Sermon For JANUARY 23, 2000
Third Sunday after Epiphany
JEWISH TESTAMENT: The Grace of God ~ Jonah 3:1-5,10
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: Now is the Time to Respond ~ Mark 1:14:20
SERMON TITLE: A Whale of a Tale
Those of you who were here last week know that I was not here. I was at St. John Vianney for the Greater Kirkland Ecumenical Parish Pulpit Exchange. While St. John’s has not been part of that exchange in the past, they are looking into joining the ecumenical parish and becoming a full participant in all of the activities that the parish carries on. St. John’s is up in the Finn Hill area. It is a beautiful church building and a large congregation, as many Catholic congregations are. I preached at three different masses. Saturday evening at 5:30, then 8:30 Sunday morning, and 10:30 on Sunday morning. There were about two hundred there Saturday night, two hundred people at the earlier service on Sunday and five to six hundred at the later service. I’m fond of saying that last weekend I had the opportunity to preach to a thousand Catholics. I think that this is particularly noteworthy because I was told by a number of people that, to the best of their knowledge, that I was the first Protestant minister to deliver the homily at St. John’s.
I remember that when I was growing up in Milwaukee, which is a heavily Catholic town, that there were the Catholic kids that went to Catholic schools and the Protestant kids that went to public schools. There was some mixing along the way, but there was also a wall of, at least unfamiliarity and sometimes mistrust and hostility between the public kids and the Catholic kids. Now that wasn’t just something that went on between the Catholics and Protestants, it was also something existed between one group of Protestants and another, and certainly that existed between Protestants and people of other faiths, for example the Jewish faith. When Cindy and I were working at County Stadium, where the Milwaukee Brewers play, we had a friend who was a Lutheran. I think that she was either Wisconsin Synod Lutheran or Missouri Synod Lutheran, which are more conservative branches of the Lutheran Church. We had another friend who was Jewish. Well, Sandy, the Lutheran friend, told Freddie that he was going to Hell, no questions asked. He was a nice enough guy, but he might as well just plan on coals and fire. I was American Baptist at the time and I think that she probably would have had similar words for me, although maybe not with quite the same certainty that she shared with Freddie.
There are all of these splits. People saying, “If you don’t do it this way, you haven’t got it right.” “If you are not a follower of Jesus the way I am, then you might as well just forget it.” Well you might guess from the things that you know about me that I shared a different message with the Catholic congregation. Not only did I take my quilt, to talk about unity and diversity, but I also took my elephant puppet, to stress the same message. So they got both barrels of the shotgun. They responded very well to a message that said there are many different ways to know God, and if we are all part of the Body of Christ we need to be accepting of one another. If we are accepting of one another we can learn from each other and all of us can deepen our spiritual lives and our relationship with God. All of us can do a better job at walking the path of discipleship. At all three services the congregation applauded afterward, and it wasn’t just a polite applause, it was an enthusiastic applause. The first two services the pastor of the congregation was there and I wasn’t certain if he had been the one to start the applause. Occasionally there is someone like Jerry in the congregation that sort of moves things along. The third mass, Father Ludvik was here with you, and I intentionally looked over at the visiting priest and he was just standing quietly as the applause moved through the whole congregation. I was touched and I was still moved, even after Father Ludvik told me that they applaud rather easily.
The Scripture passage today from the Jewish Testament is one that speaks precisely to that issue. Jonah received a message from God, “Go and warn these people that destruction is coming.” Jonah said, “It’s those people. I don’t want to have anything to do with them.” Instead of Jonah just ignoring God, he tried to run away from God. God had other plans. The storm at sea, the great fish, three days of opportunity to “Change your mind, Jonah.” Jonah did of course. He didn’t say, “Thus sayeth God”. He didn’t say, “I have something to share with you, and you might want to change your behavior”. He said, “I’m here to tell you that destruction’s on its way. You’ve got three days, two minutes left and then the end is here.” That is what he was hoping for, planning for. He was ready to get special seating up on the hill to watch the whole show. Much to his surprise the people took his message to heart. They said, “Look, we’re not really living the way we should be living.” And they changed their lives around. When they changed their lives God changed God’s mind, and Jonah was very angry. The passage today talked about Jonah going and speaking to the people of Ninaveh and their response to the message. In the last chapter of the book, and it’s only four chapters long so you can go home and read it through for yourselves, Jonah and God have this interchange, and Jonah says, “I could have stayed home for this. I knew you were a merciful God. If you want to be nice to those folks, why involve me in the whole thing? Why did I have to go make a fool out of myself, telling them they were going to be destroyed? Then you come along and change your mind and everything is all fine.” Finally, God says, “They are part of my creation, too. Don’t I have the right to be merciful if I choose to be Merciful?”
