Sermon title: God Have Mercy
Sermon text: Jonah 1:1-17; 2:1-2, 8-10
When the reviling and scapegoating of women, LGBTQ people, and immigrants becomes a path to victory, it is hard to deny we are living in dangerous times. Whether you are feeling discouraged, confused, angry, or all of the above, worship is a place for all of those emotions and more. This Sunday, however feeble our efforts may feel, we will take time to express our collective sadness, outrage, and longings. And we will listen – to one another, the Spirit, and God’s word.
For how can we carry on with hope after we have witnessed so much cruelty in our politics? It’s a question I have asked over and over again in the past few days. Mercifully, there is no singular, correct, prescriptive answer. But paying attention to an angry prophet with a keen sense of the world’s injustices might help us find our first steps.
Reading the story of Jonah against the backdrop of his struggle against an evil empire is changing everything about this ancient book for me this week. For one thing, I don’t, no, I can’t blame him for rejecting the assignment to Nineveh. His long lament from the belly of the fish becomes much more believable. His petulant sulking, no, his righteous anger – “I am angry enough to die!” he cried out to God – is understandable, even relatable.
Questions for Reflection
- If we are indeed more enmeshed in the ways of empire than we’d like to admit, how might awareness of our position (for example, within the US empire) change our reading of the Jonah story?
- How does reading Jonah with the empire in view change our understanding of God in this story?