Transcript

Well, Paul, have you noticed that Steve's arrangement of that, marvellous, and choraliers, A plus, I'll remember you when I come to my grade book, that song sings of Revelation 22, the new creation, the new heaven and the new earth, and the river of the water of life that flows from the throne and down the middle of the street of the city. And on either side of the river is the tree of life, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. But Revelation 22 echoes Genesis 2, and there was a river that flowed through Eden to water the garden, and it divided into four rivers, the Peshon, the Gihon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. But between Genesis 2 and Revelation 22, between morning has broken, and shall we gather at the river, is a long, painful story, and there are rivers, and there are rivers. For instance, if you go to Baghdad, which is on either side of the Tigris River, and go up the river for about 200 miles, on the eastern bank of the river you will find the excavated site of the ancient city of Nineveh, the grand and glorious and idolatrous and violent capital of Assyria, the apple of the eye of Sennacherib. And God cared for Nineveh, God was concerned about Nineveh, and so God looked around for a prophet to go and speak to Nineveh, and found the son of Amitai, Jonah, an Israelite. And God said to Jonah, shall we gather at the river? And Jonah said, no way. And so opposite from the Tigris, he went down to the great sea, and he went just north of Tel Aviv, to the port of Joppa, paid his fare, and as Herman Melville says, with slouched hat in guilty eye, he skulked on board. He went to the hole of the ship in the bottom of the ship and went to sleep. God wasn't through, God hurled a tempest, a strong wind against the ship, and they were afraid these sailors, and they threw things overboard, and finally in their own scattered and nervous ways said, there must be someone on board guilty for all this to happen. The gods are angry, they cast lots, the lot fell upon Jonah. Who are you? Where are you from? What are you doing? What's your country? He said, I'm a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord God of heaven, the creator of the sea and of the land. They threw him overboard, and God appointed a great fish to swallow him. And after three days and three nights, God said, shall we gather at the river? Jonah said, as you wish, and went, and he preached there on the bank of the Tigris, 200 miles north of Baghdad. He preached, not expecting anybody to listen, but they did, and there was a national repenting. The city was in sackcloth and ashes and praying to God, and even the beasts of the field and the cattle, the cattle repent. And there was a great reformation, and God repented and said, I will not destroy the city. Jonah was mad as a bald owl. He did not plan it that way, and he said to God, now do you see why I didn't want to come here in the first place? I knew you were a God of tremendous mercy, abounding love, steadfast grace, and repent of evil. I knew you would do this. What's the matter with Jonah? Jonah has whistling through his soul now, two theologies. Some of us don't have one, he had two. Most of us have more than one, that's our problem. He had two. He had the theology that we can surmise from the story, and that was he was a Hebrew. And he had the theology that said of all the nations of the world, Israel alone have I chosen, we are Abraham's children. Here was a prophet who knew who was in and who was out, who was for God and against God, who was under grace and who was under judgment, there was a God of we, God, they, and we know the difference. And he could preach those sermons. Sometimes I'm sure to standing ovations, preach a sermon in favor of Israel and a sermon that includes a curse on Assyria, standing ovation. There is nothing more powerful if you love applause, and to play upon the hatreds and the prejudices of people, draw them out, say them for them, and then receive the accolades. In fact, in some quarters it is called conviction, and it generates enthusiasm to be clear about who's wrong, who's under judgment, who is outside. Thomas Hardy said once, I think in Far From the Matting Crowd, that just as the color of our skin is determined not by the rays of the sun that our bodies receive, but by the rays of the sun that the body rejects. So it is among us that we're most often known by those things we oppose than the things we embrace. Easy to preach that sermon. But there is in Jonah another theology. I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord God of heaven who created the sea and the land. His is a God not only of the selection historically of Israel, but his is a God of creation, all creation. What's he going to do with that? Is he going to preach that? That God loves and cares for all creation? What he runs up against in this beautiful story is the God of creation. Notice the language, and God prepared a strong tempest, and God appointed a whale, a great fish. Later on it will say, and God appointed a plant to grow up over Jonah and give him shelter. And then it will say, and then God appointed a worm to cut it down. The King James has instead of appointed, has ordained. God ordained a worm. I like that. And then it says, and God appointed an East wind to blister him, and Jonah wanted to die. And God said, you're concerned about the wind? Did you know that I have in the city of Nineveh a hundred and twenty thousand babies that don't even know right hand from left and many cattle? Jonah, I'm the God of creation. Well, he knew that. He knew that, but he didn't want to preach that. He wanted to preach the other. You preach inclusivity, and people say, oh, that's all right. You preach that, and they say, sick of good