Jonah 2:1 From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the LORD his God. 2 He said: "In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me. From the depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened to my cry. 3 You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me. 4 I said, 'I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple.' 5 The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head. 6 To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever. But you brought my life up from the pit, O LORD my God. 7 "When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, LORD, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple. 8 "Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. 9 But I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. Salvation comes from the LORD." 10 And the LORD commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land. (NIV)
Alice’s aunt invited us to use her cabin near Estes Park Colorado when the kids were small…something we were only too happy to do. It was a wonderful vacation spot. And as you often do when kids are young, you stop by one of those innocent looking fishing ponds where the kids are invited to catch trout. They must starve the poor fish, because they jump at the hooks before they even hit the water, and then the fish are cleaned for you, wrapped in paper, and you pay so much an inch for fish. I think our fish bill for three trout was close to 30 dollars. Anyway, we put the fish in the freezer over the frig and enjoyed the rest of our vacation, packed up for home, and forgot and left the fish in the freezer. That would have been fine except an electrical storm tripped the main and the fish not only thawed, they spent a couple weeks getting really nasty. When Alice’s Aunt opened the cabin door, she knew something was terribly wrong…and they seriously considered throwing the whole refrigerator away, but after some ugly work they were able to dispense with the smell.
I haven’t always had good luck with fish, even the dead ones. And my suspicion is that Jonah probably didn’t have much of an appetite for sea food after his experience either.
We’re looking at the Old Testament book of Jonah. And one of the problems with visiting a story like Jonah is we tend to think we already know the story… but I wonder if we really do. The average person usually associates the story of Jonah with one other character. If you ask someone, they will think of it as (what?) its’ the story of Jonah and the ________. (Whale) Right. …the whale’s name is Monstro, and Jonah is running away from his father, Geppetto and he wants to be a real boy, and …beyond that point people get a little fuzzy as to the details of the Jonah story. J I’d like to ask you to pretend you’ve never heard the story before, so imagine what it would be like to hear it for the first time. (got this joke from J. Ortberg)
Last week we looked at the first chapter of Jonah. And if there is one word that describes what God is doing in the first chapter the word would have to be great. God is up to something great. God says to Jonah, I want you to go to Nineveh that great city. Because it turns out God has a great heart…because it seems God has a great heart for that great city. Then Jonah runs the other way, so God sends a great wind, and it produces a great storm. Then the pagan sailors are converted through a great fear. Then God appoints a fish for Jonah, …anybody want to guess what kind of fish it is? It’s a great fish. God is doing something great in this story.
Jonah on the other hand, is a total mess up. If there was one word that described Jonah in chapter one it was the word down. Jonah is going down. God called Jonah to go to Nineveh, and instead it says he went down to Joppa to catch a boat. Then he gets in a ship going down to Tarshish. Then in the ship, Jonah goes down into the hold …the bottom of the boat and there he falls into a deep sleep. Then he gets thrown down into the water in the storm…then down into the fish…and then the fish takes him down even further. Jonah has hit bottom figuratively and literally.
An Israelite at the bottom of the sea… you could not possibly get any lower. The sea was a frightening place, a place of death…Israelites were not typically sea-going people. If you remember their history, they handled seas by walking across on dry land…not boats. Jonah had been the only Hebrew on the ship. And now he finds himself inside God’s appointed fish.
Guess what Jonah does from inside the fish? He prays. He was told to go to Nineveh, he didn’t pray about that. No, he ran the opposite direction. He picks a ship in Joppa…no record that he prayed about that choice. During the storm everyone was spontaneously praying to their various gods, not Jonah. The ship’s captain wakes him and tells him to pray…as far as we can tell he doesn’t pray, he just tells them to throw him overboard. This ‘man of God’ hasn’t talked to God at all so far in this story. Even though pagan sailors have been converted and they’re having a worship service offering sacrifices to the LORD God and making vows. What kind of vows? We don’t know. Maybe they’re promising to lay off the grog, stop cussing, lose weight, and leave the strange women alone in the ports …all kinds of promises they’re making to God. You know…promises like you’ve made when your life has been spared. The sailors are making vows, that’s what it says.
But Jonah doesn’t pray through all of that…he’s not making vows…nothing spiritual is going on in his life ….until he ends up in the sea in a fish. Why do you think Jonah prayed in the fish? …He had nothing better to do. Think about it! What else are you going to do in a fish? Jonah had nowhere else to turn, nothing else to do so (we might say “finally”) he prays.
And let me offer sort of a humbling question, do you know why in our world we often have a hard time praying? Could it be because we have so many other things to do. We have so many things competing for our attention. We have so much noise, so many screens that we can turn on. Cell phones have text, and internet, and some even receive phone. People carry laptops, and have desktops, and big screen TVs…and there’s movies to watch on DVD, even in the car, and the CD players, mp3 players, and the radio. We seldom find ourselves cut off…except a few of us did on Friday….some of you may be still cut off…from electricity …we are.
Just like the sailors, we had a great storm, with a great wind, (did any of you pray while the wind was howling?) and after a few hundred trees fell down, suddenly there was no electricity, no screens, no computer, no TV, no radio except in the car and when it got dark outside, it got dark inside too.
Jonah is brought down, down, down to the bottom of the sea. The whole first chapter has been filled with exciting stuff, but it’s been a disaster because every decision was Jonah’s alone. He’s been the captain of his life, not God, and it didn’t work at all.