The message that we take from that whole story is that we try to draw our lines about who is in and who is out. Who is acceptable and who is not. We usually draw them pretty tightly. People like us are good, all the rest of the folks are bad. The story about Jonah says that we don’t decide, God decides. God is a merciful and loving God. More and more people in the Christian faith believe that you don’t have to be a particular brand of Christian. For years people have traveled from one town to another and if there is not a Methodist church they’ll go to the Presbyterian Church or to the Congregational Church. People have, for a long time, moved from one denomination to another. But denominational loyalties are breaking down even further. Churches are talking to each other more and more to figure out ways that we can work together, rather than be separated from each other. I think that is a very positive thing. We may be at the point where we recognize that different kinds of Christians may all be worshiping the same God, and may all be followers of the same Jesus of Nazareth, but we are not necessarily prepared to take it to the next step. If we can understand that at one time we thought we had the whole truth as Congregationalists. We thought that we had the whole truth as Mormons. We thought that we had the whole truth as Baptists, or as Lutherans, or as Catholics, or any other Christian denomination that you can name. We now realize that we share in the same truth. The next step would be to say that if all people on the planet are created by God, and God loves and cares for all of those people, might there be a way in which all people of faith share somehow is the same truth? That if there is something that we know about God through Jesus of Nazareth might it not also be true that there are ways in which Hindu people can know truth about God, or Buddhists, or people of the Jewish faith, or Moslems? All of the many different religions of the world. That is not to say that everything is ok. It’s not to say that we should be accepting of anything that anybody wants to believe. Instead we should be willing to recognize the truth of God that is revealed to people, in whatever way it is revealed. If hundreds of thousands of people find truth of God revealed in the prophet Mohammed, we would do well to pay attention to that. To see the ways in which the truth that has been revealed to them might be the same as the truth that has been revealed to us. If we listen to what they have to say, if they listen to what we have to say, then we all may have a fuller understanding of who God is and what God demands of us.
The Gospel passage today talks about Jesus calling some of his disciples to him. It is very clear that Jesus is carrying on the same ministry that was begun by John the Baptist. John was calling people to a repentance. To a radical transformation of their lives. A turning around. The word repentance is usually translated as being sorry for something that we have done in the past, and asking God for forgiveness. But repentance is much more of an active, a positive, a future oriented thing. Not being sorry of something in our past, but instead opening ourselves up to a whole new future. So to be transformed by God’s love means to change our lives for the better. To turn to God. To turn to truth. To be open to all the wondrous ways that God can be revealed to us as humans.
I received a videotape a month and a half ago produced by a variety of groups, including Promise Keepers. It was talking about the ways in which there needed to be a revival in the Christian faith, for us to take our faith more seriously, to work for a better world. I have some objections to their particular focus on the need for everyone to understand the same Christian Truth that we do, but here are some very powerful speakers. One large black man that said that he had grown up in the ghetto. He had grown up in an abusive family. His mom and dad were fighting all the time, there was drinking, there were drugs. He didn’t know what the future was going to be. Then one day his father met somebody at work that was a Christian. That Christian sat and talked about his faith and shared what the love of Christ meant to him. He said that his father accepted Christ in to his heart and went home and was a different man. No more arguing. No more abuse. He lived his life as a caring father. Now the wife didn’t know what to do with all of this. She hadn’t changed, he had. So she went on living the same way. Acting the same way, chewing him out for things, arguing, and fighting. But he lived his new life. One night while the father was downstairs reading some Scripture, his wife came down stairs crying. She said, “I don’t know what it is, I don’t know what is going on. Every time I yell at you, you speak quietly. Every time I say something hateful, you love me back. Every time I do something, you still love me. I don’t what it is, but I want some of it and I want it now.” According to the story, they had a prayer together. They read Scripture. Later they shared their newfound life with their children. For this family, every thing changed. Now this is repentance. This is transformation. This is turning your life around. To turn our lives around we have to be open to change in our lives. We have to watch for ways in which God is being revealed to us. We need to understand what God’s revelation demands of us in our daily lives. As we share those things with others, the world will become a much better place for all of us. This is God’s spirit at work in the world, and we give great thanks. Amen.