"Garment of Grace" Jonah 1:1-3

0:00 Sisters and brothers, it's so good to be with you. Our scripture lesson for today comes from the book of Jonah, chapter 1, and I'm going to read verses 1 through 3. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai, saying, Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me. but Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord he went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish he paid his fare and went on board to go with them to Tarshish away from the presence of the Lord we're going to stop right there and I want to speak to you this morning on the topic, the garment of grace. The garment of grace.

0:59 sisters and brothers I was on the web the other day and came across a web article that really got my attention the name of the article was clothing as a tool of resistance and that article began to detail how people who were active in the black lives matter movement were intentional about what they wore, that they took their messaging really seriously. People were wearing face masks that said enough is enough, or a shirt that said stop killing us. There were shirts and masks that said we march, or love is love, or celebratory, like young, gifted, and black. And then there were the shirts that had quotations from leaders of the past and present. And most of those quotations were real. And there were a few that were imagined. My favorite one was the quote by Harriet Tubman, we out. I loved all of those shirts and masks and signs because it was a wonderful example of how speech works. It's an example of what we call embodied speech. The people who spoke for God, prophets, actually carried God's words in their beings.

2:33 If you were one of those people who was called by God to say whatever it is that God had to say, just think for a moment about that peculiar vocation of being a messenger. It was a most difficult and lonely job because people were happy to see you when you brought a word of consolation or assurance or forgiveness or hope, but they really didn't like when you brought a negative message. This is a tough job because people don't always like what the prophet had to say. Just ask Jeremiah. Jeremiah was despised because while everyone else was bringing good news, he was bringing bad news. And so it came to the point where whenever he would show up, people would shun him and turn away.

3:31 Imagine what it would be like in our lives today to have a prophet in our midst. Here we are at the worship planning meeting and we've gone through all the details and we're ready to wrap it up, except somebody has the brilliant idea of turning to the prophet Amos and saying, hey, Amos, what does God have to say about our worship? And Amos says, well, y'all, God doesn't like it. God actually says, I hate your festivals and I take no delight in your festival gatherings. Or imagine a church council meeting where right before we have that move to close the meeting, someone has the idea of asking the prophet on the third pew, Isaiah, what does God think about our plans? Only to hear Isaiah say, well, God says an ox knows its master and even an ass knows its master's crib, but y'all do not know what God wants for you.

4:28 A prophet has the difficult job of risk in telling people the truth. And it's a lonely job because sometimes being exposed to God's truth means that you will be by yourself.

4:49 15 books in the Bible record the words of those called by God into this peculiar vocation. We have three major prophets and 12 minor prophets. The major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. These are these larger, longer books. Isaiah has a total of 66 chapters. Jeremiah has 52, and Ezekiel comes in at 48 chapters. Each one of those books gets its own scroll. But then there are these other 12 shorter books ranging from one chapter to 14, and these are called minor prophets, not because they are unimportant, but because of their lengths. In fact, we would say that the minor prophets are major players on the theological landscape.

5:49 In fact, some of the most well-known words that we have in our tradition come from the minor prophets. Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Or, in the last days I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams. or what does the Lord require of thee but to do justice and love mercy and to walk humbly before your God.

6:28 There are people who collect the greatest hits from minor prophets just so we can see the wealth of what we get from those 12 small books. But in all those lists, I have never seen anything from the prophet Jonah. this is a book that will never make the list of the greatest prophetic utterances and that is because in the four chapters that are Jonah in the 48 verses that are in that book there are a total of five prophetic words the entire body of Jonah's prophetic speech in the Bible is five Hebrew words, yet 40 days Nineveh destroyed. That's all Jonah has of prophetic speech, which means that in the book of Jonah, the message of the text is not simply in the prophetic words, but it is in the narrative. The word of the Lord for Jonah is in the story.

7:44 And so let's just run through a brief summary of the story of Joseph. And if you know the story, correct me if I'm wrong. The story goes something like this. God calls Jonah and tells him to go to Nineveh to prophesy on God's behalf. And Jonah's response was, yeah, no. Jonah decides to do something else, get on a ship. He pays his fare, the ship gets out at sea, and a huge storm comes. So terrible that the ship is about to be destroyed. The sailors are all concerned, each praying to their gods while Jonah is fast asleep in the ship. When it's discovered that he's asleep. They wake him up and tell him he needs to pray. And in their conversation, it becomes evident that the reason they are at risk is because of Jonah. Jonah confesses and says, yeah, I'm trying to escape the presence of the Lord. And the only way to stop this is to throw me overboard. After everything else that can be done, the sailors do in fact throw Jonah overboard. Jonah falls into the sea and God sends a great fish. Tradition calls it a whale, a great fish that swallows him and he is inside that fish for three days and for three nights.

