Sermon: Choral Mattins 6th September 2015

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 6th September 2015

Service:

Choral Mattins

Readings:

Jonah 3.10-4.11

Revelation 8.1-5

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 11M)

+ In nomine Patris…

The book of Jonah does not begin with the strangely unnerving phrase, ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ And I’m glad to say that sermons don’t either.

Jonah begins not with comfortable posture, but with God placing a demand upon him – that he go and preach to Nineveh – a demand that Jonah finds unbearable.

Jonah flees on a ship to find comfort in another land but things do not relent for him, because God, ‘hurled a great wind upon the sea’ (Jonah 1.4), so mighty that it threatened to break up the ship Jonah was on. As the storm rages, down in the hold of the ship Jonah is curled up fast asleep, the first time he finds comfort in the story.  But he is wakened by the sailors who pin the blame on him for the storm and he is hurled over board. Then comfort famously came for Jonah in the form unlikely form of a large fish in which he spent three days and three nights.

The depths and silence of the tomb-like interior of the whale echoes the silence in heaven at the opening of the seventh seal in the Book of Revelation: ‘and there was silence in heaven’ (Revelation 1b). Both silences are deeply unsettling; and not comfortable. The silence in the belly of the whale comes after a tumultuous storm, and the silence in heaven is followed by ‘peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightening and an earthquake’ (Revelation 8.5)

In the midst of a noisy world, silence, when we’re not used to it, is jarring. Elijah encountered a ‘sound of sheer silence’, which was the intensity of the presence of the Lord. There is no sitting comfortably in that intensity.

Those who come into the proximity of God are not able to sit comfortably. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ is not in the language of God’s call to holiness. Think of Abraham, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Mary, Paul: are all rattled by the call that God makes upon them.

In the depths and silence Jonah saw that his life was almost over. And in a sense his life was over: the life that was self-consumed and closed in on itself; a life that would not respond to the will of God; a life that tried to flee God’s call. Jonah is so much one of us. Time and again he wants the comfort that he thinks God should give and is disappointed when it is not forthcoming.

Jonah was placed on dry land again, having declared that deliverance belongs to the Lord (Jonah 2.9). The new Jonah strode off confidently to Nineveh and prompted mass penitence and fasting.

Jonah could not take comfort in God being faithful and true to his word. In Jonah’s mind the wicked, foreign city needed vengeance not mercy. And at this, Jonah wished his life over. He did not want to see God’s mercy, so he sits down comfortably, for the second time in the story, under a booth, a tent, of his own making.

Jonah’s story is worth re-visiting.

It asks us penetrating questions about where we seek, and think we find, comfort. And we learn that God’s comfort is not cotton wool.

Jonah’s story challenges the illusions and deceits that we comfort ourselves with. We might sit comfortably thinking ourselves to be under the shadow and protection of the Almighty (Psalm 90.1), whilst the world and its people aches for mercy, justice, healing and peace.

We cannot reflect on Jonah without reflecting on others fleeing for their lives: many on inadequate boats in storms; drowning and finding no rescue. Jonah was a refugee or migrant: he was a man who fled something he found intolerable; he was trafficked by others who saw no value in him other than to throw him overboard as a scapegoat to save themselves; he was a man in exile (his booth was in Nineveh on the plains of Babylon, modern day Iraq) he was far from home.

Refugees and migrants, traffickers and exiles make us uncomfortable today. We are not in a world where we can sit comfortably. The body of the young boy rendered onto a beech from the depths of the sea has disturbed and unsettled: those seated at breakfast tables reading the papers or politicians at their meeting tables cannot sit so easy any more as we see ‘humanity washed ashore’.

Ignoring the Law and the Prophets, humanity has built itself a God-defying, life denying shelter of comfort. It is a shelter of our own vanity that not only shades us from the heat of the day and the world’s pains, but stops us seeing the world with Gospel eyes of compassion, mercy and peace. Jesus Christ, the one spoken through the prophets calls us to look on God’s world with God’s eyes, God’s vision.

Jesus looked at and beheld people who were ‘harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd’ (Mark 6.34) and ‘he had compassion for them’; he wept over the city of Jerusalem (Luke 13.31-35), as we might today; and he revealed the compassion and mercy of the living God through the sacrificial love of the Cross, that creates for itself no comfort or illusion other than that of doing God’s will to his glory and the good of his people.

May we, and the whole creation, begin to breathe not the stench of death and denial, but the fragrance of abundant life and peace. May we get up from our comfortable seats and step outside our comfortable booths and see and be the compassionate, loving Christ in the world to the glory of God the Father. Amen.