Jonah chapter 2 for a Church Anniversary

When life is uncertain you for a while stop and wonder what on earth is going to 
happen next. The world is in many places in a perilous situation, President Trump leaves the G7 summit early disagreeing about trade tariffs and is off to meet Kim Jong Un. We have a President of the United States who tweets madness and we wonder how on earth he was elected and more worrying he might get elected again.  Brexit is in the news every day, do you understand what’s going on? We are leaving the EU but we might be completely leaving and there might be a hard border with Ireland or there might not and we have some sort of backstop. Do you switch off every time it’s mentioned? We’ve arrived at the anniversary of the fire at Grenfell Tower, unavoidable loss of life and scars in that community still very very raw, we have anger over the boss of Network Rail getting a CBE when our transport infrastructure is all over the place.

I’ve been in Blackpool this week and travelled up there last Sunday by train and while I found being on a rail replacement bus from Preston to Blackpool invigorating sitting on the top deck while the driver hit every pot hole and drove so fast we got to the station five minutes earlier than the train would have, imagine doing that day after day after day, or worse, there is no bus, the train is just cancelled.

We have one in four parents in this country skipping a meal so their children can eat. Where universal credit is about to be rolled out Food Banks predict a 52% increase in their usage. That’s pretty scandalous isn’t it. We live in a society where less young people have applied this year to go to Oxbridge and more to go on Love Island. That’s our context. But it’s not all gloom, tonight, ladies, life will feel so so much better. The opening scene of the fourth series of Poldark apparently has him coming out of the sea with no shirt on!

This little chapel has ministered to a context since its opening, we think the world is mad today, but I guess people who sat here before us faced the same grappling with what was going on around her and how to offer an appropriate Gospel and good news as we grapple with, especially in times of uncertainty.

And maybe there’ve been times we’ve faced spiritual uncertainty. You’ve got to be honest to be able to admit to those times, but I suggest you’ve had moments when you have wondered where you go next as it has felt tough just being here and God feels absent or is asking things of you that you really could not cope with.

So how to get Jonah into a Church Anniversary. Well, let’s revisit his context briefly before I suggest three Church Anniversary attitudes we might need or have needed in our story to be an honest and relevant people who can respond to some of the big things in the world because we are seen to live real life like people outside of here do.

Remember Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh. 

And yet God instructs His prophet to go !

I feel desperately sorry for Jonah you know.

Called to be God’s prophet. Totally against God’s task for him. He just cannot do it. He runs away to get away from anything to do with God, on a ship going in the opposite direction, giving up everything, remember the Jews were scared witless of the sea but risking your life was better than going to Nineveh.

He causes trouble on the ship, he offers to be hurled overboard, he faces the storm and surely thinks his life is over, at least he won’t have to go to Nineveh and he’ll get peace.

Cast into the sea, Jonah is swallowed alive by a great fish, is whose belly he remains unharmed three days and three nights. This God, who has been utterly rejected hasn’t finished with his prophet yet. What was the great fish?  The white shark of the Mediterranean which sometimes measures twenty-five feet in length, has been known to swallow a man whole, and even a horse. This may have been the "great fish" in the text. Pretty frightening.

So that’s where we find him this morning, and amazingly, he starts to pray to the God he wants nothing to do with a few days before. Having thought his end was nigh and being swallowed up by a huge fish – you know I used to have nightmares after watching Jaws and I knew the shark was plastic – he finds himself alive and he just wants to thank God for that. Some people think this bit of the book is a prayer journal later, he looks back with thanksgiving that the gift of life his still is. Nineveh is not mentioned in the prayer – I think he thinks he’s got away with not going there – but that’s next week’s service! I think there are three sorts of spiritual direction in this prayer.

First, some deep honesty.  He calls out to the Lord.

"For You had cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the current engulfed me. All Your breakers and billows passed over me."

'I have been expelled from Your sight. Nevertheless, I will look again toward Your holy temple.'"

"Water encompassed me to the point of death. The great deep engulfed me, weeds were wrapped around my head." Notice that these verses are in the past tense.  Jonah was dying.  The "weeds" that were wrapped around his head were slimy sea-weeds and they must have added to his certainty, at the moment, that he was going to die.

He knew his context - within a great fish that had swallowed him whole and he was beneath the surface of the Mediterranean Sea.  No human effort could help him now.  If it was in today's world, some little submarine might be dispatched to locate Jonah, but there was no technology at the time to do the job.  Even today, helping this man would likely be a human impossibility.  Many must come to a place where human help, even self-help will not be enough. 

"I descended to the roots of the mountains. The earth with its bars was around me forever, but You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God." As far as Jonah knew, he was as deep as it was possible to be within the earth.  That's what he meant by the "roots of the mountains."  Emotionally and physically, he was at the bottom.  It was like being in prison, with "bars" that were far too strong for him to open.  But at this point, it was dawning on him that he was still just barely alive.  He was just as amazed as we are that he still had some life in him.

