Real Peace. Real People.

Jonah 4:1–11 But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD, “Isn’t this what I said, LORD, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. 3 Now, LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4 But the LORD replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?” 5 Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. 6 Then the LORD God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. 7 But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.” 9 But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” “It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.” 10 But the LORD said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. 11 And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”

Yes, that ending just happened. And, yes, it totally leaves you hanging. I mean how can it not? Jonah’s outside Nineveh getting cooked on the frying pan of the Middle East. It’s so bad he’s saying, “I wish I were dead,” (v. 9) already for the second time in the chapter. This time though he’s not saying it in prayer. He’s apparently so disillusioned with the Lord by this point that he seems to mumbling this death wish to himself. So the Lord comes to him and asks this devastatingly depressed and disillusioned Jonah a profound question. And after it’s asked the question just hangs there. It just hangs there. We never find out how Jonah answers the question or if he gets turned around or anything. The question just hangs there. You know why I point this out to you? That should bug you. It should bug you worse than the TV series Nashville getting so suddenly yanked off the air that it has no ending at all. It should bug you worse than the way people experienced the ending of HBO’s Sopranoes serious a few years ago. This cliff hanger should bug you.

How do I know this? Because Jonah four is far too well-crafted for the author to just have run out of ink. There are many literary features here I could point out to make that case, but let me just point to the pure mathematical precision in it. In a chapter that is basically an extended talk between the Lord and Jonah, they each get identical air time. Identical. Jonah speaks 47 Hebrew words. The Lord does too. In verse four the Lord asks a question of Jonah in three Hebrew words. In verse eight Jonah answers the question in three Hebrew words. In verse nine the Lord re-asks the question with five Hebrew words. In verse nine Jonah re-answers the question with five Hebrew words. Jonah opens the chapter with what amounts to a question that’s that’s 39 words long. The Lord closes the chapter with a question that’s – you guessed it – 39 words long. That’s incredible precision, planning, and structure. And so it is no accident – no coincidence – that Jonah four ends with a question mark.

It’s no accident either that the chapter doesn’t just end with a question. It is a chapter of questions. Troubling ones. Did you squirm a bit at the first one? The Ninevites get into a faith relationship with the Lord. Awesome, right? Not to Jonah. “But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the LORD, ‘Isn’t this what I said, LORD, when I was still at home?’” (v. 1–2) Jonah was angry. Angry that the Ninevites were off death row. That they got a reprieve. He was so angry that he started acting out. He got down to prayer immediately and said, “I knew this was going to happen. It’s why I originally tried to go to Tarshish. I knew, Lord, you’d do this.” And that’s when he really starts to make us uncomfortable with this outrageous comments. Did you happen to hear what he basically said? “Lord, I don’t really like who you are.” And he really digs in by listing the Lord’s true attributes. It’s stunning especially because of how he just nails the Lord’s essence. He doesn’t mischaracterize him at all saying, “Lord, I don’t like that you are an unrelenting eye in the sky.” Or, “Lord, I’m enraged because you are so judging and demanding and harsh.”

No. None of that. He’s not mad because of how he’s misperceived the Lord or mischaracterized him in his head. He truly dislikes who God really is. “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” (v. 2) These, by the way, are not primarily Jonah’s words. Jonah’s quoting here what some call the John 3:16 of the Old Testament – words that keep popping up in the Old Testament over and over and over again. They’re a kind of creed that describes who God is. God is gracious and compassionate. He is slow to anger. He is abounding in love and a God who relents from sending calamity. That’s who God is. And that upset Jonah. Think of that. The essence of God rubbed Jonah so badly the wrong way that he wanted no part of what God was up to. He wanted in on no world where a God like this could forgive even Ninevites and restore them to himself. So he prayed, “Now, LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.” (v. 3)

Unusual, right? I mean I think we all get that there are tons of people who are dechurched or unchurched because they have a caricature of God in their heads. They’ve been told God’s not gracious and compassionate. He’s judgmental and mean. They’ve been told he’s not slow to anger and abounding in love. He’s quick to send you to you know where. They’ve been told he’s not a God who relents. He’s a God who brings full force condemnation. I think we get that there are tons of people who don’t like the God they’ve been told exists (but who doesn’t), but we also understand why. He’s been mischaracterized and misrepresented. We get that. But this? This isn’t a man reacting to a caricature or misrepresentation of God. This is a man reacting to who God truly is. Essentially. At the core of his being. This is human nature spiting God for who he is and what animates him at his core. I don’t think I have to tell you how scary rebellious that is. This isn’t just, “God, I’m over here trying to pull a fast one on you by breaking a rule. This is: “God, I don’t like you.” That reaction has got to be an outlier in history, right? No one ever fights the God of grace and mercy, do they? They just celebrate him, right?

