Pre:

  The story of Jonah contains many of the elements of a summer at the shore:  sailing, the beach, hot summer sun, a really big fish, and escape. 

  I invite you to listen to Jonah’s story.  The whole story.  Listen for plot twists that maybe you haven’t heard before.  Especially listen for Jonah’s feelings as the story progresses.   You’ll notice that the passage is not printed today.  That’s because it’s a little long, and because today I want you to just get into the story.  Listen as the readers tell you what happened to Jonah. 

Summer at the Shore:  The Great Escape

Jonah

            Last weekend thousands of travelers loaded up their cars and left their troubles behind in order to come to the shore for the first great escape weekend of the summer.  Instead of a quick trip to the shore, many of them were trapped on the parkway and other roads.  Some found a summer rental without air conditioning or other electrical niceties.  The power was down.  They went to the ice cream parlors and found milk soup instead of ice cream cones, because the electricity wasn’t working there either.  For many, the great escape became a plot for a Chevy Chase movie.  Escaping for a long weekend is a good idea, and it can be very restorative and helpful.  But it doesn’t always work. 

            Jonah thought that escaping from his preaching assignment was a good idea, but it didn’t work either.  It was like the Fourth of July weekend at the shore, only much worse.  It was like a reality TV show gone very wrong.  The Amazing Race, Fear Factor and Survivor all ganged up on him.  And Jonah lost. 

            Jonah’s story can teach us many things.  Because as outlandish as Jonah’s story may seem on the surface, it is all too real.  His story very often is our story as well.     The story begins and ends with attitude.  Here it is.  You won’t find this quote in the Bible, but I know this popular saying comes from Jonah:  “I don’t want to go there.” 

            I don’t want to go there.  The specific place where Jonah does not want to go is Nineveh, and I’ll get to the why of that in a bit, but first let’s talk about the emotional reality that often exists for all of us, when there is someplace that we don’t want to go.   Maybe there is something happening there that we don’t like, or we don’t want to face, or we don’t want to accept.  Nineveh could be a relationship, a place, a decision or dilemma, a conflict, a job, an illness or the threat of an illness.  Nineveh could even be at home.

            I don’t want to go there. 

            And so, we go somewhere else, either literally or emotionally.  Somewhere where we can escape.  What’s interesting about the escape is that people will often go to more work and take more risks and expense to try to escape than it would take to just go there and get it over with.  Jonah is a great example of that.  Nineveh was a short distance away, by land.  But Tarshish was much farther, and by sea.  In those days, traveling by land was dangerous enough, but by sea, well, you were definitely taking your life in your hands.   But it was worth the risk, worth the expense, worth the time, Jonah thought, if he could just get away from God’s harping about going to Nineveh. 

            When people today seek to escape, they don’t necessarily take a geographic journey.  Instead, they often attempt to anaesthetize themselves, either with drugs or alcohol or entertainment or work in order to forget the pain.  But like Jonah, they soon discover that it is not the Love Boat that they’ve signed on to, but a nightmare cruise.  The escape becomes an addiction.  And what was meant to dull the pain becomes a cruel and abusive taskmaster.   Like the storm at sea did with Jonah and his shipmates, the addiction tosses its victims on the fearsome waves of futility.  On a cruise to nowhere.  Until the addict recognizes the escape for what it is:  a fraud. 

If Jonah learned anything from his experience, it was that escapism is not a very productive lifestyle.  And that is particularly true when you are trying to run from God and God’s call on your life. 

            The most courageous thing that Jonah does in the whole story is to confess to the men on the ship that he has run away from God.  And that is where recovery starts—the confession that you’ve been on the run.  I suspect that you noticed that Jonah didn’t make it very far into his recovery by the end of the story.  And perhaps even that can be an encouragement to us.  Recovery isn’t magic.  It doesn’t usually happen overnight.  Sometimes it is a long and arduous journey.  It certainly was for Jonah. 

