SERMONS
AND REFLECTIONS
A Sermon by President Heidi Hadsell, PhD
Delivered January 23, 2006
This is a gripping story with a happy ending. Jonah was a good guy, a reluctant messenger of God; the people of the great city of Nineveh, stuck in evil ways, listened to him, changed their ways, disaster was averted, God was merciful to them. A good story, a good morality play relevant perhaps for the people of the United States, or elsewhere, and the evils ways which have become habitual to us.
And yet, I am bothered by the text. I am bothered not by the outcome of the story, I like happy endings. I am not bothered by what God did, nor what the people of Nineveh did, but by what we do with these kinds of stories. I am suspicious, because at the end of the day, here it is again, an example of one kind of religious thinking, one kind of logic, that when used simplistically gets religious people into so much trouble, all kinds of terrible trouble, often especially with each other. Why so much trouble? Not because of the good fortune of people like the people of Nineveh, but because of the flip side of such fortune. According to often used, facile logic, if God is good to Nineveh because Nineveh is obedient to God, then when others have misfortune it must be God’s wrath, God’s judgment because of their disobedience. If we are successful, rich, and powerful, it must be because God is rewarding us, therefore if we are poor and weak and miserable it too must be because God is punishing us. If the hurricane hits my neighbor’s house and not mine, it must be because I have a special relationship with God, because I am right, and holy, and my neighbor wrong and evil. In this way we seek to know with certainty how God acts in the world, and we bend God’s presence to our design, rather than seeking to conform to God’s design.
On the one hand of course, this simplistic if…then logic is very common, and human, and as such, very understandable. It can even be a kind of harmless, magical thinking that one sees frequently in children. Many of us will remember walking home from elementary school looking down at the sidewalk chanting. “If you step on a crack, you break your mothers back,” or standing at the bus stop freezing to death, and saying things to oneself like if I count to 10 the bus will come, or, in school, pleading, oh God, please, please, please, if you give me an A in this class, I will never, ever start my paper the night before it is due again.
In Portuguese such pleading with God is called a “prece” which refers to the request one makes to God, asking God to do something specific, like healing oneself or ones loved one. If God does what one hopes and asks for, then the person pleading promises to do something like mount the steps of the church on his knees, give money to the poor, carry the cross in the Easter procession, or whatever else. This kind of pleading is so common that in many Brazilian Catholic churches there are whole rooms full of wooden arms, legs, heads, hands, locks of hair and so forth, brought by the faithful to represent the parts of the body that need God’s healing or the promises made to God if God does the healing. Rooms and rooms full of graphic illustrations of peoples’ private bargains with God. This kind of logic is primitive perhaps, often desperate, full of the pathos of human existence, and therefore comprehensible and worthy of compassion and understanding.
The theology of prosperity so common in many parts of the world, including the United States follows a similar logic. The basic logic is, if I worship this God, and give generously of the little that I have, then God will reward me with wealth and security, as I can see God has done for others. Here God becomes an agent for financial success. Following this logic, if I am not successful, I must not be worshipping correctly, I must give more money to the church, or something else is wrong with me.
Nineveh’s happy ending to the contrary, this logic is often far from harmless. In the theology of prosperity it turns God into an instrument for success, and makes the leaders rich and keeps those filling the churches poor. And elsewhere in human social life it occasions and has occasioned considerable violence and enmity between human beings, each ready to read the will of God to their own benefit and thus often, more often than not perhaps, to the detriment of the other.
In fact, in the social world, this reasoning, this logic can represent religion at just about its very worst. Biblical texts are full of the drama of people acting out in God’s name… blaming the other person, the other clan, the other group, claiming one’s own good fortune to be God’s will, and claiming to know what God wants or to be sure of how God is acting in human history. And our own histories are similarly full of such behavior, the consequences of which we live with every day, and with which our children and grand children will also live.
