preach to your bitter enemies in their seat of power. Go to Nineveh.”

Is there a theme emerging, do you think?

Is there anyone who’s ever achieved anything for God who hasn’t had to go places they didn’t want to go, metaphorically or literally?

Isn’t it the case that the very start of Christian discipleship is a trip to the place of self-surrender that none of us want to visit? The place where we’re forced to acknowledge, with all the reluctance in the world, that we are not the centre of the universe, and we are not the rightful custodians of our own lives. The Scriptures tell us that we were bought at a price. We are God’s and not our own.

And the track record of the God we worship is that our character matters more to him than our comfort. He will send us to Nineveh for our sake as much as for theirs, because in going to our own personal Nineveh, we become the people God wants us to be.

Nineveh is the place we least want to go, but where God would have us go.

So what does Nineveh look like on your landscape this morning?

Maybe Nineveh’s the place where you have to revisit that relationship that’s gone wrong, and all the hurt and bitterness that’s festered there over the years. You’d rather run a mile. But that’s where God wants you to go today.

Maybe Nineveh’s the place where you find yourself having to make some countercultural choices. The place where you choose to no longer keep up with the Joneses. To no longer work for a firm that demands that you sacrifice your family life on the altar of success.

Maybe Nineveh’s the place where you have to admit that you were wrong and make some apologies.

Maybe Nineveh’s the place where you realise that all this churchgoing over all these years has been so much play acting. You know God is calling you to a deeper commitment of faith, but you’ve stuck your fingers in your ears and gone down to Joppa; down into the ship; down into a sleep. You’re trying to flee from the God of heaven who made the land and sea, but he catches up with all of us eventually. What will you say to him on that day? What will you say to him now as he gives you one more chance to respond to him with everything you are?

Nineveh is the one place we don’t want to go. But if we do go, God goes with us.

Abraham becomes the Father of Nations; Moses the saviour of Israel; Hannah bears the Prophet Samuel, Mary the Messiah. Christ defeats sin and death; and Jonah – well, we’ll see what happens to Jonah next week.

But in the week to come, if you shun the ship and pack your bag for Nineveh, I want you to know that God journeys with you. And blessings will follow.

Amen

Stories - 2 Samuel 12:1-10

There's a lesson that preachers learn very early on – for all your hours of preparation all people will remember are the childrens’ address and the stories you use to illustrate the sermon.

Something in us responds to stories and nothing holds our attention quite like a story. We have an insatiable appetite for them.

Some of us devour them in print, others prefer the silver screen; some have a taste for the epic, while others gravitate towards the more everyday storylines of the soaps. Some get their fix when they wander down to the shops or visit the mart and have a news with whoever they happen to meet. But we all love a story.

It starts in childhood and stays with us all our lives.

I remember going through a phase when Ross was about 3 when we couldn’t keep him in books, so I had to make up stories for him every night. And after three months of that your story reservoir’s pretty dry. So we ended up with this wee system where he’d choose three words for me and I’d have to weave some kind of a story around them. And that kept us going for another three months. Insatiable.

We love stories. And we hold our storytellers dear.

But why? Why are stories so important to us?

Well there are a host of reasons, I guess.

They stir the imagination, they open up new vistas to us, they inform, they puzzle, they entertain.

Storytelling’s a corporate act. Someone speaks, someone listens. And even if we’re reading by ourselves, as we enter the world of the novel we forge a connection with the writer that spans both space and time.

Eugene Peterson tells of a time early in his ministry when he was close to burnout and for six months he set aside two hours, twice a week, to read the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. There was something about his writing, and the stories he wove, that fed Peterson’s soul in a time when little else did, and he’d diary those hours in. He’d write ‘Appointment – FD’ in his filofax, and keep that appointment come hell or high water.

Stories draw us in – they draw the village round the campfire; they draw the child into her mother’s arms; they draw the masses to the multiplex.

But the best stories do more than that. The best stories also draw us out. In our response to them, they disclose something of who we really are.

Today’s reading from Second Samuel is a classic example of that.

King David’s achieved just about everything he wanted to achieve in life, and as we all know that’s when boredom sets in and eyes begin to roam.

