The Tilted Halo
The Tilted Halo podcast has a refreshing and honest perspective on the challenges pastors face in their ministry and those involved in ministry as a whole. Hosted by Pastor Kathleen Panning, who has seen it all, this edgy show explores the idea that we all have a "tilted halo" - a recognition that we are not perfect and all make mistakes.
Through personal experiences, interviews with fellow pastors, leaders, and insights from scripture, this show offers advice and encouragement for those struggling with the weight of their imperfections. From burnout and rude awakenings to personal failures and shortcomings, The Tilted Halo provides a safe space for pastors to share their struggles and find support from a community of like-minded souls around the globe.
With a focus on authenticity, vulnerability, and humanity at large, this podcast challenges the notion that pastors must have it all together and invites listeners to embrace their humanity and lean into the grace of God. Whether you are a pastor or someone looking for a fresh perspective on life's challenges, The Tilted Halo is a must-listen in the search for hope, healing, and a renewed sense of purpose.
The Tilted Halo
Ep 40: Understand Your Anger, Understand God's Mercy
Dare we look at our own flaws as we stand as ministers of God? What if the anger you carry is holding you back from truly experiencing God's mercy? We often overlook our own imperfections while expecting God to inflict punishment on others. This episode will challenge you to hold a mirror to your own actions and attitudes. As we discuss the uncomfortable reality of anger in our lives, we'll use the biblical story of Jonah as our guide. We'll consider how our anger manifests itself, both in personal relationships and larger societal issues like strikes and road rage. Most importantly though, I invite you to reflect on how anger might be affecting your ministry and spiritual journey.
By understanding God's extended mercy towards us, despite our faults, we hope to inspire you to extend the same grace to others. Join us, and let's grow together in our spiritual journey.
Welcome to the Tilded Halo. This is a new podcast and it's for anybody who's a woman in ministry. You might be a pastor like myself, a bishop, a priest, a rabbi, music minister, elder children's minister whatever your title is, you're absolutely in the right place, especially if you're someone who loves your ministry and you're doing it well and you're feeling pressure to sometimes be perfect and deep down inside, you know you're not. And how in the world to deal with that? And, men, you're absolutely welcome here too, because this is about ministry and the same thing can happen to you. So you're all in the right place. Let's get started with the show.
Speaker 1:Do you get angry? I do. I think we all do at times, but why? What are some of the things that you get angry about? No, this is not really about anger, but just for you to think about a little bit. What is it that you get angry about?
Speaker 1:It seems to me that there are a lot of people these days who are angry. There are shouting matches that happen in all kinds of places, and there are people who really want other people to think and be and do things like they want, and so they get angry when they don't. I mean drive down any highway these days and road rage is getting to be all too common. I don't even want to say popular, but it almost seems like the popular thing to do, and I know I've experienced that too. Why does that person have to go so slow? Why do they cut me off in traffic? All of those different kinds of things, even something as simple as that, it can be grounds for getting angry, and sometimes people get really angry about what seems to be kind of little stuff, and there have been as I'm recording this. There have been some strikes by unions in the last 12, 24 months or something like that. It depends upon when you're listening to this but there have been some larger unions that have gone out on strike, and that didn't happen for quite a number of years. And it's not that the people on strike were being violent or anything like that, thankfully. But some of these strikes have gone on a long time because the people who were on strike were saying enough the way they've been treated by the companies or by the job type situations. Those companies, those businesses, have experienced a lot of growth and a lot of income and they just want to get a fairer share of that as well, so people have been willing to go out on strike for things like that. Anger happens all over the place. It happens what we see on the media. It happens close to home as well, and it just seems to be a lot of angry people out there. It doesn't seem to take a whole lot these days to get us angry and angrier, and maybe that's because there's more stress in our lives and in our world than there used to be. But whatever the reason, we seem to be angry a lot and in that sense we're kind of like a biblical person in the Bible, in a book from the Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, the book of Jonah.
Speaker 1:Now, many people are familiar with the story of Jonah, at least part of the story. It's the one about this guy getting swallowed by a whale. Well, actually there is no whale. In the Hebrew text that means big fish, but getting swallowed by a whale or big fish and living in the stomach of this fish for three days. Now, come on now. How in the world could anybody survive in the stomach of a big fish or a whale? How would he breathe? Being down there with all the digestive juices does not sound like a very pleasant place to be. Anyway, it's a story about Jonah and getting swallowed up by this whale but big fish. But the story is a lot more than that. You see, god called Jonah to be a prophet and go to the city of Nineveh and call them to repent.
