Jonah was angry

 Jonah was angry.

Angry enough to die.

God had sent Jonah to preach repentance to Nineveh, and Jonah didn’t like it one bit.

Jonah said no. Jonah ran the other direction. And God drafted Jonah anyway.

And so reluctantly, against his will, Jonah preached God’s message to Nineveh: Repent, or God will destroy your city in forty days.

This most successful of prophets declared God’s word, and miraculously, Nineveh listened. Miraculously, Nineveh obeyed. Miraculously, Nineveh declared a fast, and asked for God’s forgiveness.

And miraculously, God forgave.

God forgave even Nineveh. God forgave even Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire, the slaughterer of the lost tribes of Israel.

And Jonah was angry.

Angry enough to die.

How could God forgive Nineveh?

Nineveh! Forgiven? Impossible.

Jonah wasn’t frustrated.

Jonah wasn’t confused.

Jonah wasn’t petty.

Jonah was furious.

Jonah was livid.

Angry enough to die.

What good was a God that would forgive *Nineveh*?

Jonah was angry with the fury of the oppressed.

Jonah was angry with the fury of someone who has been treated as less than human.

Jonah was angry with the fury of someone whose family had been torn apart.

Jonah was angry with the fury of someone whose loved ones had been killed or left to die.

Jonah was angry with the fury of someone whose culture, whose people had been annihilated.

The fury Jonah had at the Assyrians was only matched by the fury Jonah had at God for suggesting that the Assyrians could be forgiven. The idea that Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian empire – Nineveh, inventor of tactics for imperial genocide – Nineveh, scourge of the Fertile Crescent – Nineveh, who killed and culturally erased the Kingdom of Israel, who singlehandedly caused the “lost tribes of Israel” to be Lost – the idea that Nineveh could repent – and be forgiven – this was too much for Jonah to bear.

What good is God’s justice if it doesn’t condemn a genocidal killer like Nineveh?

What good is God’s anger if it fails to be aroused against so thorough an evil?

What good is the wrath of God if it fails to smite this sadistic tormentor of an empire that slaughters God’s people and obliterates God’s chosen kingdom?

What good is such a God if in this moment of consequence, God fails to condemn the evildoer?

How could God’s presence be welcoming to the oppressed if God so willingly welcomes the oppressors?

The story of Jonah is set before the fall of the Northern Kingdom, but it was written afterward. God had planned, had promised to destroy Nineveh for its wickedness, but when Jonah begrudgingly preached repentance, Nineveh repented, and God turned aside the destruction planned for Nineveh.

What was the cost of Nineveh being spared? How many victims of genocide would have survived if Nineveh had been destroyed? Would the Northern Kingdom have not fallen? Would the lost tribes not be lost? Judaism is called Judaism today because of the twelve tribes, only the tribe of Judah remains. Nineveh caused the very name and identity of God’s chosen people to be altered to a tiny subset of where it started. What kind of God can truly forgive Nineveh? What does it mean to worship such a God? Can God hear the cries of the oppressed and still pardon the oppressor?

Jonah was angry with the fury of the oppressed at a God whose divine inclusiveness left Jonah out in the blazing heat, unwilling to embrace a God who could embrace evildoers and oppressors, even if they allegedly repented.

This is the story of how reconciliation begins.

This is the story of how redemption begins.

This is the story of how we begin to remember how to love.

This isn’t the end.

God’s wrath is turned back in this story, but this isn’t the fullness of salvation. Not for Nineveh. Not for Jonah. This story is only the beginning. The pause in wrath, the pause in judgment that opens the door for transformation.

Nineveh fasted. They acknowledged their evil. They turned to God.

God didn’t say all is well. God didn’t say the effects of their sin were taken away. What happened here is an opening. In acknowledging their guilt, in acknowledging the evil they were capable of, God finds a crack in the armor the Assyrians build around their hearts. The briefest of openings, a way in for God. The very beginning of transformation.

Enough for God to say that there is something to work with. Enough for God to conclude that Nineveh’s destruction is not the only possible solution. If Nineveh is capable of a moment of repentance, there is room for God to work. If Nineveh is capable of a moment of repentance, there is hope for even us.

