Sermon 9.20.26 On Aging
The biblical story of Jonah and the Whale is a Sunday School favorite.
It’s one of those stories that lends itself to a simple retelling.
It holds a simple and valuable lesson about how running away doesn’t solve our problems or change our responsibilities.
It’s also interesting to imagine a creature so big that you could actually live inside of it.
Playing with this idea of living inside of a whale was the starting point for one of the most memorable scenes in Disney’s adaptation of Carlo Colladi’s Pinocchio.
And if you think about that novel, or that movie, it’s one of the first to ask questions about human relationships with things they have created such as Artificial Intelligence.
But let’s save that for a different sermon, back to Jonah.
We have this famous story about Jonah and the whale, but does anyone remember how or why Jonah got into the whale’s belly in the first place?
He wasn’t like lobster diver Michael Packard who was half engulfed by a humpback whale for 30 seconds in 2021 before being spit out and surviving the encounter.
Jonah was actually trying to avoid God’s call.
Jonah was called to be a prophet and to use his prophetic witness to save a people from the consequences of living without regard to God.
Here is the catch.
Jonah was Hebrew, but he was sent to the people of Ninevah.
This is far from being simply a story about someone being sent to a foreign people group as some kind of proto-evangelist on a mission trip;
“Let me tell you about my God, he’s a great God, I think you’d like them, My God created the whole universe, night and day, all of the creatures of the field,
I know the Greek philosophers haven’t really postulated the existence of an eternal soul yet, but thinking ahead, have you ever thought about where this potential esoteric piece of you might go after you die?”
Ninevah was the capitol city of the Assyrian Empire, the empire that would take over the northern half of the lands inhabited by the Hebrew people in 722 BCE.
Maybe we can see why Jonah would have been reticent to go to one of the most powerful city centers in the ancient world to tell them, that they had 40 days to change or else.
Now, this story is almost certainly a satire; a story that uses irony to make a larger point.
In our passage from this morning, we hear something that I am sure you’ve heard before many times before, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”
Does that sound familiar?
Does it also maybe sound a little weird at the end?
That’s because we usually we either hear it without the “ready to relent” piece, or we hear it like this:
“The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”
Which is how it is in Numbers 14 and similar to how it shows up near the Ten Commandment stories in Exodus and Deuteronomy.
The reason it may sound familiar is because it is actually a formula that is used 13 times in the Bible; in Exodus and Deuteronomy, but also in the psalms, in Nehemiah, in Proverbs, and in the prophet Joel.
And each time it is used, it varies just ever so slightly as the examples I cited show.
The variations are interesting, but what is more interesting, I think is that the way we heard it this morning in Jonah is an exact replication of the way it is said in the Prophet Joel.
What we see when we compare these two (Joel and Jonah) is that Jonah’s whole story is a test case for Joel’s prophetic call to the Hebrew people to repent.
The irony of Jonah’s story is that here we have a prophet sent to the God forsaken Assyrian Empire and within 40 days they repent.
And so the question that Jonah raises for the Hebrew people is: If these people can do it, when will you?
This is ultimately why Jonah is so upset, why he was so avoidant in the first place, why he sits and pouts and prays for death under a bush that was created by God out of mercy for his internal struggle.
God’s call was inconvenient for him, but worse, he found out that God’s mercy is far larger than just his own people group, no matter how chosen they are.
And doesn’t this kind of mercy sound like the kind of generosity that the vineyard owner shows in Jesus’ parable in Matthew 20?
There is a promised wage for listening to God’s call to you no matter when it comes.
It is not based on anything you did to earn it, only on your willingness to join the harvesting.
Now, I want to pivot for a minute, but don’t worry it will come back around to this parable and final point.
As you can see, the story of Jonah and the parable of the vineyard owner could be fruitful ground for many types of practical discussion.
We could talk about Empire, or xenophobia, we could talk about faith in God even when God’s call is completely different from what we expect or want.
We could definitely talk about socialism and equal wages.
We could talk about how to organize church resources and who the church is supposed to be for: is it for the members who have been here the longest and have “earned their keep?”