Wrong. My 8th anniversary of pastoral ministry is coming up. I couldn’t be more thankful. I love being a pastor. I love being your pastor. In eight years, the Lord’s given me now probably hundreds of chances to take people into the faith for the first time or to take neophyte Christians and show them the heart of God like they’ve never been seen it before. I want to tell you something I’ve learned through the years in dealing with lots and lots and lots of people. We all react in some way to the God of pure, unmerited, un-won grace. There’s always some point on which we fight it. In fact, sometimes I can almost guess when it’s coming. When I begin to insist that Jesus died for the forgiveness of the world and that everyone who receive that in faith is forgiven? You know what happens so often when I teach that and it begins to sink in? You know what I hope for? I hope that everyone I’m teaching begins to weep tears of sweet relief that even they the worst of sinners have been forgiven. That their rebellious college years; their lack of reverence for the Word they’ve seen in their on and off church attendance; their fill-in-the-blank sins are all forgiven and so they say with joyful tears, “Sweet Jesus. There is finally relief.”

That’s what I hope for, but that’s almost never the whole story. By the grace of God people grow into that, but you know where they often start? Someone inevitably asks, “Can even murderers and such be forgiven too?” Why is that? What’s happening there? I’ll tell you what’s happening there. We like to check up on God. We don’t naturally want to receive him the way he is and just celebrate his massive heart of grace. We prone to checking up on him. We want to make sure he’s being equitable and fair. That he’s doing this salvation thing right. We think, “There can be forgiveness for all as long as they aren’t any worse than me.” Because that’s equitable. And that’s fair. And that’s right. But if they’re worse, God should ban them from his presence. They shouldn’t get to receive the gospel too. Let me tell you something. We really don’t want a fair God. I promise you. We don’t. We don’t want an equitable God. I promise you. We don’t. If there is any part of you that thinks you do you’ve got two huge problems. 1. You’re totally underestimating how much sin you’ve got. And 2. you’re totally underestimating what sin deserves.

But you know what’s great about this story? You don’t have to trust me on that. You can just see how it goes for a person who takes the opposing position. Jonah wanted a fair, equitable God. That’s why he was outside Nineveh. He couldn’t be inside celebrating with the newly, unfairly, inequitably saved trying to deepen them in faith. He had to position himself outside the city. He was saying, “I will protest this magnificent grace. I’m staying outside the city. I will have no part in the celebration of it.” He was so determined with his protest that he even fashioned for himself a hut to survive in the heat and the sun out there. And then grace comes for him. I mean think of it. Jonah was hating and dissing God’s very essence. Worse yet, he was being just plain foolish. There were well over a 100,000 people that his preaching had saved. I’m pretty sure he could’ve gone in, celebrated, and someone would’ve given him a great place to stay. But, no, he had to be a lonely hut building protester.

So what’s the Lord do? He gives him undeserved love. “Then the LORD God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant.” (v. 6) Something must’ve happened to Jonah’s hut (Preacher’s aren’t good builders!) so all he’s got is this plant and the Lord condemns it. A worm comes and chews it through. In the Scriptures, worms are often pictured as a part of judgment. Hell, for example, is a place where the worm doesn’t die. So a worm comes with God’s judgment on the plant and chews it through. And the plant dies in the judgment. And sure enough Jonah didn’t really like this judging, condemning God. He didn’t like this equitable, fair-with-people God especially as he personally begins to experience what that kind of God would be like for him. “God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, ‘It would be better for me to die than to live.’” (v. 8) And then the Lord asked the key question: “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” (v. 9)

