Scripture: Jonah 3:1-5, 10 & Mark 1:14-20
05/19/2019
I was a freshman in college when I first encountered a traveling preacher named Rev. Gary Birdsong. And each subsequent year, without fail, Rev. Birdsong would come to campus on a mission to start some kind of a religious renaissance in the upstate of South Carolina. I should say, being of a certain age and from a certain region of the country and having grown up in a small town, I saw some version of this guy pass through my hometown fairly regularly and the fervor that his presence always caused for a brief period before and after his arrival. And setting aside the fact that I would guess that rural South Carolina has to be one of the two or three most religious places on the planet, Rev. Birdsong was convinced that Clemson was a target rich environment for someone trying to convert college kids to Christianity and so it was that every few months or so, Rev. Birdsong would set up on the stage of the outdoor amphitheater that sits in the center of campus just in front of the library, and with a cheap microphone and speakers that were turned up way past what should have been their actual capacity, he would proceed to yell at all the students that passed him by...in the name of Jesus, of course. And on those mornings, in Rev. Birdsong’s world, at least, all the gentlemen that passed him by had been up all night the previous evening in some state of inebriation while all the ladies were departing from those same gentlemen’s places of abodes having spent the evening there and he was bound and determined to let all of us know just how disappointed he and God and Jesus all were at the way in which we were living our lives. I should say, even back then, it felt a little wrong to hear Rev. Birdsong preaching the gospel by calling out especially the women with an analysis mainly on the manner in which they dressed. It seemed one thing to castigate the guy passing by who looks like the 8:00AM class is just a little too early for his schedule. It's another thing to seem like you are getting pleasure from yelling at 18 year old young women. At any rate, no one I knew took this guy much too seriously and like I said, it provided a day's worth of entertainment one to two times a year. Folks would carry their lunches down to the amphitheater and watch this guy do his thing the same way you might go to a comedy show and watch the comedian heckle the poor guy in the front row. And while this guy and I ostensibly played for the same team, as did most of my friends, exactly none of us believed that this guy was speaking for us. And having left college some two decades ago, I was content to leave those memories of Rev. Birdsong in the past never to be disturbed again. Until it happened that while reading the story of Jonah for this morning, Rev. Birdsong popped into my head. But this time around, I saw him through a new light—the light of God. And thinking about him in this new light, reconsidering what exactly he was trying to do, what I find most interesting about Rev. Birdsong, as with most street corner preacher types, is the degree to which they feel like they are doing something they wish they didn't have to do. When Rev. Birdsong would do his thing, it was clear that his bluster, his verbosity, his larger than life presentation with blaring speakers and recriminations against the student body were all there to mask the deep discomfort he felt standing up there, speaking what he believed to be a message of God for a lost people, and trying to no be overwhelmed with the generally chilly response that he garnered. And so, while I may disagree with virtually everything that came out of Rev. Birdsong’s mouth and the methodology and medium by which he chose to spread his message of God, I do admire the way in which he goes into places and offers messages that no one wants to hear and for which he routinely is derided. In this way, Rev. Birdsong has taken his place in the long line of pastors from John the Baptist and his proclamation of "God's winnowing fork being about the task of separating the wheat from the chaff and throwing the chaff in the fire," to Jonathan Edwards reminding us that we are, "sinners in the hands of an angry God," and Jonah, standing in the streets of Nineveh warning of the coming to wrath of God that will soon destroy the whole of the city.
Jonah is, for me, both one of the most difficult books in the all the Bible to make sense of and the most honest to the human experience in all of scripture. In it is a fantastical tale of a prophet of God, being called by God to go to what was, at the time, the biggest city in the known world, and tell them to cease living their sinful lifestyles and to repent, and to follow the Jewish God. It is a story of a man, so overwhelmed by this call of God that he immediately boards a ship heading in the exact opposite direction only to be overwhelmed by storms at sea, tossed overboard by the crew who very much wanted the storms to stop only to be swallowed by either a whale or a big fish depending on the translation that you read, though, I have to think at the point that you are inside the belly of one or the other, I’m not sure it matters all that much to you whether it is a fish or a whale. It is an account of the three days spent inside the belly of the sea creature and what has to be the easiest change of heart in all of holy scripture, followed by the erstwhile prophet being vomited back up onto dry land and presumably right at the gates of the mighty city of Nineveh. Oddly enough, quite out of the blue, this week, I was in a non-religious setting when one of the people I was with found out I was a pastor and she asked me if I thought the story of Jonah was real. In my business, that’s called hearing the voice of God through the words of someone else. And I told the lady that I didn’t know if the story was real, but I knew that it was true. Because besides being a story told as if it were a myth, Jonah also captures the difficulty that accompanies the challenge of following the will of God in each of our lives. We have all heard the voice of God come to us and tell us to do someone that deep down we know that we should only to have us go and do the exact opposite. In the case of Jonah, it is not hard to understand why he might find this particular task to be challenging to do. It would be a bit like God coming to one of us and telling us that those folks living in New York City are a sinful, licentious and that we should go up there and walk the streets telling them that. In that scenario it is not difficult to envision any one of us hopping the next flight to Miami. And in reading the story of Jonah, it is not difficult to understand his reticence in going to Nineveh. It was the capital of another empire—an empire that had captured Jerusalem, had taken a large portion of the Jewish population back to Nineveh to work as servants while living in exile. It was an empire that spoke a different language, had different customs and rituals, that worshipped a different God. And Jonah was essentially being called to go into enemy territory and tell the whole of the city that they were wrong. And he must have known that the odds of success were long even as he began to open his mouth and shout out against the din of the everyday noise from the hustle and bustle of a large city and yet, that simple act, that willingness to step out in faith just a bit, to forego personal safety and pride, to stick out like a sore thumb was all God needed to turn the whole of the city around. And perhaps it is that we are just given a Cliffs Notes version of what Jonah said so that we can get to the substance of it without getting lost in the style. Maybe it was that God had softened the hearts of the denizens of Nineveh to hear and accept this divinely inspired message from God through the person of Jonah. Maybe it was that Jonah was a dynamic and charismatic speaker who reached the people with his soaring oratory. In any case, we are told that the people heard him and immediately went into a period of atonement and sadness. We are told that from the greatest to the leastest, people put on sackcloth, a rough and uncomfortable burlapesque sign of repentance. From greatest to leastest they fasted as a sign of sorrow and confession before God. From greatest to leastest they wailed wales of confession to God. And God, to the surprise of everyone, Jonah included, relented judgment and forgave. The city was spared. The mercy of God ushered in by a guy who only just before was streaming in the opposite direction of Nineveh.
