Category: Sermon

Genesis 11:1-9 ;Acts 2:1-21

When I moved up to Boston for a new job in 2012, I found a couple of things to be troubling, especially having lived in the southern United States my whole life. Most obvious was the winter- it was no mistake that I interviewed for that position in September, and not in January. I suspect that if they had done that in January, no one would have accepted it. But over the next few months, Shannon and I realized something more subtle, yet still disconcerting to us. We rarely heard Spanish!

My roots are, of course, here in Miami, and even in North Carolina where I spent my teens and early twenties, there was a sizeable Hispanic community. Shannon grew up in Houston, Texas, and we met in Dallas, where Spanish speakers are a sizable minority.

Yet in the first ring suburb that we landed in in Boston, we didn’t. That wasn’t to say there wasn’t diversity there; Watertown, Massachusetts is the home of the second largest Armenian community in the United States, behind Los Angeles, yet that wasn’t the language of the streets, English was.

Thankfully, we found out in our exploring that this wasn’t the case for all of Boston; the town over from us, Waltham, has been a refuge for immigrants since the 1800s, with successive waves of English, Irish, Welsh, Italian, Mexican and now Guatemalan and Indian immigrants landing there and leaving their imprint on the town. We often preferred the vibes there. It’s good to be around people who are different.

That’s because human diversity, in all its forms, is not a curse. It is a blessing. Unfortunately, in the past and in the present, the Bible has been misinterpreted to support ethnic nationalism, and in the United States, racial segregation and white supremacy. Yet I believe a closer read of the Bible, and especially our stories today, tell a different story. One where every person on the planet, no matter who they are, is a beloved creation of God, and part of the great work of humanity is to not just learn to tolerate one another, but celebrate and love one another.

Our first bible reading, our first story, is one you probably know, if not from Sunday School, then from popular culture. The story is mythic in its quality, a just-so story, attempting to explain the diversity of language and people in the world. There is but one tribe or group, it seems, and they come and build a city in what the Bible calls Shinar, this ancient tribe decides to settle down, build a city and eventually a very large tower.

The land of Shinar was in modern day Iraq, and which the Hebrews knew most intimately, but not fondly as part of Babylonian Empire.

Scholars tell us that This part of the story was probably influenced by the Jewish experience in the city of Babylon, where they were exiled from about 597BC to 537BC. It was the largest city in the world at the time with a population of close to 150,000. If this seems small, Jerusalem wouldn’t achieve that population for 2,000 years, in 1944. It must have been incredibly diverse; as the administrative center of a sprawling multiethnic empire, we can imagine it as a city of dozens, if not hundreds of tribes and nations, with as many languages.

It also boasted one of the tallest buildings in the ancient world, the Etemenanki. A temple dedicated to the Babylonian God Marduk, it stood close to 300 feet tall, something like a 25ish story building- still very tall today. Now imagine if you’re used to two story houses, something this size would have been unfathomably big, so large that it challenged the heavens themselves. Although it was shorter than the pyramids in Egypt, this was a building people walked in and around on. Priests of Marduk, a sky God, did ceremonies at a shrine at the top of the building. We can see the ties here between the story of the tower of Babel and the Israelite experience of Babylon: lots of people, lots of languages, a very tall building, and worship of a foreign God!

We all know the aftermath of the tower; the people are dispersed and form many nations and languages. This is often called a curse, but I refuse to call it such. My reading of what God says, “nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” does not sound like a curse of humanity, but instead recognition that humanity’s potential is great in a way that we can best describe as awe-ful, in the old sense of the word- that the awe we feel about it should have a little bit of wariness in it.

Power, be it political, technological, or economic, is a tool; there are countless examples of it being used for the common good. But, we also should remember that the pursuit of power was behind the worst moments of the 20th century and indeed, of human history, as dictators attempted to bind together the forces in nations to the will of state and leader, and the terrible results were paid out in the blood of the innocent, and in crimes against humanity.