9:19 While Jonah's inside the fish, he prays. And after three days, the fish vomits him up on the shore. and God says to Jonah, are you ready to go to Nineveh now? And Jonah goes. He goes to Nineveh, and there he proclaims God's word, and the people there repent. I'm going to stop there. That's most of the story of the book of Jonah. And from that familiar story, I want to suggest to you that there are lessons that are easy for us to learn. That from that story, we can take three lessons and one question. So let's just find the points that are right there in the story for us. The first point that we learn in the story of Joseph is an easy one.

10:17 You can't run from God. You cannot hide from God. Jonah should have read Psalm 139. Whither shall I go from your spirit? Where shall I flee from your presence? If I go to the heavens, you're there. If I go to the depths, you're there. There is nowhere in this story that Jonah goes that God is not. From the place that he starts, to the ship, to the sea, to the fish, to the beach, to Nineveh. the text is trying to make this clear to us when it says in the beginning, Jonah tries to go from the presence of God. That is the craziest thing that anyone who knows God would ever hear. How does one go from the presence of God? Hear how crazy it is to think that you can go from the presence of God. And think then about how many times in our minds we actually think we are somewhere God is not. Think about all of the people who have this terrible interior struggle and agony and think no one understands their pain, that no one else knows what they feel.

11:40 God is there. those of us who have these secrets in our family, these lies that we tell ourselves, we think we're living under the radar. God is there. And I say that not in judgment, but in invitation. Some of us hide from God because we are ashamed. And what we need to understand is that God is already there. The jig is up. There's no room for shame. Only room for relationship and for hope. the prophet Ezekiel has this really lovely image at the beginning of the book in his call narrative where he describes the the the throne of God if you will and one of the crazy images that Ezekiel gives us is a being that has four faces that is simultaneously facing in all four directions I love this image because it seems to me that it is suggesting to us that God can see.

12:58 God has eyes in the back of God's head. That God can see everything. we can leave God's will, but we can never leave God's presence. The prodigal son left his father, but he never left God. Ruth left her home and her identity and her people, but she never left God. Some of us are struggling with being separated from loved ones because of COVID-19, dear ones who are in assisted living that we can't see, family in hospitals that we can't see, relatives that we can't get to, away from us, but never from the presence of God. God sees in all directions. And so all of us at the same time are under God's watchful gaze.

14:03 Jonah reminds us, you can run, but you cannot hide from God. Another lesson that we can pick up from the book of Jonah is that we cannot hide from God, but when we choose to run from God, there is always a price to pay. I love the fact that the story makes the point of giving the detail that Jonah paid a fare to get on the ship. That's not the only cost that he incurred. When Jonah knowingly walks away from what God wants him to do, I would argue that he pays with the price of his legacy. Hear me now. Jonah, Ben Amittai. Jonah means dove, Ben Amittai, son of truth. Jonah is a prophet who is mentioned in another part of the Bible. And in Kings, he is portrayed as a known and established prophet, someone who arguably had a good reputation, someone with name recognition. If he were on Instagram, he would be someone with a number of followers. Jonah has that recognition in Kings.

15:31 but because of what happens in this story for the rest of his life he's known as the guy who got swallowed by the fish it's funny to me how people will remember our scandals more than they remember our successes God will forgive us but some of us will carry a legacy of scandal that does not represent all of what we did for God. Because of that moment, we said no.

16:03 There is a price to pay for walking away from God's presence. the third point we can take from this story is that God's mercy is greater than our sin. God's mercy is greater than our sin. Now, I want you to think about this for a moment, because we say this, and we say phrases like this all the time about the greatness, the vastness of God's mercy. But most of the time when we're talking about it, we're thinking about ourselves. We're thinking about all the ways in which God's grace has covered us and kept us and preserved us. And when we're feeling particularly generous, we might be thinking about how God's grace covers our family, how God's grace covers our church, how God's grace covers us.

17:04 the Israelites think about God's grace. And when they are pushed to think about how God's grace might be expansive, they will think about, well, maybe God's grace would extend to those people who used to be a part of us that we put out. The Moabites, the, you know, we'll bring Ruth in and we've got the Edomites and the Moabites, the Edomites, the Ammonites. We'll bring them all in because they used to be a part of us anyway. We're related to them somehow or we know them somehow. But if God's mercy and grace is greater than our sin, then God's mercy is greater than our. God's mercy is greater than us. In order for God's grace to be truly boundless, it has to reach out to more than just us.

