Fishing for Ice
Jonah 3:1-10; Mark 1:14-20

The Scriptures this week both are involved with fish, and it just seems to me that one cannot talk about normal fishing in Saskatchewan in January, for that requires a certain amount of heat in the atmosphere and that is the one thing we now lack. Ice fishing is our thing now, and seemingly to prove the point, the sermon title on our corner sign board is still "Nothing Good" - last Sunday's title - because the plastic letters have frozen onto the board. Guess we will have to wait until spring for "nothing good" to become something more positive.

It is hard to think of Jonah operating in a northern climate. God wanted him to go to Nineveh, which is modern-day Mosul in Iraq, and it doesn't get cold there. He heads west, sailing on the Mediterranean towards the legendary Tarshish, which is supposed to have been in Spain - where the rain falls mainly on the plain.

One thing for sure, it wasn't cold in the belly of the whale or big fish, and then he starts all over in hot Nineveh, sitting under the unpredictable plant and broiling. Nothing Jonah did was cool. The Word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, but not for the first time. Much earlier (2 Kings 14:25), Jonah had played the prophet's role in counselling one of Israel's unvirtuous kings, Jeroboam II. He was good at being a prophet and his eventual success with the Ninevites underlines the fact.

The obvious thing we miss is that Jonah was a full-fledged, certified prophet, and you didn't get much bigger than a prophet in the Old Testament. He was not an average Joe; he was an experienced religious professional. When God wanted him to go do the prophet thing in that decadent land of Iraq - and if you were a prophet then Nineveh was the major leagues - he didnŐt say a thing. He turned around and headed in the opposite direction, sailing towards Tarshish in Spain, where God couldn't hear or see him. It's at this point that one knows that Jonah, Israel, and most of us, believe in more than one God. Polytheism, the belief that there are many gods, takes on many forms.

Jonah believed his God didn't live everywhere. Either there was no god at all in Tarshish or there was a different god. If you're counting along, that makes at least two gods. Jonah wasn't some modern skeptical professional who harbours doubts about whether his God has any real power to affect the world. Jonah did not want to preach in Nineveh because he was afraid his preaching wouldn't work. He was afraid because he knew it would work. God would save the Ninevites. That was a sacrilegious thought, but not on Jonah's account. God was actually the one who was having sacrilegious thoughts - how could my God save my enemies? How can my God be their God too?

During World War II, German soldiers went into battle with the words sewn on their sleeves, 'Gott mit uns' - 'God with us.' But wasn't God with our side back then? How could our God possibly support the inhumanity of the Nazis? How could those soldiers possibly presume that God would be with them? It must have been a different God! Maybe polytheism is real after all.

Yet Jonah comes around slowly in the eye of a storm. All his fellow travellers and sailors apparently believed that there were different gods, and it was logical that they called upon him to appeal to his god. Casting lots with the lot of guilt falling upon Jonah brought him to admit that he was indeed at the centre of the storm. He declares that his God is the creator of heaven and earth, and in saying so realizes that the Lord God is the god of all of them - even if they don't believe in God the way Jonah does. They were a good, decent bunch of guys anyway, for in vain they laboured to avoid tossing Jonah over the side.

The story changes its direction for Jonah. The Lord provided a large fish (NRSV). This was not a punishment, but providence, which means God gives you what you need. There are a lot of people who think being religious and Christian means you believe Jonah spent three nights in the belly of a whale. It's only when Jonah gets vomited out onto dry land that the religious quest really gets started again.

Jonah trudges off to the giant wicked city and walks one day into its midst - must have been close to downtown - and preaches a pretty short, grim sermon, only five words in Hebrew. No gospel, no hope, no strategies, just "40 days and Nineveh will be annihilated." Jonah will win no preaching prize, but it worked. Nineveh repented, its men and women repented, its animals repented, which I would have liked to have seen. Everyone repented, put on ashes and sackcloth and fasted. They even put sackcloth on the animals just to make sure that every form of life changed its way of doing things. Even God repented and changed his mind and did not annihilate. The only one who did not repent was Jonah. He was right in his suspicions that his God was just too kind. He was mad that there was only one God of heaven and earth - or rather, that God had only one people.

God provided a fish. God still provides fishers, fishers of people. Most of us have to be hooked or caught or swallowed up like Jonah to get the message. In our one world, there is only one God - all other gods are figments of our imagination. That does not mean we all have to think of God in the same way and we certainly do not, whether it be as United Church people, Roman Catholics or Orthodox, evangelicals or Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or Shinto.

Yet the fact that there is only one God - 'the Lord is our God, the Lord alone' - is really not a comforting reassuring thought of the unity of all life and authority. If there is only one God, then there is only one people. If there is only one people under one God alone, then the differences we perceive in one another are in our minds, not in the nature of creation. If we are all belonging to one people, then we are brothers and sisters who get closer the more we sit around the table and eat together, as we are about to do. If we eat together, then we will be that one bit closer to one another.

But you know what the Gospel says? There are no "if's." Only, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan
January 23, 2000