As luck would have it, I read the text for this sermon in the lectionary, right about when Pat Robertson proclaimed to the world, that Sharon’s ill health was the punishment of God because Sharon had dared divide the land of Israel. So, already suspicious of this kind of if…then logic, I had to ask myself, what is so very different about the story of Jonah, Nineveh and God, from the story of Pat Robertson, Sharon, and Israel? Robertson claiming to know just what God intends, and just how God is acting in the world, although of course, he quickly recanted, when it became clear that his business deal – a kind of a Christian theme park in the holy land as I understand it, was threatened by his proclamation.
What can one do with such logic, such outlandish and destructive claims, besides condemn their simplistic nature, and lament the behavior they provoke? The pronouncements of people like Pat Robertson are enough to want to join those who seek to banish religion from the public square altogether. Haven’t we had enough of people claiming to have God on their side and therefore claiming that God is against the other? Aren’t we already sick to death of the violence and injustice perpetrated in the name of a God we claim is love?
But here is the text, and here is the logic of the text and we have to grapple with it, and by so doing, grapple too with these very same temptations and tendencies in ourselves and in our religions. And of course, upon reflection, the text isn’t quite as simple as I have presented it here. In the text we have several elements which unlock it and separate it from the kind of mechanistic and often destructive logic I have just described. The if/then pattern of this story can be understood in the light of another pattern at work here, a pattern which is something like, believe, repent, and follow.
This text is first of all an affirmation of God’s presence in human life, and human history. It is a story of God’s involvement with humanity, God’s care for God’s creation. It is thus an invitation to believe in this God, who is present in human life, in ways that are almost always mysterious to us. Whatever else we might say about this text, we cannot read it and affirm that God is either indifferent to humanity or that God is absent altogether. The text however even while it underlines God’s presence in human history, emphasizes the difficulty we humans have in figuring out just how, just when or just where or through whom God is present. Jonah ran from God, trying in every possible way to escape the onerous task of messenger. The people of Nineveh ignored God’s presence entirely, going about their own ways and habits, so thoroughly did they ignore God’s presence, that God needed to send poor Jonah as a messenger, in order to get through to them. Listening to Jonah, the people of Nineveh were able to believe in God’s presence, and God’s involvement in their history.
Once believing in God’s presence, God’s active concern, and God’s judgment, the people of Nineveh were able to understand that they had become so wrapped up in their own habits, customs, assumptions, and sins, that they were no longer able to hear God, or discover God’s presence or God’s will. They were in short, no longer able to be in relationship with God. With belief, they were able to see that their arrogance, their lack of humility, had become an impediment to their ability to discern God’s presence in their lives.
The story makes clear that relationship with God, the ability to discern God’s presence, requires not just transformed behavior, but an inner transformation as well. Here we often use the word repentance, which implies a recognition that one is often wrong, often mistaken, often self-centered. And it also implies in some way, genuine sorrow for straying from the path, and resolve to do better in the future. Repentance requires humility, and occasions the ability to change – to find a new way forward.
The emphasis of this story is on Nineveh. God does not invite the people of Nineveh once they are back on the right path, to judge or to admonish others. It is enough that the people of Nineveh come to terms with themselves, and concentrate on their own sins, their own relationship with God, that they undergo their own process of repentance, and try to figure out how to proceed in faithfulness. Religious people proclaim many things. But the power of God’s presence in the world is not in what we proclaim about God’s relationship with others, about what God does for us and against our enemies, but in how God’s presence transforms our own inner selves and our behavior.
So, how is this story different from that of Pat Robertson pronouncing God’s will?
This story is different because it centers precisely on that which is absent in Robertson’s pronouncement: the textured context and complex process required to begin to discern the presence of God in our midst, and to be transformed by it. It is a story not about humans using God as an instrument for our will, but about relationship with God, in belief and not empirical certainty, it is about the inner movement of repentance and humility, the recognition of the impediments we put between our selves and God, and it is about how we go astray and then how we find our way back to the path and take it up again.
May God grant us the wisdom and the humility to believe, to repent, and to follow God’s way.