What if our vast human potential were instead redirected away from the pursuit of power and directed instead to the pursuit of love. What if we understood that our primary calling in life was not to accumulate power and wealth, but to learn to love our neighbors who are of different religions and races, who have different political views and gender expressions and sexual orientations. To learn not just to tolerate them, as the line between tolerance and intolerance is a thin one, easily crossed back and forth, but to celebrate each other.

This means that God’s action at the tower of Babel is not a curse, but a blessing. In creating our diversity in race, gender, sexuality, thought, etc., etc., God transformed the richness and beauty of creation from a mono color canvas into a rich tapestry. Our differences do not make us weaker, they make our experiences richer. Yes, we have to talk and compromise, and sometimes we can’t build a tower to the moon as quickly as we might, but the purpose of humanity is not to build towers, it is to love our neighbors.

Why does this story of Babel matter on the feast of Pentecost? The traditional teaching of the church has been that the story of Pentecost, detailed in our second reading, is the reversal of the story of Babel. Recently, however, we have noticed that it is not the case; the story of Pentecost is not that diversity is bad, and that we should become one people. Indeed, the great miracle of Pentecost, the tongues of fire that settle on the crowd, is not that everyone speaks the same language. No, the great miracle is that the crowd understands each other as in their own languages. This is not a call to a monoculture or even a one language state, but rather once again, recognition of the diversity that exists, and a call for us to learn about our differences and reach across them.

So friends and neighbors, let us go into the world, not to build monuments to our power and pride, but to love our neighbors a little bit better, a little bit more. Let us learn to recognize our differences, reach across the gaps as we find them, and fulfill our calling as a people of God.

Amen.

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21;Acts 16:16-34

It is not often that I am rendered speechless, but I was on Wednesday afternoon, when news broke of the events in Uvalde, Texas. Like all of us, I felt horror, sadness, and now anger. There’s a reason it took me close to 8 hours to figure out what to say to you all in the pastoral letter which you’ll find printed in your bulletin.

I’m not going to go into a political polemic about gun control right here and now. If you’ve talked to me for more than about five minutes you probably can guess most of my views on that, and well, that’s probably not why you came to church.

I’ll be happy to rant at you during coffee hour if you like.

To be honest, I don’t have much immediate hope right now; hope for our cities, our country, and our world. There’s a lot that will probably get worse before it gets better. Summers will get hotter, and weather events like hurricanes and wildfires will get more extreme. Wealth inequality will probably get worse and communities will get more disconnected from one another, with people having fewer and fewer friends and social connections. Our country’s politics will probably become more and more dysfunctional, as our government becomes less and less representative of what people actually want.

If this seems cynical, it is. I am especially so in weeks like this one, where evil is plainly clear not only in the tragedy of a massacre of innocents, but also in the church (not our church). The Southern Baptist Convention, the conservative denomination founded originally in defense of slavery, was forced to reveal that for decades, leaders kept a secret excel spreadsheet list of hundreds of ministers, deacons, and youth leaders who had committed sexual assault or other misconduct, and refused to share this list with churches or the general public.

So please forgive me if I don’t have a very high view of human nature right now.

Yet despite it all I do hold on to ultimate hope; that is that everything will one day be made right, even though the process will be terribly painful. I also believe in immediate miracles, where beautiful and good things happen and God’s fingerprints are all over them.

Our first reading today is the last in a multi week series Revelation about what our ultimate hope will look like when realized. Our passage today includes the final words in the book of Revelation, and as it’s the last book in our Bibles, the last words of the Bible.

This passage reminds us of a number of truths embedded into our faith; the sovereignty of God: God is the Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. That Jesus is both root and branch, divine and descendant of David. That all who are thirsty can come and drink, taking the water of life as a gift.

Yet there’s a flip side of this passage that’s escaped my attention on previous times I’ve preached on it: this is city is not without its price. Now, its price is not gold or silver, indeed, it’s free yet is so despised by our culture and society it might seem impossible to achieve. Accountability. “See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work.”

“Blessed are those who wash their robes.”

Self-examination, accountability to not only our God but a community is a key part of the Christian life. It’s one of the reasons we go to church instead of going to brunch every week. Just like every child needs a non-parent adult who can nudge them back onto better paths when they stray, so to do we need friends, communities, and well, God to help us from getting too self-involved, too focused on the wrong things. I had a member of my internship church tell me that she went to church because she needed her heart and moral compass reset on a weekly basis.

