Jonah 3:1-5, 10 * February 19, 2006 * Epiphany 7 * Prof. James P. Tiefel

There are certain pairs of people and things that always go together in the Bible. If I say Cain you’re going to say Abel, right? If I say Noah, you say…ark. If I say David, you say…Goliath. Anybody who knows the Bible can play this game and win. And so if I say Jonah, you’re going to say…WHALE. Of course. Jonah’s the guy who was swallowed by a whale.

Jonah got away from that whale once, but he hasn’t been able to get away from the whale since. Everybody wants to stick that whale on Jonah. And that’s why most people don’t take Jonah too seriously. Most people are pretty sure you can’t get swallowed by a whale and live to tell about it. Most people are pretty sure this story isn’t true. Now don’t get me wrong. I believe this story is true. I believe God created a great fish to make a big impression on a lazy prophet. I also believe this story is true because Jesus said it was true; he compared his three-day stay in the tomb with Jonah’s three-day stay in the great fish. But even if you believe the story is true, you have to ask the question: What does my life have to do with a whale?

But the story of Jonah isn’t really about a whale. When I say Jonah, you really shouldn’t think whale. When I say Jonah you should think missions. Jonah was a missionary and God sent him on a mission. That’s what the story of Jonah is about. The whale just gets in the way here.

The truth is, a lot of whales get in the way of mission work. You know what I mean. We don’t talk about Jesus because we’re afraid to. That’s the fear whale. We offer less for the world-work of the synod than we do for work at home because we like things to be nice here for us and our kids. That’s the comfort whale. We don’t think about the need to prepare pastors and teachers for the future because, well, frankly, we have all the pastors and teachers we need right here. That’s the selfish whale. It happens too often that we lose sight of our mission on earth because some whale gets in the way.

This morning we’re going to get rid of the whale and look carefully at what the Jonah story really teaches us. And when we do, we may be able to get rid of some of the distractions that keep us from the mission God wants us to carry out in the world. So if not the whale, what should we see in Jonah’s story? We see that

God Has a Heart for Missions

He loves mission work

He loves mission workers

Most of you know enough Bible history to know that the great kingdom God gave to David and Solomon split apart after they died. This wasn’t God idea. This was the Civil War in reverse; the north wanted to secede from the Union. The people in the north wanted their own king, and then they wanted their own temple (remember the temple was in the south, in Jerusalem), and eventually they wanted their own gods. It got pretty clear pretty fast that the north—we usually call the northern kingdom Israel—was going to come to bad end. And it did. 700 years before Jesus’ birth the nation of Assyria swooped down from the north and took the whole nation into captivity. To this day, no one knows what happened to these people. God was patient for awhile. The people of Israel kept on trying to break away, and God kept on trying to get them back. Sometimes he sent them peace and prosperity to remind them that he loved them; sometimes he sent them wars and poverty to remind them that they better come back or else. And through it all he sent prophets to proclaim his message. We know their names: Elijah and Elisha, Amos and Hosea. And Jonah. Jonah was one of the prophets God sent to Israel.

It was during one of the peace and prosperity times that God came to Jonah with a special assignment. I want you to do some foreign mission work, Jonah. Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before me. Jonah couldn’t have been more shocked if God had hit him in the head with a baseball bat! Why on earth did God want to save Nineveh? To Jonah, Nineveh was Amsterdam and Baghdad mixed together in one big hellhole of filth and terrorism. And besides that, Nineveh was the capital city and Assyria, and Assyria was Israel’s avowed enemy. Jonah wouldn’t go. He ran.

But God had a heart for Nineveh. That’s why God went and found Jonah and made him spend a little time in the

whale hotel. Once he was dressed and refreshed, God called Jonah again. This time Jonah went.

And what do you know? The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.

