Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the third Sunday after Epiphany, January 26, 2003, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Jonah 3:1-10; I Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!

                      -Jonah 3:4

     I restrained myself this time: I didn't read you all four chapters of the Book of Jonah, just chapter three. It's not easy resisting that, but we've gone ahead and read the whole thing aloud more than once before this, so I hope I can assume that you're familiar with it.

     Thus, for example, you remember what happened before "the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, 'Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city'." The first time the Lord told him to get up and go to Nineveh, he took off in the opposite direction, and through a series of misadventures got thrown overboard from a ship in a storm at sea, but the Lord appointed a large fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, singing and praying loudly and continually, until the fish got so fed up with him that it spewed him out on dry land. And that's when the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, and this time he did as he was told.

     Now I could just tell you that the point of the story is, When the Lord tells you to do something, even if you don't want to do it, you might as well face facts and bite the bullet and get it over with. And that would be the end of today's sermon. But I want you to think about what happened when Jonah got to Nineveh and told the Ninevites the word of the Lord.

     He cried out to them: Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown! Think about how he sounded. Think about how he looked. Think about how he smelled.

     I mean, this man was walking, talking fish barf. Benjamin Franklin, in his advice column, liked to say that houseguests and fish are good for about three days and then they begin to stink. Well, Jonah has been a three-day guest inside a fish. No wonder the people of Nineveh gave him their full attention.

     It says, When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and God did not do it. Evidently God decided that Jonah all by himself was calamity enough.

     All these years people have marveled at Jonah because in spite of his negative attitude, he was far and away the most successful prophet in the Bible. His sermon was exactly eight words in length — Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown! — and yet everyone in Nineveh, that great city, from the king to the cows, immediately repented and put on sackcloth and ashes and prayed for mercy. I think he owed all his success to the large fish. Maybe more preachers ought to be anointing themselves with seaweed and fish fragrance.

     But what he said was, Time's up! No more business as usual. No more behaving the way you've always behaved. Just because it seems to have worked well enough until now, that doesn't mean it'll keep on working. Things are going to change, and you can either change with them or get steamrollered.

     Which is quite an interesting message given the contemporary international situation, and given in particular that Nineveh, that great city, is in Iraq. It's no longer a great city, though. It's a historic site, an archaeological site, in northern Iraq, near the Turkish border. In one of the no-fly zones. I guess it could get bombed if we have a war, and then Jonah's prophecy will finally be fulfilled. So a case could be made that in 2003 the part of Jonah is now being played by President Bush, except of course he's not what you'd call reluctant and he doesn't smell like he's been living in a fish.

     Jonah always makes me think of the apparition known as the Get-Ready Man, whom James Thurber wrote about in his memoir, My Life and Hard Times. A cartoon figure, really: the bearded, crazed doomsayer, the street preacher who appears out of nowhere and interrupts everybody's routine and makes such a spectacle of himself that he overshadows his own message. Thurber's Get-Ready Man lived in Thurber's hometown, Columbus, Ohio, but we've all seen his like somewhere. For some reason I always think of him as popping up in downtown Manhattan, on Wall Street near the Stock Exchange.

     Paul is a Get-Ready Man too: The appointed time has grown short, he writes. The present form of this world is passing away. Get with the program: conduct yourselves as though the old order were already gone and the new already launched. Likewise also Jesus, who says: The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe it.

     So let's pretend for a moment that the Get-Ready Man might actually be a messenger from God worth listening to, and let's see if we can figure out what to do about him.

     It's all about time, isn't it? The Get-Ready Man is saying, Now's the time! How do we respond to that? We've all been bombarded with that message so long and so repetitively that we don't even notice it. Every piece of junk mail is urgent. Every TV commercial commands us to Do It Now! The result is, we don't believe anybody who says now's the time. We just don't believe time is running out. Until it actually runs out, and sometimes we don't believe it even then.

     But time does run out. No matter what choice we may be facing, the moment always comes when that choice is taken away from us and we can't get it back. Sometimes we're lucky enough to see that moment coming, sometimes we're not, but it always comes. In that sense, the Get-Ready Man is right, even if he is ridiculous. A person can be ridiculous and right at the same time. This is especially the case with authentic messengers from God.

     We so-called normal people have always laughed at the Get-Ready People, and or course they ask for it — predicting calamities that don't happen, laying out God's doomsday timetable, severing all their earthly ties and preparing to be swept up to heaven. Occasionally it goes beyond laughter and we're appalled and grieved, with good reason, at the harm they do to themselves or to others because they think the time has come.

     It would be great if we could discern for ourselves what time it is, and not rely on prophets who could be crackpots. Then we could arrange our lives appropriately. Same old same old until time's up, and then we get our act together and shape up.

     The problem with that approach is that it assumes we have the power and the will and the determination and the ability to do whatever we decide to do, and that's just not true. When Jesus says, Repent! he doesn't expect us to remodel our personalities and our value systems and become virtuous and pure and saintly. He's inviting us to admit we can't do it.

     If Jesus or anybody else appears on our streets saying that the time has come, the ways of the world are over, and the kingdom of God is upon us, our natural reaction isn't going to be Hallelujah, praise the Lord, come quickly Jesus! It's going to be Good God, I can't handle that! I'm not ready for it! Well, that's all repentance is — just admitting to God that it's more than you can manage. It may not sound like much, but without it we never begin to understand what it means to trust in God.

     And as for figuring out what time it is, the truth is that the great once-in-a-lifetime moment is always right now, because right now is all we've got. Which means that when Jesus or Jonah or Paul tells us to repent, they're not talking about a one-time life-changing decision, they're talking about a way of life. A routine, a habit, if you will. A habit of looking for God's kingdom and living in anticipation of it. A habit of freedom, of detachment from the way the world has always chugged along. A habit of being in God's presence. A habit of allegiance to things that supposedly do not exist.

     Amen