In a similar manner, Jesus begins his own ministry as something of a street corner preacher. We are told that after John was arrested it was Jesus who gathered the earliest followers of John and began to declare the good news of God. This is, as you know, in stark contrast to the words of John the Baptizer, what with his declaration of the people of Judah being a brood of vipers about to be thrown into the eternal fire. As my grandmother McLeod often told me, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Whereas John preached a sermon of wrath, Jesus came along and preached one of good news, of love, of forgiveness, of unity. And clearly his message and method resonated with the Hebrew people because he quickly developed a following of the faithful and in story after story as he calls what will become his inner-circle of disciples we are told he only had to speak a few words and they each dropped whatever it was that they were doing, leaving behind work, and stuff, and friends, and family and followed him without ever looking back. Almost as if the words of Jesus had reached into the soul of each one of his followers and said the one thing that broke loose the floodgates and allowed the spirit of God to flow through each one.
We live in a similar kind of moment—a moment that is pregnant with a deep yearning to cut through all the clutter and clatter of ideas and believe in a singular truth. In our culture we have arrived at an instance in which the internet, media, books, and magazines have become something of a street corner preacher screaming out in all caps or breathlessly talking, reporting, describing everything going on. And whatever values are espoused by writers or bloggers or reporters or really anyone who produces content pass in front of our eyes as a nonstop stream of information and opinion. In a race to garner as much traffic and thus advertising dollars and to gain as much attention as possible in an ever exploding canvas of content, websites use and abuse superlatives and diminutives to express our times as being the best for something, or the worst of something like modern day Dickensian copycats. Below these screaming headlines and titles to think pieces, is also a sinister underbelly to the internet and social media. A seedy underground of hate speech and racism and anti-Semitism and bigotry that turns the world wide web into a hate-filled echo chamber in which is heard only what the individual wishes to hear. In response to this, seeking to elevate over the brash declarations online, news and opinion, both on the television and radio, has elevated rhetoric and presentation to such a fevered pitch that often times people merely tune in to hear the next radical thing said. Reasonable conversation is replaced by screaming matches and denigration of "others." Books, magazines, essays, all suffer from the need to catch peoples attention in an ever overcrowding marketplace of ideas and wares until our lives seem to careen in between the best and the worst, both cresting the highest waves and sinking into the lowest valleys until it becomes almost impossible to hear a prophetic word from God, the still small voice, heard only in the sound of sheer silence, over the din of everyone else screaming at us. In some ways, declaring things in the extreme is nothing new. In 1729 Jonathan Swift, best known for the novel, Gulliver’s Travels, satirically suggested that poor Irish folks eat their own children as a way of staving off hunger in the midst of the one of the famines that often troubled the Irish. Swift's Modest Proposal used extreme satire to draw attention to the plight of the poor. In today's world, it is possible that such an expression would be missed in the midst of so much over-the-top speech. And yet. And yet, it is surrounded and inundated by all of this clatter and chaos that we are called to try and perceive the still small voice of God, it is surrounded and inundated by all of this clatter and chaos that we are to find solace in the silence that overcomes everything else, to take moments of holiness in the midst of brokenness to dwell in the presence of God. Moreover, it is our job to, once we have heard that voice to lift our own voices, once we have sat in the presence of the Holy, once we have found that peace that surpasses all understanding to depart from that place ready to go out saying the thing that challenges the prevailing movements of the moment with the timeless truth of the gospel, the timeless truth of love—the love from which all of the cosmos has arisen and the love to which all of creation will one day return—the timelessness of the truth of the mercy of God who never stops speaking, calling, urging all God’s children to come back home. And the reality is that we need not wear a sandwich board that warns readers of the impending judgment of God, nor do we need to go to the middle of Nineveh or New York City or Clemson University, because in each moment there are opportunities to share the gospel with your neighbor, with your friend, with the one in your midst who believes that no one cares about them, with the one in your midst who aches to hear a message of love and acceptances that drowns out the cacophony of voices that tell her the she is no good, that tell him that he must act a certain way or believe a certain way or love a certain way. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the antidote to all of that shouting, all that babble, all that noise. And we are blessed to bless one another with a different kind of message. We are blessed to be bearers of the gospel—witnesses to the love of God, the grace of Christ, the unpredictable movement of the spirit, who blows where she will, eventually speaking to each person where they are, and welcoming them into the joy of the master—a joy prepared since before the foundations of time were laid down in the universe. Sisters and brothers, outside these walls is a world yearning for the cornerstone of the gospel to overcome all of the chaos of uncertainty and the din of competing voices in a world that has become overgrown with disunity and dis-ease and its our job to bring it to them. So let’s get to work. Glory be to God in the highest and on earth peace amongst all God’s children. Alleluia, amen.
*-image is a Russian Icon (Date unknown)