Epiphany 3 Year B
Jonah 3:1-5, 10, 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, Mark 1:14-15
That Darned God
By Rich Gamble
Jonah did not like the people of Nineveh. Not surprising, Nineveh is the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, and the Assyrian Empire eventually swallowed up the northern tribes of Israel. Nineveh was a superpower in its day, a malevolent shadow on the eastern horizon of Israel. They were probably pushy people too.
The crime they are accused of in the book of Jonah is violence. Most often that word indicates the violence of the powerful over the weak. Bullies- that is the way we would describe them.
Jonah doesn’t like those pushy bullies from Nineveh and he is more than happy to hear God pronounce dire judgment on them. But when God calls on him to carry the message of judgment to the people of Nineveh, Jonah runs away. He hops the first boat out of town. And well, you probably know the rest of the story. There is a terrible storm at sea; Jonah tells the sailors that he is responsible because God is miffed at him. The sailors chuck Jonah into the sea, a big fish swallows Jonah. The fish vomits Jonah up back on shore where he started. So Jonah goes to Nineveh and tells the people that God will destroy the city (the word used is the same word to describe what happened to Sodom).
God and Jonah do not give the people of Nineveh a chance to change. It is just doom and nothing but doom for them. But the people of Nineveh do change. They repent, they stop eating and wear scratchy clothes and do whatever else they can to show God that they are going to change.
So seeing this, God changes God’s mind. God decides not to scramble Nineveh.
This of course is just what Jonah had feared. He later tells God that the reason he ran away was that he was afraid God would go and forgive the pushy Ninevites and Jonah didn’t want them forgiven. He wanted them scrambled.
Paul in today’s reading just knows that world as he knew it was about to end at any moment. He imagined Jesus would return, blow some sort of cosmic whistle and call game over for old the ways of doing things. And since everything was going to end in a couple of days, people should not get so hung up on the things of this world, marriage, business, all that stuff is so last world. Paul is ready for the new world to sweep in, similar to though much bigger than the recent change in presidents.
God didn’t destroy Nineveh. God didn’t end the world. God can be such a disappointment sometimes. We want God to like what we like, hate the people we hate, act in ways that make us comfortable, and offer us the improvements we are hoping for.
We want God on our terms and instead we find ourselves having to respond to God on God’s terms.
Often people try to use the notion of the divine to inflate their own fears, prejudices, and desires to a cosmic level. They need a God who is utterly inflexible. They need a Bible that is “infallible” so that when they hunt down scriptures that agree with their world view, they can claim with complete authority, that God is in utter agreement with them.
But how can the Bible be infallible if the Bible says that God changed God’s mind? How can an inflexible document confine the will of a God who changes?
Though Paul totally missed the boat on the old end of the world right around the corner angle, he did get the general approach right: don’t sweat the small stuff. We can’t lock God into a bunch of persnickety rules, at best we can say that God is going to call us into a relationship that forces us to grow in our capacity to love others, even those pushy people, even those angry people, even those strange people, even those people of other races, and faiths.
We want God to shake her finger at all the people we love to hate but instead God’s finger beckons us to see the world of hate and fear fading away.
Which brings us to God’s most recent challenge to us here at Keystone, that challenge comes in the guise of one we know: Rob. Most of you know Rob. Rob and Becky are members here. We have comfortably fit them into our community.
Well it turns out that Rob was born with the body of a male and self identity of a female. Rob is transgender.
Remember when we spoke about the vote taken long ago to be Open and Affirming of people who were Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender. Well now we are called on to actually practice what we voted on. We are called on to be open to and affirming of Rob who shall in our presence be called Jenny.
Now this is probably going to be a challenge for some of us. It is not what we are used to and such things can make us uncomfortable. Jenny will be a part of our community and we may worry about saying the right pronouns, we may worry about saying something stupid. We may worry what bathroom she will use. We may worry about what others will think when they find out that we not only tolerate but celebrate a person who is transgender.
To all of these possible concerns our texts today offer us a couple of helpful approaches. We can take Paul’s view that the world is passing away anyway and all of our old fears and hang-ups are relics of the old world.
Or we could take insights from Jonah’s experience, that the love of God pays no attention to our prejudices.
We may want God to obliterate all of those people who are not like us and are unwilling to conform to our world view. Well, if not obliterate, at least vex and terrorize them so that they are forced to change. But God doesn’t play by our rules, God calls on us to grow in our capacity to love.
So if you are uncomfortable with Jenny, know that it is your growing edge. Don’t wear out your Bible looking for some inflexible commandment against behavior that makes you uncomfortable. There is only one inflexible aspect of the divine, and that is love. But of course love calls on even God to be flexible in God’s relationship with humanity. Why should we think that the love of God would demand less of us than it does of God?
The love of God pushes us outside our comfort zones. The love of God pushes us beyond our fears, and desires. The love of God can carry us to places of loss and danger. The love of God can carry us to the place where we will receive the hostility aimed at the ones we are called to love. The love of God will poke us, inspire us, lampoon us and embrace us always, always urging us to grow in our capacity to transform who we are, into whom we are called to be: the incarnation of the love of God.
Jenny didn’t choose her identity, but we can choose whether to be the embodiment of a fearful majority in the presence of member of a minority community or the communal embodiment of God’s love.
I have great faith that Keystone will live up to my hopeful expectations and God’s loving nudge.