Jonah is not wrong about Nineveh’s evil. The road to their sanctification is very very very long. All is not well because of this one decision by the King of Nineveh.

Neither Jonah nor the Assyrians were ready to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Jonah needed healing. Jonah cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven until he can forgive, and he cannot forgive until he can heal. Until he can see himself as the fully human member of a family and culture and nation that the Assyrians denied he was. Jonah’s anger is his soul speaking the truth: the Assyrian degradation of their conquered peoples is wrong, and the core of our being ought to cry out in protest against the dehumanization led by Nineveh. That anger declares a truth: the marginalized, the dehumanized, the oppressed, the downtrodden are beloved children of God, and any empire that treats them as less than this is profoundly wrong, profoundly not okay. That anger has to speak its truth: when we dehumanize God’s beloved children, we rend the very fabric of the universe, and if these voices were silenced, the very stones would cry out. Jonah cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven until he can forgive, but expressing and not repressing this anger is a vital step on the road to forgiveness. Victims of violence and oppression must declare their angry truth that despite the empire treating them as if their lives count for nothing, the lives of each marginalized, discounted child of God matter.

Any healing, any reconciliation, any sanctification, any salvation for the oppressor must include a thorough conversion to affirm from the core of their being that those they discounted as acceptable collateral damage in maintaining the well-oiled cogs of the imperial machine are, in fact, lives that matter: beloved children of God and not inconvenient obstacles to wealth and order or means of expansion of wealth or power. Nineveh’s redemption and our own begins, not ends, with acknowledging that the carefully planned violence of their empire is supremely wicked and utterly foreign to the will of God, as every empire is. There is a long road ahead of us still if we are to turn from our wicked ways, and then to make amends. There is a long road ahead for the people of Nineveh if we are to convert to believe that the lives of conquered people matter. And it is an unlikely road for us to travel. Our power, their wealth, our existence as an empire depends on the people of Nineveh sharing widespread belief that the people they conquer are means to the end of the wealth and power and way of life of the city of Nineveh, and not fully human children of God whose lives count just as much as those of the imperial race. Accepting a conversion that threatens our very way of life is no easy task. But without it, Nineveh’s moment of repentance, their fast, their brief turn to God will all amount to nothing.

God longs to reconcile all people, to restore all creation to the presence of God. And yet within the chapters of this story, neither Jonah nor Nineveh are ready to dwell together in the new earth ruled from the new heaven that God is creating. Both Jonah and Nineveh, both trespassed and trespasser, both sinned against and sinner need conversion, transformation, and reconciliation before they can dwell together in the Kingdom of God.

We are both Jonah and Nineveh in this story, and the book of Jonah doesn’t give us a happy ending for either. Jonah did not forgive by the end of the book. Nineveh repented in the book but went on to persist in their destructive ways. 

Jonah’s anger is real and necessary, but it can’t be the end of the story if the story is to lead to redemption. Nineveh’s repentance is real and necessary, but it can’t be the end of the story if the story if to lead to redemption. Anger must be followed by truth, healing, and ultimately reconciliation, if not in this world then in the next to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Repentance must lead to amendment of life, penitence, atonement, and reconciliation, again, if not in this world then in the next, or we cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. But this story gives both the oppressor and the unforgiving the hope that no matter how much any of us are resistant to God’s redemptive project, no matter how much we resent those who have wronged us, no matter how much we persist in our sin and go on failing to recognize the full humanity of those we would write off as expendable – the only sign Jesus has to give us is the sign of Jonah, the sign that God is more persistent than we are stubborn. In the end, we put our hope in God’s steadfastness. Amen.