stuff. He knew it, but he didn't want to preach it. It was such a painful clash within him that he wished he were dead. A theology of creation and a theology of historical selection and particularism is painful. Shall we gather at the river? Lest you think this story is just a quaint story from ancient Israel, let me remind you how Luke in the New Testament loves the character Jonah. For in Jonah is captured so much that's going on in the early Christian movement. And so it is that Luke tells us a story about a man named Simon. Simon Bar Jonah, remember, who was selected by God and God said, Simon Bar Jonah, shall we gather at the river? In other words, shall we go and preach to the nations? And Simon Bar Jonah, who was non-kosher things on a sheet and a voice that said, get up, Peter, kill and eat it. He said, I don't eat that stuff. Get up and eat it. I don't eat that. It's unclean. Get up and eat it. If I say it's clean, it's clean. Reluctantly with the reluctance of the first Jonah. Simon Bar Jonah left his Joppa and went to Caesarea and in the house of an Italian military man, as foreign as you could get, with the army of occupation in Israel, the Holy Spirit fell. Simon Bar Jonah looked around and said, well, looks like God accepts these people. And then he said, can anybody here hinder these people being baptized? And there was silence. And they were baptized. Can anybody here hinder it? Luke loves that word hinder. You remember the Greek word for that? kōlyō. Can anyone here kōlyō? And nobody spoke up and they baptized these Italian military people. It's Israel. He was called on the carpet. He went back to Jerusalem. They said, we understand you went in and ate with some Gentiles. And Simon Bar Jonah said, I did. But who am I to kōlyō God? It's painful to think about. But can you identify with Jonah, with Simon Bar Jonah, when there is in all of us the particularism, the cultural, historical, national, economic, educational shaping of our lives a certain way? And then God taps us on the shoulder and says, shall we gather at the river? And we look, where is the river? And it means moving outside Tennessee or Alabama or Akron, Ohio or San Francisco, Opelika. But this is who I am. This is the way I live. This is the way these are the values I have. This is the way my family talked. This is the way we thought and this and that. And God said, but I'm the God of the sea and the great fish and the wind, the plants, the worms and the cattle. And I have a lot of little children there. It is so difficult to go into the ministry unless, unless you want to get ordained and just go repeating the same. You can do that, you know, and you'll be applauded. I'm sorry, but you will. It is so difficult. Paul told about Simon Barjona coming to Antioch when they had the church dinner there and there were Jews there and there were Gentiles there. But now they all become Christians. So there was a integrated fine congregation at Antioch of Syria and they had the fellowship meal and Simon Peter was eating with all the others. This fellow was eating with all the others until some came in from Jerusalem from James and he took up his plate and his glass of iced tea and they formed a separate table, a separate table. This is the same man who stood up on the day of Pentecost and said, the promises to you and to all your children and their children and to as many as God will call a far off. He said it. But when it came right down to it, my grandparents and my parents and this is what I eat and this is with whom I eat and this is the way I eat and this is the way I talk and this is the way I pronounce words. It's painful. The gentle snow reminded me this morning of being caught in a blizzard in Erie, Pennsylvania once, some years ago. No planes flying, no buses, no trains, nothing there was checking all the motels. They were full. Finally, last effort came to one of those little bitty ones you know at the edge of town and has a blinking light and says, inner spring mattress, phone in office, one of those little things. I went in, I said, you have room? No, we're full up and I'm about to close, but you can sleep here in the office if you want to. Well, there were two of us. There was another fellow there. I learned that he was Navajo. He was a Navajo Indian, a big man from Arizona. He had no place either. I had no place. And so the man with his left hand just said here, you can sleep in here in the office. I'm closing up. And there was a chair and there was a couch and this large Navajo said, I'll take the couch. And I said, well, I'm sort of attracted to that straight hard chair over there. So we sat it in for the night and he removed his shirt. And there were huge scars on both shoulders and down the arms. I said, are those ceremonial? Are those ritual? He said, yeah, yeah. I said, why? Because he had earlier in the conversation told me he was a Christian and how long he had been a Christian and we talked of Christian things. And then he takes off his shirt and I said, oh, then you weren't into all of that before you were a Christian. And he said, no. He said, two years ago, my father died. I grieved. I was paralyzed. I was immobilized. I was lost. I just stumbled around. I couldn't get any relief from my grief. And finally one night I went to our old medicine man and he bled me of my grief. I said, he said, I know. I should be able to say I did that before I became a Christian. The fact is, I did it after I was a Christian. It is so hard. You don't just come to Candler. You come every morning and it's still hard. Can anyone hinder all Luke loved that word? He used it a lot. You remember once in chapter nine when there was an exorcist that was not of the band of Jesus followers? And the disciples came to Jesus and said, we saw a man casting