His response? Disappointing. Disillusioned. And angry. He said, “It is. I’m so angry I wish I were dead.” (v. 9) And so the Lord went after his hypocrisy. “Jonah, you didn’t tend this plant. Jonah, you didn’t make it grow. Jonah, you had a relationship with this plant for less than 24 hours. And, Jonah, it’s only a plant. And yet you’re so opposed to my judgment and my condemnation that you want to die. Jonah, do you see how I can feel the same way about Nineveh? I’ve got this great city of 120,000 men. Spiritually, they don’t know “their right hand from their left.” (v. 11) “Should I not have concern (for them)?” (v. 11) Should I not have concern for them? Bam. Done. That is the end of the book. Unanswered question. Unfinished book. And one powerful cliffhanger. So incredibly powerful. The Lord goes going toe to toe with his prophet in defense of the gospel. “I don’t want the Ninevites eternally super-heated. I want them eternally chilling with me. I don’t want them suffering forever worm. I want them hanging with me in my forever garden.” Here’s what’s happening here: with the closing question of Jonah, the Lord is challenging this entire world to tell him he’s wrong to give grace. Should I not have concern for the worst of sinners?

And the question still hangs. It has for centuries now. In a way, it’s the eternal question. Do you realize that’s what’s so brilliant about this ending? You’re not supposed to ever know how Jonah responded to it. The only response you ever get to know is yours. Will you spend your time outside the city protesting, “Lord, be more fair. Be equitable with your salvation?” Will you stay outside the city and be critical of the Lord’s unfair, overly generous salvation to all the sinners? Or will you see that personally you’re worse than you ever dared deem, and more forgiven than you ever before conceived? Will you see the fight against grace as dissing God for who he is? Or will you celebrate that you too through faith in Jesus have sweet relief? Will you see yourself as unworthy and just as bad as everyone else (That’s why it has to be grace!) and join the mission of this church to bring everyone the Word so they can join the party? That is the eternal question that Jonah has hung in the air before our eyes today.

But you know what? I honestly don’t think that the Lord was fishing so much for your answer to the question. You know why I think he asked it? So he could answer it himself. Should the Lord not have concern for this Nineveh? For the world? For the worst of sinners? For you? For centuries these critical questions just hung in the air as a massive spiritual cliffhanger. Not so that you could finally answer them, but so that he could. The question hung in the air outside that city until God’s answer hung in the air outside another city. On a cross. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ is God’s answer. The Lord could be concerned. The Lord would be concerned. The Lord would die before he would allow a worm to chew a sinner. The Lord would give his life before he would allow his judgment to blast. And as inequitable and as unfair as it was, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ satisfied God’s justice so that through faith every sinner is square with God. Nineveh. Aiken. You. Answered question. And finished book. You know how? The Spirit’s letting you write the ending with the ink and pen of your life. He’s even suggesting how you might. Do what you hope Jonah did. Head back into Nineveh and celebrate with and deepen the other sinners in God’s eternal answer, Jesus Christ. What do you say? Are you in? Amen.

Jonah 3:1–10 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.” 3 Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. 4 Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” 5 The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. 6 When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. 7 This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” 10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.

Sometimes I get sermon ideas and I’m pretty sure they’re bad so I run them past my wife to get her reaction. This week I said to her, “What do you think of this one? I pretend to be Jonah. I hold a mic in my hand. (I figured out that it was a bad idea already by this point because she kept saying, “You don’t ever hold a mic. It’s on your ear.” Stubbornly I pushed on saying, “But I could this time.”) So I hold a mic in my hand. I have a pillow up there so I can do a mic drop without wrecking the mic. (She’s rolling her eyes by this point and telling me it’s cheesy. But I still push on.) I hold the mic in my hand and I preach a five-word sermon just like Jonah. Deadly seriously say, ’40 more days and Aiken will be overthrown, Bourman out.’ I then walk off the stage, sit down, and I act like the sermon’s over. That was my idea. Well, sort of, really it wasn’t my idea at all. It was Jonah’s, but it wasn’t just his idea. It was his prophetic practice. It was what he did. And I thought maybe just maybe this church should have a real experience of that.