I love to think about people when I come into a church building who have sat here before us. I guess they sat on pews. I note new chairs are coming later in the year and you are selling these ones. Every act of worship should enable people to meet the living God, and sometimes the God they don’t believe in very much or the God who is driving them mad. Jonah’s spiritual life was in bits. I have a Geordie Bible on my shelves where God is the Superintendent Minister and Jonah is a local preacher and Jonah is planned at Nineveh Street, and doesn’t want to go because they are all horrible and he’s taught the discipline of the Circuit plan! Jonah knows God has been angry with him, he knew what being thrown into the sea meant, Lord only knows what he was thinking when this great fish opened its big mouth and swallowed him. But now, he reminds God of what God has done and retells his story and where God has met him. We have been here in this village, on this site, in this place, to enable God to be met, but also to enable people to voice life’s complexity with God or simply to be in his presence with little sorted inside them. You don’t know what difference you make through offering decent worship, through being kind, through pouring out that cup of tea, by being with those teenagers who drive you mad on a Wednesday night, by talking to parents at Messy Church, by going into the school, by living here faithfully as God’s people. And you do your best work when people encounter and they are having a rubbish day and you simply do what you are meant to do.

You may remember I was meant to take this service last year but I didn’t make it. Lis has just come out of hospital in Peterborough and we were recuperating in a flat in Peterborough, and my mother had died a few days before, and I’d been with her then had to sort stuff out following her death as you do. A year ago, on Sunday morning I staggered void of energy and unshaven into Peterborough Cathedral for Sunday Eucharist. I felt dreadful. I can’t remember a word of the sermon, but it was important for me to be there, to be in God’s presence, to be with others, perhaps some of them feeling equally as rubbish as I was. To have your wife and your deceased mother mentioned in the prayers was quite something! I went through the motions and was enabled to be. There are people who in the story of the Church need simply to call to the Lord in their distress. To name the problem and wait for God’s presence. So, keep the doors open and keep being in the village for the people who feel swallowed up, entangled by the weeds or like they’re behind prison bars. It is for them as well as you this little church and St Mary’s down the road exist. 

We remember the saints who have passed through this building today. You’ll all have different ones, but I want to remember Alison Spencer. Dear Alison, who wasn’t with us very long but Alison loved to get alongside people, a true friend of Jesus. She never thought about her own situation, towards the end of her life despite indescribable pain, she was more worried about other people and how they were coping with it. She immersed himself in prayer and in the Scripture verses she knew and would quote them at me! An honest, authentic credible Church full of people like Alison is a healthy one.

Then I think we need to remember the end of Jonah’s prayer here, he’s so grateful to God for coming to him, he makes some new promises, because he’s been delivered! He’s not been delivered from Nineveh but he doesn’t know that yet. Remember today this little church has had year after year of faithful response to the God of love who has called it into being and equips it and enables it to grow. A church only grows if her people are grateful and are sacrificial and know that God can do something with them. I’ve known you for 6 years now, I’ve been your minister for a year and a half of them in that crazy time before Tricia came and very bad news for you my friends, I am coming back to be your minister again at the end of February when Tricia begins a much-deserved three-month sabbatical. Sorry about that. But the Circuit is blessed by having you in it, hear that on your Anniversary, you are an inspiration to us and others can learn from you.

I know some of my folk at Pett want to come and learn about Messy Active Teens from you.

What is your voice of thanksgiving and sacrifice today? What do you vow to keep doing?

Well, had I told you six years ago you’d have the only active teenage youth group in the Circuit, had I told you you’d have a successful Messy Church, had I told you you’d move to morning worship rather than the afternoon, had I told you you’d be doing café worship and pop up cafes outside and going into the school regularly, had I told you relations between the two churches would be strengthening, had I told you you’d be a popular and well used venue for community groups to come, had I told you you’d be an example of good practice in Connexional rural material, I wonder what you’d have said? Take time this morning to thank God for your call and your part in this place. Then take time to thank God for being God. Someone wrote this: “Christianity isn’t meant to simply be believed, it’s meant to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken and enacted in the midst of other people.” That’s your call and it has been and it will always be as long as God has use for you.     

Finally, a wacky thought. How does Jonah chapter 2 end?

“Then the Lord spoke to the fish and it spewed Jonah out onto the dry land.”

The chapter ends with a decent bit of spewing out. Spew in the dictionary means to expel large quantities of (something) rapidly and forcibly. Or, to vomit. To get rid of something… A bit of divine vomming onto the beach.

It’s very easy to be Church in a building, to create space for prayer and honesty, to be refilled with the Spirit after a hard time, in the end God requires us to move on. Do we need God to spew us out today where God needs us to be? We cannot be Sunday Christians. We cannot avoid what God wants of us. Jonah is spewed back up on the beach where he started. And God will try again.  Great is his faithfulness!  Imagine us at a Church Council considering a bit of spewing! Where do we need God to forcibly move us out of and into? Don’t burn out, but I wonder what is wanted of this little place next.

Happy Anniversary Ninfield Methodist Church. Thank you for being a place where honest prayers can go up, a place of faithfulness, a place that is prepared to be on the beach again waiting for a new call. The most important thing is the faithfulness of God for you. The faithfulness of God is what has brought you to this point and what will move you forward. When our successors take a long gaze backward and wonder who we were and ponder our faithfulness, be it ever so fragile some days like Jonah, they will be sure of one thing, that we served, and that they serve a faithful God who shall never leave nor forsake.

Alleluia! Amen.