18:07 Which is why God sends Jonah to Nineveh. God is inviting Jonah to extend an invitation for redemption, for restoration to the enemy. God wants Jonah to go to the people who destroyed them. God is sending Jonah to the people who oppressed them. Nineveh, the capital city, would have been a word that represented the man. It would have been a word like Pharaoh or Babylon, a word that all by itself embodied the forces of oppression. In sending Jonah to Nineveh, God is saying, I want to extend my mercy to the people who tried to destroy you. And when you understand what God was calling Jonah to do, perhaps now you can understand why Jonah didn't do it. Brothers and sisters, this is difficult because the fact of the matter is we are a people who have experienced chronic trauma in this country. We are people who know what it is like to have been enslaved, marginalized, robbed, gypped, had our humanity stripped away from us, excluded from opportunity, denigrated, unrightly imprisoned. We have experienced a whole lot of trauma. And in some very peculiar ways, the prophetic language of God's judgment and God's justice has found its way into our revenge fantasy. Stay with me here. When we hear the words about God coming to do justice and execute mercy,

20:20 we like the Israelites hear that and rejoice in knowing that God is going to get the people who have been so bad to us. And then God comes along and wants to change the tune. we have in our roots this understanding that one day our enemies are going to get theirs. One of my favorite Negro spirituals is, I got shoes. I got shoes. You got shoes. All God's children got shoes. When I get to heaven, going to put on my shoes and walk all over God's heaven. heaven heaven everybody talking about heaven ain't going there that was our ancestors way of singing a song about God's goodness and also condemning their masters to hell this this language of God's justice feeds something in us that wants to get revenge against those who do, who have done us wrong.

21:35 That's why Jonah ran. Even though he knew he couldn't escape God, I think Jonah just walked away as a form of protest. He was protesting what God was asking him to do. And maybe he was hoping that God would pull a Mordecai Esther on him. Remember that time when Mordecai says to Esther, if you don't go, God will send another. Maybe Jonah was hoping God would send another. But God said, no, Jonah, you are going to go. how can you claim to be somebody who knows me and try to ignore this about me? How can we claim to know a God who is full of mercy and grace and then act like all of a sudden we have run out of God's mercy and grace?

22:31 how many of you find yourselves in a relationship with somebody and you have to do a little truth telling to yourself you knew she cursed like a sailor before you married her that's what got your attention so don't turn around now and try to make her into something else you knew he was a flirt when you met him that's how we got you so don't turn around and try to change the narrative God is saying to us, you knew I couldn't hold back my mercy because that's how I found you. My mercy, my grace extended to you. My mercy, my compassion that saved you will not stop with you. God's mercy wants the best for everyone, even Nineveh.

23:30 when we don't want forgiveness and mercy and wholeness for our enemies, we are committing the sin that they perpetrated against us. When we decide that our enemies are not worthy of God's mercy, we are robbing them of their humanity in the same way that they denied it to us. after Jonah utters his five words,

24:12 weakest sermon ever, to the people of Nineveh, and after they all repent, Jonah is sulking. They all turn back from their evil ways and God renounced the punishment and that's exactly what Jonah didn't want to have happen. He goes off and sits off by himself and it's hot outside. And so God causes a plant to grow to give him some shade. And Jonah's feeling a little better. And then a worm came and infected the plant so that the plant would die. And Jonah was sad again. God came to Jonah and asked him this question. How can you care for this plant and not care for these people?

25:07 How can you care for a part of God's creation and not all of God's creation? How can you mourn for the abuse of animals but tolerate the abuse of other human beings? How do you understand who God is? when you're selective about where God's mercy goes. saints some of us have been trying to form boundaries on God's mercy we have guidelines and entrance requirements and dues and an intake process all about deciding who is going to qualify for God's grace God's grace God's grace don't forget how you got it Don't forget where you were when it found you Don't forget who gave it to you this morning I want to speak to those of you who love the Lord and have been serving the Lord for years and somewhere deep inside you have been secretly nursing a revenge fantasy about how God's going to get that person who abandoned you the person who abused you the person who fired you the one who wronged you the person who betrayed lied criticized you you're holding on and nursing that and god is going to show up one day and make a demand of you that you are going to want to run away from God is going to ask you to be the vehicle through which someone who has done something wrong to you is a recipient of God's grace.

