Pastor Darren: As we begin today, I have an assignment for you.
Pastor Darren: I need for you to be thinking of the most frequent villain in your life.
Pastor Darren: That villain in your life and in your head and in your heart.
Pastor Darren: It may be someone that is actually in your life.
Pastor Darren: It might be someone that is someone from your past.
Pastor Darren: It may be someone with power.
Pastor Darren: Maybe power over you.
Pastor Darren: It may be someone in power, in control of things that include you, but are much more broad than that.
Pastor Darren: But I want you to grab that person in your brain right now and be thinking about it.
Pastor Darren: You know, hold on to that person.
Pastor Darren: For me, it's Ryan Seacrest.
Pastor Darren: Rockin' New Year's Eve.
Pastor Darren: Indeed.
Pastor Darren: Just kidding.
Pastor Darren: I don't know him.
Pastor Darren: We've reached the end of Jonah.
Pastor Darren: All right.
Pastor Darren: Has it been a decent journey?
Pastor Darren: Have you enjoyed it?
Pastor Darren: I hopefully it flushed the book out to a certain extent for you.
Pastor Darren: You know things about that story that you didn't know before.
Pastor Darren: We're grateful to Mark last week.
Pastor Darren: You know, he really laid out chapter four really well for us, and now I'm responding.
Pastor Darren: Now we're going to break that down a little bit.
Pastor Darren: And so it starts with the story we all know, right?
Pastor Darren: Jonah gets asked to do some godly work and decides to do the opposite.
Pastor Darren: Not only not do the work, but run away, the complete opposite direction in which he was called.
Pastor Darren: And uh you will remember the lesson we learned about Jonah when we were in Sunday school, right?
Pastor Darren: Oh, how foolish we are.
Pastor Darren: God is everywhere.
Pastor Darren: You can't run from God.
Pastor Darren: You better do what God wants you to do.
Pastor Darren: Did anybody get that lesson in Sunday school?
Pastor Darren: I got that lesson in Sunday school.
Pastor Darren: All right, I see some nodding.
Pastor Darren: Yeah, that's that's the story of Jonah.
Pastor Darren: We tend to remember when we think about Jonah, right?
Pastor Darren: And uh we just got to be mindful that God controls everything, including the seas and the fish.
Pastor Darren: So trying, you can't just run, is what we're learning, right?
Pastor Darren: Then chapter two, we actually move into a whole new uh feeling, a whole new vibe, right?
Pastor Darren: There's this really sincere and some fairly moving poem or prayer about the nature of regret, the nature of God's forgiveness and and how that feels.
Pastor Darren: Uh, and so there's some some real uh nourishing that can come from that.
Pastor Darren: Then in chapter three, we go back to the kind of original story, right?
Pastor Darren: We were reintroduced or brought back to that Jonah we learned about in chapter one, this rascal, and now he is, I assume, grudgingly delivering his message to the Ninevehites.
Pastor Darren: It is a message that is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight words.
Pastor Darren: Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
Pastor Darren: There's the message.
Pastor Darren: That's all we get from Scripture.
Pastor Darren: I don't see, I don't hear Jonah really laying it thick.
Pastor Darren: I don't see him really worried about all of these people.
Pastor Darren: But here's the big surprise that community, the Ninevites, well, they repent.
Pastor Darren: I don't know if anybody would have anticipated that.
Pastor Darren: If we were to run to a place called Nineveh and let them know that they ought to repent and that God was going to come for them in 40 days, I don't know that they would listen to us.
Pastor Darren: Would you do you think uh, you know, even if I wore a nice shirt like this, I think they would go, yeah, it's a nice shirt, but I don't believe you.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: A weird kind of circumstance.
Pastor Darren: Uh and so for them to repent, it's a little bit surprising.
Pastor Darren: They do exactly what God wants without pause.
Pastor Darren: News reaches the king, and even he repents.
Pastor Darren: He takes on sackcloth, he sits in ashes, he is in grief, also that God may relent and turn from his fierce anger.
Pastor Darren: They fully repent.
Pastor Darren: At this point, hopefully, we're realizing the story isn't really about Nineveh.
Pastor Darren: It's not about Nineveh or the Ninevehes any more than it was about those sailors in chapter one who ends up throwing Jonah in the water.
Pastor Darren: They exist in this story, in this tale, to show us who Jonah the prophet is.
Pastor Darren: So who is he?
Pastor Darren: Well, he's a guy who is not down with this redemption thing at all.
Pastor Darren: Jonah is not into God's uh forgiving grace.
Pastor Darren: Not only does he not want to be the guy who delivers the message of redemption, he doesn't even want the people redeemed at all.
Pastor Darren: He is not a fan of forgiveness or grace for the Ninevehites.
Pastor Darren: We don't 100% know why he's not a fan, but maybe that's the point.
Pastor Darren: It doesn't matter why.
Pastor Darren: Only that Jonah does just not want it offered.
Pastor Darren: God wanted to inform these people about the possibility for redemption, and Jonah wanted no part of it.
Pastor Darren: Just look how it rolls out.
Pastor Darren: First, he says, you were going to forgive them, and this is why I didn't want to do this in the first place.
