Third Sunday after the Epiphany

Call to Worship

L: Wait for the Lord. Our souls wait in silent longing.

P: God alone is our rock and our salvation!

L: Wait for the Lord. God is our fortress against the storm.

P: God alone is our rock and our salvation!

L: Wait for the Lord. God is our refuge and our strength.

P: God alone is our rock and our salvation!

First Reading: Psalm 62:5-12

5 Yes, my soul, find rest in God;

my hope comes from him.

6 Truly he is my rock and my salvation;

he is my fortress, I will not be shaken.

7 My salvation and my honor depend on God;

he is my mighty rock, my refuge.

8 Trust in him at all times, you people;

pour out your hearts to him,

for God is our refuge.

9 Surely the lowborn are but a breath,

the highborn are but a lie.

If weighed on a balance, they are nothing;

together they are only a breath.

10 Do not trust in extortion

or put vain hope in stolen goods;

though your riches increase,

do not set your heart on them.

11 One thing God has spoken,

two things I have heard:

“Power belongs to you, God,

12 and with you, Lord, is unfailing love”;

and, “You reward everyone

according to what they have done.”

Second Reading: Jonah 3:1–5, 10

1 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.”

3 Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. 4 Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” 5 The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.

10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.

The New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Jon 3:1–5, 10.

Sermon

One of the most famous Biblical images from the Old Testament occurs in the book of Jonah. If you spent any time at all in Sunday school as a child, there is no doubt you heard the story of Jonah and the big fish, or as popular culture tells it, Jonah and the whale. The whole idea that a man in an attempt to run from God’s will for his life boards a ship headed in the opposite direction. The crew of the ship finding themselves in the middle of a storm cast lots and discover that Jonah is the problem. After much discussion, they throw him overboard where he is swallowed by a whale, stays for 3 days, and finally is spit out on dry ground right where God had told him to go from the very beginning. It’s a great story.

But it’s only a part of the story. And depending on your perspective, it’s not even the most important part of the story, or what we might call, the heart of the story. If you’ve ever been on I-70 heading toward St. Louis, you’ve no doubt passed a sign for the Blue Springs Cafe. And the sign on the side of the road boasts, Blue Springs Cafe, home of the foot high pie. But if you go in, you’ll discover that an inch or maybe two inches of the pie is filling and the other 10 inches is simply the meringue fluff. This morning we are going to bypass the fluff and get to the center. So, for the next few moments, I want us to put Jonah and the whale aside and focus instead on Nineveh and the heart of the message.

There are a few attributes we can glean from Nineveh based on the book of Jonah:

First, Nineveh is not Jewish. Even worse, Nineveh as the capital of the Assyrian empire was an enemy to the nation of Israel. Jonah’s unwillingness to go there to preach was in part because of this dynamic. Assyrians hated Israelites. Israelites hated Assyrians.

Second, Nineveh appears to be an incredibly evil and dangerous place. Now, we aren’t given a list of the sins of the people or what it was they were doing that offended God. But Jonah's message, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown” was a foretelling of the upcoming judgment and punishment from God. God was angry enough with what was happening there, He was prepared to destroy it. Now, I don’t think we can begin to appreciate how sinful Nineveh was for God to be this angry. Consider all the things that are happening today, and yet God hasn’t come down and made a completely destroyed any where. When I was a teenager living in Washington D.C., I got to tour the headquarters of the FBI and in one of their displays was a wall of clocks. And next to each clock was a crime, theft, rape, murder, and the sign included the average minutes per day each crime was committed. Literally every minute across this country, a crime is being committed and we deserve the anger and punishment of God. Jonah’s message to Nineveh, “Get ready. God is just in His anger and He will destroy you.” In other words, God will give you what you deserve.

And God was so serious about bringing His wrath against the Ninevites, he sent a Jewish prophet to tell them. It’s one thing for a person to be mad at you if you don’t know it. It’s a whole other thing to hear they are mad at you. And it’s a completely different thing when your enemy tells you to watch out because someone is mad at you. And that’s exactly what Jonah did.

Notice, how Nineveh reacts. When the people hear the message Jonah has to say, the Bible says, “The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.” In other words, they repented. They told God they were sorry for their sins. They publically displayed their attitude of regret and sorrow.

So we all know what God did. He said, sorry. Too little, too late. Right? He said, Jonah get out of there because Nineveh is going down. Watch out for lighting! No. Not at all. Jonah 3:10 says, “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.”

Even though God’s plan was to completely annihilate the people of Nineveh for their actions, for their sins, when they repented, God completely forgave them. He changed His mind. He relented and did not bring on them the destruction He had threatened.

Sometimes people think that God couldn’t possibly love them if He knew what they had done. Or that they have been so awful that God can’t forgive them. Yet, here we have an example of God choosing to punish people for their sin and then, upon their repentance, changing His mind. What happened? God was more interested in the hearts of the people changing than He was in their destruction. He was more willing to show them love than wrath.