This is not to say that we should live bound by regret or self-incrimination, but rather that we should try to do better. There is always time for us to live better, to do better, to be better, to not cause quite as much harm in the world. This is sometimes really hard. Neuroscientists tell us that as we do things, as we think about things, different neural pathways are activated in our brains, and it makes physical, not spiritual, but physical changes in how our brains work, which make it easier to do the same things again. It is an act of conscious choice to change, one that is best done with support and community.

Indeed, I would call the breaking of habits, the transformation of our ways of being when it actually sticks a miracle.

This brings us to our second reading, a longer story from the book of Acts. It’s the dramatic story of a miracle living out Jesus’ first sermon in the Gospel of Luke, that the Good News is that captives and prisoners be set free.

The story itself is a little strange: an enslaved woman, used as a fortune teller, starts harassing Paul and his companions, following behind them and yelling, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.” Paul gets annoyed and exorcises some sort of spirit from her, presumably the source of her fortune telling powers.

Her owners got mad and did the ancient equivalent of calling the cops on Paul and Silas. Interestingly, what they accused Paul and Silas of wasn’t ruining them economically; it was being of the wrong religion, disturbing the peace, and advocating for strange illegal ways of life that were incompatible with their obviously superior Roman ways of life. I’ll let you fill in the gaps on whether or not people have continued to use violence to enforce what they perceive as threats to their “way of life.”

Paul and Silas are almost lynched, and then thrown in prison.

At midnight, while singing and in prayer, an earthquake loses their bonds and shakes the very foundations of the prison.

The jailor, knowing what fate awaited him if the prisoners escaped- let us remember that violent systems inflict violence on everyone involved with them, not just those who are the primary targets of them- attempts suicide, but is stopped by Paul.

The jailor frees them, and does his penance, faces his accountability; he washes their wounds, the ones that he helped to inflict.

It is only after that that he is baptized.

This is a beautiful story and a miracle; not even the earthquake, but the change in heart of the jailor.

Unfortunately, this sort of miracle is a rare one; throughout history, Christians have been jailors, conquistadors and slave owners. We have committed terrible atrocities, many of them in the name of the church.

Yet, against the weight of history, against my cynicism, I still believe in miracles. I still believe that we can be washed clean, even if, like a child who just got a new outfit, we will sully ourselves again. I still believe in the power of human and divine connection, that we can hold ourselves and each other accountable, that our love of God can, in our most open moments, cause us to choose the better way.

This is the hope that the alpha and omega, the first and the last is not doctrine or dogma, idols or our human foibles, but our God.

This is my hope against hope, the hope I must have to be and remain a Christian, and indeed, probably a functional human being. That we can hold each other in accountability, and in doing so grow in love and goodness, and sometimes, miracles do happen.

Amen.

Vello, Berta, for Fine Acts

Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; Acts 16:9-15

What is a home?

A home is not necessarily the same thing as a house. A house, or an apartment are buildings, physical spaces.

A home, on the other hand, has a deeper meaning to it, even in secular usage will have an almost spiritual tinge to it.

After we hosted a party a few weeks ago, my wife Shannon and I were told that we had a very welcoming home.

This doesn’t mean they were necessarily complimenting the parsonage, although it does have a nice relatively open living room and Florida room combined entertaining space.

Not too toot our own horns too much, but I think they would have said this even if we lived in a small apartment. The core of a welcoming home is not the physical surroundings- there are beautiful mansions that feel like a warzone, and tiny apartments filled with love. I believe it’s not even the individual people inside of it. Instead, it’s about the connections that we have in our family, and the warmth, openness, and safety that we were willing to extend to others. It was this warmth and openness that made our home was place where our guests could relax and feel safe.

I sincerely hope that where you live feels like a home is a place where you feel warmth and openness, and I hope that this church is a place where you can feel safe and loved.

It is a reason I open many worship services with the words, “welcome home”. We all want a place where we can feel safe, where we can rest, where we are welcomed not just for the gifts we bring, but our simple presence.

