Epiphany 3

There are certain pairs that always go together in the Bible.  If I say Cain you’re going to say Abel, right?  If I say Noah, you say…Ark.  If I say David, you say…Goliath.  And if I say Jonah, you’re gonna say…Whale!  Of course.  Jonah’s the guy who was swallowed by a whale.

Jonah got away from that whale once, but he hasn’t been able to get away from the whale since.  Everybody wants to stick that whale on Jonah!  And that’s why most people don’t take Jonah too seriously.  Most people are pretty sure you can’t get swallowed by a whale and live to tell about it. They think this story isn’t true.  I believe this story is true.  I believe God created a great fish to make a big impression on a lazy prophet.  I believe this story is true because Jesus said it was true; He compared his three-day stay in the tomb with Jonah’s three-day stay in the great fish.  But even if you believe the story is true, do you ask the question: What does my life have to do with a WHALE?

Well, the story of Jonah isn’t really about a whale.  When I say Jonah, you shouldn’t think whale.    When I say Jonah you should think missions.  Jonah was a missionary and God sent him on a mission!  That’s what the story of Jonah is about.   The whale just gets in the way.

The truth is, a lot of whales get in the way of mission work!  You know what I mean:  We don’t talk about Jesus because we’re afraid to.  That’s the fear whale.  We start concentrating more on the people inside our church community than outside because we like things to be nice here.  That’s the comfort whale.  We don’t reach out to other cultures because they wouldn’t believe it anyway.  That’s the racist whale.  Too often, we lose sight of our mission on earth because some whale gets in the way.

This morning we’re going to get rid of the whale and look carefully at what Jonah’s story really teaches us.  And when we do, we may be able to get rid of some of the distractions that keep us from the mission God wants us to carry out in the world.  So if not the whale, what should we see in Jonah’s story?  We see that: GOD HAS A HEART FOR MISSIONS.  He loves mission work, and He loves mission workers.

To give you a little Bible history, the great kingdom God gave to David and Solomon split apart after they died.  This wasn’t God’s idea.  The people in the north wanted their own king, and then they wanted their own temple (the temple was in the south, in Jerusalem), and eventually they wanted their own gods.  It became pretty clear that the Northern Kingdom of Israel was going to come to bad end.  And it did.  700 years before Jesus’ birth, Assyria swooped down from the north and took the whole nation into captivity.  And that was the end of them. 

God had been patient awhile.  The people of Israel kept on trying to break away, and God kept on trying to bring them back. Sometimes He sent them peace and prosperity to remind them that He loved them; sometimes He sent them wars and poverty to remind them that they needed Him.  Through it all He sent prophets to proclaim his message.  We know their names: Elijah, Elisha, Amos, Hosea.  And Jonah.  Jonah was one of the prophets God sent to Israel North.

It was during one of the peace and prosperity times that God came to Jonah with a special assignment.  I want you to do some foreign mission work, Jonah.  “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before me.”  Jonah couldn’t have been more shocked if God had hit him in the head with a hockey stick!  Why on earth did God want to save Nineveh?  To Jonah, Nineveh was Amsterdam and Baghdad mixed together in one big hellhole of filth and terrorism.   Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria, and Assyria was Israel’s avowed enemy.  Jonah wouldn’t go.  He ran.

But God had a heart for Nineveh.  That’s why God went and found Jonah and made him spend a little time in the Whale Hotel.  Once he was dressed and refreshed, God called Jonah again.  This time Jonah went. And what do you know?  “The Ninevites believed God.  They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.  When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.”

Here’s where Jonah made his mistake: He didn’t realize how deep God’s love really was.  Jonah knew God loved his people despite their sins, but he just couldn’t believe God could love Nineveh.  And he certainly couldn’t believe that God could convince the Ninevites to repent!

You and I can’t allow ourselves to make Jonah’s mistake.  When Jesus said, “For God so loved the world,” he put the emphasis on world.   When Jesus said, “Go and make disciples of all nations,” he meant all nations.  Jesus doesn’t only exist for the people of Cross of Life.  Nor is He only present in that other church you went to. He isn’t only the Saviour of the Lutherans. Or the Catholics, Baptists, or Anglicans.  He isn’t just the Saviour of the Jamaicans.  Or the Trinidadians, Guyanese, Barbados people, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Latin Americans, Portuguese, Brazilians, Italians, Germans, Indians, Pakistanis, French Canadians, Mexicans, or white Canadians.  He even is the Saviour for the USAmericans.  He loves Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, and followers of Gilles Duseppe. God has a heart for ALL people!

The truth is, God has a heart for mission work wherever it happens.  God loves to forgive sins, and He doesn’t care what the forgiven look like!  God wants people to trust in his Son, and He doesn’t care how they talk or how they walk or how much money they make.  God doesn’t care how many sins they’ve committed or how far they strayed or how lousy their lifestyle has been.  God loves mission work.  Jonah needed to learn about God’s mission heart.  Jonah needed to have God’s mission heart.  And so do we!

I wonder how God felt when Jonah refused to go?  If I were God, I would have let the whale eat Jonah!  But God loved this prophet and He wasn’t about to lose him.  “Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah second time: Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.  Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh.  Now Nineveh was a very important city—a visit required three days.  On the first day, Jonah started into the city.  He proclaimed: Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.  The Ninevites believed God.”

I want you to notice four things.  First, God gave Jonah a chance to repent.  That’s what the whale was for.  Jonah needed to learn that God’s way was right and his way was wrong.  And when Jonah repented, God forgave him.  Second, God gave Jonah a specific message: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.”  Jonah must have wondered how Nineveh would react to that kind of message—you know how you react when you see some religious nut saying stuff like that – but he wasn’t going to mess with God again.  Third, when Jonah got to Nineveh he worked non-stop for three days shouting that message from street corner to street corner, and God gave him courage to do it.  Fourth, God let Jonah see success where he expected failure.

So what does this mean for us?   It means that our mission-hearted God loves his mission workers.  He loves mission workers who work across oceans, mission workers who preach and teach, mission workers who volunteer and bring offerings, mission workers who talk to people about Jesus, mission workers like you and me.  It means God never throws his mission workers away when we sin.  You name the sin you’ve committed, God can forgive it.  God can forgive every sin we commit because Jesus already carried those sins to the cross.   It means that God wants us to analyze the attitudes we have about our mission.  He wants us to check ourselves for signs of apathy, pride, selfishness, bigotry, or any other sin that gets in the way of the mission God has given us.  It means that if we’re guilty, God wants to come clean and repent. 

It means that God has given us a message to proclaim.  It’s a message that doesn’t seem as though it will impress anyone: a message from a book that most people don’t believe in, a message carried in simple tap water, a message that comes with little pieces of bread and inexpensive wine.  It means that God’s message has a power we can’t fathom and that the message is able to change hearts in ways we never believed possible!  It means God brings victories when we thought we’d lost, it means God gives success when we thought we failed, it means God surprises us when we thought we had it all figured out. And God does all this—He forgives us, He empowers us, He gives us success--because He loves his mission workers!

Friends, don’t let the whale get in the way.  There’s a lot more in this little book than the story of man and a big fish.  What we find here is nothing else than the beating, pulsing heart of the Saviour God who loves to save sinners!  He loved the people of Nineveh, He loved the prophet Jonah, and He loves you and me just as much.  Let the mission heart that loved you and found you and brought you into his family push away whatever keeps you from seeing the great mission God has given us to do!  Look away from yourself and see the Saviour who died for the world.  Look past the distractions and see the mission.  In other words, get rid of the whales!  Amen.

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