One night as he hangs about listlessly on the roof of his palace he catches a glimpse of naked flesh on another rooftop and lets his gaze linger on the forbidden form of another man’s wife. The man is Uriah, one of his soldiers, and the woman is Bathsheba.

David has her brought to him, she falls pregnant, and then to hide his sin he arranges for Uriah to be sent into the fiercest part of the battle and then abandoned, leaving him to certain death.

He thinks he’s got away with it. But then Nathan comes with this story about the rich man who took away the poor man’s lamb to feed his guests, and David rushes to judgment., not realising he’s judging himself. “I swear by the living Lord that the man who did this ought to die”.

“You are that man” says Nathan. The story has drawn David in, but it’s also drawn him out. The truth about David has come to light.

And that’s exactly why Jesus’ teaching is marked not by doctrinal exposition but storytelling. He didn’t give us elaborate formulations about the nature of the Trinity. He told stories about merchants and farmers, fathers and sons. He told parables that were obscure or even deliberately provocative to challenge the preconceptions of his hearers.

“What - do you mean the Samaritan’s the good guy?”

“Are you telling me the father took that boy back into the house after all he did to him?”.

“Are you telling me the folk who worked in the fields for one hour got paid the same as the folk who worked all day?”

Jesus’ parables drew people in, but they also drew them out. Their responses to those stories revealed who they really were.

Now all of this is a long prelude to what we’re going to be doing over the next few weeks in these summer services, because we’re going to be looking at one of the most well know and popular stories in the Bible – the story of Jonah.

But before we begin to look at it, I felt it was important to have this conversation about the purpose of story.

You see the scholars can’t agree about Jonah. Is it fact, or is it fiction?

On the side of fact, Jonah’s name is found elsewhere in the Bible. He’s mentioned briefly in the book of 2nd Kings and there he’s described as a prophet. And in the New Testament, Jesus speaks of Jonah as a real person and of these events as factual.

On the side of fiction, some see this more as a parable, which helps us digest the more irrational parts of the story, like a man surviving three days in a whale’s belly, or the plant that mysteriously springs up overnight to give Jonah shelter.

They also point to the fact that there’s no historical anchor to the story to tell us where it fits in – and that gives it an air of ‘once upon a time’.

We could easily kick around those arguments all summer. But instead, let’s agree that whether it’s fact, or fiction, it’s in the Bible because it’s a story that can draw us in and also draw us out. And Godwilling, it will do so in the weeks ahead.

But let me round things off this morning by leaving you with a question, and it’s one to which I’m not sure I have the answer.

What does it say about God that his chosen medium of communication is the story? Or to put it another way, why is the Bible full of stories, and not full of nice, neat, systematic, precise doctrine?

Maybe it’s because only stories can do the sheer wonder of God and human beings justice.

Any one of us could rhyme off bare bulletpoints that describe us:

Male, Caucasian, 5’8”, British, son, husband, father, minister.

None of that’s incorrect. But if you really want to know me, you need to get beyond that. You need to hear some stories. You need to speak to my parents, my wife and kids, my friends. Then, maybe, you’ll have a better idea of who I really am.

I’m more than any formula you might derive to try and describe me. And so are you. And so is God.

Life in all its glory resists over-simplification. You need a sonnet to extol your lovers’ eyes, not an algorithm. You need a story to feed your faith, not a formula. Some things just won’t be simplified and we do them damage if we try.

The author Donald Miller tells about his first forays into writing, and the day he attended a seminar on writing for the Christian market. The woman who was leading the seminar had a clear formula for success – you must paint a picture of great personal misery; you must talk about where you are now, having gained control over the situation that was making your miserable, and you must give the reader a three or four point plan for getting from the misery and lack of control to the joy and control you currently have. It had worked for her, and it could work for them, she argued.

Donald, in his own inimitable way, was graciously sceptical about whether this was either Biblical or helpful. So he went back to the Bible and found no three step plans. Just a bunch of messy stories about messy people. People with rough edges and dubious methods who nonetheless encountered God in real ways.