Speaker 1:A couple of things to know. Number one Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian, assyrian empire way back in the 700 BCE, before the Common Era, and the Assyrians were a group of people, an area that they were conquering all kinds of other territory, and they were not the nicest people when they took others captive and conquered territory. They were known to be very brutal to the people they conquered, those who survived the actual war part of it. Some of them were I mean, it's very distasteful to even think about this but some of them were skinned alive. Some of them were impaled on giant steaks. Some of them had either great big hooks put in their mouth or a great big ring through their nose not just a tiny little one like people pierced with today, but a great big thing and then hauled off to Assyria just like a herd of livestock. In other words, jonah had a lot of reasons not to want the people of Nineveh to repent, because if they did not repent, god was saying that God was gonna wipe out Nineveh Sounded like a pretty good idea, you know, to somebody the Assyrian Empire conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and marched against and attacked Jerusalem in 701 BCE. So you know, if God had wiped out Nineveh, that wouldn't have happened. This is happening before all of that march against the Northern Kingdom.
Speaker 1:Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh, he did not want to tell the people to repent, he didn't want them to repent at all. And so Jonah runs away. Well, thanks, he can run away from God. He gets on a ship on the Mediterranean Sea and goes north from Israel up to Tarshish, which is in now modern-day Lemberdan, and but while they're out at the sea, there's a storm that comes up and it's in danger of capsizing and swapping the ship, and so the crew on the boat starts throwing cargo overboard. And then they, for some reason, they think that it's because of Jonah that the storm is there. And Jonah says yeah, it's me, I'm running away from my God, so throw me overboard and you'll be okay. So Jonah prefers to die drown rather than go to Nineveh. But God says, not so fast. You know, I really want you to go to Nineveh.
Speaker 1:So that's where the whale or big fish comes into the picture, because swallows of Jonah keep them from drowning, I guess. But again, how in the world would somebody survive in the belly of a whale or a big fish for three days? Anyway, jonah decides, you know, maybe God saving him like this was a pretty good deal. And so, while in the belly of this marine preacher, he gives a prayer to God in thanks for his life and the story takes on a bit of an error of like a comedy, because the word Jonah in Hebrew means either dove or pigeon. So we have prophet pigeon, who has been trying to fly away from God and, you know, has been in the belly of this big fish. Well, after three days the fish can't stomach Jonah any longer, literally, and spits him out, regurgitates him close enough to shore so that Jonah can get to shore and he cleans himself off. And God again says hey, jonah, remember you're going to Nineveh. Jonah says OK, or prophet pigeon says OK, I'll go to Nineveh.
Speaker 1:Now the other thing to realize is Nineveh is not exactly next door. If you looked at a map of the Middle East, these days Lebanon is north of Israel current day Israel and to the east of Lebanon is Syria. So to get to Nineveh, jonah has to go through, probably, lebanon and Syria, continuing to travel east, and then curves southeastward into the Assyrian territory, which would be closer to modern day Iraq, and Nineveh would be on the southern end of that territory, where the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers come together is where this ancient city of Nineveh was close to modern day Baghdad, I believe, if I've got my geography correct here. Anyway. So this is a couple hundred miles. It's going to take Jonah some time. There's no airplanes, no trains, no cars. The fastest mode of transportation was probably a camel, okay, and even on camel back on a caravan of traders traveling the ancient silk route and through the what was known as the fertile press. That would have taken weeks to get there.
Speaker 1:But Jonah goes and he still doesn't want these people to repent. And so Nineveh is described as a big city, takes three days to walk across it, which could be like, if you think of three miles an hour pace for walking that in a day and a walking for eight hours continually, you could get about 24 miles. So three days to walk across that, you're talking somewhere between 60 and 75 miles and across. So, jonah, he still doesn't want the people to repent. So what does he do? He goes one day's journey into the city, just one day's journey. And then he sets up shop, and one time, and only once, does he tell the people that God says that if they do not repent, the city is going to be wiped out in 40 days. Well, and then he continues on and leaves the city, but he doesn't leave the area. He wants to see what's going to happen.
Speaker 1:Well, what happens, unbeknownst to Jonah, is that that one time that he shares the message, it spreads. It spreads not just to the little group of people who were around him and heard him, but it spread all the way to the king. And the king declared hey, you know, we got to take this guy seriously. So he declared that everybody had to put on sackcloth, including their animals, and fast till the end of the 40 days as the sign of repentance. Now, think about that. When was the last time you saw a herd of cattle or some chickens in sackcloth? It's a curious little comical type of imagery to think about. But anyway, they all do this. The idea is they all repent, and Jonah is sitting outside the city waiting to see what God's going to do. And the day comes and you know what happens Now.