Well done, good and faithful servants

 Last week I told you about Ezekiel and I told you how terrifying it is to preach, because if God calls upon me to speak out against the demons and if I fail to do so then woe be unto me! My job as priest, terrifyingly, often calls upon me to speak on behalf of God. This is a fearsome thing to be called upon to do, to proclaim a message from God Almighty. And it's a role I'm still growing into. I had only been a priest for a few weeks when I was sent to you. One hard thing for me about this pandemic has been the fact that until March, I've had Bill by my side for almost every Eucharist I've ever celebrated. I had to learn quickly what to do without Bill and the rest of our amazing Altar Guild setting everything up and without Bill making sure everything appears in the right place at the right time. I'm still growing into my role as priest, as a man of unclean lips among a people of unclean lips, as Isaiah put it, who is nonetheless called upon to proclaim the word of God.

In our tradition, there are three messages from God we specifically reserve for priests to deliver, the ABCs of sacerdotal or priestly ministry. Absolution, blessing, and consecration. Absolution: your sins + are forgiven; go in peace. Blessing: the blessing of God Almighty, Father, + Son, and Holy Spirit be among you and remain with you always. And consecration: take, eat: this is my body, given for you. I don't forgive your sins; God does that. I don't bless you; God does that. I don't make bread and wine into the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; God does that. But as a priest, I'm called to speak on behalf of God from time to time: to declare to you the good news that God has wrought in our midst. God forgives you. God blesses you. God is present with you in flesh and blood. I don't make these happen. I'm not forgiving or blessing or consecrating. I'm just the messenger.

Our lessons today are powerful stories about forgiveness and its importance. Hear them. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them. But unusually, today’s lessons are not what God is calling me to preach about today. 

Instead, I need to proclaim a different message today. Last week I had to talk about the false gods in our midst, the demons that can lead us astray. That warning is real, and the demons that turn us from love are real and dangerous. But today, on this rather dark anniversary, I have more cheerful news to proclaim to you. I stand before you as your priest to declare God's blessing: well done, good and faithful servants. Well done.

This is hard to believe, but it’s been half a year now since this crazy crisis began here and the world as we knew it stopped. It’s been an unimaginable six months that we have not been able to do almost ANYTHING in quite the way we’ve been accustomed to doing it as a church. Despite this, St. Paul’s has been able to continue its ministry through this Coronatide.  The world still needs our prayer and service, perhaps more than ever. These past six months have been a challenge, but this congregation has risen to the demands of our day and proclaimed the good news to a world that needs to hear it in ways that we might not have dreamt of a mere six months ago. I certainly hadn’t.

It wouldn’t have happened without a lot of people practicing their faith in all sorts of ways, some of them new and quite unanticipated, using their gifts to advance the kingdom of God. A lot of the people practicing their faith in all these varied ways don’t like attention called to them, so I’m not going to name names. But the canons call upon faithful Christians to work, pray, and give for the spread of the Kingdom of God, and we’ve seen so, so many examples of people stretching outside the bounds of the familiar to do just that. And I personally want to say think you, because your faith in action inspires me. The ways I see people in this church living our their faith teaches me what I can aspire to and hope for in my own life of faith. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and brothers and sisters, you are all among those witnesses.

First of all, people stepped up with praying. We’ve had a greater number of people at services in half a year since the pandemic hit than we have in many entire years. For a while we had daily services, praying for the sick, the dying, the dead, the front line workers, the mourning, the lonely, the fearful, those making decisions, and those in need. We’ve gathered electronically in ways none of us ever expected to try. We’ve had outdoor gatherings in person without our beloved music and worship space. We’ve tried to learn new technologies and new ways of gathering. People have stepped up as readers and offered their prayers. To everyone who has been praying, thank you.

Secondly, people found safe ways to keep up the physical work of maintaining our church and garden and grounds. Christians here have practiced their faith by tending to the lawn and the gardens and even the building. Plumbing has been fixed, surfaces have been sterilized, vegetables have been planted and watered and weeded and harvested and delivered, grass has been mowed, trees have been trimmed – and all of this has been done by people here practicing their faith. Thank you for showing me how trimming trees and mounding potatoes and wiping door handles and mowing grass is all prayer.