27:06 And here's the thing that Jonah didn't get. part of Jonah's healing comes from allowing God's grace to flow through him. The work of God's grace is not just to save us, but to make us whole, to make us healed. And that's when we recognize that our wellness and our wholeness is tied up with everybody else's. I wish there were a way for us to wear a shirt that said, not by my own goodness. A shirt that said, saved by grace. One that said, God found me as I was and took me anyway. This is the message we take into the world.

28:03 this is the messaging we send to our friends and our enemies that the God of creation seeks to make us all whole and that wholeness and healing begins with us but it does not end with us.

28:25 One day God is going to call each one of us to go to Nineveh and when that call comes what will your answer be? Amen. When you read over the life of Jesus in the Gospels, you find that one of the most common things Jesus does is enter someone's house and sit at a table and eat. more than walking on water, more than raising the dead, more than opening blinded eyes. We see these moments where Jesus is at a table.

29:25 And sitting at a table was a sign that you welcomed someone, that you're in fellowship with them, that you're open to peaceful conversation. And that, beloved, is what got Jesus in so much trouble. that according to the Pharisees, he sat with the wrong people. He sat with tax collectors. He sat with a well-known prostitute. He sat with those whom society deemed unworthy and unacceptable. And the Pharisees had the audacity to be angry when they saw him at a table with those sinners. But might I suggest to you that the most controversial table Jesus sat at was not with Mary, was not with Zacchaeus, was not with Matthew, but rather that table on that Thursday night where he sat with his followers.

30:25 It's easy to identify the others as sinners, but at that table that Thursday were the worst, the followers who would still sin, the disciples who would abandon, the disciple who would betray, the disciple who would deny. That table and this table reminds us that being a disciple does not grant us immunity from failing the Lord, but it's a reminder of the grace of God that even when we abandon, when we betray, when we deny, there's still a table set before us where God welcomes us through the blood of Jesus to receive what we could never do for ourselves, the forgiveness of our abandonment, our betrayal, and our denial. So on the night Jesus was betrayed, on the night he was abandoned, on the night he was denied.

31:31 He took bread and broke it. And he gave it to them and said, now take and eat, for this represents my body, which is broken for you. Likewise, as the disciples who abandon, betray and deny, let us break bread and eat together. And after they'd eaten of bread, Jesus took a cup. He blessed it. He gave thanks for it. And he said, now take and drink. For this is my blood which is shed for the remission of your sins. Likewise, we take our cup, we give thanks, and together we drink that which reminds us of the blood shed for the remission of our sins.

32:37 Let us drink together. Would you bow in prayer with me? God, we receive by faith what you offer to us in grace, the forgiveness of our sins, the newness of our life, the security of our soul's salvation, the assurance of our home in heaven, and now the commandment to spread that love and that grace around the world. Lord, thank you for doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. and now we do for you what you require of us, that we might share the good news of Jesus Christ with all whom we meet. Lord, may your love emanate through us. May your forgiveness utter from our lips and may your love be seen in our hands.

33:35 In Jesus' name we pray, amen. During the season when we are socially distanced from one another, we don't have the joy of corporate worship, when we're dealing with pandemic and turmoil all across the land. My sincere prayer is that your time in the word and worship will have been a blessing to you to prepare you for the season and the week that awaits us. If you have been blessed and you really want to rededicate your life to the Lord, or even better, if you want to know the amazing love of God for the very first time, do me a favor if you will. Email deacons at alfredstreet.org. We want to reach out to you and share with you God's amazing plan of salvation and God's unconditional love for you. If you desire to become part of our church family, you can email deacons at alphastreet.org or go on our website.

34:27 And no matter where you live, we joyfully welcome you to become part of this family of faith. Before we leave, do me a favor. Join us next weekend in worship. Saturday, 6 p.m., Sunday, 8 a.m., Sunday, 10 a.m., and then Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. that together we might continue in our growth in God's word and in our worship. Won't you follow us on all of our social media sites? Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Be prayerful for the leadership of this church. Be faithful in the giving as God has placed upon your heart, that together we might continue to make glorious the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And now, to the Almighty, the all-wise, the eternal, the sovereign, the omnipotent God, who alone is creator of heaven and earth, To the God who's made himself perfectly known to us in Jesus who alone is our Christ, our loving Lord, our sacrificial Savior, our resurrected, risen, reigning, returning Redeemer. To the God who chooses to dwell in these earthen vessels of clay through the sustaining power, promise, presence, purpose, and person of the Holy Spirit.

35:33 To that all wise God be glory and majesty, dominion and power from now until eternity. and all those who love the Lord and awaited his return said amen.