Sermon preached 28 July 2005 by Deacon Dave Skidmore
Good morning. I’m going to start with a joke. You may have heard it. Like the story of Jonah, it involves both water and God:
A man lived in an area struck by a terrible flood. The waters rose about his house and he climbed onto the roof and prayed for deliverance. A rescue crew in a rowboat appeared, but the man on the roof turned down the offer of help. “God will save me,” he said. Well, the water kept rising and along came another rescue crew, this time in a speedboat. The man on the roof gave the same answer: “God will save me.” Finally, there wasn’t much space left on the roof and a rescue helicopter hovered overhead and lowered a rope ladder. The man on the roof refused it, saying, “God will save me.” Well, the water kept rising and he was swept away and drowned. Upon arriving in heaven, he marched straight to God and complained, “I prayed to You to save me, I had faith, and yet You did nothing.” God gave him a puzzled look, and replied, “I sent two boats and a helicopter, what more did you expect?”
Buh-buh-BUMP. Anyway, how many of you here today are familiar with the story of Jonah – have at least heard of it and know that it involves a character in the Bible being swallowed up by a whale or a big fish. Almost everybody, I see. Well, my topic today is, “Jonah Reconsidered.” Let me explain why I think the story of Jonah – a story, to some degree, familiar to nearly all of us – needs to be reconsidered. I think the very ubiquity of the story has to some extent dulled our appreciation for its power. The images of Jonah in our minds have become cartoon-ized. When we hear the name “Jonah,” the first thing that comes to mind is apt to be a Disney image of Pinnochio in the belly of a whale. That has all the raw power of, say, Wile E. Coyote plunging off a cliff in a Roadrunner cartoon. When we contemplate the cartoon image of Pinnochio in the belly of the whale, we do not at all feel the experience of being devoured whole by an enormous sea beast any more than we experience the terror of plunging off a sheer cliff when we think of the hapless Coyote. So, I invite you this morning to reconsider Jonah, to see his experience with fresh eyes.
I’d like to proceed by running through the story we just heard, pointing out certain things and playing with the images. I’m going to play with the images much as a Jungian psychologist might consider the images of a dream or a myth – as representations of elements of our inner lives. In other words, even though, as Freud said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” I’m not going to take the images in Jonah at their face value. A large fish might be nothing more than a large fish, but I will ask what it might mean if the large fish were, in fact, a representation of the “Beast in Me,” or what a Jungian psychologist would call your shadow.
Jonah’s story begins with God telling the prophet to go to Nineveh. Now Jonah, the real Jonah, was a prophet in Israel in the eighth century before the Christian era. But scholars believe the Book of Jonah was probably written three or four hundred years later. By the time our tale is written down, Jonah has become a figure of fun, a hapless little man, surely bearing little resemblance to the wise adviser who helped King Jeroboam II hold the Assyrians at bay. Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq, was the capital of the Assyrian empire, the reigning regional power of the time. So, ordering Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach its destruction was a little bit akin to, say, ordering an electrician in Soviet-dominated Poland to proclaim the end of communism. Or, maybe it is like asking an African-American preacher to march from Selma to Montgomery in the segregated South and proclaim the right to vote. But, whereas Lech Walesa and Martin Luther King Jr. responded to their calls, Jonah hopped a ship headed to Tarshish, thought to be in southern Spain. In the ancient world, that’s about as far away as one could get from Iraq. In effect, Jonah opted for a beach vacation instead of the daunting and dangerous task set before him by God.
So, what are the consequences for Jonah, for anyone, of ignoring what, deep down, we know we need to do? The consequences are we find ourselves adrift on the storm-tossed seas of our troubled minds. You might consider the sea, in the story, as a metaphor for our psyches. Deep, deep within it, far below the conscious surface, are things that we would rather not face: emotions we would rather not feel, like anger; things we fear, like death, dependency, irrelevance; in other words, whales, large fish and elephants in the living room.