Third, people have found ways to continue our call to serve others. One spectacularly unrewarding but essential form of service is everything everyone has done to reduce the spread of disease. Staying home might not feel like a heroic act of love and service, but you do now know how many lives you may have saved by eliminating inessential contact. Difficultly, for many of you, that meant refraining even from ministries at the church that had to take a fallow season. That wasn’t what Milton had in mind when he said, “They also serve who only stand and wait,” but it is nonetheless true. Standing and waiting to slow the spread of disease has been a form of love of neighbor and service to the world. But your service did not stop there. When I’ve talked to people, I’ve heard stories about how people from this congregations have been checking in on people in need. How you’ve helped people move and get to appointments and stay connected. I know about your outreach to Grace House despite the fact that we couldn’t travel there this summer. I know that people have demonstrated to support people of color in our community. I know people have read and joined discussions to better inform themselves about issues afflicting the world, and some of you have recommended things for me to read too. I know what you’ve done to continue to serve Samaritan House. Your generosity in caring for each other and all people even at risk to your own health. I know some of what you’ve done to encourage one another. And I know how discreet so many of you try to be in this service, so I don’t even know how much I don’t know about. But God does. To everyone who has continued in our call to work in service to the world in so many ways during this pandemic, thank you for both your service and your example. Don’t hide your lamp under a bushel basket; let it shine.

And fourth, somehow through all this craziness, through loss of normal settings for employment and school and even friendship, through disruptions of every sort and turmoil in financial markets, the church bank account has remained solvent. That isn’t miraculous manna from heaven; that happened because of people’s diligence and generosity and commitment. People continued to send in their pledges and contributions, despite multiple changes in procedures. People stepped up when they could with new particularly generous donations to address particular crises. Your faithful stewardship of the money God has entrusted to you has enabled the church to continue to pay its bills and serve this community. Thank you for your stewardship. Thank you for enabling this parish to continue its work.

As your priest, my job here today is to look back on our ministry over the past half a year in exile from the usual shape of our beloved community and proclaim to you God's blessing: Well done, good and faithful servants. For six months, you have labored faithfully in exile from normalcy. For six months, you have bourn witness to God’s love in a wounded world. You have been faithful ministers of the Gospel in this troubled time. I am not a prophet, nor a prophet's son (I’m not even a herdsman or dresser of sycamore trees). I have no word from God about the things to come. There are no signs for us to see; there is no prophet left; there is not one among us who knows how long this will go on. But you have been faithful for the past six months, and we have found a way to sing the Lord’s song upon alien circumstances. Now I call upon you to be faithful again going forward into the unknown ministry to which God calls us in the next chapters.

And so with the Psalmist, we pray:

Restore us, O God of hosts; *

show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.

You were once gracious to your land, O Lord, *

you restored the good fortune of Jacob. 

You forgave the iniquity of your people * 

and blotted out all their sins.

You withdrew all your fury *

and turned yourself from your wrathful indignation.

Restore **us** then, O God our Savior; * 

let your anger depart from us.

Will you be displeased with us for ever? *

will you prolong your anger from age to age?

Will you not give us life again, *

that your people may rejoice in you?

Show us your mercy, O Lord, * 

and grant us your salvation.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit

As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. 

Amen.

—

I will listen to what the Lord God is saying, * 

for he is speaking peace to his faithful people and to those who turn their hearts to him.

Truly, his salvation is very near to those who fear him, * 

that his glory may dwell in our land.

Mercy and truth have met together; * 

righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

Truth shall spring up from the earth, *

and righteousness shall look down from heaven.

The Lord will indeed grant prosperity, * 

and our land will yield its increase.

Righteousness shall go before him, *

and peace shall be a pathway for his feet.

False Gods of the American pantheon

This was one of the most intimidating weeks to write a sermon, because this reading from Ezekiel is downright terrifying, where it says if God calls someone to preach the word, and I don't say all the things that I'm supposed to say, then it's going to be my fault if you aren't redeemed. So if I leave out important things that I'm supposed to preach about, and all of you aren't redeemed because of it, then God is going to hold me personally accountable for it.

