ACalled to Change@[i]

Polk City UMC

January 26, 2003

Mark Haverland

 

 

 

Jonah 3:1‑5,10 The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, "Get up, go to Ninevah, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you." So Jonah set out and went to Ninevah, according to the word of the Lord. Now Ninevah was an exceedingly large city a three days' walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, "Forty days more, and Ninevah shall be overthrown!" And the people of Ninevah believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.  (Jonah 3:10)  When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it. 

 

Mark 1:14‑20  Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news." As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea ‑‑ for they were fisherman. And Jesus said to them, "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." And immediately they left their nets and followed him. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

 

 

 

Have you been following the saga of Joy Lee Sadler, the Waterloo nurse just released from serving a four-month sentence in Banda, Indonesia?  She seems about as ordinary a person as Iowa produces.  But she went off to a far away land, as Jonah eventually did, to bring the love of God to people hardly any of us knows about and even fewer people in the world care about.  When she heard the call of God to journey to a far off land, she went.  I read that she has misgivings about going back.  She no doubt had doubts about going the first time.  But God called her and she went.  She left her ordinary, everyday life with its predictable normalcy to go off to a distant and dangerous jungle.  Jack London wrote a story once about a dog who responds to the “Call of the Wild.”  I’m afraid that Joy Sadler notwithstanding most of us prefer to stay home where it’s warm and dry.

 

We prefer life with it’s daily routine of eggs and bacon in the morning, or the obligatory cornflakes and skim milk. Then off to work - same desk, same tasks to be done, the same almost.  We were talking at my office the other day about public records.  Virtually nothing I do is private.  Anyone can read all the correspondence I write, including emails.  I got to wondering what people would think if they went through my emails and noticed the personal correspondence, say the exchange of email with Faith that occurs in the course of a week.  You know, the normal notes to each other about schedule, shopping social engagements.  My great fear is that they would read all of these notes and wonder, this guy needs to get a life.

 

There is something undeniably reassuring, if boring, about life as routine, ritual, habit, and continuity. Sometimes, the only thing that keeps you going is the routine, the sameness of it all.  Some people like this.  Many animals survive this way.  What we call intelligence in dogs is probably just an innate ability to pick up habits quickly.  My Lab seems to know after just a few repetitions what to do. If she comes into the house and finds her bed gone, she looks very bewildered indeed.  With no hesitation, she comes over to have the lead put on with barely a sound from me as we approach the road from the prairie on our daily walk.  She is a creature of habit and feels most comfortable when she is doing what she has always done before.  Change is hard on our pets.  It’s hard on us, too.

 

I attended a seminar this past week on change.  Mark Roberts was very good at illustrating how difficult it is to get people and institutions to change.  Corporations are forever falling behind because they don’t change with the times.  McDonalds may be the next illustration of a company which wouldn’t change.  They haven’t seemed to notice that we don’t want to eat with four year olds and that we now know the one Big Mac with super sized fries gives us our entire daily calories and a month’s worth of cholesterol.  I’ve pretty much decided that I just can’t eat at McDonald’s anymore and stay healthy.  Many others, it seems, are making the same decision.  McDonald’s needs to change with the times.

 

People are not much better than corporations sometimes.  My mother designed and arranged her house so that the furniture could ever be re-arranged.  Retirement meant moving from that house where she raised her children.  It was a source of grief few of her family appreciated.  Each day I see another illustration about how people don’t like to move to new surroundings when they get old.  They even want to die at home, surrounded by the familiar people and places of their lives.  Hardly anyone gets to do this anymore, of course, as modern medicine both prolongs our dying and forces it to take place in unfamiliar, cold and sterile environments.

 

But there is another life, life just beyond the horizon, life that we do not know rather than that which we know all too well. Don't you find yourself longing for that life, also? Life is also becoming, moving - moving out, moving up. We long for life as change.  I wonder sometimes when this desire will emerge in Kate.  She shows no signs of wanting her life to change.  But she as all kids will eventually long for a life of their own.  But it’s a big change to move on, to grow up and probably smart to delay until your really ready.

