Sermon Tone Analysis

SERMON OUTLINE, SESSION 1 Chapter 1, “Strangers in a Strange Time”

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Scripture reading: ,

Guiding theme: God is up to something in exile.

Introduction:

We have

**The last few week’s we have discussed some heavy topics.

We looked at the persecuted church and in Sunday school that topic continues.

In worship I moved from that topic to Lent which is also a heavy topic.

At this time, I am moving into the topic of exile.

Exile sounds like a heavy topic, but it is my hope that you will find that exile is not such, but instead holds hope and the promise of exciting things coming.

Bow your heads with me as we open this topic with prayer.

Pray

Jonah is a popular story in the Bible.

Let’s take a moment and revisit that story:

**Jonah is a prophet from the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

God calls to him to go to the Ninevites who are apparently carrying on in such a wicked way that God has had enough.

So Jonah is to go and tell them that they need to straighten up or God will bring judgement upon them.

**Now the Ninevites were enemies of the Israelites.

Jonah has no interest in offering them an option to clean up their act.

He just wants God to wipe them out.

Talk about lack of compassion.

This is not an attitude we expect to see in one of God’s prophets, yet here it is.

Well Jonah jumps aboard a ship heading in a different direction.

But God is not to be swayed by Jonah’s disobedience.

A storm kicks up that is threatening the lives of all on board.

They are all praying to their various gods and throwing all the cargo they can overboard, but to no avail.

So they cast lots seeking why this disaster has come upon them and it falls on Jonah.

Well Jonah fesses up why God is angry with him.

The sailors ask what can be done to appease God and Jonah says to throw him overboard.

Well these gents are obviously more compassionate than Jonah as they are reluctant to do that.

They try other things, but when nothing works, they finally do as Jonah said.

Jonah is tossed into the deep blue sea.

However, God is not done with Jonah.

It is not God’s intent to kill Jonah, He just wants Jonah’s attention and obedience.

So after three days in the stinking belly of a large fish, most likely a whale of sorts, Jonah cries out to God.

Well, God answers Jonah’s prayer and Jonah is up chucked right onto dry land.

Well God then makes it clear that it is still His intent for Jonah to go to Ninevah.

So Jonah obeys this time.

Now Ninevah is a really large city.

It is a three days walk to cross it.

Jonah begins walking through town crying out that Ninevah has 40 days to repent before God destroys it.

Word gets to the king and he immediately responds.

Not only does he call for a fast of all the people, but of all the stock animals as well.

They are all to fast from food and where sackcloth and ashes.

God responds by relenting and not destroying them.

Jonah then goes into a pout.

He declares this was what he was afraid of and why he did not want to come.

God then uses a plant to show demonstrate to Jonah how he (Jonah) has more compassion for a plant which he did not even create or have any involvement with aside from the comfort it brought him and yet Jonah expected God to have no compassion for people he had created and interacted with.

And so ends the story of Jonah.

I share this story of Jonah as it is a good visual picture of the life of Judah.

Before we get to far into that, I want us to look first at a key point in this story for our topic today.

** Look with me at

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Jonah 2

The story if Israel moves in a linear fashion.

It has a beginning and an end.

However...

In 1972, Richard Adams finally found a publisher for his children’s story about a warren of rabbits, called Watership Down.

A dozen or so publishers had turned him down, declining the opportunity to publish what would become one of the most widely read children’s books of all time.

But, Watership Down isn’t just a children’s book.

It’s a story as timeless as those of Homer and Virgil.

It’s an epic involving rabbits and here’s how it begins.

Here's the way it went down.

The season before, Cumberland’s baseball team humiliated the Yellow Jackets, beating them 22-0.

So Tech coach John Heisman (yes, that Heisman), was looking for revenge.

So he was determined to run up the score as much as possible.

And he did.

32 touchdowns.

They scored a touchdown every one minute and forty three seconds.

471 yards of offense, which if that doesn’t sound like very much for 222 points, that’s because 73% of the game was played in Cumberland’s red zone.

Cumberland’s quarterback was carried off the field uncounscious THREE DIFFERENT TIMES.

At one point, Georgia Tech’s kicker kicked off, ran down the field, and caught his own kick for a touchdown.

At halftime, when the score was 126 to 0, Cumberland’s coach went to Coach Heisman and begged him to end the game.

Heisman agreed to shorten the game by five minutes.

Fiver, born fifth in the litter, has a premonition that something terrible is going to happen to their little rabbit warren, Sandleford.

So Fiver convinces his brother Hazel that all the rabbits must leave the warren to escape the coming danger.

Hazel takes Fiver to see the Chief Rabbit to tell his story, only to no avail.

Fiver and Hazel, and a ragtag band of rabbit brothers including Bigwig, Dandelion, Pipkin, Hawkbit, Blackberry, Buchkthorn, Speedwell, Acorn, and Silver finally head off, only to find out later that the entire warren has been destroyed by a housing developer’s bulldozer.

But there’s another part of the story that isn’t told as often.

In 1916 Cumberland College was experiencing such financial difficulties that their president cut funding for all sports, including football.

However, when Cumberland tried to back out, John Heisman demanded that they either play the game or pay a $3000 fine to forfeit.

In order to pay that money (about $70000 today), Cumberland would have to not pay their professors, and the school would have closed.

So Cumberland chose 13 members of the Kappa Sigma freaternity, some of whom didn’t know how to play football to go to Atlanta and sacrifice themselves in order to save the school.

In the Old Testament history of Israel we find it is not only linear but also circular.

In that linear fashion, we find that life often repeats itself.

It is what scholars call a hermeneutical circle.

(Consider the story in Exodus.

Walk through the history as you walk around the image displayed).

The people move from exile to land to kingship to division to exile again as demonstrated in the picture above.

In their search for a new home, which they ultimately find at Watership Down, the band of rabbits face repeated danger, and have to find the courage to keep going in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

They cross streams, a bean field and even an open road.

What keeps them going, keeps them looking forward, are stories.

They tell themselves the stories they were told as baby rabbits.

Stories of the great rabbit hero, El-ahrairah.

Now, I ask you, how would you feel to have been chosen for that kind of assignment?

Would you have looked at Tech’s record at the time (in the middle of a four year, 33 game winning streak) and opted out?

The story goes something like this — while Frith, the ancient god of the rabbits, was giving out gifts to each species — cunning to the fox, eyes that could see in the dark to the cat, and so on — El-ahrairah was eating, dancing, and generally having a great time.

When Frith realized that El-ahrairah has missed out, he gives him strong hind legs for escaping and declares that all the world will be the enemy of rabbits.

“But first they must catch you,” Frith tells El-ahrairah, “Be cunning and full of tricks and your people will never be destroyed.”

Let me put it this way: What if you knew that because of your actions, the school would be saved?

Not only that, but eventually Cumberland College would become Cumberland University, whose alumni include 14 governors, more than 80 members of the United States Congress, two Supreme Court justices, three United States ambassadors, and the longest serving secretary of state in US history?