So I went through a lot of drafts of the sermon this week, because this is just a downright terrifying reading. Before you think, "Well good, that's his problem not ours," I hate to break it to you, but God is calling all of us to proclaim the good news to the people in our lives. If any of us are failing to deliver the message that God has for us, then we're all on the hook for not doing what God is asking us to do and not proclaiming the good news.

I'm actually going to start with the bad news. You might think, "Why is he starting with bad news; this is supposed to be about the good news." I do have to start with the challenging part, but I want to tell you that this is going to end in a place that we've been before. This is going to end where, as Linda read for us in the second reading today, it's really all about loving one another. That's going to be where we end up, but it's going to take a little bit time before we get there, so just be patient, but know that I'm not leading youon a wild goose chase here. We are talking about God's love, and that's that's where we've been, and that's where we're going.

I do need to start by talking about the fact that Ezekiel was sent to Israel to warn the people of Israel that they were worshiping false gods. It's really a sad thing, but in our society today there are some false gods that we tend to worship, and what's even worse is we worship these false gods and we call them Jesus.

We worship these false gods and we call them Jesus, but they're really not Jesus. They're really demons. They're really things that lead us away from loving one another. In our American pantheon of the gods that we worship here in the United States, I've got five of them, and I made a list and because you know, thanks to Ezekiel, I'm terrified of leaving things off the list here. So I've got five of them that I've come up with that we need to be careful of: five false gods of the American pantheon. When we worship them, it turns us away from loving our neighbor as ourself.

As Saint Paul reminds us in the letter to the Romans, "the one who the one who loves neighbor as himself fulfills the law. Love does no wrong to the neighbor, therefore love is the fulfillment of the law." So just keep that in mind here. We've got these five demons. There's probably others, but there are five that I that I came up with this week as we were praying over this that we need to make sure that we're not worshiping.

The first one on this list here is the demon of peace through strength. This is the Roman Empire in a nutshell: the world will be at peace when the powerful can crush anyone who would rise up against them. In the world, this can look like empire, and in our own country, this can come this can look like we're worshiping law and order. When we worship peace through strength, we're saying it's not love and service that is what leads us to salvation; it's crushing anybody who would disrupt things. Sometimes we call this "American Jesus" here. This is not really what Jesus was all about. Jesus died on the cross. Jesus was about vulnerability, and not peace through strength.

Now the second demon that we tend to worship is the demon of prosperity through wealth. How do we find our salvation? By making enough money. By saving enough money. And if we've stored up enough for ourselves, then we'll be okay. Then we can buy all the things that we need. This is the worship of mammon. Sometimes we call this "rich Jesus."  In this worldview, Jesus is smiling on us if we have wealth, and therefore we accumulate wealth, and then we know that we're in God's favor.

The third demon we need to watch out for is dominance through tribe. How do we make sure that we're okay? We make sure that our people are victorious. This could look like a particularly perverse form of patriotism. This could look like white supremacism. This demon claims that Jesus is one of our tribe, and not one of those people out there. We paint pictures of "White Jesus" and think they're the real thing. We've got to make sure that that's not what our faith leads us.

The fourth demon is demon of meaning through pleasure. Hedonism. If it feels good, do it. That's also something that can lead us astray from following Jesus, and it's all about just consuming things that make us happy, and not about service. Unfortunately (or fortunately, because it's real), love often involves doing things that don't make us immediately satisfied. Getting up in the middle of the night with somebody who's sick is not the most immediately satisfying and joyful thing in the world. It might be fulfilling. It's definitely an act of love, but it's not what most people would put on their list of, "What am I going to do on my ideal day? I think I'm going to get up in the middle of the night and help somebody who's not feeling well." Sometimes, though, that's exactly where love leads us. 

The fifth demon is the demon of salvation through our own efforts. We might call that "DIY Jesus" – Do it yourself Jesus. This is when we worship self-reliance, and we don't realize that we have to put our trust fully in God's grace.

So these five demons can lead us astray. These five demons are very present in our popular culture and, the problem with each of these five demons is that they turn us away from what Saint Paul tells us in the letter to the Romans: "Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another, for the one who loves has fulfilled the law."