Speaker 1:Most of us like to talk about God as the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. God is steady as a rock. Well, the text tells us that God changed God's mind, for people repented, so he did not destroy the city, and Jonah is furious with God. He said, god, this is exactly why I didn't want to come, because I knew I knew this is what you would do. You're slow to anger and abounding instead fast love, which is where this is part of, where we get that phrase from, and you're not going to do this. I wanted you to wallop these people real good, they're not good people. I wanted you to give it to them, good, and you're not going to do that. And so Jonah's angry with God and Jonah's sitting outside the city, someplace on a little bit of a hill or something where he can see what's happening or not happening, and God causes a plant, a castor bean plant, to grow up and provide some shade for Jonah, and Jonah is delighted to have the shade from this plant. That's desert area, and so it can get pretty darn hot sitting out in the sun and Jonah's very happy about the plant. But then over the night, god, or the next morning God causes a worm to come in and destroys the plant and withers and dies and Jonah's angry with God for that. And God tells Jonah you know you're concerned about this plant. You didn't have anything to do with it growing and it's just a plant. Why shouldn't I be concerned about all of the people of Nineveh? So pigeon prophet gets told you know God cares about the people.
Speaker 1:You think about all of the things that we get angry about. There's the whole abortion issue. You know the people who are pro-life get angry with those who are pro-choice and call them, you know, unconcerned. You know they call them names. And the people who are pro-choice get angry at those who are pro-life. And you know one group calls the other one baby killers and the other, you know, if they're pro-abortion they get called baby killers. If they're anti-abortion they get told that they don't care about women and about all kinds of other things.
Speaker 1:You get people who are threatening other people and going around literally executing just what they call justice because they don't like the way some people look or who they are or what they believe in or how they behave, and so they open fire with weapons of war and you get people on the pro-gun or the whole gun issue, those who want anybody and everybody to have access to weapons and those who want you know, want to protect the Second Amendment, and doing that is what they say. And then those who want some other laws to have, like universal background checks or something like that and the different sides that people take on that and how angry people get with each other on any of those issues and a whole bunch more. And people sometimes have taken matters into their own hands to literally execute what they call justice. And these are some of the big things that we get angry about these days. But there are all kinds of little things too. There's the driver ahead of us or somebody around us, person who votes differently than we do, who says something that is different about a candidate who we support, who says something critical about them.
Speaker 1:You know we get angry about all kinds of things and along comes God, because we want God sometimes to settle the score for us. You know, get out there, god, do the justice, do it right, and what does God do? God doesn't settle the score, at least not the way we want. But God offers mercy and grace and forgiveness even to those people whoever we think of as our enemies, who are bad, wrong, hurtful whatever term we might use for them, those people it's great to be a recipient of God's grace and love and forgiveness. We all like that, we all need that, including me, and I have to admit that there are times where there are people who I don't agree with and who I see as doing some very hurtful or bad things and there's plenty of that in the world these days and I don't really want God to be nice to them. But I'm like Jonah in that respect. I want God to give it to some people real good, and I suspect you are too.
Speaker 1:But if we want a God who's angry like that and who is so unbending, unyielding, uncaring, in a sense, about others, it just realize what kind of God we're asking about for ourselves too. If we want God to give it to those people, somebody else wants God to give it to us. Yo, how angry do we want God to be? Do you want a God who's angry? Do you want a God who's loving and forgiving? Do you want to see God mostly as executing justice on everybody who you know, whatever your criteria are? Or do you want a God who is open to you, being the one with the tilted halo too Not perfect, sometimes one of those people in the eyes of somebody else? We're quick to be like Jonah, to be wanting God to execute and do justice as we understand it. How quick are we to hear that God is the God of grace and mercy, steadfast love and abounding in mercy for everyone, including you and me? So the next time you realize your halo is a little tilted, think about all of the people that you get angry with and how tilted their halos are too, and remembering that you know yours and mine and everybody else's. None of us have one that's unperfectly straight. We're not perfect and so if we want God's love and grace and mercy, we need to be able to show it to others too, even to those people, whoever they are. For you, be faithful and go, as Jonah did, but also be faithful and know that God is the God of mercy and abounding and steadfast love for everyone, including you and me and everybody else.
Speaker 1:This is the Tilted Halo. Thank you so much for being here and for listening. Give us peace and blessings to each of you and come back again next time for another episode. You have been listening to Tilted Halo with me, kathleen Panning. What did you think about this episode? I'd really like to hear from you. Leave me some comments. Be sure to like, subscribe and share this episode and catch another upcoming episode. For more conversation on ministry, life, mindset and a whole lot more, go to wwwTiltedHaloHelpcom, where I've got a resource guide and other resources waiting for you, and be sure to say hi to me, kathleen Panning, on LinkedIn. See you on the next episode.