“CALL WAITING”
Epiphany3/Janaury 22, 2012
The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: “Jonah, get up and go to
Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message I will tell you.” This time
Jonah got up and went. Jonah 3:1-3
“Call waiting” - that annoying little beep when you’re on the phone. It’s the beep that has causes people to say: “Let me put you on hold. Someone more important may be trying to reach me.”
When you think about it, the story of Jonah is a story of a call waiting. In this case, someone important was calling – the LORD, we are told – only the last thing Jonah wanted to do was put his life on hold and answer it.
A little background. What we have in the book of Jonah is a teaching parable. A popular, widely known story has been reworked by its author for a very particular application to Israel. He did his re-write in the time following the Babylonian exile and used it to challenge Israel’s narrow nationalism. Israel’s religious leaders were determined that there would never be another Babylon. In Babylon they were convinced that they were witnessing the end of their race. Never in a million years did they think they would get to return home and rebuild their nation. But, against all odds, it happened. And never again would God have reason to punish the nation in such a way. So priest and prophet preached moral perfection, ritual cleanliness, strict obedience to the law. Keeping the law became more important than knowing the God who gave the law, more important than enjoying the kind of life God wanted for them. And the “love your neighbor” thing was completely forgotten. You only get in trouble when you start including everyone. One of the reasons for Babylon, they said, was that Jewish men had married foreign women, mixed the races, and thus became impure – especially when those foreign wives started setting statues of their pagan gods on the mantle and sticking pictures of them on the side of the refrigerator. After Babylon, the prophets Ezra and Nehemiah held mass divorces – “Get rid of those non-Jewish wives – they’re bad influences! Get clean!” It was ethnic cleansing on a large scale. God’s call to Israel call was beeping in the background – “I give you as a covenant to all people, as my light to all nations” (Is. 42:6). But it was to be a “call waiting”, as Israel instead prayed for the destruction of her neighbors and sang - “God Bless Israel – And No One Else!”
With great skill and finesse, the author of Jonah calls Israel to repentance and reminds her of her mission.
That’s the background. Now to the story: Jonah the Israelite was called by God to be a prophet to the Assyrian city of Nineveh. Instead of going east to the city, he gets on a west-heading boat, to put as much distance as he can between him and the call. His epic adventure includes being thrown overboard from a ship and swallowed by a great fish and finally thrown up at the very point he started running from his mission. We could berate Jonah for his lack of faith or courage, but it is more helpful to identify with him for a moment. He was given a mission impossible. Nineveh was one of the greatest cities of its day. It was a city of conquerors, a city with a strong commercial base, superior technology and a powerful war machine – and a mortal enemy in Israel. Imagine yourself suddenly being asked by God to go into those rugged, desolate mountain ranges on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. God tells you to climb into those mountains and tell Al – Qaida to repent. See what I mean? Jonah had a mission impossible. He would leave that call waiting.
The world conspires to make Jonahs out of all of us. The world beats you down and tells us that you can’t change the big picture, so just fall in line and make the best living that you can for yourself and your family. In his book “The Politics of Meaning”, Michael Lerner writes that too often we give up on our deepest held values of compassion, caring and community because they do not seem practical in the real world. An ethos of selfishness and materialism prevails by default. We may not be able to bring about racial reconciliation, but we can pursue our own happiness and carve out our own little niche for peace of mind. Our values may tell us we need to head East to Nineveh, but we turn around and walk west with Jonah. We settle for life out of touch with our calling.
The spirit of westward-heading Jonah is alive and well in the Church today. Listen as Christian adults discuss social issues. It’s all around us. Listen, and what you hear is discussion of the merits of an issue based on whether a “position” is liberal or conservative. Listen and you hear Christians sacrificing their calling on the altar of the political left or the political right, without ever getting to “What Would Jesus Do?” We need some time in the belly of the whale, time enough to cease all this “left/right” talk and become responsible students of scripture. We need to stay there until our own voices grow silent and we can hear the “beep” of our call waiting, and, answering it, set our course through this life according to the priorities of the One whose theme song is “Give me land, lots of land, under starry skies above. DON’T FENCE ME IN!!!!”
“God, you must know how the Ninevites are! They will never change. You’re wasting your time. You’re wasting my time!” Jonah reminds me of the way we categorize people, lock them away forever into today’s estimation of them – “Well, you know how their kind are.” “She’s always been that way.” “He’ll never change.” We claim to be followers of the greatest change agent ever, whose grace has transformed hundreds of thousands of lives throughout the centuries, and yet, when the time comes to extending his grace to those we’ve pigeon-holed, we fail time and again. It’s more convenient for us if they never change. We can write them off. But if they change we have to change – think of them differently, treat them differently, we might have to start including them. To Jonah’s dismay, when he grudgingly announces God’s word to Ninevah, the entire city, to a person, repents and turns to God. And is Jonah happy? Just the opposite – now he’s really ticked. Now the lines are blurred between good guys and bad guys. Now the ground is leveled by grace. Now Jonah must consider having positive regard for Ninevites. Today it’s the Ninevites – who will it be tomorrow?
Yet God is undeterred. God seems relentlessly determined to seek us out even when we have put our call on hold. It still happens. Perhaps it’s happened to someone you know. Perhaps it’s happened to you – a sudden and terrific sense of conviction that this is what your life is for, that of the thousand and one ways in the world, this is the way for you. With a sudden clarity you know that you belong to God and that you are called to love, to serve, to forgive, to go not so much where you want to go, but where you are needed. You know that you are called to imitate Christ, and make the choices that resemble his. You see yourself on the receiving end of grace and being daily changed into a conduit of grace to others. You see yourself in unique and unambiguous relationship with God and thereby in a unique and unambiguous relationship with the rest of humanity.
William Willimon, Duke University Chaplain, tells about getting a call from a parent who was very upset because his daughter had just informed him that she was going to go do mission work with the Presbyterians in Haiti. “It’s absurd!” shouted the father. “A degree in mechanical engineering and she’s going to dig ditches in Haiti. …I hold you personally responsible Willoman!”
“Me? What have I done?”
“You filled her head with all that religion stuff. She likes you, that’s why she’s doing this foolishness.”
“Now look, buster,” Willimon said, “Weren’t you the one who had her baptized?”
“Well, yes,” he said.
“And then, didn’t you read her Bible stories, take her to Sunday School, let her go on those trips with the Presbyterian Youth Group?”
“Well, yes, but …”
“Don’t but me,” Willimon said. “It’s your fault that she believed all that stuff, that she’s gone and thrown it all away on Jesus, not mine. You’re the one who introduced her to Jesus, not me.”
“But,” the father said meekly, “all we ever wanted her to be was a Presbyterian.”
“Sorry,” Willoman said, “You messed up and made a disciple.”
Amen.