At any rate, Jonah did an ancient mic drop and there was nothing cheesy about it. It was terrifying. For its solemnity. For its sureness. For its death. “40 more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” (v. 4) Jonah out. That’s the sermon that Jonah preached in its entirety. In Hebrew it’s just five words. Think of that. Jonah trudged probably in a caravan for well over a month to get to Nineveh. And for what? A five-word sermon. Just five little words. That should probably tell us something. And more than just that the Word of God is effective. It should tell us that for sure, but it should also clue us to what’s going on with this prophet. He’s not really into this thing. This is something the narrator has already begun hinting at. The narrator has told us that this time Jonah gets up and he does head to Nineveh. He gets up. Check one. He goes to Nineveh. Check two. But suspiciously the narrator never tells us right away whether or not Jonah preached exactly what God wanted. We do end up finally hearing him preach though and oddly it’s only a five-word sermon.

And, yes, that is odd. You’re not going to find other great examples of this in the Scriptures. You’re just not. Short sermons? Sure. But this short? Hmmmm. It should at least make us scratch our heads a little bit. How much? Well, let me tell you this. There is some speculation that Jonah had a connection to an ancient seminary called the company of the prophets. I’m willing to bet that if he had turned in this sermon to his professors there they would have told him to head back to the drawing board. That’s what my seminary professors would’ve done that to me. I’m dead serious. They would’ve looked at me with darts in their eyes. In fact, they would’ve not only sent it back to be redone, but they would’ve sat me down, told me to get serious, that souls were at stake, and to get down to properly dividing law and gospel. I know that beyond a shadow of a doubt. 40 more days and Nineveh will be overthrown is probably not the best example of preaching you’d ever hear.

There are other problems with it too beyond just that it’s short and not a great example of Christ-centered preaching. It’s that it’s uncaring. Brutally so. Did Jonah tell the people who he was? No. Did Jonah tell the people what they had done wrong? No. Did Jonah seem to care at all? No. There was nothing impassioned or loving or helpful about this warning at all. From the looks of it he showed up like some kind of prophetic Eeyore and corner by corner of the city very glumly preached, “In 40 days you’re all going to die.” Then he just walks off. Like that was the Lord’s last word on the issue. Like that’s how the Lord wanted himself represented. But let me tell you something about what happened despite this brutally short brutal message. Not a single person said, “Uh, guy who won’t tell us his name, what did we do wrong?” And not a single one of them piped up and said, “Hey haggard, glum looking prophet, we totally don’t deserve this. Why is the Lord going to rain down fire and brimstone on us? We don’t understand.”

And can I tell you this? Not everybody in ancient Nineveh was a member of ancient ISIS. There were almost certainly some with consciences. Some that ran upright businesses and tried to take care of their husbands. Some that played the ancient version of Rummy with friends and tried to help others when they were sick. Some that got their kids a good education and tried to be decent citizens. I mean this was a great, great city in the day. Nobody is all bad in a city more than four times the size of Aiken are they? Or are they? The Ninevites believed the latter. You know why? These people feared God. They saw God for who God was. They didn’t see him as Santa saying, “Yeah, there was that one guy you thought some nasty things about. No biggie. I’ll still give you presents this year.” And they didn’t treat him like he was an old grandpa who winks at sin and says, “I know how you slept with that girl in your 20’s. I know how the hormones rage. I get it.” Nor did they see him as some sort of spineless divinity who says, “Do whatever you want. Believe whatever you want. As long as you don’t hurt anybody I’m good.” No, God was feared.

And so not a one of them fought the verdict. I’m not sure that’s how it’d go down with us. I think there’d be a voice in my head saying Jonah’s either A) a wing nut or B) couldn’t possibly be talking about me. You know why? You know what I think our besetting modern sin is? We don’t fear God. We treat God like he’s a projection of our minds. He’s some Santa in the sky who’s good with us doing with our bodies whatever will make us happy. He’s some celestial grandpa who’s good with whatever I want to believe and whatever I want to do. He’s some heavenly life coach, who doesn’t give ten commands which show us our felonies, crimes and high treasons against the High King. Our spineless, go-with-the-flow divine therapist just gives 10 good suggestions. Because I love you let me be clear. If you think your body is so yours and you can do whatever you want it, go ahead and raise it from the dead too. Then you’ll figure out how yours your body really is.  And if you think they’re just 10 suggestions go ahead and just imagine if you really want to say it just that way to the God who made the universe in your upcoming court day with him. And if you think that God’s just going to go ahead and let you define morality – well – Sodom and Gomorrah thought that too.