But home isn’t always easy. Family can be very hard. I think all of us have had an experience where our foundations of home- not of a house, but home- either shifted or became unmoored in some way. Hopefully, when that happened, we- or our family- were flexible enough to change and find secure footing again.

Our Bible readings are about this forging of a new home in their own ways. Our first reading is about the New Jerusalem, the Heavenly city on the remade Earth. It’s a radically different place than our homes now. God lives there, not in a temple, but in the middle of the city. There’s trees and fruit, and healing is readily available to not just the chosen but the whole earth. This is a picture of what home could be like.

Yet getting there is not an easy process. There’s a lot to cleanse on this earth; and if you’ve ever dealt with harsh chemicals in the bathroom to get a particularly gnarly stain out, imagine how hard it would be to scour racism, misogyny, or extreme nationalism out of our planet.

Yet, eventually Humanity and Divinity are able to live together in harmony under a new normal, with new foundations, a rebuilt and completely reimagined home. Even if the people involved are the same, there is a new set of relationships that are fairer and more loving. No longer are there debts or debtors, abused or abusers. Instead, we dwell with God in a place of peace, much like our poet describes on the back of the bulletin.

Our second reading is from the book of Acts, and features one of those rare features in the bible that we have been highlighting since Easter: a named female character. This particular story introduces us to Lydia, a merchant who dealt in the luxurious imperial purple. Scholars suggest that she too, was wealthy, or at least had a household. The patriarchal culture of the time suggests that if she had the sole power to invite these men, including Paul, into her house without asking permission of her husband or father that she was probably a widow, one of the few social situations a woman could be in with some degree of independence.

Lydia, interestingly, is the first follower of Jesus in Europe. This makes Europe the last continent in the bible to have Jesus followers in it- Israel/Palestine is in Asia, and the Phillip the Ethiopian Eunuch converts way back at the beginning of the book of Acts, and starts the church in Africa. As for Lydia, church that she founded, or probably led in the town of Philippi, is the subject of one of Paul’s letters in the New Testament, the book of Philippians.

Lydia, for her part, is honored by churches that have calendars for different saints, including the Episcopal, Lutheran, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The Orthodox Churches even call her “Equal to the Apostles.”

But what I found most intriguing about this passage is that she invites these men into her home. This is a move that took courage, as it would have been scandalous for a woman to invite three unattached men into her home, but she does it. Her act of invitation, however, is no mere act of charity, of sympathy for pitiable creatures.

This happens after her baptism, which, the same then as now, are celebrated as a welcoming into the Christian family of faith. Indeed, her invitation is conditional, but not on them, but on herself. She was not taking pity on a stranger, she was inviting a new brother, a new teacher into her house and into her life. This is what home looks like in practice.

The reading tells us that Lydia’s whole household converts along with her. That must have been quite a disruption! Old ways of relating to one another were upended, and new ways of thinking of their place in the cosmos and the social order had to be made, in addition to new religious rules to follow or not follow- did they allow pork in the house?

We don’t know the minutiae of the discussions and new adjustments that they had to make, but Lydia is clearly able to understand the shifting of the meaning of home and expand it to include Paul and his fellow disciples as siblings in faith, not just as guests.

Let us aspire to Lydia’s flexibility and welcome in our church and our homes. We know that disruptions come to our church and homes surely as they did to Lydia. Some of them are positive; the addition of a child, whether by birth or adoption. New members who join us for coffee hour and maybe sit in our pew occasionally. Others are more painful; suffering from addiction, the loss of a family member or friend; perhaps a beloved family moves away because they just can’t afford to live in Miami anymore.

Yet if we remember that our homes, and indeed our churches, are not the buildings or even the people inside of them, but the network of relationships inside them, including that great relationship to Jesus; although the foundations might bend, they will not break.

Members and friends of the Miami Shores Community Church, Welcome Home. Home to a church that tries to echo that New Jerusalem, a place of healing for all people, not just the people inside its wall. A place where we might learn to love God and each other learn how God loves us and reflect that love in our world that needs us so dearly.

