The Lord’s word came to Jonah a second time: “Get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, and declare against it the proclamation that I am commanding you.” 3 And Jonah got up and went to Nineveh, according to the Lord’s word. (Now Nineveh was indeed an enormous city, a three days’ walk across.)

Jonah started into the city, walking one day, and he cried out, “Just forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown!”  And the people of Nineveh believed God. They proclaimed a fast and put on mourning clothes, from the greatest of them to the least significant.

God saw what they were doing—that they had ceased their evil behavior. So God stopped planning to destroy them, and he didn’t do it

In the book of Jonah, we find one of the most interesting characters in Scripture, the book’s namesake, a man who has been asked by God to be a truth-teller, a prophet, but who does everything possible in order to not do what God asked him to do. I know that most of us know this story because we were brought up on it as children, and the focus and fascination was always around that fish, and Jonah being swallowed up by it. But that fascination with that unbelievable element of it has often allowed us to ignore the incredible adult wisdom found in this tale, especially around the vagaries of human nature. You have some who desire to make this story a historical narrative, something that happened in history, whereas all the evidence is that this really meant to be a wisdom story, told first around campfires throughout the Middle East, and then finally written down by our spiritual forbearers, in order to make a point about who we are and who God is. Even the detail in verse 3, where Nineveh is said to be “three days walk across” would make it, by ancient measures of how a day’s walk would have been calculated, it would make the city almost 60 miles wide, a size unheard of by the archeologists studying the cities of that era. This is not history, but truth telling, a story meant to share a deeper truth about God and humans. One of the stories I often share with our confirmands as they begin to read Scripture with more adult eyes is one about how often ancient native American speakers would begin their own storytelling around their own campfires – they would say, “I don’t know if the story I am about to tell you happened this way, but I know the story is true.”

Friends, perhaps this story is not history, but so much of the book of Jonah is true, this story that wrestles with human nature, and God’s nature. We find Jonah running from his calling from God to warn the people of Nineveh of impending disaster, and we find God being more merciful to humans than Jonah is to his fellow creatures, and we find a God who is persistent, who can meet our intractable reluctance with an equal amount of tenacity. Jonah is called by God to warn the Ninevites that Israel’s God will destroy this great city of the Assyrian Empire, the Assyrians being Israel’s enemies. Jonah is not chosen to be a prophet to his own people, but to foreigners, and not just any set of foreigners – he is called to be prophet to people who have oppressed his own people, to say to them that Israel’s God will destroy this Assyrian city if the city does not repent from its wickedness. Jonah objects to his calling and he quite literally sets out in the opposite direction of Nineveh by boarding a boat going somewhere, anywhere other than Nineveh. God sends a storm that threatens to sink the ship, and after the crew through its cargo overboard to prevent disaster, they cast lots among the crew and passengers to see who the gods are trying to punish through this stormy calamity – and Jonah is found to be at fault. He confesses that he is running away from God and he tells them to throw him overboard, which they do, only to find himself being swallowed up by a great fish. Inside the belly of this sea-faring beast, the water starts to close in around him, and he prays for deliverance, hoping God will give him another chance. God does, and the fish spits him up on the beach. Still deeply cynical about his task, about whether these people, these foreigners, this enemies, can really change, he does what he is told, and he proclaims in Nineveh that the city will be overthrown if the city does not repent of its sins. Forty days is given, forty being such an important number in Scripture, as the deadline given for them to change their ways, to repent, which quite literally means to go in a opposite direction from the negative path one is following.

