Sermon — January 24, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
There’s a Chinese restaurant in Montreal that’s gotten famous recently for its menu. It’s not become famous for its authentic dishes or its affordable prices, but for something else: the owner’s very honest commentary on each menu item, printed just below the photo.
“This is the number-one-choice dish ordered by Chinese customers across China,” one description reads. “I am not a huge fan of our version, to be honest.” “This is a very popular dish,” another goes, “among the customers who don’t care about its greasiness.” And then there’s my favorite: “Compared to our General Tao Chicken, this one is not that good. Anyway, I’m not a big fan of North American Chinese food, and it’s your call.”
The owner of this restaurant is what I call an “imperfect messenger.”
Jonah knows what this is like.
“The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh.’” You may recall the first time the word of the Lord came to Jonah. “Get up and go to Nineveh,” God said, “that great city” far off to the east, “and cry out against it; for their evil has come to my attention.” (Jonah 1:2 CEB) So Jonah got up and booked passage on a ship headed not east to Nineveh, to Tarshish—as far west as you could go. You know the rest of the story. God sends a storm. Jonah goes overboard. Jonah’s swallowed by a “whale”—it’s really a fish—and so on.
Now after all this, the fish vomits him onto dry land, and the word of God comes to Jonah a second time. “Get up. Go to Nineveh.” So Jonah gets up and goes to Nineveh, but with quite an attitude. You can see the thought bubbles in the comic-strip version of the story. “Fine, I’ll do it. But I’m not going to like it!”
Jonah gets up and travels to Nineveh, which is a significant trip, to proclaim God’s message to the city. But when he gets there, he drags his heels. He doesn’t even go into the city center. He begins to go into the city, the story says, but he walks just one day, only a third of the city’s width. Geographically speaking—and here I really did the math using Google Maps—it’s the equivalent of walking from Columbus, Ohio all the way to Boston, coming into the city along the Mass Pike and then stopping somewhere in Allston to deliver your message. And not only does Jonah barely breach the city limits; he gives the shortest possible sermon: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (Jonah 3:4)
Sure, Jonah will obey God this time, but he’s going to do the bare minimum. He’ll preach repentance to Nineveh, but it’s going to be a short sermon on the outskirts of town.
Although—as a classmate of mine used to say, “If the minimum wasn’t good enough, it wouldn’t be the minimum.” And apparently the minimum is good enough, because the king and the people and even the animals repent and turn from their evil ways, and God changes his mind about destroying them, and Jonah, predictably, sulks.
Jonah is stubborn and resistant; the restaurant owner is maybe a little too honest. But the message is effective, even with such an imperfect messenger.
Now, the story of Jonah is a satire, so his personality is exaggerated. But the disciples Jesus calls in the gospel story today are just as flawed. The gospels don’t have much to say about the disciples. As a group, they’re unimpressive; they mostly appear in the story as a chorus to tell Jesus they have no idea what he’s talking about. Andrew never really appears again. James and John mostly show up to maneuver for top roles in Jesus’ coming administration. The “Simon” he calls with Andrew is, of course, Simon Peter. Peter is the one disciple to recognize Jesus for who he really is, answering Jesus’ question “Who do you say that I am?” with a simple, “You are the Messiah.” (Mark 8:28-29) But he is also the one who denies Jesus three times in his hour of greatest need, claiming he’s never even heard of Jesus just to save his own skin.
You have to remember that none of this is an attack on the Church or its leaders. These aren’t stories written by atheist critics, trying to show its hypocrisy and foolishness. These are the stories written down by the dearest friends and followers of these disciples in the decades after their deaths. It was Simon and Andrew and James and John who kept Jesus’ message alive and shared it with the likes of Matthew and Mark and Luke. So it’s remarkable that these are the stories they choose to tell: stories of disciples who are, at best, imperfect messengers.
I think that the messengers’ imperfection tells us something about the message that Jesus is going to send them to proclaim. “The time is fulfilled,” Jesus says, “and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15)
I think many of us struggle with these messages of repentance, these words from Jonah and from Jesus. If we repeat them we seem arrogant and judgmental, as though we were claiming the moral authority to know who needed to repent and to say it to their faces. In part, I think this is because this is how the message often sounds in our own day. When we hear talk of repentance in our culture, it’s usually more Jonah than Jesus; less “repent and believe” and more “repent…or else.”
“Repentance,” though, is not shame or fear. It’s not a confession or an apology that you give to avoid punishment. It’s a transformation. In Hebrew, it’s teshuvah, “returning”; coming back from the places you’d wandered away and returning to God. In Greek, it’s metanoia, a “change of mind and heart.” And so one recent translation renders this verse: “Now is the time! Here comes God’s kingdom! Change your hearts and lives, and trust this good news!” (Mark 1:15 CEB) When Jesus talks about the kingdom of God arriving and tells people to repent and believe, he’s not threatening them with what will happen if they don’t—he’s offering an invitation. The kingdom is coming, and this is good news! Come home and try to wrap your head around it.
And here it helps to have imperfect messengers. Jonah and Peter, James and John are hardly the glossy preachers who can stand up in the pulpit and point their fingers down at you in judgment. They’re stubborn, disobedient, power-hungry, cowardly; they’re brittle and flawed in all the ordinary ways we human beings are. They’re imperfect messengers who can stand among us, like us, and point us toward God, and say with all humility: “This is the number-one-choice religion in the world. I’m not a huge fan of our version, to be honest.”
I ended last week’s sermon reflecting on Philip’s words to Nathanael, before he brought him to meet Jesus for the first time: “Come and see.” When Jesus recruits Simon and Andrew to be “fishers of men,” (Mark 1:17) this is what he’s asking them to do: to come and follow him, to see what he’s about, and then to go to others and invite them in the same way: “Come and see.”
They do this with all the humility that comes from their imperfection. They don’t come to condemn or to judge. They’ve just found something that changed their lives, “The peace of God that filled their hearts / Brimful, and broke them too.” And all they can say to the people around them is: “Come and see,”
There are thousands of different books and videos and articles on how to have a growing or just a healthy church, and people often read them hoping for a magic solution, a secret plan that will fix everything. At the core of every one of them, though, the answer is simple: “Come and see.” We, as individual members of this body, need to be able to identify what it is that draws us here, what’s good about the good news we hear here. And we need to be able to invite others to try it for themselves.
We don’t have to be perfect to do it. We don’t have to be trained to do it. We don’t even have to like doing it. We can, like Jonah, dig our heels in, and refuse. We can, like Peter, hide our faith from sight. But we have found something we love, someone who fills our hearts with joy—and we cannot hide it from the rest of the world.
I maybe wouldn’t lead with “repent and believe in the gospel”—you can leave that one to Jesus, for now—but even if you only have the courage, like Jonah, to walk a third of the way into the city to share your message, you can still borrow that line from Philip, and say to someone who asks why you are here: “Come and see.”
Amen.