Amen.

11.8.2020

Back when I was in high school, in Christian circles there was a craze for a series of books called “Left Behind”, about one particular interpretation of the end times. 

They were written in the style of a Tom Clancy or Dan Brown thriller and spawned a multimedia empire of movies and video games, which for a certain period, dominated Evangelical Christian Culture, which, considering I lived in the midst of the Bible belt, I could not avoid.

Written by a pair of politically and theologically extremely conservative authors, their vision of the apocalypse is honestly pretty awful on all levels.

Theologically, they embrace the rapture, the bodily assumption of all born again Christians into heaven before the destruction and violence of the apocalypse, which is not how most Christians throughout history interpreted Jesus’ return.

The idea that we Christians, who literally worship a man and God who suffered and died from violence, should be cheerfully absent from suffering, rather than in the midst of it, tending to and in solidarity with the victims of suffering is against the bedrock principles of our faith. It makes a mockery of the crucifixion.

Even more disturbing, they sensationalize and even seem to relish the death and suffering of the authors’ political enemies- liberals and progressives, Muslims, Catholics, LGBTQ people. The anti-Christ is the child of a same sex couple. 

That is literal demonization- turning your opponents into demons.

This is disgusting. I’ve never understood this glee for punishment that some people have about Christ’s return.

Perhaps it is a side effect of an incredible degree of self-righteousness- not even that they are on the side of God, but that God is on their side, that they will be winners and their enemies the losers. That when judgement comes, that they will escape it, gleeful watchers.

It is to people like this that the prophet Amos is speaking to in our first bible reading.

To introduce Amos a little bit, Amos is a prophet, kind of like Jonah, and the prophet’s job is not to tell the future, but rather, to stand as a mediator between God and the people of God.

He’s a relatively early prophet, and the whole book of Amos is fascinating for a number of different reasons.

From a secular standpoint, the prophet’s writings are important: the first two chapters are as far as I know, and I’m happy to be corrected, one of the first times war crimes are condemned in history. He explicitly condemns wartime violence against civilians, especially women. It’s not the basis for the whole of our tradition of human rights, but it is an important first step.

Then there’s our passage for today, which starts by saying (and I am paraphrasing here)

“Oh, you think the day of God is going to be easy. Because it won’t be. Not for you.”

To understand this passage, we have to know who Amos is speaking to.  He’s not talking to the general populace, to the working class, but rather to the elite of society, both political and religious.

Widespread among these elites is the belief that God will save them from foreign foes, yet at the same time they are violating God’s laws by being corrupt and trampling the populace under their feet.

If Amos sounds brash and harsh in this passage, it is because he is unequivocal in the knowledge that God demands fairness and rightness, especially towards those who have little. Earlier in the book, Amos not only condemned war crimes, but also says that the wealthy and powerful would “sell the poor for a pair of sandals.” 

These are the folks that Amos is trying to shock into decency with these meaningful and sometimes scary images of the day of the lord being not a day of great light, but darkness, a day that comes like a lion.

The difference between Left Behind and Amos is that Amos takes no glee in this pronouncement. He knows that he will suffer alongside the people. Thus, Amos pleads and cajoles these elites, reminding them that God is not on their side, and indeed, that they need to get back to God’s side.

Furthermore, this passage is, not, in fact, a call to end music programs or stop having Sunday worship.

But rather, it is a reminder that God despises the hypocrisy of those who would prize art, wealth, and beauty, but not human life. 

St. John Chrysostom reminds us that “If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, you will not find Him in the chalice.”

This section ends, however, with this note: God’s justice will roll down like water. God’s righteousness will flow like a stream. This is the certainty that Jesus would later use in his sermon on the mount. These are the words of a prophet.

This imagery, after the anger of the earlier pieces, should grant us, if not peace, then hope. The waters are not destructive, like the flood of Noah, flowing waters that will cleanse. They will cleanse from this world the injustice of systems, and to leave behind new life in its midst.

That this will happen is inevitable; our job as Christians then, is to make our world as much like the next as we can, to uphold justice and righteousness, to transform our world so that when the streams come and cleanse, there will be as little flotsam and debris as possible.

