Prophecy
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
There’s something within human beings, I think, that longs to have the future foretold, to have an idea of what it is that comes next for us. There are stories and legends of oracles and soothsayers, of fortune tellers who provide clues to what we need to do where we need to go, who will go with us and what will finally happen to us. Just yesterday as if she knew I needed an illustration for my sermon, Claire grabbed my had as we rode on the bus and said, ‘You won’t be famous, Mum.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked, unsure of how she might know what seems likely to be the not too unhappy truth of my life.
‘There,’ she said, pointing to an area on my hand. ‘You don’t have a star right there. I do. I even know what I’ll be famous for,’ she told me confidently, though she refused to say anything more about it.
There’s something, as I say, within us that longs to know what will come, and particularly, wants to know that all will eventually all will be well in the world, and especially for us and those who we love.
We look to those who might tell us what lies ahead regularly. Some look at horoscopes, others note the weather forecasts, still others consult the economic signs for indications of what financial fortunes they may find. These predictions – the weather, the economy, what will come in the next election – all seem to me to be a blending of good, though sometimes vague guessing, along with a good dose of luck. Accuracy seems to rely upon the well tuned generalities, and the ability to speak to what might happen in such a way that it can come true. It’s not quite the child’s trick when tossing a coin to call ‘heads I win, tails you lose’, but there is a family resemblance.
Biblical prophets are often portrayed in this way, too, as fortunetellers, predicters of events beyond the horizon of their view. If you listen to the evangelical preachers, they’ll tell you that all that happens has been predicted by some prophet in the Bible, in some apocalyptic vision: they told us that this war would go on, or that ruler or tyrant would be in power. In fact, there are those Christians who support the state of Israel because in doing so they believe that they are bringing about the second coming of Christ, something they believe because of a sideways sort of interpretation of a Biblical prophecy.
But those prophets, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Micah and Hosea, to mention just a few of the best known and Jonah, – our prophet of the day – were really a different sort of person. They were not fortunetellers or soothsayers. They weren’t divining the future from the entrails of chickens or even noting the direction of the wind, and the colour of the sky and discerning the coming weather. They weren’t looking a millennia into the future to describe the bad behaviour of modern governments, no matter how tempting it is to think that they were doing that.
Their role was to proclaim God’s judgement upon the people, to call people back to righteousness, and most importantly, to remind them of their relationship to God, and God’s relationship with them, their covenant.
Isaiah, for example, was most deeply concerned with the injustice he saw around him. People were mistreating the least among them, not caring for the widows and the strangers, not living in good relationship with each other. And the reason that Isaiah cares so much about injustice is because the existence of injustice showed clearly that the people’s relationship with God was tenuous. One could not be in good relationship with God, he believed, and not live out a just life. He preached that people attend to their relationship with God and live an exemplary life. That’s what the prophet said.
But there’s a bit more to this than simply getting the message across that we should live mindful of the powers of the universe that give us life. The stories of the prophets tell us both about who God is – for Isaiah, it’s a God of justice, who has ordered the universe in this way – and the stories tell us about what it means to be on a first name basis with the divine. It is not, as one might immediately assume, a good time, a light filled existence graced with beauty and peace.
No, in fact the prophets were probably not people that any of us would want to be around. Dour people, likely, beaten up by life. None of them want the job, and who can blame them? Would you want to be the one who has to go and proclaim ‘Woe unto you!’ to the people? Would you take on the role of telling people that they must come back to their righteousness, to being in good relationship with God, to living lives that were true and worthy? Have you ever tried to do that? The prophets were all reluctant, and none wanted the job. Jeremiah, in fact, goes so far as to accuse God of seducing him – the language he uses suggests something more violent than a seduction: ‘you have overpowered me, you were the stronger....’ He continues his lament by cursing his mother that he was ever born. Pretty rough stuff there.
Jonah fits this mould in large measure. He surely doesn’t want the job. Runs as far as he can from it, in fact. Tarshish was understood to be the literal end of the world. It was as far as you could go. It was even beyond God’s grasp and command, if you can imagine such a thing. Jonah, after receiving his marching orders, instead of heading off to proclaim judgement upon Nineveh, takes off in the other direction. Reluctant hardly covers it. Again, who could blame him? Who would want the job of telling people that there were only days left to live? Who would want to be both the voice that proclaims the coming doom and is witness to it?
He runs, but is found out, and the sailors, wishing to both save their lives and be obedient to God, toss him overboard where he hopes to find his way to dry land. Instead, in the single part of the narrative that everyone remembers, he is swallowed by a great fish in which is rides for 3 days and nights, though how he could know that I’ve never figured out. He is vomited up onto the beach in Nineveh, the place he was told to go.
One can hardly blame him for not wanting to go to Nineveh. It was a vast city of bloodthirsty, violent people. They were aggressors who wanted nothing more than to take over the world and were sorely trying to do so. Jonah was to go and to tell them that in a matter of weeks their city would be levelled because of their wickedness and disobedience. He could rightly fear for life and limb going there and saying such a thing.
There on the beach, he chooses to go and do as he was commanded to do, he chooses to fulfill his duty, no matter the consequences. And a funny thing happens after he speaks his word of judgement. The people repent. They hear the word of judgement and condemnation, and they repent. They take up their sackcloths, and sit in ashes, the traditional stance of those who seek forgiveness. From the lowliest slave to the King himself. The whole vast city repents and calls out for mercy.