Is it for new people entering in, who’ve been here a minute, for children who bring both joy and noise or who flap the priest’s robes like angel wings, when they’re praying over the Eucharist?
Is it for those struggling with addiction and trauma, those who have no need for church, those outside our doors?
So many pertinent and timely issues that we could discuss based on the principles laying behind our readings today.
But actually, what I’ve been thinking about this week, the place that my spirit went, when I started reading these familiar passages about God’s call, workers coming at different times, and equal wages came to an unexpected place as I read our passage from Philippians 1.
The Apostle Paul tells the Philippians at the very beginning of his letter to them that he has also been struggling with God’s call to him.
Though he doesn’t reference Jonah, his plight is similar.
God has sent him to spread the Word among the living,
But Paul says that he would actually prefer to be with Jesus.
“My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you.”
He is caught between what he wants, and what God is calling for him to do.
And, I’ve actually heard similar sentiments to Paul’s in pastoral conversations around aging.
I can remember at Marjorie Parham’s funeral, hearing about how she wondered after hitting the 100 year mark, “what am I supposed to do now?”
As a high-powered woman, who led Cincinnati’s major black newspaper, The Cincinnati Herald, for 50 years before retiring, how could she remain useful many of her closest friends had passed on, after her body lost the energy and ability to do the simple things?
I can remember my grandma, my Tutu, Roberta DuTeil admitting to me that she just wanted to be with Claude, my grandfather.
We wonder as we age how God might continue to call us as we go from what is familiar to what is unfamiliar or new.
And this doesn’t just happen, if you are fortunate to make it to a century.
When retirement comes along, this question of usefulness and call are prevalent;
This sense of “now what? I used to have a very clear understanding of how I fit into the picture” and now there’s an uncomfortable renegotiation.
If we dig deeper in our memories, I would wager that these questions of call and purpose and usefulness follow us throughout life.
If you’ve ever lost a job, or changed careers, or wondered if what you’re doing now is actually what you want to be doing.
If you’ve ever been starting out in life and the pathways that you might take are full of mystery. The future seems unforeseeable and that can feel daunting.
As a child, you may not have had the words or the broad view to worry about life’s full trajectory, but kids still worry about how they fit in, whether their parents understand them, if they’ll be allowed to fully participate in things that are usually reserved for someone who is older.
In a sense, whether we’ve been in the vineyard for a long time, or if we’ve only been in for a short time, the questions, the anxieties… the wages are the same.
Though we are all asking slightly different questions depending on how long we’ve been around,
We all really want to know about how we can continue to have purpose, to be valued, to be useful in whatever stage of life we are in.
And so, even though we may have different specific questions, the underlying question is the same.
The wonderful thing about being in a place like this, in a church, where we have so many different generations present in the same space,
Is that when we examine this question for ourselves, if we are able to put away the worry about whose problems are bigger,
Or whether the other groups even have problems,
In other words, when we put away the questions about whether it’s fair that we all get the same wage no matter when we arrived,
We can support one another.
What we see in Paul’s question about whether he like that old British punk band the Clash asked, whether he should stay or whether he should go now,
He says, “Since I am convinced of this (that he should stay), I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith, so that I may share abundantly in your boasting in Christ Jesus when I come to you again.”
When we come to this place together, we are given the chance to see that the wage of purpose and usefulness is in fact a gift of mercy that God offers to everyone at every stage of life,
And that we can nurture each other as we each seek to find those wages of eternal life that God has promised to all of us no matter how long or how short our stay in the vineyard has been.
And isn’t that Good News?
You are in a place, where perseverance will win the race,
A place of mutual concern.
And even if we don’t all understand, where anyone is on their journey at any particular time,
We are in a place where God is calling us to purpose and giving us what is necessary to fulfill our individual purposes and God’s heavenly will for all people.
Don’t wait for a whale to remind you that God’s mercy is for all.
Don’t sit under a bush that God provided for your shade and take it for granted.
God is calling you and even if, or especially if it’s not somewhere you want to go, go anyway.
God’s not done with you yet.
So, let’s go out and get it done.
Amen.
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