How Do We Hear
God's Word to Us Today?

Last week in her sermon Sharon told us how these bitterly cold winter days reminded her of her childhood in Manitoba. She mentioned the red cheeks, tongues sticking to most anything if left out too long and frost on the eyebrows. Well, as one who grew up in Saskatchewan I can tell you that Manitoba winters don't even compare. Why in Saskatchewan we would drive all winter with the bump-kabump of square frozen tires, the is air so cold that at every breath leaves ice pellets on your chin and the aurora borealis crackled more loudly than popping corn.

And our snow-storms lasted for a week!

Nevertheless, we teenagers wanted to be fashionable and wearing heavy-duty winter duds simply did not qualify I don't think things have changed much. Many of you will have watched your teenagers leaving the house clearly not dressed adequately for the frigid temperatures outside. And yet no amount of nagging helps. Nothing but the most dire circumstances will convince them to wear that big winter coat, gloves and worst of all the dreaded hat.

On Friday the Ottawa Citizen carried a cartoon depicting a mother with her pre-teen son meeting a teenager with neck withdrawn into his collar, hair coiffed into peaks , sneakers, and a light jacket on a cold winter's day. The pre-teen remarks, "Hey Mom, he looks cool", to which she replies, "Cool, he looks downright cold to me".

I remember such an incident when I was about 16. Our scout troop was planning a winter hike and as I was preparing for this event my parents insisted that I put on heavy duty long underwear and extra layers of clothing. No way I was going to wear that underwear. So I went into my mother's mending box, cut 2 feet off of the legs of an old pair of underwear and put them on so that I could lift my pant leg and prove to my parents that I had indeed dawned the required long underwear. Off I went with my buddies on this 5 mile January trek across the bald Saskatchewan prairie. Within an hour I was back home. Driven home by a less than pleased scout leader. My legs and arms were the colour of this carpet.

When your sixteen years old the dumbest people in the world are your parents. Teacher come a close second. On a spiritual level many of us pass our lives convinced that God is pretty dumb too. We say, "I can't believe in God! If God is really God all the horrible things we see would not be allowed.". If we were God the universe would be run much better.

Clearly, in today's story from the Book of Jonah, God had gotten things wrong when he called Jonah to speak a prophetic word to Nineveh. Nineveh, you see, was the great the superpower, the Evil Empire, the culmination of human self-will and power on a collision course with the Divine Will. The very idea that Jonah should take a word from God to the people of Nineveh was so ridiculous to Jonah that he simply disregarded God's request altogether and fled.

Continuing on with the story, Jonah doesn't get very far in fleeing from God. God is hot on his trail. When he tries to escape by sea God raises up a mighty storm and the super religious Phoenician sailors soon determine who is to blame for the predicament and Jonah the reluctant prophet-to-be of the Lord is thrown into the sea where he is swallowed by a great fish. In desperation Jonah's prays for deliverance- a prayer so pious that it makes the fish sick its stomach provoking piscine puking. Jonah is vomited up onto dry land. ( I'm just conjecturing here since the bible doesn't say what it was about Jonah that made the fish sick).

Off he goes back to Nineveh and tells the people that the end is near and that because of their wickedness they will be toast in short order. According to biblical scholars the great sin of Ninevah was violence- the hebrew word is hamas. The Evil Empire was a violent one. The violence referred to appears to have been that of violence against the poor and vulnerable. Nineveh, rich and powerful, was caught up in a spiral of greed so destructive as the warrant the term hamas..

Well, surprize, surprize the entire city repents. This is truly more than any modern day evangelist could possibly hope for. Imagine carrying a sandwich board down Elgin Street with the slogan "The End is Near" and being taken seriously! But that is what happens in this story.

So God changes God's mind to the great displeasure of Jonah. For well over a chapter of this saga Jonah pouts and frets that God has decided to show mercy to the Ninevites ( or were they call Ninies). Why is Jonah upset? Was he looking forward to the scene of mass destruction? Did he think that God was not acting justly and that the Ninevites should have gotten their just deserts? Did he believe that the only way to stop the Evil Empire was by violence? Or was he just embarrassed that his own word was set aside? It is not clear even at the end of the story if Jonah's heart is moved to accept God's reasons for showing mercy in Nineveh.

From such a story it is not difficult to draw many moral conclusions. One might even see in it something of a metaphor for our own time -a time in which the human community seems hell-bent on self-destruction.

The good news here is clear. Even Nineveh can change. Even Nineveh, the symbol of ultimate human hubris and willfulness, is still loved of God.

But the bad news is that we are free to chose our own destiny - whether it be a personal or a collective one. We have the freedom to self-destruct and many people chose to walk that path to death every day. An increasing number of theologians and other writers now conclude that human kind is on a course of self-destruction from which it is difficult to see deliverance.

I read these opinions and am disturb. I read these comments and cannot disagree. We have become addicted to the illusion that we humans are the centre-piece of creation and in control. In fact we are not either. Our species has existed but a tiny millisecond on the evolutionary scale. The created order got along just fine for millions of years with us and will, no doubt, be better off when we are gone. Contemporary theologian Diarmuid O'Murchu goes so far as to suggest that our species, homo sapiens, may cease to exist within the next 100 or so years and be replace in God's evolutionary process by another. He reminds us that we need to recall that there have been not one, but several mass extinctions in the history of the world and climatic factors usually play a key role. He makes this insightful comment, "We are a dimension of the evolutionary story, co-creators but not masters ."

This is decidely scary stuff. But it does not lead him to despair because he understands God to be the divine and creative energy which holds the whole universe in being and is behind the evolution of all things. God is not remote, "out there" watching the universe unwind as one might watch a pocket watch tick away. As one mystic has put it, "The world is God's body". In religious language O'Murchu says that Calvary, the sacrifice of Christ, the Christian metaphor for ultimate fear and suffering for humanity, in which one must die before resurrection can occur, may very well be our collective destiny. Our species may have to die in order for God to bring forth a new creation.

Such thoughts are a long way from the crackling aurora borealis of the Saskatchewan winter sky. Or are they? If there is one thing that a magnificent display of Northern Lights does it is to give one a sense of place within an immense and awesome created order infinitely more powerful and complex than the small human theories and technologies we devise to explain and control it.

If we were to write a Jonah story for our time, what would be the word of warning that the prophet of the Lord might bring to us? Might it not be the same condemnation of the violence of our species- in our case our violence not only against one another but against the rest of the created order?. Is the evidence not clear that we will not survive if we do not repent of our destruction of planet by greed and war? What will it take for us to repent?