To love one another could look like lots of different things, but ultimately what it really means to love someone is to deeply desire that that person thrives, and lives, and lives abundantly. To really desire good for someone is to love them. If we really desire good for someone, then that's not just an opinion we have – "oh yeah, I hope good things happen to you." If we really desire it, if we really long for it, then it's going to shape our actions. So not only do we say, "oh yeah, we want that," but we act to make it happen. We act to try to promote the well-being of other people. When we act out of love then, as Saint Paul said to the Romans, "Love does no wrong to someone." Love means that we never desire ill for somebody. Jesus starts by telling us that we're supposed to love our friends our neighbors, but then it gets harder when he tells us that we're supposed to love our enemies too. We're supposed to desire good for everyone. We're supposed to work for the good for everyone. There's no one we can push aside and say, "Well, we don't care about that person. Well, they're not one of ours. Well, they're not the ones that we care about." We really need to desire. and work for the good of all humankind.

God didn't create us to be at each other's throats. God created us to live in love with one another, and when we do that – when we put on our Lord Jesus Christ instead of quarreling and jealousy – what we put on is the full armor of light. What that means is we are transformed into people of love. We are transformed into people whose instinctive action is to act in the interest of everyone. To act out of love for one another.

Now I don't know about you, but I'm not there yet. I'm working on it. There are some days I do a great job acting out of love for other people, and there are some days that I don't. But God has forgiven us for our sins, and God is actively working to transform us into people of the kingdom of heaven. Every time we do acts of service, we're practicing being a person of love. Every time we praise God, we're practicing being a person of love. Every time we practice singing, and sing our praise to God, we're practicing being a person of love. We're rehearsing for the kingdom of heaven, because we can't live in the new heaven and the new earth until we've been born anew in love. We can't live there as long as we are slave to sin. We can't live there as long as our actions and our desires aren't for the good of all others.

As long as we have a "them" in our mind that we don't want good for, there isn't room for us in the kingdom of heaven.

But the good news is, as Ezekiel, said the Lord God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked but wants the wicked to turn from their ways and live – and by live I don't just mean not physically die, because we're all going to physically die, but there's a resurrection coming. Death does not have the final word. When we're born anew in this resurrection, Jesus wants us to be resurrected so that we can live in the kingdom of heaven, and not resurrected but exiled from the kingdom of heaven: The resurrection of eternal death, where we're cast out. That's not what God wants for us. God wants us to be reconciled. To turn back from our evil ways, and embrace, as Saint Paul says to the Romans, love from one another. That is what we are called to be. That is what we are called to do.

God's grace gives us opportunity after opportunity to turn away from the demons that distract us from God and to embrace love. Tt takes practice, and then more practice, and then more practice, and maybe by the time we're done with this life we'll have it down. Maybe we'll still need even more practice in the afterlife. Our hope though is that God is far more patient than we are stubborn. Our hope is that God will not be done working on us until each of us is reconciled to God's love. Until each of us is made whole, so that we can live in the kingdom of heaven.

Our gospel today talks about conflict, and conflict is going to happen. It talks about all the different steps to resolve conflict, and then it says if after all that you still can't resolve conflict with someone, treat them as a tax collector and a Gentile. You might think that means write them off: have nothing to do with them anymore. But remember, this is Matthew's gospel. And what was Matthew's job before Jesus called him? He was a tax collector. So this is the gospel according to the former outcast. This is the gospel according to Saint Matthew. And so when Jesus says treat someone as a tax collector and a Gentile, he doesn't mean have nothing to do with them. He means maybe you need some temporary boundaries so that they don't bring you down, but this isn't writing them off. This is having some space. Ultimately, what does God want from tax collectors and Gentiles? God wants to redeem them! This may be someone that we're not currently reconciled to, but we still very much hope and long that God grant us reconciliation with.

The good news here is that even if we're not ready for the kingdom of heaven yet, God is still working on us. God is still transforming us, and helping us to put on the full armor of light, so that we, too, can be people who live so that our only rule is to love one another. Amen.