Thus, we are compelled not to passivity, but to readiness and action, not because it will save us, but because our God has called us to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and to let justice roll down.

But I will ask us to think about this readiness and action in a little different light.

That is, I believe our readiness is less about what we do, and much more about our ability to reside in the arms of God ever more wholly.

Readiness is the theme of Gospel reading today. That’s probably the clearest thing about it.

Our parable today is an odd one, with some elements to the story that are, quite honestly, nonsensical, but it does provide us with some hooks to explore.

Pervading this parable is the theme of wisdom and readiness, or possibly, planning. The bridesmaids are divided into two groups, in our parable, the wise and the foolish. The only difference between the two groups is that one brought oil in their lamps and the others did not.

There’s no indication that the wise were betting looking, more spiritual, wealthier, or poorer, but simply that they remembered to have oil in their lamps.

Why having oil in the lamps is important, we aren’t ever told, nor are we given any reasoning for “the foolish ones” to try to go oil shopping in the middle of the night.

But even more than that, we don’t really know what the oil in the lamp is supposed to signify!

Is it spiritual preparation or faith? Zealousness? A scorecard of good deeds? Concern for the poor? We don’t know.

Different pastors and preachers over the past few millennia have preached on it different aspects of it, how apparently you can’t buy this oil, you can’t fix your neighbor’s oil deficiency, how you better stay awake, how you better be ready this instant in case Jesus comes back.

But I don’t think we need to get into any of that today. Because honestly, just like all of those bridesmaids, we’re tired. All of us are tired. We can admit it.  This year has been a decade. Life in these United States in this moment is utterly exhausting.

Whether it’s home and family concerns, economic concerns, a deadly global pandemic with skyrocketing case counts, a edge of the knife election, racism and homophobia, or that mix of all of the above, there is little more that I want to do as your pastor than make church just one more source of anxiety.

This doesn’t mean I won’t challenge us to become our best selves, to be ever more open to Jesus, but anxiety over the state of the oil in our lamps is a lost cause if there ever was one. For Jesus reminds us that his yoke and burden are light. Jesus does the heavy lifting in our religion. Not us.

And honestly, I suppose I can’t help but get into what the lamp signifies a little bit; I don’t think that the oil in the lamp represents any of our own personal qualities and strengths. I don’t think it represents our joy, or spiritual discipline, I don’t think it represents the amount of prayer we do each day or the amount of money we can give.

I think the oil in our lamps represents our capacity to lean on and rest in the arms of God. That’s right, I think it’s better to think of being ready less as the state of strength of our spiritual muscles, then our ability to unclench the sore and seized up muscles in our souls.

If this seems strange, I’ll extend the analogy. I’m not a huge yoga person, but I suspect that some folks here are. I’ve been told that perhaps the hardest stretch and movement in yoga is the final one at the end of most sessions, where you simply lie down on your back on the yoga mat and try to relax all of the muscles in your body.

We spend so much of our days with muscles tight that releasing them becomes almost impossible.

Yet how much better are we able to move when are muscles are loose?

How much more enjoyable is the physicality of life with loose muscles able to move about freely?

So too with our souls.

If we want to do the work of justice that is so sorely needed, we need to learn loosen the muscles in our souls so that we can abide more and more deeply in the arms of our God. We need to remember ever more clearly that there is much in this world that is not in our control. This is not to abdicate responsibility, but to recognize the power of God.

I will not lie to you and say that this is easy work. This is hard.

As someone who struggles with anxiety and depression, it is something I work on every single day, and I know I cannot do it alone. I thank God for my wife and dogs, my family, my church, my support communities, and friends that remind me to unclench my soul, to create spaces where I have safe places to do this work. But I know that it is ultimately my work to do.

I hope this doesn’t seem too daunting, or at least any more than that final yoga pose does. But I encourage you to do what you can. Recognize what is in and out of your control. Listen to relaxing music rather than the news podcast. Remember that you are still a good parent if your kids get a little too much screen time. Realize that refreshing twitter and facebook one more time is not going to make the news come quicker or people like your posts more.