Now, this is where things get a little funny. Instead of smiting the whole of it, instead of calling down fire and brimstone, instead of destroying the wickedness, God offers them mercy and saves the city.
Up to this point, Jonah is pretty much like all the rest of the prophets. He doesn’t want the role handed to him, and after some struggle and fuss about it, he goes and says what he has to say, does what needs to be done, tells them they will all die as God has told him to say. But it doesn’t come to pass. What is foretold doesn’t happen. The city is saved, and instead of rejoicing at the good fortune of the people, instead of rejoicing in their turn to faithfulness and good living, instead of the pleasure of relief that the dire future that he predicted has not come to pass – who, after all would want a vast city to be levelled? Instead of any of this, Jonah is bitter. ‘Didn’t I tell you it would come out like this?’ he is reported to say. Why all the fuss and trouble if you’re just going to save them, he asks quite rightly. Jonah goes out of the city and mopes, once again seeking to hide from God.
Why, you might well be asking yourself, would he be feeling that way? For Jonah, I think, the extension of mercy to the people of Nineveh is the shattering of the world as he knows it, the world of sense and constancy, a world where there are rights and wrongs, and justice is done and that’s what holds it all together. The world, his world, has been shattered and may never come back together. If Jonah indeed cannot rely upon God, if he cannot rely upon God to be faithful to him, what can he believe in? How can the world continue to turn when there is no sense, no rhyme or reason? How can it all continue when the wicked receive mercy?
Haven’t you been there, too? Haven’t you found yourself in that moment where anything that resembles justice has evaporated, and you are left with nothing in your hands, nothing in your heart, and the world fallen apart?
A girl I worked with in Chicago, a teen who was in foster care made a suicide attempt, but chose to live, and we got her to the hospital in time. Because she had tried to kill herself, and because the hospital didn’t have the staff, the foster parents and a couple of my colleagues and I sat with her day and night for three days. She wasn’t to be alone in case she tried again. Her mother refused to return from a business trip when she heard that her daughter was hospitalised, continuing the long pattern of neglect that characterised their relationship. We made arrangements for Misty, this child, to be transferred to a psychiatric facility to start working on the losses and griefs that had torn apart her young life, but her mother became angry at her for talking to her boyfriend and abandoned her at the hospital. We could do nothing other than to put her into the custody of the state.
While trying to get some appropriate care for her, to find a placement where she could get the kind of care and help she needed, I discovered that the agency that she had been placed with had done an investigation into allegations of sexual abuse – none had ever been made – determined that she hadn’t been abused and released her into her mother’s custody. I remember the feel of the phone in my hand, and the heat of the day, and the cigarette smoke drifting toward the open windows next to me from the smokers across the hall. I was so stunned I could only look at the phone in disbelief. My kind co-worker sent me home for the day. The world no longer made sense. It had all fallen apart.
Jonah’s loss was more profound. Falling out of relationship with God, having a God who didn’t abide by his own promises, who forced a good enough man to declare destruction and then to not follow through. There was nothing stable in the world, nothing other than shifting sands.
The foundations of the world have been shaken to nearly nothing. The ordering of the universe is in a shambles. If there was one thing one could depend upon – at least for Jonah – it was God’s rules and God’s rule. But none of that was left. Mercy, not Justice had prevailed. It is not what Jonah depended upon.
It’s likely 20 years ago that one friend commented to me that he thought the most people didn’t really want God’s justice in the world, not if they really thought about it. Most of us, he said, if we reflect upon it honestly, would cry out for mercy before justice. Our hearts know too well who we are and what we deserve. Most of us, I suspect it is true, after searching our hearts with honesty and openness, would cry out for mercy.
The final word for Jonah is that God’s mercy is extended. Mercy is granted to those who do not deserve it – the wicked and the aggressive, those who have transgressed God’s laws. Mercy is extended to those against whom judgement has been proclaimed. And though he doesn’t consider it, it is extended to the disobedient Jonah, who ran from what he was called to do, who tried to hide, who resisted and who was reluctant. Mercy was offered to Jonah, who was angry, who turned his back to God, in fear for what he was being told to do, and in response to the gracious mercy offered to Nineveh. Jonah, bitter and unwilling to forgive was extended God’s mercy. Jonah, like all of us, was gathered into that mercy. No matter our anger, our disobedience to our highest values and truths, no matter what we have done or forgotten to do. All, all, all are gathered up in the wideness of God’s mercy. That’s the last word from this reluctant prophet.
These figures and stories in the Hebrew Bible can teach us many things. It isn’t the inerrant single Word of God that I hear in their words, but an illumination of human living, human relationship with what is most powerful and true. The prophets call us to live in the light of truth, to be aware of injustice and to battle for it in our own lives. They call us to live justly as much as it is in us to do so. They proclaim God’s justice.
That which is most powerful in the universe, they say;
that which creates and sustains the ground and fabric of the planets and stars and solar systems, they say;
the forces which enliven the animals and plants and even we humans, they say;
that which we name God has woven into the most basic elements of the universe justice.
And there is order and sense to the world that we can rely upon.
Jonah’s story offers to the world the word of mercy in balance to the proclamation of justice. That same force that calls us to battle injustice has within it a divine tenderness and love that will not forsake us, no matter how lost we may become. We will not be forsaken.
So it is, and so may it be.
Amen.