The surface of Jonah’s sea is turbulent because he is ignoring what he ought to pay attention to. I find it very telling that Jonah was riding out the storm sound asleep in the hold, until the captain woke him. It is said, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” However, often, like Jonah, when the going gets tough, we’d rather roll over and go to sleep, either literally, or emotionally.
So, what happens next to our hapless hero? The worst imaginable thing; he is tossed into the ocean by his shipmates. Then he is swallowed by a monstrous fish. But the worst thing turns out to be the best thing. The fish takes him back to where he began; only now he has the inner strength to go to Nineveh. The imagery in the psalm that Jonah utters in the belly of the fish evokes the imagery of death and rebirth. The deep surrounds him, weeds are wrapped about his head. Then, the fish spews him out upon the dry land.
Before I continue, I’d like to point out that tales of being swallowed up by a whale or other beast as a metaphor for psychological rebirth are found in many, many cultures. Joseph Campbell in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” notes some of them:
In Jonah, being swallowed by a large fish is the most vivid and central image in the story. So, I think it is worth spending a moment reflecting on the irony that Jonah’s encounter with this fish, this beast, this thing that may represent all that we fear and suppress and ignore, is the vehicle for his salvation. It is an encounter that occurs at the point of utmost desperation and helplessness for Jonah. Let me just note two details at this point of the story. Jonah has some insight into what is going on. He knows that he is the cause of the storm-wracked sea just as when we are depressed or anxious, we often have some idea why. And, Jonah’s shipmates don’t force him from the ship; he asks to be thrown in. It seems that Jonah finally realized, as the cliché goes, “You can run, but you can’t hide.” Or maybe he realized, “No matter where you go, there you are.” He could sail toward Tarshish, but he couldn’t escape confronting his inner demons. And it is his encounter with the beast within that allows him to grow and mature as a human being.
Let me digress from Jonah’s story to reflect a few moments on the question of how one should confront fear or other inner whales. I suppose the realistic answer is, “As best one can.” You could, for instance, slap a bumper sticker on your car that says, “No fear!” But that might be, as Shakespeare would say, protesting too much. Perhaps a better answer is, as a Buddhist might say, “with mindfulness.”
Let me illustrate with a story. About a dozen years ago I went on a retreat to an island in a lake in northern Ontario, sponsored by the Jungian Institute of Chicago. One of the exercises, meant to give participants some insight into how they handled fear, was a ropes course strung about sixty feet above the ground in some tall pines. It was pretty safe. We wore helmets and were strapped into harnesses connected to guidewires. But, it didn’t feel safe and that was the point.
The last obstacle was to navigate a long, slender wobbly log, about four inches wide and suspended high above the forest floor. Now the worst that could happen was that you could fall perhaps three feet and hang in your harness until you could climb back onto the log. But it felt as if, one slip and that would be the end.
Methods for crossing varied. Mine was to take a deep breath, focus on the platform at the far end and walk quickly – achieving the objective without embarrassment and feeling as little fear as possible. I recall that one woman walked to the middle of the log and then, deliberately, flung herself into the void. She screamed, climbed back on the log and continued to the other side. I recall even more vividly a second woman. I can’t remember her name, but I remember that, ironically, she was employed as a risk manager for a Fortune 500 company. She stood on the starting platform for a long time. Slowly, she edged her way out onto the log. A guidewire was strung a few feet over our heads that we could grab onto if we needed to. The woman’s hand reflexively clutched that wire and, after a moment, she forced it down to her side. She’d inch along another little bit and her hand would again shoot to the guidewire and she’d stop. She repeated the pattern over and over until her fellow participants and the instructors were urging her just to hang onto the overhead wire and use it to walk easily across the log. But, she refused. She lived with full awareness of that excruciating fear on that wobbly log – not for the seconds it took to rush headlong across or the minute it took to walk to the middle, deliberately fall off and climb back on – but for something like fifteen minutes. She didn’t fall and, eventually, she got to the other side. Looking back, I think she demonstrated more courage and probably got more out of the exercise than anyone else because she was willing to live with her fear for so long.
