Jonah 3:1-10; Mark 1:14-20 Fish Stories: Rethinking Everything A sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt At Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA On January 25 th, 2015 Our first passage for today is from the book of Jonah. According to the outlandish story, Jonah, who had been called by God to go to Nineveh, the capital of hated Assyria fled by ship in the opposite direction. When he was thrown overboard by the ship s sailors in an effort to calm a storm, he was swallowed by a great big fish. He spent three days in the belly of that fish praying. When the fish regurgitated him, Jonah a second time heard the call of God to go to Nineveh. Listen now for what God might be saying to you and me through this portion of the tale of Jonah. The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you. So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh 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 Nineveh shall be overthrown! And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish. 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. Jonah is a story about Israel s most hated enemies changing their ways, and God changing his mind about them, and when you get to the end of the book, the question is whether Jonah will change his mind or not whether he will be able to embrace the idea that God s mercy is bigger than he wants it to be, or whether he will resist and pout about it. (Like the elder brother in the story of the Prodigal Son). Our second passage begins with the start of Jesus public ministry in Mark he invites people to repent (to metanoia which means to think, and therefore act, differently and to believe the good news). It proceeds to showing the disciples responding to Jesus. 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 lake for they were fishermen. 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. A fish story.
That s what we call a tale that seems exaggerated, too good to be true. Like the angler who talks about the one that got away, breaking the line at the last minute, right before he could get that whopper in the net or how somehow, once landed, the big one flopped out of the boat before a picture could be taken to document it. You know the classic fish story: the size of the fish gets bigger and bigger with each successive retelling, until the story strains credulity. The term fish story has become an idiom for a greatly exaggerated tale. The whole book of Jonah has a bit of that character to it. It s so hard to believe. The prophet being swallowed by a great fish then spit out on land 3 days later. The prophet going to the capital of enemy territory to Nineveh in Assyria, for heaven s sake (that d be like going to Pyongyang in North Korea, or Baghdad in Saddam s Iraq), and not only receiving a hearing, but actually getting people to change their ways. Then the leader of that country, Kim Jong Un, calling for everyone, even the animals, to fast and put on sackcloth and turn away from violence. And then all of them doing so. Can you imagine that? It s a fabulous story. Like a fable. It s so hard to believe. Now what s easy to believe is how angry Jonah would be about God showing mercy on his nation s enemies, his own foes. That I can wrap my mind around. I can see Jonah, arms crossed, bottom lip out, begrudging God s generosity. The book of Jonah makes me think of what Brian McLaren says about miracles: There is a time and place for arguments about whether this or that miracle actually happened. But in this literary approach we turn from arguments about history to conversations about meaning. We accept that miracle stories intentionally stand on the line between believable and dismissible. In so doing, they throw us off balance so that we see, think, imagine, and feel in a new way. 1 So what is the book of Jonah trying to do? Why would Jonah be dropped into Hebrew scripture like a literary sleeper cell at a time when people were fearfully busy trying to build walls around themselves, declaring that there would be no intermarriage with foreigners, reinforcing careful rules about who was in and out, and carefully protecting their identity in the wake of just returning from exile? How might Jonah have invited the people to see, think, imagine, and feel in a new way? Why is Jonah in the Bible after all? Think about it. Then there s our story from Mark s Gospel. The call of the four fisherman, who leave their nets behind and follow Jesus. Oh, it s not as outlandish as Jonah. It s not so hard to believe that the four fishermen might have had their socks knocked off by a preacher and teacher with the charisma and authority of Jesus. Especially if they d heard him speak before that day, as a number of commentators on this passage suspect. 1 McLaren, Brian. We Make The Road By Walking. Jericho Books (June 10, 2014), ISBN 1455514004
It s not so hard to believe that they, as young men, might have been able to leave their old lives behind even their families like Zebedee, for instance and start something new. Fishing was hard work and Jesus saw something in them. And young people make bold decisions like that. What s harder to believe, almost fabulous, is that any one of us who have settled into certain patterns in the way we think and live in what we ve become accustomed to could embrace change as quickly as those four fishermen did. That d be like getting a new hymnal and embracing it from day one without batting an eye, with nary a single complaint. Mark says the disciples followed Jesus immediately. Immediately? Really? They didn t form a committee to study his invitation? Carefully weigh the pros and cons? Anytime I ve ever dealt with this text in Bible study, someone will hasten to make the point that surely