In the second chapter we just read, there is no action at all…just prayer.
Just prayer…Maybe because Jonah had nothing better to do. Maybe because Jonah’d finally hit bottom. Maybe because the fact that he was still alive sparked some hope in him.
And so he prayed, “In my distress I called and the Lord answered. From the depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened. You hurled me into the deep…all your waves and breakers swept over me. I said, “I’ve been banished…and yet…I will look again toward your holy temple. But you brought my life up from the pit.” He prays, “I with a song of thanks will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed, I will make good.”
If we could take just a little time out here for a second, has anyone here ever been in over your head in life? Jonah would say, “pray.” Is it your own fault that you’re in that situation? “Pray anyway.” Have you been living a life that is contrary to what you believe God wants for you? Pray then too. Are you concerned that your motives are not pure, maybe you’re just looking out for your own best interests? I think Jonah would say, “pray anyway.”
God is never more than a prayer away. And God is so willing to hear. God is so tender hearted toward us that even when Jonah, or you, or I have hit bottom and we’ve nowhere else to go, God still says, “Come to me.”
Jonah prays, and God hears, and Jonah gets delivered on the third day. But again this is an odd book, and so his deliverance is not on the wings of angels, not with a chariot of fire, not with a parting of the sea. In this odd book, good things happen in funny ways here. So after three days in the fish, there’s (let’s say) an unsettling of great fish’s digestive system. You Moms out there, you know that look? …when your child has the flu…and is about to prove their illness once again…they get that look? At God’s command, the fish had the look. And the gurglings all around Jonah became profound. That had to be a gut-wrenching sound from inside, huh?
Verse 10 says, “The Lord commanded and the fish vomited Jonah onto dry land.” Now folks, is that a little more detail than we really wanted from the Bible just a few minutes before we go to lunch? Couldn’t the translators of the Holy writ have chosen a more dignified, churchier, more Methodist term than ‘vomit’ for what happened here? It’s as if this book was written for Jr. High boys. “Vomit” is a great word for them. Just the mention of the word brings back fond memories.
Preacher John Ortberg said, the scripture “is hitting us over the head with it. The writer wants to make sure the reader gets this. Jonah did not get dropped off by an angel. The Fish had a protein spill, tossed his cookies, lost his lunch, launched the food shuttle, took a ride on the regurgitron…ok?” (The only way this story could possibly have been better for 8th graders is if Jonah had finished the whole trip through the fish’s digestion system.
Jonah ends up on shore, not a tragic figure, covered with suffering. Not a heroic figure, covered with glory. But a ridiculous figure, covered with shrimp cocktail and tuna tartar…or whatever else the great fish had eaten.” My best guess is…it was extremely nasty…something like that refrigerator in Estes Park. My two boys like to watch that show “dirty jobs” and one of the only time’s I’ve seen the show’s strong stomached host lose his lunch was when he was grinding bait on a fishing scow. We’re talking something right guard just won’t take care of.
I wonder how long do you think it was before Jonah could laugh about how he looked there on the beach? I’m thinking it was a while…I’m sure his buddies would loved to have seen him come ashore…but no-one would have wanted to take him home in their pickup. Did that odor still lingered on Jonah when he arrived at Nineveh. I’m thinking it might have. “Great message pastor, but what’s that funky smell?”
Most stories are either comedies or tragedies. In tragedy: joy loses, life loses, hope loses. In a comedy: joy wins, life wins, hope wins. What is Jonah? What would you say? Is Jonah a tragedy or comedy? It’s a comedy. Jonah keeps going down, but great things keep happening. Jonah the prophet, who as the “man of God” ought to be the hero of the story runs from God and has to hit bottom before he even prays. It turns out that when people are going down, down, down, God is up to something great. Great things are about to happen for Jonah.
I’m sure the fish would tell us (with a wink) that you just can’t keep a good man down.
What can we take from this? Jonah chapter 2 tells us that people in the worst possible situations can pray, for God hears. People in the deepest holes imaginable can pray, and God is there. And as modern day Jonah’s, mess-ups like you and me, are willing to bring themselves, their situations, their lives to God…God can do great things with them.
The New Testament says, God can do “far more abundantly than we could ask or think.” And as we said last week, anyplace with God is better than any place we might choose without his blessing. Prayer is the language of positive change…no matter what language you pray in, prayer is the language of great possibilities. And deliverance is near when God is hearing the prayers of his people.
You may think God won’t listen, he will. You may know you caused the problem yourself…you may have…that fact changes nothing about God’s willingness to hear your prayer or work with you. In all honesty I think Jonah would tell us it might not be pretty…your deliverance might be an ugly smelly thing (as it was for him.) Jonah would remind us we might not get to keep our dignity…he didn’t keep his…but God will save. You may think it’s too late, it’s not. The situations you’re thinking of …its resolution may depend one someone you don’t think will change…let God deal with that. You can let life (every situation, every problem) let it all call you to pray.
My challenge to you this week is to see every situation as an invitation to pray. The worse it is, the more it needs prayer. The more it’s your own fault, the more it needs your prayers. The more you don’t want to pray, the more you must need to pray about it. From the belly of the beast that has swallowed you whole, pray! God can still do great things with your life. Pray, pray, pray. Do you understand the challenge? Do I need to say it again?
Then let’s pray right now.
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