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September 17, 2006
Perils of the Deep
Jonah 1: 1-6
John 6: 16-21
September 17th, 2006
There is a passage in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” where Brutus offers haunting wisdom to Cassius: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”
Does it not sometimes seem to you that your life is lived on the surface of a great deep? We are like little boats headed for some port that we think we know. There are depths to life that every now and then we realize are there; moments we are aware are full of significance.
There come those tides in our lives that carry us along, winds that catch our sails and push us at a pace and in a direction we could not have imagined when we were young. It is important that we set our sails at times when the winds are favorable and set our rudder with the good tide. And sometimes we must fight against the winds and set the tiller at an angle to the tide or life will go ill.
And sometimes there come frightening storms that threaten to drown us. The storms are sometimes due to our mistakes or sins. We made some very bad choices and the consequences blow hard. At other times the storms come completely without our deserving. These storms seem all the more ruthless.
When we face such storms what should we do? The two stories from Jonah and John’s Gospel that we read this morning have to do with these two kinds of storms that come to us. If we will notice there is wisdom for us in both stories.
The two points I would make this morning are these:
First, when our storms are due to our offences or sins in word or deed, we must acknowledge them rather than ignore them, and repent of them before God and before the ones we offended. To repent is to turn away from the wrong that we have done. We must not try to ignore our offenses or blame them on others when they turn out badly. Unrepented of, our sins will certainly become storms or even like hurricanes.
Second, when we have suffered sorrow we are not responsible for, we should take to heart the promise we quote some times on the Lord’s Day from the Heidelberg Catechism. “Whatever evil God sends my way in this troubled life He will turn to my good, for He is able to do it, being Almighty God, and determined to do it, being a faithful Father.” The great promise of this Almighty God-Father is that he will be with us, and that is all we need.
Maybe you wonder why is it that one offense or an accident may cause a tsunami while we have to keep on making good decisions for them to have good effects; and we must have continuous good fortune for good effects to continue? I ponder this too.
Let me begin first with the event described in John’s Gospel. The disciples were crossing the Sea of Galilee at night. Jesus left them alone after the previous day’s feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fish. That gracious deed drained Him. He needed to be refreshed. He withdrew to a mountain by Himself. We can imagine that Jesus needed to be alone to pray, to speak with His heavenly Father, to gather strength for the tests to come.
Perhaps He had told the disciples to meet Him on the other side. So they set the sail of their little craft toward Capernaum. But as often happens when the winds blow across the Sea of Galilee from the surrounding hills, a storm of frightening proportions threatened to capsize them. Then, to make matters scarier still they saw this apparition walking on the water. Was it a ghost? If the water didn’t drown them they’d die of fright. But Jesus spoke, “It is I, don’t be afraid.” And they were glad to take Jesus into the boat with them and thus they reached the shore safely. We’re not told that the storm subsided, but that Jesus got into the boat with them. They were glad to have Jesus with them.
I began this morning’s worship by reminding us all of the promise in the Prophet Isaiah: “Fear not for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine. When you walk through the water I will be with you, and the rivers shall not overwhelm you.” “I will be with you,” the Lord promises us. How often in distress have the word of Psalm 23 surged to mind, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for Thou art with me.” That is enough. I am not alone in this. You are not alone. Claim this promise.
The disciples were not responsible for the storm at sea. They did not do wrong to set out when there might be a storm. Presumably Jesus had agreed to meet them on the other side. Yet the storm came and they were at risk.
Perhaps terrible accidents or illnesses have come to you or to loved ones. No one was responsible for the dreadful brain cancer that recently took a young mother in our community of whom I was told this week. The tragic death of three children in the Hockerman family as they returned from holidays last year, hit by a drunk driver comes to mind. They were not responsible for this.
Then I think of the distress that comes with being misunderstood. For example, the speech Pope Benedict gave at the University of Regensburg this past Tuesday, taken so wrong. He spoke to colleagues in a place where he once taught of the importance of the use of reason that we learned from the Greeks. But the illustration he used toward the beginning cited a conversation between a Byzantine emperor and a Muslim academic that focused on the idea of jihad and the will of God. The pope was not impugning Islam. This was not his intent. It is inconceivable that in this highly charged environment he would choose to incite Muslims! He surely had no idea the consequences that would follow his illustration. A frightful flame has been fanned in the Muslim world that results in this peaceful, loving pope being compared to Hitler.
You can think of moments in your life in which you were taken wrong, perhaps falsely accused. A friendship broke over your friend’s taking you entirely differently than you meant. Maybe your reputation took an unearned flogging. It cast a long shadow over your life. Such are the causes of life’s sorrows that make us want to say, “In times like these we need a Savior!”
When events like this happen we look to God. We pray as Jesus prayed, “If it be possible remove this cup from me.” But the answer that comes most often is, “Fear not for I will be with you.” The disciples were glad when Jesus got into the boat with them. Great peace uncannily comes to us when we have cried out to God and recognize that though we’re still in the storm Jesus is there with us in the boat.
But sometimes we earn the storms that come.