“It got me thinking that perhaps formula-type books, books that take you through a series of steps, may not be all that compatible with the Bible. I looked at all the self-help books I happened to own, the ones about losing weight, the ones about making girls like you, the ones about getting rich, the ones about starting your own pirate radio station and I realised that none of them actually helped me that much. All the promises of fulfilment really didn’t work. My life was fairly normal before I read them, meaning I had good days and bad days, and then my life was fairly normal after I read them too, meaning I still had good days and bad days. It made me wonder, honestly, if such a complex existence as the one you and I are living can really be broken down into a few steps. It seems if there were a formula to fix life, Jesus would have told us what it was.

I bring this up only because life is complex and the idea that you can break it down or fix it in a few steps is rather silly. The truth is there are a million steps and we don’t even know what the steps are, and worse, at any given moment we may not be willing or even able to take them; and still worse, they are different for you and me and they are always changing. I have come to believe the sooner we find this truth beautiful, the sooner we will fall in love with the God who keeps shaking things up, keeps changing the path, keeps rocking the boat to test our faith in Him, teaching us not to rely on easy answers, bullet points, magic mantras or genies in lamps, but rather in His guidance, His existence, His mercy and His love”.

For me, that sums it all up. Faith isn’t a three step programme. It’s a living relationship with the God who’s great overarching story of creation, fall, redemption and reconciliation is being played out across time and space. And what God wants more than anything, is that you and I gather round the campfire, open our ears and our minds, and get drawn into the tale for ourselves. Because we, just like Jonah, have our part to play in this great unfolding story.

Happiness - Psalm 128

The secret of happiness came to me the other night as I was watching the television, and I want to share it with you now. The next few moments might just change your life…..

[Showed an LG ad for a wireless TV]

It’s all so clear now - the path to happiness and freedom lies in finding a bigger, skinnier TV. It’s so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t realize it until now…..

Did you see those poor sad people, trapped within their four walls, and then they got the new telly and they’re free! Suddenly it’s pillowfights and jumping through sprinklers and diving off cliffs…..

Except of course, it’s not. Because in reality they’re not doing any of those things! They’re sat on the sofa watching a bigger, skinnier television. And probably working overtime in their little cubicles to help pay for it.

Beware the siren voices of materialism! They promise they can deliver happiness but it’s really all smoke and mirrors.

So if a better telly isn’t the answer, then what is?

There have been lots of surveys done on happiness over the past few decades, and their findings are remarkably consistent. The happiest people tend to be the ones who surround themselves with family and friends, don't care about keeping up with the Joneses, lose themselves in daily activities they enjoy and, most importantly, have a faith or a philosophy that gives their life meaning.

So we do have an idea of where happiness lies for people in our part of the world. But that doesn’t seem to be helping us achieve it.

A survey commissioned for the BBC shows that overall, Britons are less happy now than in the 1950s - despite the fact that we are three times better off. And another survey a few years back placed Britain 32nd in a survey of world happiness. The peoples of Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Nigeria, India, China, Latvia and Estonia are all happier with their lives than we are.

Not much happiness in sight. And maybe part of our problem is that we’ve turned being happy into the goal of our lives when in reality happiness is something that tends to emerge when you’re pursuing something else.

The Biblical writers knew that. They didn’t say much about happiness, but they did talk a lot about joy and blessedness which are experiences with much deeper roots.

Psalm 128 occupies that kind of space.

“Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways” says the writer in verse 1 and I want us to look at that this morning because in that little phrase I think we’re hearing the secret of a deeper kind of happiness.,

So what does that word “blessed” actually mean?

Well a lot depends on which branch of the church you belong. I’m a bit of a pragmatist in these things and I don’t believe that when a minister or priest says a blessing over something or someone it automatically confers some kind of mystical power on the recipient.

I bless couples in wedding services all the time. And some will end up separating. I bless children in baptism. And some may well turn out to be bad eggs. I say a blessing over you folk every week as you leave the church…. And I think I’ll leave it there!

There’s no magic in it.

I read about a vicar working in the city of London who’d unearthed an old tradition where, on the first Sunday after Christmas, the local artisans would come to have the tools of their trade blessed. Farmers would bring their ploughs, blacksmiths their hammers and so on. So he organised a service for the blessing of the city traders’ mobile phones and 80 people turned up for this blessing!