out demons, but he was not in our group. And so we collured here. And Jesus said, you don't collure them if they're not against us. Therefore, don't do that. In chapter 18, some mothers were bringing their babies. The other the mothers were bringing their infants and they were listening to Jesus. But apparently the infants, the babies were a disturbance. So the 12 apostles came in and said, get the kids out of here. We're trying to have the kingdom here and don't get these out of here. And Jesus said, permit the children to come and don't collure the children. What of such is the kingdom? They said, what? They can't even take care of themselves. They can't sing in the choir. They can't teach. They can't take up the offering. They can't participate in the little industry. They even have to have other people take care of them. They're a burden. They're an expense. You mean to say people like that belong in the kingdom? And Jesus said, yes. No, collure. Can anyone hinder? Luke loves that word. He used it once in chapter eight of Acts when there was a man who was an Ethiopian eunuch. Get it now? Ethiopian eunuch. Riding along in the chariot and the evangelist Philip comes along and Philip gets in the chariot and begins to talk to him about Jesus and about Isaiah and all of that. And finally the eunuch stops the chariot beside some water and says, here is water. Can anybody collure? And I know something in Philip was saying, yeah, I can. I mean, you're an Ethiopian. Let's face it, you're an Ethiopian and you're an eunuch. My land of living Ethiopian eunuch. Can anybody collure? Yeah. In fact, everybody in my home church would collure just like that. Can anybody collure? My being baptized and nobody raised a word. He was baptized. Shall we gather at the river? It's so hard to do. And it's not solved by some of the little schemes we have. Some of us think we solve, we don't solve it. I noticed some of the efforts of piddling efforts of some of us to be inclusive. And you know, the way we do it, we become generic, not inclusive, but generic. Just start using a lot of words that don't mean anything and therefore nobody will be offended. We get into personhood and humanity and all like that. As though there were ever any such person, there was never any such person. There is no human being at large. There is no human kind, humanity anywhere. There's a difference between being inclusive and being generic Generic is nothing. People live in particular places with names and loves and hates and pains and joys and expectation. I remember when I was in school and we were way below the poverty line and there was a family in the church, a little church where I served. He worked for Stokely van Camp. He was a chemist and his job was to sample the cans. Every so many cans, he had to open one to see that it was what was supposed to be inside. And so he had a lot of cans. He would pull them off the track, you know, and open one and look at it and all. But then he would just collect a bunch of cans. It was before they had labels. And he would bring them over to the parsonage. He would bring a box of cans with no labels and give them to us. Well, we were extremely grateful, but when I would say to Nadia, what are we having for supper? She said, I don't know. I haven't opened the can yet. Just generic. Now, I know we're against labels, but the fact of the matter is, there is no unlabeled human being. When God chose to say, I'm the God of all creation, land and sea, and I love you, when God decided to do that, God didn't roll up all the thunder into one big ball and say, I love you. God didn't dip the finger in the cloud and right across the sky, I love you. God sent a Jew of Nazareth in Israel. When I was over at RTC to preach a few years ago, I worked so hard on that sermon to be totally generic because I was so afraid I would offend somebody and reveal the own deep, deep, deep problem I have with seeing whole. And I worked on it and I had all the bland vanilla language you can get. I mean, nobody would be offended because, in essence, I wasn't saying anything to anybody. And when it was over, a very attractive young woman came over to me and thanked me for the sermon and she said, do you have a piece of paper? I said, well, yeah, why? And she said, I want you to write this down. I said, okay. And I couldn't find a piece of paper. And I said, I'll remember it. What is it? And she said, my name is Marlene. I am from Birmingham, Alabama. I am here because I've been called to the ministry. I am a woman. I am black and I'm going to make it. And I said, thank you. I didn't honor her in all my piddling effort to be inclusive. All I had done was become generic. And there wasn't a generic person in the house. Shall we gather at the river? We cannot do it. We cannot do it as long as we're unwilling to move out past our own culture and background and proverbs that were heard around the supper table and listen to the God of sea and land of fish and storm and plant and worm and cattle and 120,000 children in Nineveh. Now, see, the burden on us when we enter the ministry is to preach out past bigger than, beyond than, greater than all of our own feelings. If we just get up and preach our own feelings and pull everything we say through the knot hole of our own small backgrounds, the kingdom can never come. Just because I'm a wren doesn't mean I cannot preach an eagle message. Of course I can. Is that a lack of integrity? If I preach something bigger than I can even feel, if I preach a message that I haven't even grown to, that's not a lack of integrity. That's accepting the call. That's what it is, because there's too much at stake to do otherwise. And so God says, Shall we gather at the river? And it scares me to death. But who am I that I can kōlyō God?