March-29-2009-click-here-to-play
Here we have an ancient, and an oh so current, story of Jonah who:
- Flees God’s request to to Nineveah
- Is thrown overboard and swallowed by a large fish
- Prays a prayer of humility and thanksgiving
- Is spit up on land
- Adheres to God’s call to preach in Nineveh
- Gets angry when God shows mercy towards Ninevites
- Is rebuked by God for not appreciating mercy and is still sulking at the end of the story.
Jonah is one of the minor prophets – with a passive prophet and an active God. It was probably written as one of the last books in the Hebrew Bible, with a flavor that suggests it had been a long time since the story tool place. One of the important questions is, “Why is this story here?”
Is it because Jonah is such a great model for our lives? Probably not. While we remember the story because of the whale, and some of us because Jonah wouldn’t go to Nineveh, we do have inaccurate memory that it all ended well. Just as we often forget that the rainbow at the end of Noah and the Arc isn’t so much a sign of love as it is a sign God will try not to wipe out all the people on earth again. Just as we talk about about the “patience of Job” when it fact he while he was persistent, stubborn, grouchy, and irritable – he was anything but patient.
In this case, the story is left unfinished – we don’t know if Jonah “gets it” or if he continues to sulk on the hillside. We don’t know if he “learned the lesson.” There is no “happy ever after” ending.
No, the story isn’t here to lift of wonderful Jonah. It is included in the Hebrew Bible because it is a story about God’s mercy. The writer’s perspective was that it doesn’t matter if “we get it.” What matters is that our sacred text bear witness to God’s mercy.
It is a story of God’s continued patience with God’s people, in spite of our prideful resistance to kindness Jonah’s view is quite limited and self focused – God’s view is much larger.
Many of you may have seen Slumdog Millionaire – which has some amazing camera work that helps give scope and dimension to the level of poverty. On a couple of occasions, there are scenes that take place in the crowded, ramshackle slums of Mumbai. The camera then pulls back and you slowly get a larger and larger perspective and the individual setting gets smaller and smaller. What seemed to be a larger than life slum hut is suddenly a tiny speck in a picture taken from high above the city, and eventually, high above the earth. The fading back of the camera gives a wonderful, and almost overwhelming, sense of perspective. It shows both the smallness of one area and the largeness of the entire slum.
But this is just a symbol for the rest of the movie in which the child of the slum answers all these questions for a Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.” What the host of show can’t understand (because of his narrow and prideful perspective) is how someone on the fringe of society, with no formal education – a slumdog- can gain a holistic, and well grounded knowledge of the world not through his wealth or his formal schooling, but through profound, memorable and at times horrific life experiences. His life becomes a powerful symbol of a much larger, Spirit infused perspective of the world.
Pride, as we see from Jonah, is believing that we are the center of the world; while humility involves remembering or relearning that we are part of a faithful, but much larger purpose of God in the world.
When my oldest child was an infant, there was a funky early morning folksong radio show on the local public radio station that frequently played a wonderful song called “The Galaxy” by Jim Post. Using the solar system as a reference point, he tries to remind us of our place in the world…
When life gets you down Mr. Brown, things are a hard and you fill that you’ve had quite enough.
Remember that your standing on a planet that’s evolving and revolving at 900 miles an hour. It’s orbiting at 90 miles a second so it’s working from the sun which is source for all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars we can see are moving at a million miles a day, in an outer spiral arm at 40,000 miles an hour, in the galaxy way we call the Milky Way.
The galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars, it’s a hundred thousand light years side from side. It bulges in the middle 16 thousand light years thick but out by us it is just 3000 thousand light years wide. We’re thirty thousand light years from Galactic Central Point and we go round every 200 million years, and our galaxy is only one millions and billions in this amazing and expanding universe
Remember how amazing unlikely was your birth…
Unlikely – but still amazing. We are important, but okay to just “lighten up.”
Parker Palmer, in a quote from our daily devotional on March 23 writes that one of the ways pride causes us to lose perspective is how it causes us to miss our impact on others. “If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am (this) will eventually have consequences. I will distort myself, the other, and our relationship… When I try to do something that is not in my nature or the nature of the relationship, way will close behind me…. When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself—and me—even as I give it away.”
Is not this the story of economic greed? The AIG bonuses, hedge fund profiteers, and auto company executives flying corporate jets are outrageous not only because of the economics, but because those involved seem clueless about their impact on others. Regardless of contracts and regardless of compensation practices that may be longstanding at companies like AIG, what the bonuses highlight is the short sightedness of human greed and pride. They demonstrate a dis-connect between one’s own reality and the impact of one’s decisions on others.
If we are honest, what happened with those bonuses is not unique – it is just a larger, more public version of what trips us up all the time. Jonah’s story is our story because we too have periods where we like to sulk, complain about someone else’s gift of mercy, think only about ourselves.
Alternatively, activist monk Thomas Merton speaks to the power of humility. “In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity…We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting any immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.”
One might say that it was easy for this world famous author, social activist and spiritual director (in the 1960’s) to suggest we live without any special recognition. He had as much recognition as almost anyone on the globe. Yet, what he seems to remind us is that humility requires a certain detachment from ourselves and a reconnecting with the purpose and vision of God as we understand it. The WAY to this detachment may vary – his list probably reflects his own challenges – but that we must detach seems wise. Jonah flirted with this. His story is a reminder of how hard it actually is to do.
The prayer of those of us who live with pride like Jonah is, “Holy One, help me to find the way to detachment, help me to remember your larger purpose and remove those things that keep making me think it is all about me!”
The paradox, of course, is that humility and pride are both part of the spiritual journey.
Accepting one without the other can suppress or seduce us into a false, imbalanced life. On the one hand, we can slip into perception of insignificance that is defeating: What do I matter? What does anything matter? Yet the other side alone is just as dangerous. We can puff ourselves up into a state of grandiosity: I can change the world; everything depends on what I do.
Of course, our understanding of this balance is shaped and guided by our cultural and gender experiences. The call to pride and humility have been used as weapons in culture wars, or as tools to gain power of influence. We know all too well that for some, like women and minorities and gays and lesbians, a cultural and personal history of oppression makes the message of humility more complicated; but it is no less important.
But just as we need two eyes in order to perceive depth, we need both aspects of this paradox in order to perceive the depth of the Universe.
Let us take some moments of prayer asking for guidance to our own balanced life…Amen
Today’s Text
Jonah 1:1 Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying,
2 “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.”
3 But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.
4 But the LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up.
…
15 So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging.
16 Then the men feared the LORD even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows.
17 But the LORD provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
2:1 Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish,
2 saying, “I called to the LORD out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.
3 You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me….
9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the LORD!”
10 Then the LORD spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.
3:1 The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying,
2 “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.”
3 So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across.
4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
5 And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
10 When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
4:1 But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry.
2 He prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.
3 And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
4 And the LORD said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
5 Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.
6 The LORD God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush.
7 But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered.
8 When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”
9 But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.”
10 Then the LORD said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night.
11 And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”