Pastor Darren: I'm not about forgiveness.
Pastor Darren: Did you hear it rattled off?
Pastor Darren: All the things we hope to understand about God and to learn when we finally get that experience, that full experience.
Pastor Darren: Everything we want to know about God is what's laid out here.
Pastor Darren: Jonah hears it and says, Ah, none of that.
Pastor Darren: You're a forgiving God, I am out.
Pastor Darren: He even goes to the next step and asks to be put out of his misery of knowing that these people were forgiven.
Pastor Darren: Are you hearing some of the satire in this thing?
Pastor Darren: He responds, or God responds to him in the midst of this fit, this tantrum that Jonah is having, he responds, Is it right for you to be angry?
Pastor Darren: Although I don't know how you think God sounds.
Pastor Darren: Sometimes I think God sounds like a really wise Jewish man.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Is it right for you to be angry?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: You know that.
Pastor Darren: So that question first goes unanswered.
Pastor Darren: Jonah finds his way out of the city, he finds a place to sit, he goes and he starts to wait to see what happens with the city.
Pastor Darren: Safe to say he's not really hoping for good things.
Pastor Darren: Then the story takes kind of a supernatural turn for a bit here.
Pastor Darren: God creates a bush to shade Jonah, which makes him happy.
Pastor Darren: Then God sends a worm to eat that bush.
Pastor Darren: And now Jose Jonah, he's just withering now in the sun.
Pastor Darren: He's wishing he had this bush.
Pastor Darren: And again, God asks, Is it right for you to be angry?
Pastor Darren: And Jonah, he's going down with the ship.
Pastor Darren: Yes, I am angry enough to die.
Pastor Darren: Story ends with God pointing out to Jonah that he would mourn this bush that's offering him shielding from the sun, but not Nineveh.
Pastor Darren: This town with thousands of souls and many animals.
Pastor Darren: Don't forget the animals.
Pastor Darren: It all comes down to a lesson about God and God's heart for forgiveness.
Pastor Darren: You could argue this is the most Christian story in the whole Old Testament.
Pastor Darren: This emphasis on grace and forgiveness, to me, it's worthy of New Testament writing.
Pastor Darren: That was, in some ways, the transition from Judaism to uh Christianity, that was one of the transitions.
Pastor Darren: The more emphasis on grace and forgiveness, this is all about grace and forgiveness, God's grace and forgiveness.
Pastor Darren: And we learned that Jonah, the prophet, is not about forgiveness at all.
Pastor Darren: So, on one hand, we probably ought to hear the sack uh the satire of this.
Pastor Darren: He is not your typical prophet by any means.
Pastor Darren: Have you heard of Schadenfreude?
Pastor Darren: If Schadenfreude was a virus, Jonah's got it.
Pastor Darren: He is sick with this.
Pastor Darren: Schadenfreude is this German word.
Pastor Darren: Uh it is the word that they use to describe people's happiness with others' misfortune.
Pastor Darren: Of course, the Germans have a word for that.
Pastor Darren: I got a lot of German.
Pastor Darren: I'm allowed.
Pastor Darren: That's Schadenfreude, and that's Jonah, is it not?
Pastor Darren: Almost joy that he thought, oh, the Nineveh might receive their uh uh uh their justice and then to find out there's gonna be forgiveness.
Pastor Darren: He's lost it.
Pastor Darren: His Schadenfreude doesn't get to get answered.
Pastor Darren: So we can sit in that that satire, but on the other hand, we want to be careful to remember that this story is still speaking to us.
Pastor Darren: We really shouldn't be saying to ourselves, silly Jonah, he doesn't get it.
Pastor Darren: He doesn't understand God in the way that we do, right?
Pastor Darren: We know Christianity better.
Pastor Darren: I'm gonna invite you to remember your villain now.
Pastor Darren: Oh that person.
Pastor Darren: That person that is in your life or over you in some way has power in this world that you resent, or maybe it's smaller, somebody who said something uh that really damaged your life.
Pastor Darren: Think about that villain and remind yourself of why you think so poorly of them.
Pastor Darren: What is it that happened that created that image of them in your mind?
Pastor Darren: And with that, now I will invite you to imagine yourself being asked by God to go and offer up a message of God's redemption to that person.
Pastor Darren: You'd probably feel happy early on, right?
Pastor Darren: Oh, thanks, God.
Pastor Darren: I've been dying to tell that guy God's going after him.
Pastor Darren: You you I I you don't even have to give me the words.
Pastor Darren: I got 'em.
Pastor Darren: They're right here.
Pastor Darren: I'll be right there.
Pastor Darren: I will tell them that they are in big trouble.
Pastor Darren: Then what do you do when that person re repents?
Pastor Darren: Says sorry.
Pastor Darren: Presumably forgiven in divine ways for all that they did to you, around you, to your heart, to your spirit, to your well-being.
Pastor Darren: Forgiven.
Pastor Darren: All that they've done kind of wiped off the slate.
Pastor Darren: Are we telling ourselves there's no part of us that feels like Jonah?