 

Yes, we are creatures of habit. The conventional is comforting. But sometimes, there comes a word, an invitation, a vocation. We hear our name called. We are addressed, and we come forward, and our world begins to change.

 

Being a preacher was the last thing on Jonah's mind. Above all, he did not want to go and preach at Nineveh, worst of the tyrannical regimes of the ancient Near East.  And yet to Jonah the voice of God came telling him, Go!

 

Jonah later explains that he refused to go to Nineveh because he was afraid that his sermons might actually have good effect. The Ninevites might actually change; that is, for all he knew, the Ninevites might listen and repent and God would forgive them. But if they should repent (the word means literally "to turn around"), then Jonah's world would be disrupted, radically changed because his enemies had changed. And of course, Jonah would have changed too.

 

After three days in the belly of a big fish, Jonah finally relents. God comes to Jonah again saying, "Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you" (3:1). Jonah begrudgingly does what God commands and goes to preach to his enemies, all the while probably hoping that they won't change.

 

He goes to Nineveh which we are told was "an exceedingly great city." Jonah goes to the edge of town, delivers his one sentence, five-word (in the Hebrew) sermon, packs his bags, and prepares to head home. No illustrations, no poems, no pithy slogans or alliteration, just "Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" (3:4).

 

The response to the world's shortest and worst sermon is the greatest in the entire Bible. The people of Nineveh all repent. They start fasting, they all put on sackcloth from the oldest to the youngest. The king, even the cattle, repent! Dogs, cats, kings -everybody repents.

 

"I knew this would happen!" pouts Jonah. "I knew you were a God who was merciful, forgiving, a God who loves to change the world, even our greatest enemies."

 

No wonder that early Christians in the catacombs, when they painted images and symbols of their faith, hardly ever directly depicted Jesus. They often depicted him as Jonah. Jesus, like Jonah, was the one who came preaching to God's enemies, and through his preaching, transformed them into God's best friends.

 

Have you been following the saga of Joy Lee Sadler, the Waterloo nurse just released from serving a four-month sentence in Banda, Indonesia?  She seems about as ordinary a person as Iowa produces.  But she went off to a far away land, as Jonah eventually did, to bring the love of God to people hardly any of us knows about and even fewer people in the world care about.  When she heard the call of God to journey to a far off land, she went.  I read that she has misgivings about going back.  She no doubt had doubts about going the first time.  But God called her and she went.

 

Christians differ from those who are not Christians, not that we are better people, and not that we are smarter. We are simply those who know something that the world does not. We know that this world, with all of its preoccupations and attachments, is passing away. More than that, our present selves, with all of our preoccupations and attachments, are passing way. Something, someone new is being born. We can change.

 

In today's gospel, Jesus says to various fishermen and other ordinary folk, "Follow me" (Mk 1:17). But just before he said that, just before his invitation, he makes a proclamation: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near" (Mk 1:15). In other words, the world has changed, the old time has ended, a new time has begun. He invites them to be disciples as a sign of a new beginning for all people.

 

They followed, and neither they, nor the world, has been the same since.

 

This is the great promise I want you to hear today. You don't have to live in the old ways. You can have a new world, new life.

 

I fear that sometimes we in the church obscure this great good news. We bolt down the pews. We go over the same thing, week after week, tell the same stories, begin at the same time and end at the same time. It's easy to get the impression that church is about sameness, routine, ritual, and permanence.

 

No, church is about gospel, about the good news that the world has changed, and we have a gracious invitation to be part of the action.

                                         

As you leave here today and go about your Monday, I want you to keep open and aware, watching for signs of new life and a new world. Sometimes, the only solid evidence the world has that Jesus Christ is Lord, that a new age has dawned, is you.