I’d really like to know how that works! The trader’s on the phone doing a deal which is going to make him rich, a whole lot of other people poor, and a sizeable number of folk unemployed – and God’s going to bless this transaction because some cleric’s muttered an incantation over his i-Phone? I don’t think so.

I’m not sure blessing works that way.

It seems to me that blessedness is another way of speaking about the contentment and security and peace we enjoy when we are walking in God’s way. It’s as simple as that.

If we live God’s way, we’ll experience his blessing.

If the couple getting married really mean the vows they take before God, they’ll know stability and love all the days of their lives. They’ll be blessed.

If the child being baptised is brought up well by their family and their church, they’ll learn and keep the faith. They’ll be blessed.

If the congregation who gather Sunday by Sunday go back out into the world determined to walk with God, they’ll find his blessing as they go.

There’s no magic in it. If we set ourselves to walk in God’s way, we’ll know the contentment and security and peace that the Bible calls blessedness.

And if we choose to depart from that way, we’ll put ourselves in the way of danger.

I had an object lesson in that a few years ago when walked the Aonach Eagach in Glencoe .

It’s the hardest ridgewalk in the mainland UK, and though there’s more challenging stuff on Skye there are a few very exposed scrambles.

But I was climing with my friend Stevie Thomson, a very experienced hillwalker. And I knew that as long as I kept following Stevie I was going to be ok.

As it turned out we had a fantastic day – I was kept safe in the danger because I had someone leading me in the way. And for me that’s a good picture of what it means to be blessed.

But why is blessing linked with fear in the verse we’re thinking about?

“Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways”.

Isn’t fear a negative emotion? Why not love instead?

Well let’s remember that sometimes a little fear is good for us.

I saw read a news report a while back about a man of 66 in Ontario who was mauled to death by his own Siberian Tiger. He was feeding it in its pen as usual when it went for him. In the earlier days he’d wear protective clothing when he’d enter the cage, but he’d become so familiar with the animal that he’d stopped taking that precaution. A little fear might have saved his life.

And that’s the kind of fear the Psalmist is talking about here. A proper respect; a reverence towards God, recognising him for who he is: the one to whom we will all one day have to give an account of ourselves and how we’ve used the life he’s blessed us with. And there’ll be no hiding or prevaricating on that day.

In CS Lewis’s Narnia books, the lion Aslan is widely understood to be a Christ-figure. In the second book – the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe – the children who’ve entered the magical world of Narnia hear rumours that this great lion is finally on the move. Soon they’ll be meeting him for the first time, and the prospect is something that fills them with fear.

“Is he safe?” asks Lucy – the youngest of the children.

“Of course he’s not safe” says her Narnian friend. “But he’s good”.

Not safe, but good. Worthy of respect and reverence. Someone not to be trifled with, but heeded. That’s our God.

Going back to the Aonach Eagach, if I hadn’t had respect for Stevie, things could have gone badly wrong. If I thought I knew best and struck off to the right when he was sure we needed to go left, it wouldn’t have been long before I was in trouble.

I respected him because in a lifetime of climbing he’d bagged almost all of the Munros, he’d climbed tower ridge which is a 1000 metre sheer cliff face on Ben Nevis, and he’d walked the Aonach Eagach half a dozen times including a winter traverse. He knew what he was doing and I was glad to defer to his experience. Who knew those hills better than Stevie Thomson?

And who knows life better than God? Do we? Can we safely dispense with the accumulated wisdom of 2 millennia that’s been gathered up in this book we read Sunday by Sunday? Will we defer to God when it comes to the path we choose for our lives, or will we insist on going our own sweet way?

Are you starting to see why the Word teaches that the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom?


We started out this morning thinking about happiness, and human experience suggests that when individuals and societies make happiness their goal, they tend to miss it.

That’s not just my view, that’s the established view of some of the world’s greatest thinkers and writers:

The novelist Aldous Huxley says that “Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities”.

Viktor Frankl, the novelist and holocaust survivor, says the same: “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue... as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself."

For the Christian, the course greater than ourselves is the path of faith and obedience which God calls us to walk. And if we seek him first along that way, all these other things, happiness included, will find us.

“Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways”.