Pastor Darren: Part of us want to be part of the redemption of somebody else that has hurt us, that has harmed us.
Pastor Darren: We like to see ourselves as people of grace, but it it's not without its stipulations.
Pastor Darren: Am I right?
Pastor Darren: There's a part of us that's that really likes the idea that God is up there keeping score.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Marking down the things that have been done wrong, making sure that justice is served out.
Pastor Darren: We're also a little bit happy that, hmm, you know, maybe I can get my blessings as well.
Pastor Darren: If that's what's gonna be fair and everybody gets theirs, well, surely I'm gonna get the blessings that I should get for being the one who made sure I didn't hurt other people.
Pastor Darren: Are you hearing maybe a little bit of why this is problematic thinking?
Pastor Darren: I'm convinced that Jonah would fit very well in our polarized society of today.
Pastor Darren: Aren't we pretty firmly entrenched that the idea of forgiveness for everyone is a bit of a stretch?
Pastor Darren: We've been walking a journey with Richard Rohr this year.
Pastor Darren: Uh, we've got the weekly devotional, daily devotional, but we're also reading the book, The Tears of Things.
Pastor Darren: This emphasis, and this has been a lot my choice, it's because I I feel him working on a softening understanding, a way to soften our understanding about living in that space like Jonah, of wanting there to be some sort of justice accounting, much more than this realm of forgiveness and grace.
Pastor Darren: Richard Rory talks about our problem stemming from a reliance on dualistic thinking.
Pastor Darren: Our brains want to simplify the world around us by creating really just two categories for ourselves and for the world around us.
Pastor Darren: What are the two categories?
Pastor Darren: Well, it's either good or it's bad.
Pastor Darren: It's dark or it's light.
Pastor Darren: It's right or it's wrong.
Pastor Darren: Our minds, we as a species, we tend towards that space of wanting to just get everything sort of solved like that.
Pastor Darren: It's a little bit of the same thinking that uh we use when we're inviting a world of God's judgment over forgiveness.
Pastor Darren: The driver is that the same part of us that wants to know that God is keeping score, that judgment is real, that that's in the midst of all that.
Pastor Darren: That's the part of us that wants that.
Pastor Darren: But it's interesting too, it's the same part of us that also wants to know that we're going to get the blessings that we deserve.
Pastor Darren: Hopefully you're hearing it again.
Pastor Darren: The problems with this way of thinking, the slippery slope towards God is surely thinking the same way I am, because it's the way that makes sense.
Pastor Darren: A faith grounded in our own idea of what God wants as opposed to the one God is calling us to.
Pastor Darren: To a certain extent, we need to soften this tendency in order to find the centeredness, in order to find the light of wisdom that God is trying to offer us.
Pastor Darren: And this is where Richard Rohr speaks into that importance.
Pastor Darren: Uh, this is actually uh um, it'll be in your email today, uh, but it was part of, I believe, Sunday's devotion this last week.
Pastor Darren: Uh, and I do we have it on the thing?
Pastor Darren: The contemplative, non-dual mind is not saying everything is beautiful even when it's not.
Pastor Darren: However, we may come to everything is still beautiful by contemplatively facing the conflict between how reality is and how we wish it could be.
Pastor Darren: We must face dualistic problems, name good and evil, differentiate between right and wrong.
Pastor Darren: We can't be naive about evil.
Pastor Darren: And here's the key phrase But if we stay focused on this duality, we'll become unlovable, judgmental, dismissive people.
Pastor Darren: I've witnessed this pattern in myself, is what Richard Rohr says.
Pastor Darren: We must eventually find a bigger field, a wider frame, which is non-dual thinking.
Pastor Darren: In other words, we get locked into these dualisms, right?
Pastor Darren: We become Jonah.
Pastor Darren: And our lack of appreciation for God's grace becomes a problem.
Pastor Darren: Not just for those who might have come to know a better way through our ability to offer that loving grace, to be a representative of that loving grace in this world, so we lose ground there, but we also have a problem for ourselves.
Pastor Darren: This thing does not end well for Jonah.
Pastor Darren: He ends up on that hill, lost in his own disappointments, unable to see what God has done right in front of him, even using him to do it.
Pastor Darren: This is the concern that we carry.
Pastor Darren: Will we be stuck on that same hillside, lost in our frustrations as we deal with the dangerous polarities of our current culture?
Pastor Darren: I know many of us carry the burden of that polarization pretty heavily.
Pastor Darren: We're concerned for a society that has chosen to work against itself rather than to work together in some common sense solutions and compromise.
Pastor Darren: We grieve for a time when we would look for the good in each other even when we disagreed.
Pastor Darren: In our quote, Rohr called it being able to say everything is still beautiful, even when it's not shining God's light.
Pastor Darren: To me, the invitation of the story of Jonah is clear as we navigate these polarized times in our day-to-day life, in our places of engagement with the community, even when we're sitting in a voting booth, we need to ask ourselves can we trust in God's loving grace?
Pastor Darren: Or will we land on that hill paralyzed with our anger?
Pastor Darren: Will we find our way back to that hard work of redemption?
Pastor Darren: That is our question for today.
Pastor Darren: Amen.