Sermon: Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 2nd September 2012

Service:

Mattins

Today completes our sequence of readings from the book of Jonah at Matins.

To many people Jonah’s is a familiar tale - despite their often being a little hazy on some of the detail and why it might matter. Jonah: who absconds, to flee from the call of God to preach repentance to the people of the great city of Nineveh; who escapes by ship heading to Tarshish; who is deemed to be the cause of a raging storm that blows up and so is unceremoniously thrown overboard by his shipmates; who, in a most unlikely way, is swallowed up by a passing great fish, and then spewed onto a beach before resuming his preaching career, and ends up very miffed because, having been rather effective and making the city repent, God doesn’t go through with a threat to destroy the lot of them.

Despite the caprice and whimsy of the Jonah story, Jesus singles it out as worthy of examination as a sign: ask for a sign if you must, says Jesus, and the only one that will be given is the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12.38-39; 16.4; Luke 11.29-30).

Signs exist to point us somewhere beyond ourselves and where we know. The sign of Jonah is, at its most fundamental level, that of the man who is dead to the world for three days who emerges from it with new purpose and direction and a radical openness to God’s call; that sign points us immediately to the three days of Jesus in the tomb, his experience of the watery places of death that is conquered in his being raised by the loving power of God the Father. The sign of Jonah is the sign of Resurrection.

Following the sign of Jonah is to walk down the path of Christian discipleship: in St Paul’s words, ‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead’ (Philippians 3.10-11). In the Christian life that sign is one of participation in the life and death of Jesus: taking us to the waters of baptism, the ignition of discipleship, and eucharist, where we come to feed on Christ before being sent out of the warm belly of the church back into the world.

My summer reading (Macfarlane, Robert,. 2012. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. London: Hamish Hamilton) introduced me to a whole new world of the language of journeys and paths. On a watery theme, I knew nothing of the plethora of Old English names for ocean roads and sea lanes. We tend to think of paths existing only on land, but the sea has paths too, though water refuses to take and hold marks. Pilgrim routes may have first been trodden thousands of years ago, but the sea will not record a journey made 10 minutes before.  Yet sea roads are not arbitrary; they are determined by the shape of the coastline, the depth of the sea, surface currents, prevailing winds.

Jonah discovered more on his sea journey than his land one. Christian discipleship is a way more akin to sea lanes than the well trodden land path. We navigate, we spot the paths of fellow and previous wayfarers - like the first sea travellers observing the migrating patterns of birds - we are prompted by scripture and prayer to see the promontories and undercurrents, and glance over our shoulders to see where we’ve been in life: and the path, like the sea, has gone.

Let’s take for our journeys of land and sea the sign of Jonah: the death and resurrection of Christ.

Lord of mercy and redemption,
rescue us we pray, from the depths of sin and death,
walk with us as we journey on
and give us grace to stand in your presence
to serve you in the Risen Lord Jesus Christ
Amen.