I ask us to do these things because we don’t know when we will need those lamps, or when it will be too late.

Amen.

Readings: Jonah 3:10-4:11; Matthew 20:1-16

Candidating Sermon for the Miami Shores Community Church

Pity Jonah, and not just because he got swallowed and then spit up by a whale.

Jonah’s not a bad guy, although he is a bit stubborn and melodramatic. Thankfully those qualities alone aren’t enough to condemn us.

Frankly, if God condemned everyone who was stubborn and melodramatic, we wouldn’t have telenovelas, musicians, or Miami Dolphins fans.

Jonah, however, is not a character in a soap opera; he is a prophet- and to his credit, in the bible, the prophet’s job is a tough one. It’s not to tell the future- that’s something Greek Oracles and diviners did.

Instead, a prophet’s job is to mediate communication between people and God. For many of our prophets in the Bible, usually this involves communicating God’s displeasure at the harm that society was doing to the poor, like Amos does, imagining new forms of leadership, like Isaiah does, or even demanding answers from God in the form of a trial, like Micah does.

Usually these prophets spoke directly to the Israelites and Judeans, although sometimes they spoke to foreigners- Daniel is particularly notable for this.

So Jonah’s mission, to proclaim repentance- turning away from evil- and the good news of God to a foreign adversary isn’t unique to him, but what is unique is his success. Nineveh was a city in what is today Iraq, near the modern city of Mosul, and the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the biggest and baddest empire on the block, and possibly in the world at its time.

As empires often are, they were bullies, and the Israelites were often a target of that bullying. As the product of such bullying, the Israelites hated and feared the Assyrians, and the city of Nineveh as its capital was a symbol of that hatred.

So its especially astonishing that the book of Jonah tells us that Jonah has merely to say the words once, and the people of Nineveh heed him. They fast and pray in sackcloth and dust and ashes, all the way from the donkeys to the king.

Normally, a prophet actually succeeding on their mission would be a cause for triumph and celebration. But that’s not the case here. For Jonah this mission that God called him on is one he’s deeply conflicted about.

He’s so conflicted about it that he actually attempts to runs away from his duty, first on land then by sea, to the ends of the earth. The city that he attempts to flee to, Tarshish, was in modern Spain, clear across the Mediterranean. He is only set back toward his calling when he leaps overboard in the midst of a storm and is famously swallowed up by a whale and spewed back up on to dry land.

Yet even though Jonah is conflicted, God uses Jonah all the same, to teach Jonah and to teach us something about God’s mercy and love. Jonah reminds us that although it is our duty to proclaim the good news, the gospel that Jesus preached about; of freedom to the captive, liberation to the oppressed, good news to the poor, God’s love will always work beyond the borders of our words to places we cannot yet imagine.

God’s love will be present, even when we are not.

As an aside, if Jonah’s story seems a little too neat and easy, you aren’t alone. There’s no historical record of something like this happening in Nineveh, and many scholars don’t believe that the events in this book ever “really happened”, or on this scale at least. Even if it did, this transformation didn’t last long, as the Assyrians would still later invade and destroy the Kingdom of Israel, and scatter its people.

Instead, I would encourage us to think of this story as an instance where we can uphold the bible’s truth; that it says and teaches things that are true, in the form of a story.

Most prophets have to sing, shout, and preach in the streets, practically begging for the Israelites and Judeans to listen to them, yet Jonah has merely to go to the foreign land, the capital of a cruel empire destined to invade and scatter his people, and they listen.

This is where we pick up our story with Jonah for today’s reading.

We see a Jonah is sullen and moody, at times sounding more like the worst stereotypes that we adults have of teenagers than a wise and faithful prophet.

Jonah angry prays to God. That’s right; Jonah gets angry, and then he prays. How beautiful is that! Indeed, I think God loves it when we do so, for as we see in this story, like a good parent, God handles our anger quite well.

Who hasn’t angry prayed at God before?

Even if it’s just driving down Biscayne Boulevard and someone makes a right turn from the left lane, and we say “oh Lord, give me patience this day,” at least it’s not a stream of vulgarities. Which, to be honest, God hears those prayers just as well.