Surprisingly, the unthinkable actually happens – Nineveh actually repents, it goes in the different direction than expected, it actually changes its mind. Keep in mind that despite God’s sending of prophets to the people of Israel, the insiders, and to people like the Assyrians, the outsiders, these prophets rarely ever had any success– people rarely actually changed their minds and their lives. But here, here, we have a story in which human beings were told that they needed to change for their own wellbeing – and they actually did it, they repented, they went in a different direction and the city was saved from God’s wrath. Later in the story, we will find Jonah actually bitter and angry that the city wasn’t destroyed, primarily, I suspect that he actually wanted the city demolished, because they were, after all, the enemy of Israel, and oftentimes a brutal oppressor. Ironically, Jonah was successful in the mission God had given him, but deep in his troubled soul, well, he was hoping he wouldn’t be, which is a sad commentary on human nature. I also think that this same soul held the same kind of cynicism we often harbor about change, about the ability of humans to actually change our minds and behavior. What’s the point of going to Nineveh, if, in reality, so few of us ever really change our ways, right? People never really change, we say about our friends, our enemies – people may say they’ve turned over a new leaf, but, really, have they, and if so, it probably won’t be long before they revert to their old thinking, their old behavior, or that old thinking or way of being just naturally shows up again? For me sometimes that comes out in my ideas about extreme thinking –I often say that people who were once fervent fundamentalist Christians often become fervent atheists, or people who were once fervent and absolutist in terms of their politics simply transfer that absolutism to the other end of the political spectrum. People who are absolutist, people who don’t like the grey or the messy or the complicated simply shift their extremism from one end to another, I often say to myself, and others. That reflects perhaps my own cynicism about the possibility of change, about whether or not people can actually change their lives, or, frankly, whether or not God can change them, or maybe even change me.

So, can we human beings actually change? Can we be changed, either by ourselves or by God? In the past, I’ve preached on the topic of whether God can change God’s own divine mind, so to speak, on whether or not God can change course, which is no small theological issue, despite the seemingly obvious answer found in the Bible, which is yes. And surely the answer would be same for us humans, right? There are calls all over the Bible that mimic Jonah’s call to the people of Nineveh, calls for people to repent, to change, to move in a better direction, calls made even by John the Baptist and Jesus himself, and the assumption in that invitation, that call towards change is that humans can actually change, they can stop moving in a destructive direction and go in the opposite direction, a more life-giving direction. Surely change is possible for us humans, and yet some of us, including myself at time, wonder, really, if it is really all that possible. Do people really change, is human nature changeable, or do we simply put new veneer over the old? Even as a minister I’ve wondered about the nature of spiritual change, about whether or not conversion to Christ actually always changes people. I once knew a guy who was a pretty cruel and mean guy and when he became a Christian he just became a cruel and mean Christian. Now, we and I can certainly question his conversion – if a decision to follow after the way of Jesus doesn’t end up making us kinder and more loving persons over the long haul, perhaps, just maybe, we aren’t actually following Christ, despite our words and intentions. Deeds actually do actually have to match words in our Christian faith, at least some of the time, though God knows all of us fail our own words many times, our own intentions, all of the time. Still, if being a follower of Jesus doesn’t create change that goes in a generally life-giving direction, which is life geared towards love, which is who and what God is according to Jesus, then I think we can wonder if that divine change, which is something that happens all through our journey of faith, is really happening to us, or even to others, who seem to use their religion as a weapon of cruelty and harm rather than as a source of love and kindness.

Despite all those questions and examples of people who don’t quite change or completely change, either by divine means or through a personal program of self-transformation, all of these examples that we all can surely name, I do want to endorse or make the case for the general Biblical sentiment that human beings are capable of real change, sometimes even substantial change, even if it is not always complete transformation, at least on this side of eternity. It’s interesting – I do think that of all the creatures that God created, we humans are the ones that are the hardest to change, and perhaps that has something to do with being created in God’s image, after all. Sometimes the ability to be the same and the same, over and over again, is needed – ask any parent about the importance of a regular schedule for their children, the need for familiar patterns in order for children to survive, if not thrive. But that same divine gift, the ability to do the same and be the same, is also a shadow burden, laid upon our heavy shoulders when that sameness, that regular pattern is found in our sins, our challenges, our addictions, our old death dealing patterns with others. And yet, the witness of Scripture, and certainly the witness of our text is that human beings can change, we can be different and do differently. I can change, you can change, I can better at this, or that – I can actually make choices other than the ones I’m making right now, for good and ill, of course, but change does happen to human beings, and even to organizations – in fact, change probably has to happen for human beings to thrive – repent, turn around, do something different – that ancient call is a truth across all of our human endeavors, including the personal and the communal, the economic and the social.