Jonah was disobedient to God who told him to go East to Nineveh, but he went west toward Spain. He was told to go tell Nineveh to repent of its sin or suffer dire consequences. He wanted Nineveh to suffer for its cruelty. Assyria was notorious for barbarity towards its enemies. He wanted Nineveh’s doom more than he wanted to obey God, even though his calling was to tell what God told him to say.
We don’t know all that contributed to Jonah’s thinking. Maybe when he mentioned to friends what God told him to do they said, “That’s ridiculous!” Maybe there was a protest from devout Israelites in his village. They thought the way the prophet Habakkuk thought. Why should God favor wicked nations over good nations—that is Assyria over Israel. Only bad should come to Israel’s wicked enemies. It was only reasonable. So Jonah faced peer pressure as well as his own native bias against Nineveh.
But God told Jonah, “Go to Nineveh and tell that wicked city to repent.” But he flat refused. Not only that. He did not stay at home in his refusal; he went the other way. He disobeyed as deliberately as possible. He went down to Joppa and bought a ticket in a boat going the opposite direction, to Tarshish in Spain.
There was an idea the Israelites picked up from peoples who lived around them that the gods were all local deities. Every Baal had its territory. So the Israelites sometimes thought that “the God of Israel” was just the local deity, rather than the Creator of heaven and earth. So Jonah could escape the annoying deity who told him to go to Nineveh by getting out of his territory. It didn’t quite work.
But we know how it came out. The God who spoke to him, the Creator of heaven and earth was every bit as much with him in that boat going to Tarshish as He had been with him in Israel. God goaded him to repent in the most forceful way. A great storm at sea threatened to wreck the ship that took him east. The pagan sailors prayed to their gods as Jonah slept in the hold of the ship. He was momentarily at peace; he had escaped his god’s influence; he was getting away with flaunting God’s will. Just go east, young man, and you can avoid God’s command.
But his peace didn’t last. God taught him a very forceful lesson about repenting of his omnipresence and of his sin of disobedience. The only reasonable thing for the sailors to do with Jonah—he told them—was to toss him overboard because he was the cause of the storm. And so they did.
Jonah found himself in the reeking stomach of a large fish. It stank like crazy. Imagine the company he had in the belly of that leviathan! Everything it had had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner that day was being digested around him! Somehow, like Pinocchio in the whale, he was able to breathe still for three days and three nights before the fish couldn’t stand his company any more. Do you see humor in the story? Not only the sailors but also that great fish could not stand his company! “You make me sick,” it thought. It vomited him up. He found himself on dry land.
Jonah got the point. He reluctantly turned back and went to Nineveh. To his chagrin Nineveh responded to his call for repentance—that came from a prophet who in coming to them was repenting of his own disobedience. The rest of the story you probably know well.
There is a great lesson here. The way back from ours sins against God and against one another is to repent. That is, to admit the wrong we have done and turn from it. We are a proud people, much more apt to stonewall after we know we have offended than to confess our sin and turn from it. We plow on straight ahead. Acknowledging we have done wrong is a sign of weakness—we show that we believe this. Thus we reject the peace of God for ourselves and bring grief to others. Jonah needed to be tossed into the sea and get swallowed by a great fish to get the point. Maybe we need this kind of reminder too.
The truth has surged in my heart in recent years that Christianity seems so much more a matter of believing right than of doing right. It really didn’t matter what Jonah’s theology was if he was disobeying God. It doesn’t matter very much if we have good ideas about the Holy Trinity, about Jesus the Son of God, about the Holy Spirit, about sexual ethics, etc., if we are living in disobedience to God. Bonhoeffer reminded us recently, “To believe is to obey; to obey is to believe.” But we separate obedience from faith because we are getting away with it in our prosperous times.
I think of the line we sing vigorously in Fosdick’s great hymn, “God of grace and God of glory.” “Rich in things and poor in soul.” Thus we may sing cheerfully of ourselves little realizing that the hymn is an appeal to our consciences from God.
When you come down to the bottom line the voyage of life for us all will come to an end. And in the end we look back and see that our storms have a beginning and an ending. It is how we respond to them that matters. Perhaps your storm will end if you confess the wrong, the sin you have done, and turn from it. If you sincerely repent your storm will taper down to a breath of wind. Afterward you will realize that it was a kindness of God that you suffered this consequence of your sin. Your suffering turned you around. Or perhaps you are living in on-going tension inside, in hostility against those who were once your friends because you have not repented of your sin against them. You have not turned around, and you realize you must. Don’t ignore such tuggings of conscience.
Perhaps your storm has come to you unearned. Take comfort in God’s promise that He is with you when you go through the deep water. You are not alone.
God is with us in life’s storms. His kindness is exposed in the storms we have caused, urging us to turn around, to repent and be reconciled. His kindness is exposed in the peace He gives us in the storms that have come “undeserved.” Of course, most of the tragic things that happen cannot be thought of in terms of deserving or not deserving. It is a troubled world we live in. But God presides over this world for good. It belongs to Him.
O Lord God, grant us in the storms of life to see more clearly that You are always near us, and then so to live, responding to your voice, taking comfort in your presence. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at September 17, 2006 09:30 AM