Here’s where Jonah made his mistake: He didn’t realize how deep God’s love really was. Jonah knew that God loved the nation of Israel despite their sins, but he just couldn’t believe that God could love Nineveh. And he certainly couldn’t believe that God could convince the Nineveh to repent!

You and I can’t allow ourselves to make Jonah’s mistake. When Jesus said, For God so loved the world, he put the emphasis on world. When Jesus said, Go and make disciples of all nations, he meant all nations. Don’t try to make Jesus a Wauwatosa Savior. God is not Caucasian, and he is not the God of America. Well, of course we know that. We know that in theory, but do we always live that in practice? As the new millennium dawned five years ago, the members of the Wisconsin Synod were supporting 72 missionaries across the globe. Today we support half that number. For half a century after World War II WELS people worked together to cover our nation with mission congregations. Today, a new mission start is almost unheard of. Standing before you this morning are 45 young men who are willing and eager to go and make disciples of all nations. But how can they go if there’s no one and no money to send them?

The truth is, God has a heart for mission work. God loves to forgive sins, and he doesn’t care what the forgiven look like. God wants people to trust in his Son, and he doesn’t care how they talk or how they walk or how much money they make. God doesn’t care how many sins they’ve committed or how far they strayed or how lousy their life style’s been. God loves mission work. Jonah needed to learn about God’s mission heart. Jonah needed to have God’s mission heart. And so do we.

I wonder how God felt when Jonah refused to go? If I were God, I might have let the whale eat Jonah! But God loved this prophet and he wasn’t about to lose him. Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah second time: Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you. Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very important city—a visit required three days. On the first day, Jonah started into the city. He proclaimed: Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned. The Ninevites believed God.

I want you to notice four things. First, God gave Jonah a chance to repent. That’s what the whale was for. Jonah needed to learn that God’s way was right and his way was wrong. And when Jonah repented, God forgave him. Second, God gave Jonah a specific message: Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned. Jonah must have wondered how Nineveh would react to that kind of message—you know how you think react when you see some religious nut saying stuff like that--but he wasn’t going to mess with God ways again. Third, when Jonah got to Nineveh he worked non-stop for three solid days shouting that message from street corner to street corner, and God gave him courage to do it. Four, God let Jonah see success where he never expected to see it.

So what does this mean for us? It means that our mission-hearted God loves his mission workers. He loves mission workers who work across oceans, he loves mission workers who preach and teach like the potential mission workers singing for you today. But God also loves mission workers who volunteer and bring offerings, he loves mission workers who talk to people about Jesus. It means God never throws his mission workers away when we sin. You name the sin you’ve committed, God can forgive it. And God can forgives every sin we commit because Jesus already carried those sin to his cross. It means that God wants us to analyze the attitudes we have about our mission on earth. He wants us to check ourselves for signs of apathy, pride, selfishness, bigotry, or any other sin that gets in the way of the mission God has given us. It means that if we’re guilty, God wants to come clean and repent. It means that God has given us a message to proclaim. It’s a message that doesn’t seem as though it will impress anyone: a message from a book that most people don’t believe in, a message carried in simple tap water, a message that comes with little pieces of bread and inexpensive wine. It means that God’s message has a power we can’t fathom and that the message is able to change hearts in ways we never believed possible. It means God brings victories when we thought we’d lost, it means God gives success when we thought we failed, it means God surprises us when we thought we had it all figured out. And God does all this—he forgives us, he empowers us, he gives us success--because he loves his mission workers.

Don’t let the whale get in the way, brothers and sisters. There’s a lot more in this little book than the story of man and a great fish. What we find here is nothing else than the beating, pulsing heart of the Savior God who loves to save sinners. He loved the people of Nineveh, he loved the prophet Jonah, and he loves you and me just as much. Let the mission heart that loved you and found you and brought you into his family push away whatever keeps you from seeing the great mission God has given us to do. Look away from yourself and see the Savior who died for the world. Look past the distractions and see the mission. In other words, get rid of the whales! Amen.