And the truth about change, that it is actually possible, both personally and culturally, might also give us some hope in these divided times. Obviously, we live in an especially divided era in this country, where we look across the political divide that come between us and we wonder if there is a possibility that those “others” could possibly change their minds and their actions. Some of us are very cynical about that possibility, and some of the social science research shows that there are some scientific reasons why change, especially political change, is rare, and is becoming rarer in our day and age. Yet, again, the overall witness of the Bible is that we humans can change, we can go in a different direction, we can do things differently – and if we couldn’t change, if it weren’t possible to go in the opposite direction than the one were going on yesterday, I don’t think you would have God issuing that invitation to change, to repent, all over the Biblical narrative. And that perhaps means we ought to be careful about assigning categorical judgments about others and their ability to change, or even our ability to change. Perhaps we cannot be a Jonah or even any of the other prophets, issuing a constant call to change to our friends and family and ourselves – it is exhausting work, and, it might get us cut off, or cut out from those human connections that do matter to us – ask the prophets how often they were either exiled, excluded, or executed for their persistence. Maybe the best we can do with those closest to us is to set the door wide open, as the father did with the prodigal son, hoping and believing that his wayward son could change his mind, and if he did, the door was open to receive him.

We are at best when we allow for the possibility for a change of minds, of hearts, in ourselves in others. This past week I was speaking to our confirmation class about some of things that make wild and heady mix we call the United Church of Christ, and we talked about how the United Church of Christ, unlike many parts of the church universal, has a particular gift for changing its minds. In 1993, Dr. Paul Sherry, the formal General Minister and President of the UCC, a position that our own John Thomas once held in the early 2000’s, apologized to the native Hawaiian people on behalf of UCC for the actions of some the Congregational missionaries who helped to overthrown the native Hawaiian government. Dr. Kaleo Patterson shares his remembrance of this moment with these words: After attending services at Kawaiahao Church, and processing to the grounds of Iolani Palace where thousands of people had gathered, the Apology to Na Kanaka Maoli was given by Dr. Paul Sherry, President, of the United Church of Christ on January 17, 1993. With tear-filled eyes and deep emotion his historic words were heard by the young and old, and many were touched with the hope of a new day. Latter in the day Dr. Sherry delivered the same Apology address, on the grounds of Kaumakapili Church under a large luau tent. In that apology he said said these words: We acknowledge and confess our sins against you and your forebears, na Kanaka Maoli,.  We formally apologize to you for “our denomination’s historical complicities in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy in 1893,” by unduly identifying the ways of the West with the ways of the Christ, and thereby, undervaluing the strengths of the mature society that was native Hawaii.  We commit ourselves to help right the wrongs inflicted upon you.  We promise respect for the religious traditions and practices, the spirituality and culture that are distinctly yours.  We promise solidarity with you in common concern, action and support.  We will seek to be present and vulnerable with you and the Hawaii Conference of the United Church of Christ in the struggle for justice, peace and reconciliation. Instead of sharing in the planned reception and meal after the Kaumakapili event, Dr. Paul Sherry, Dr. Kaleo Patterson, and Dr. Haaheo Guanson, returned to Iolani Palace to participate in a religious ceremony consecrating the newly constructed ahu – altar.  As the group of Hawaiian leaders gathered, the manuscript of the Apology was placed on the altar being blessed by Parly Kanakaole. The ahu - altar was made of stones – pohaku that were brought from all the islands to commemorate the day, and the hope of unity.  This date January 17th, 1993 was the 100th Anniversary of the Overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy. Not only did we issue and apology, showing that we changed our minds about the justness of our earlier actions, but 3.5 million dollars was given to UCC churches, and to an organization in Hawaii that served all the churches on the island. You know, so much of the spiritual journey is just setting the door wide open for the possibility of change, change at God’s hands, or the change possible within human beings. If we don’t have the door open, the door of our hearts, how can God walk in, how can another human being, one as fallible and yet changeable as all are walk into our hearts? Change is possible – I can be changed, you can be changed, we can be changed, and so, despite some of our cynicism about human nature, about what is possible with the human heart, may we leave the door of our hearts wide open to change, in welcome, and with hope. Amen.