But back to Jonah. In the course of his prayer, we get not only his internal motivation for running away from his calling, “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.”

We see the roiling in his spirit through this prayer; his knowledge of God’s goodness, mercy, and love, is in direct conflict with what we would today call his xenophobia or racism- his anger and hatred of the Assyrian people. He is a man at war with himself.

I think it’s telling of something true about humanity that divine intervention is not quite enough to overcome Jonah’s xenophobia and racism.

Let’s sit with that for a moment.

Literal divine intervention is not quite enough to overcome Jonah’s xenophobia and racism.

Jonah continues on in his prayer, and here’s that most melodramatic of moments, “And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

Jonah would rather die than let his opponents live. Jonah would rather die with hatred in his heart than acknowledge that love wins, that all means all, that love is indeed, love.

Jonah, a good and faithful man, would rather let hate and death win out in his heart than have those people be loved by God just as much as he is.

Yet even so, God does not cancel Jonah. I’m not sure we should either.

To Jonah’s credit, with some heavy duty pushing by God, Jonah does the work.

He goes to the city that he hates, holds his nose, and he calls, however quietly, on the people to repent of evil and return home to God.

He does the work.

The work succeeds not because of his personal charisma or organizing efforts, not because he has a business plan or a 17 step model to building a better church, but because of the power of the Holy Spirit.

For what else could explain the repentance of a people so complete that everyone, from the animals to the king fasted?

Who knows, perhaps it is precisely the fact that Jonah comes to foreign and hostile city, where his safety was not guaranteed, implies that he is no charlatan looking to make a quick buck, that this testimony is no message from him, but the source of that message must have been divine.

It is after seeing the miraculous, almost certainly life changing repentance of a city that Jonah still acts like this.

So God decides to give Jonah an object lesson.

After Jonah leaves the city, he builds a booth; folks familiar with Jewish practices would recognize this as a Sukkah, a structure many observant Jewish families build outside during that holiday and eat meals in during Sukkot.

God has a vine grow up and over this booth to give Jonah some shade, and he is very grateful for the respite from the blistering sun.

But over the course of the night, God sends a pest- possibly a worm, to destroy the bush.

So when Jonah wakes up, the sun beats down, the hot and sultry winds blew from the east, making it so hot that Jonah, once again, wishes he would die.

In one of my favorite teaching moments in the Bible, God reminds Jonah that if Jonah is “allowed” to be angry over the destruction of that single bush, that Jonah did not create and only lasted for a single night, that God is all the more “allowed” to love the city of Nineveh, which, if nothing else, was home to hundreds of thousands of children and animals, all of whom are God’s Creation.

This is a reminder to Jonah that our God is not the creator of any one people, but of all peoples.

God’s vision for the world is more just and merciful, kinder and more hopeful than even the “most effective” of prophets.

It’s a reminder that our default conceptions of fairness and rightness are much more limited than the vision that God has for us.

Jesus picks up this theme in our Gospel story, the parable of the vineyard workers.

In it, there is a man who owns a vineyard and hires out some day laborers. Throughout the day, the man hires various workers, some working from the dawn, others only working for an hour.

He then lines the workers up, in order from the most recently hired to the earliest hired, and proceeds to pay them each the exact same wage.

The workers who were hired first grumble, but the man tells them that it is not theirs to grumble about.

“Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

Is that not the same issue that Jonah had? A selfishness that would have others starve – because no money means no food- rather than all be treated equally in the sight of God?

These stories remind us that we all have work to do in proclaiming the gospel. Whether that work is provoking spiritual growth in ourselves and others, community building and creating connections, especially across differences, witnessing for God’s love that society has tossed aside, or even just showing up for one other, we all have work to do.

God loves that we do that work, for the work of love is the work of God. Yet we must remember that this work does not make us better than anyone else in the eyes of God, and we must always remember to leave room in our ranks for those who would walk beside us who either come late to the party, or who aren’t like us in many different ways.

For God’s love is bigger than any one of us. Indeed, there is no greater force in the universe than when our faith, hope, and love, unite with that of God.

Amen.