Anyway, so far, I’ve talked about the first two chapters of the Book of Jonah. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh but Jonah flees on a ship, a storm arises, he is thrown overboard, swallowed by a large fish and delivered back to land. Now, as radio commentator Paul Harvey likes to say, “the rest of the story.”
What does Jonah do after his experience of rebirth? He goes to Nineveh and proclaims God’s message: In forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown. He is spectacularly successful. The people believe him. They repent their violent ways, put on sackcloths and fast. The king takes off his robe and sits in ashes. So, God spares Nineveh. You’d think Jonah would be pleased. Instead, he was more concerned about his credibility as a prophet than he was about the happy result. He wants to die —presumably of embarrassment. He is mad at God for undermining him and sits outside town waiting for the reign of destruction that doesn’t come. This is a bit of ancient satire. The Israelites, by the time the story was written, were quite accustomed to prophets predicting the destruction of their enemies – usually to no result. But this part of the story also has a serious point – that God’s love extends to all, even the hated Assyrians.
The verses at the end of the story, about the bush that provides Jonah with shade and the worm that ate it, offer another lesson to Jonah – about being grateful for God’s earthly gifts but mindful of their impermanence.
Now I’d like to return to an aspect of the story that I glossed over at the start – that is God’s call to Jonah. We’re accustomed to using that phrase about people pursuing a religious vocation. We’ll say so-and-so has a calling for the ministry. Actually, I think we are all being called to do all sorts of things, all the time – things that may be easy to do or hard to do and may or may not be as dramatic as traveling to an enemy capital and prophesying its destruction. I think we are called to relationships and to meaningful work in the world. We may be called to parenthood, or to church, or to create art. Now it would be nice if the call came, as it did to Jonah, in a loud clear voice with unambiguous instructions. But, at least for me, that’s not the case. Thus, before we can muster the courage to pursue God’s call, we need to spend some time discerning what it is. Let me ask you this morning, “What is God calling you to do? When deep calls to deep, what do you hear?”
I don’t know what the voice you hear might be saying. It might be saying, “Find work worthy of your talent, time, energy and devotion.” It might be saying, “Care for your parents or children,” or both if you are part of the in-between generation. It might be saying, “Seek a deeper relationship with God” or “Love your neighbor.” Only you can discern for yourself what you are called to do. The problem, as amply demonstrated by Jonah, is that often we don’t listen. The fact is, when God says, “Go at once to Nineveh,” we may procrastinate or even ignore the call.
Here’s where I find the message of Jonah so hopeful. I find it especially hopeful for people, such as myself, who cannot relate to stories of being “born again” – of experiencing oneself one way and then, after an intense encounter with God, of forevermore experiencing life as utterly changed. Jonah did have an intense, God-filled encounter – an experience of rebirth – and he did grow from it. He found the courage to go to Nineveh. But, as his childish and peevish reaction after God spared Nineveh shows, he had not exactly achieved enlightenment. He has more lessons to learn. Thus, to me, the message of Jonah is a Universalist message. The story shows that God is a God of second and third and even more chances. God offers rebirth and renewal again and again.
Let me close by again bringing to mind the joke about the man on the roof and the boats and the helicopter. I’m picturing Jonah confronting God in heaven and demanding to know why God didn’t help him more. “I sent a whale and a bush,” God would say, “what more did you expect?” I hope we can have more insight than the man on the roof. I hope we can realize that our everyday encounters with the large fish, the beasts within – the fears, the guilt, the anger, the anxieties that we try to ignore – can be the means of salvation rather than obstacles to salvation. These experiences of going deep within, these experiences that it seems we try to avoid at all costs, can, if experienced with mindfulness, take us to the next stage in our journey toward answering God’s call.
Posted by Mark McNabb at August 3, 2005 05:40 PM