"Jonah's Prayer, Our Prayers"

First Presbyterian Church
March 4, 2007
Peter S. Buehler
Jonah 2:1-10

Deliverance belongs to the Lord!

When we think of Jonah, the man and the story, we don't generally think of prayer. For us, it's about a man who fled from God -- from God's presence, from God's call. It is the story of the man who lived for three days in the belly of a fish, albeit a large one. Jonah is the tale of a reluctant prophet who went to Nineveh and cried to the people to repent of their sins -- which they did, spectacularly.
The king fasted and covered himself with sackcloth and ashes; the people fasted and covered themselves with sackcloth and ashes; even the animals fasted and were covered with sackcloth and ashes. It was a sackcloth seller's dream! From one end of the city to the other, all you could see was sackcloth and ashes.

No prophet in Hebrew history had ever had success like this; Jonah preached and there was instant repentance -- he should have been elated. Instead he sulked. He had hoped God would strike them down with fiery judgment. After all, this was the capital of Assyria, the center of power of Israel's most hated enemy -- yet what did God do but show mercy. What a terrible disappointment!

It is an amazing story -- and all this in only four chapters, forty-eight verses total.
But Jonah's brevity is deceiving, because this is a story packed, not only with adventure, and humor, and irony, and insight into the human heart, but also with prayer. Jonah is packed with prayer; we could say that Jonah is about prayer.

Beginning with the prayers of unbelievers. Because in Jonah, God hears other people's prayers. First, those of the sailors. When God calls to Jonah and tells him to go to Nineveh, that great and wicked city, Jonah does the opposite of what Abraham does for Sodom -- instead of hanging in there, challenging God and negotiating with God, Jonah takes off in the opposite direction. If Nineveh was to the east, Jonah jumps on the first boat west, to Tarshish. Tarshish, in ancient literature and popular imagination, was synonymous with paradise; for us it would be God calling us to go to Baghdad and instead we buy plane tickets for Tahiti.

Only God says, Not so fast. Jonah's vessel had hardly left Joppa when a fierce storm turned the sea into a death trap; the captain wasted no time, woke up Jonah, and told him pray. All hands on deck, all prayers on deck -- somebody's god out there has got to be listening! Yet before he could start, Jonah was accosted by the sailors who, having cast lots, learned that he was responsible for their predicament.
Jonah advised them to throw him overboard; the sailors instead, mercifully, tried rowing hard back to shore, but when that failed they reluctantly acceded to his suggestion, only after the most eloquent and heartfelt prayer to the Lord.
The sea immediately became calm as glass.

Because Jonah is about God answering people's prayers -- pagan sailors' prayers, even brutal enemies' prayers. It makes us think. I tend to assume that those who devote themselves to spiritual practices, who believe in prayer and pray throughout the day, who faithfully come to church, who involve themselves in ministry, that  these are the people God listens to -- not the ones who sleep in on Sundays and never darken the door of the church! Hey God, what are you doing answering their prayers? Remember me, your faithful servant? Answered any of my prayers lately?

Yet the question Jonah asks has to do with the mercy of God. How merciful is our God? How wide is God's mercy; how inclusive is it; how free is it? And therefore, how free are we to be merciful?

The story of Jonah is about God's stunning freedom. We expect God to behave as we do, for there are parameters on our forgiveness. We'll be forgiving as long as the person who hurt us apologizes first and asks for forgiveness. We'll be forgiving when we've emotionally come to a place where it is sincere and honest.
We'll show mercy as long as the other person promises to change his behavior and never do it again. We'll show mercy as long as the other person understands that while we may be generous and merciful, God however is strict and severe; God does not let sin go unnoticed or unpunished. We may be patient and kind, but God is unbending and unyielding.

Is this the case? Is this the God we meet in the scriptures? Is this the God we meet in Jesus Christ? Is it the case that God's justice binds God; does it make God unfree? Is it not God who is free of parameters -- is not the truth the opposite of what we think?

In the scriptures no one is more qualified than Jonah to testify to the grace of God's freedom and the freedom of God's grace. How does God deal with disobedient people, people who get a clear, unambiguous message: Go at once! and instead they go at once the other way?

How well do we know Jonah? Are we ever like Jonah?

Our child is quieter than usual, bothered about something, but it's late in the evening and we're tired; we assume that whatever it is it will pass -- He'll get over it. We're downtown and a homeless person looks at us, making eye contact, but we're in a hurry so we look away, avoiding contact. We fully intend to get more involved in our community, to use our gifts and skills, to give back in some way, but we're so busy and now's not the right time, so we say No. Then come the times in our lives when we too are stopped by a storm, and we find ourselves in darkness. Read Jonah's prayer sometime when you're in the darkness!

We don't know Jonah until we hear his prayer. We wonder if we really know anyone until we hear his prayer, her prayer; the same goes for ourselves, listening to our own prayers. Jonah hears his prayer in, of all places, the belly of a fish! In our mind's eye, it's not a pretty picture, there with everything else the fish is trying to digest, but for Jonah it's the place where he "gets it" -- not only that God answers prayer, and his prayer; not only that God found him and rescued him, but in the process he also found God. I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me… As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord; and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.

It's really the most basic prayer of all, Lord, save me! At some point in every person's life, in our life, we hear ourselves crying to God to save us. It comes from the belly of Sheol, as Jonah puts it -- from the place of shades where death, in any of its many forms, seems near, and we are beyond our ability to save ourselves. We hear stories of near-death experiences, and they are fascinating and inspiring, but we don't have to wander that far from our own experience to know what the people of the Old and New Testaments knew so well -- that death is not so much an event as it is a process, something that intrudes, a darkness we must be face over and over.

Yet what Jonah realizes -- finally, after three days inside the fish -- is that he's alive and well, and that this particular darkness is his salvation! He's not drowning, he's being saved! Jonah doesn't pray his prayer when he's safely back on land with the sun shining, he prays his prayer of gratitude in the dark, because it is there that he realizes there is no place where God is not, no place where God is absent. He did his best to flee from God's presence, until he realized that what he needed most and missed most was God's presence. So it was God all along: God who stopped his flight, God who showed him the very real possibility of his death, God who rescued him and brought his life up from the Pit, God who
spared him for a purpose.

In the story of Jonah, the experience of God's power and presence is expressed in prayer. In our own story, our ongoing story, do we not rediscover God's power and presence in prayer?

When we stop what we're doing, when we allow ourselves time to sit and be still, when we let go of the noise in our minds -- our half-digested troubles and anxieties -- when we, like Jonah, remember the Lord, letting our prayers rise like bubbles of air from the deep, is it not then that we rediscover the meaning of grace, God's undeserved kindness and mercy?

If Jonah teaches us anything, it is that our times of darkness are meant for prayer, for it is in prayer that we remember we are alive, that we are well, that we are safe, that we are not forgotten, that we are loved, and that we have a holy purpose. If Jonah teaches us anything, it is that each day is for us an occasion for remembering, for starting afresh, for receiving the mercy we need.

Of course, then we need to show it. Our prayer is incomplete until we put mercy into practice: showing others forgiveness, remembering to be generous with others as God has been generous with us. Remembering that we should surprise people with mercy and kindness, not because they deserve it but because they don't deserve it. Neither do we.

The sacrament of the Lord's Supper is all about not deserving what Jesus is waiting to give. When we come to his table we let go of our pretensions; we come as we are. When we go from his table we cling to his promises; we go as we are. Because the sacrament is about beginning again;  it is about living with mercy and practicing mercy, again. The Lord's Supper is receiving the grace we need to love our neighbors, all of them, whoever they are, as they are.

For where they are is where God's love begins, again.