Jesus is not calling us to leave our families and livelihoods behind. If that is what is expected of me, then I can t do it, someone will say. And sometimes that someone is me. If being a disciple of Jesus means that we leave everything behind, to follow in his Way, and do it immediately, then I suppose it s true that not many of us would sign up for that. Judith and I had friends in seminary who left behind careers in other fields who did that. Who uprooted their spouses and kids and moved into student housing. They left behind a lot. Not Judith and I. I came straight out of college, she out of a job as a director of youth, education, and music in a church where the pastor had encouraged her to think about seminary from the moment she arrived there. Of course, following Jesus doesn t mean you have to go to seminary. It doesn t mean you have to leave your family and livelihood behind to trail behind an itinerant preacher. But then what does it mean? Does it mean we have to leave anything behind? Does it mean we have to take anything on? Yesterday a number of us went down to National Presbyterian Church in the morning for the Reformed Institute s Annual Convocation. Bradley Longfield, a church history professor at Dubuque Seminary spoke on the topic of how Presbyterians dealt with the influence of the broader culture in the twentieth century. It was a really good lecture. But as a colleague of mine said, it was during the question and answer session that Dr. Longfield took us to church. He was answering questions about how we have become so accommodated to the culture around us and he said that one of the reasons is that we have abandoned discipline after discipline, practice after practice, intended to form us into disciples. If you are going to learn to play the piano, he said, you have to practice it. If you are going to learn to play tennis, you have to play. And if you are going to be a disciple of Jesus, you have to be engaged in practices that deepen and nurture your soul, that teach you his priorities.
Like regular corporate worship, to start with. Like observing Sabbath. Like daily devotional reading. Like prayer. Like regular service to those less fortunate than ourselves and we ll be talking about that in the Next Big Thing presentation. These are things that form us. And that doesn t mean you have to leave your family and livelihood behind like the four fishermen. But it does mean that you say no to some things in order to say yes to others. It means you make being formed as a disciple a priority, rather than something you get around to if there s nothing else better to do. What happens when you are formed as a disciple is that you begin to think differently, and act differently, and live differently. We wrestle with stories that show us God s love and concern for those we would consider enemies. With the disciples, we learn from Jesus what is important and that happens over the course of a lifetime. When Jesus started his ministry by saying, The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe in the good news. I think he was asking people to rethink everything, to question long-held assumptions about what was important in life to take on a higher knowing. If you look at those four fishermen, the first people he called, they responded immediately, but they didn t get it right off the bat. It wasn t one and done, wham bam thank you Ma am. The process of them rethinking everything took time which you can see if you look at how clueless they seem throughout the rest of Mark s gospel. Two people I greatly admire died this week. Marcus Borg and Ernie Banks. Borg helped people who thought they were done with Christian faith including a number of people in this church to meet Jesus again as if for the first time. And Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs hall of fame shortstop and first baseman and ambassador of goodwill, well, he showed a lot of people including a young African-American outfielder named Doug Glanville how to live, too. Glanville, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who came up to the big leagues with a chip on his shoulder, said of Banks: I am not even sure when I first met him, but that is irrelevant to the experience of knowing Ernie Banks. All I can think about was how he always pointed you toward the good in people. He didn't even have to be specific in his advice to you. This man had an aura that you understood was your call to be better, to get perspective that you are probably worrying about something small in the grand scheme of things. And so this brings me back to race. I looked at Ernie Banks and immediately accepted that my walk was not hard. No matter what experiences I had that frustrated me, that made me question if our country was living up to its tenets. I understood that he was a symbol of hope and that there was a lot to be thankful for.
I began to ask myself, "How upset can I be?" There was Ernie Banks who had played in the Negro Leagues, served our country, endured segregation, lived when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and saw some of the darkest days in civil rights our nation has ever known -- and he was still smiling. Then I began to wonder if I was the one who needed a new perspective. 2 A new perspective. Rethinking everything. It takes time. It takes being around the right people. To believe that it can happen may seem like a great outlandish fish story, but let me tell you something. It can happen. It happens here. It s happened to me. In Jesus name. Amen. 2 Glanville, Doug. ESPN.com. Commentary: What I learned from Ernie Banks. January 24, 2015. http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/12221497/what-learned-chicago-cubs-legend-hall-famerernie-banks