            God had said, Go to Nineveh and preach to them.    Preach hellfire and damnation.  And Jonah said, no, I don’t want to go there.  It wasn’t that he was afraid.  Preaching didn’t scare him and the Ninevites didn’t either.  But he didn’t want to go there.  And the reason he didn’t want to go there was because he didn’t want God to end up forgiving them.  You see that’s the problem with God.  You just get all cozy with your judgmental attitude about somebody, and God goes and forgives them.  And maybe they even change.  What a rip-off!  You can’t keep your old bigoted bitter attitude any more.  It isn’t fair.  Nineveh needs to rot in hell.  So, I’m not going there.  No way.  No how. 

            I said earlier that Jonah’s story begins and ends with attitude.  In many respects, the story is an emotional journal.  I was thinking this week that if I were an artist, I would like to paint a series of five portraits of Jonah.  Most pictures of Jonah that you see are cute ones of Jonah and the big fish.  But my pictures would not be cute.  The first one would have a kind of Macaulay Calkin look (“home alone” face—not afraid, but alarmed).  When God said, go to Nineveh, that was Jonah’s response.  The second picture in the series would be Jonah sloshing around in the belly of the great fish, singing his heart out and praising God.  The third picture would be Jonah on the beach (having been just vomited out by the fish), disheveled, disoriented, scraping kelp out of his hair, grumbling, “All right, all right, I’ll go to blankety blank Nineveh.”  (Under his breath:  But I won’t like it.)  In the fourth picture, he’s smiling, sitting in the shade of the bush, just outside of Nineveh, drinking a mint julep.  But in the last picture, the bush is shriveled up, and Jonah face is contorted in rage, and he is shaking his fist toward the heavens. 

            What strikes me about Jonah’s attitude is that there are only two times in the story that he is truly happy.  First, when he is in the belly of the fish, which is a whale of a lot better than drowning, and second when he is in the shade of the bush that God provided for him.  Jonah is happy whenever God is fixing things for Jonah.  When God is rescuing Jonah.  But when God wants Jonah to enter into God’s agenda, Jonah becomes a spiritual two-year-old.

            Lloyd Ogilvie made the rather understated comment that “Jonah was a faithful prophet as long as God wanted what Jonah wanted.”  And here again, Jonah’s story becomes frightfully real to us.  For we each have our agenda.  We have strong opinions about how things should be.  And when God agrees, we are right in there pitching.  Yeah, God!  But what about when God leads us in a new direction?  When God challenges our long-held attitudes and prejudices?  Our very beliefs about ourselves and others?  What then? 

            I don’t want to go there.  You can’t make me. 

            For Jonah, it’s all about attitude, isn’t it?  And that’s true for many of us. 

It’s interesting that in spite of Jonah’s attitude, God gets the job done.  The Ninevites get converted.  But think what a rewarding experience Jonah might have had if he had been willing for God to convert him.  This is one of the toughest things for the people of God to understand and accept.  No matter how long you have been a child of God, a follower of Jesus even, you still need to be converted.  You are still human after all.  God’s ways are not our ways, and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts.  The life of faith is a life of continual learning, and continual surrender to God and God’s ways.  One of the greatest traps in being a Christian, I think, is adopting an attitude that we are all set, we’re doing all the right stuff, we’re in!  It’s the rest of the world that needs to change. 

            Jonah was a tough nut to crack, and some of us are, too.  Zig Ziglar once said that there are three things that are hard to do:  One is to climb a fence that’s leaning toward you.  Another is to kiss [someone] who is leaning away from you.  The third thing that is hard to do is to help someone who doesn’t really want to be helped.  And that’s Jonah. 

            Perhaps in thinking through Jonah’s story, you have identified a Nineveh in your life. Perhaps you have also identified some areas of resistance or even escapism in your behavior.   The final thing that I want to encourage you to do is to do an attitude check.  Are you willing for God to help you grow spiritually in some new directions?  Are you willing for God to change you into what God wants you to be?