But Nineveh didn’t. Nineveh didn’t. “The Ninevites believed God.” (v. 5) They didn’t get all huffy and offended and say, “How dare God impugn us in the least!” In fact, when God came to them and said, “you’re going to be overthrown,” they thought, “That’s totally fair. I’ve done this and this and this. I’ve believed this and this and this. I’m totally only getting what I had coming.” They believed God. How much did they believe him? From the greatest to the least. From the king to the cow. From robe to sackcloth. From throne to ashes. That’s how much they believed God. They believed God so much that they wanted to wear on their bodies how they felt about themselves and their judgment. They believed God so much that they didn’t just want to wear it. They wanted to feel it. They wanted their mouths slaked with the thirst they knew they deserved. So they didn’t drink. And they wanted their stomachs to growl with the growl that God felt toward them. So they didn’t eat. That’s how much they believed God about themselves. You know what that’s called? Contrition. Contrition is terrors smiting the conscience through the knowledge of sin.

There was just one big problem. The Lord did manage to use Jonah’s impersonal, uncaring, glum, five-word sermon for so much good. So much good. The Ninevites had come to know themselves. Not who they wanted to be, but who they actually were as God saw them. And that was a great good. In fact, I should probably point out that this still is the greatest and largest ever conversion on that front ever in the history of the world. I’m not sure Paul, Peter, or even Jesus ever accomplished so much in a single sermon. Well over a 100,000 people came to see themselves as they were. This was amazing, amazing, amazing. There was just one massive, awful problem with Jonah’s sermon. It had turned the Ninevites away from themselves, but it had given them nowhere to turn to. It had convicted them that they were sinners, but it hadn’t told them where to find forgiveness. It had worked contrition, but it hadn’t given them a place to put their faith. Contrition is good, but never by itself. By itself it leads to despair – to the spiritual black hole of being convinced that you’re headed to a very bad place and you’re never coming back. Ever.

Contrition happens along God’s way, but it’s never his destination. So the law and condemnation is never God’s last word. It’s his starting word, his humbling word, his terrifying word; but it’s never his final word. The gospel is always and only that. You know who got that when Jonah didn’t? The king did. At least, sort of. In his edict to all of Nineveh he said, “Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” (v. 9) You can see where Jonah left them with his preaching. Not knowing. They literally had no idea from Jonah what would happen when they turned away from themselves to God. They had no idea. The King seemed to. Why? I can’t tell you. Had he heard the story about a bad prophet getting mercy in a fish? Did he think to himself, “Why in the world would God send his prophet to us just to let us know we’re all going down in flames? Perhaps what God really wants is for us to turn to him.” I have no idea. What I do know is that the king pointed them to repentance. He told people to turn from themselves to God for compassion and for mercy.

And such is the mercy of God that that teensy, teensy bit of hope against hope kind of gospel was there and it was believed. It was barely there, but it was there and the Spirit must’ve worked with that. Because then it happened. “He (God) relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.” (v. 10) You know why that worked? Let me tell you what’s not happening here. This isn’t God thinking, “You’ve sackclothed and ashed this thing good enough. You’ve felt enough terror. That’s compensated me for your sin.” That’s not what’s happening here. God can, does, and will deny you anything that’s about you. If you come to him and say, “I’ve sackclothed and ashed this thing awesome, Lord, check it out.” He’ll deny it. Why? Because using sackcloth and ashes that way is sin. You know why? You know what the biggest sin is? The essence of sin is being turned in on yourself. You know how you do that in the most profound way? You try to save yourself. You forget about God’s Christ and you try to save yourself. “Lord, I’ve beat myself up enough now. I’ve made up for my sin.” Not going to work. Repentance is the exact opposite. It’s turning from you to God for his pure mercy.

And that works. You know why? Because while God can, does, and will deny you when you bring yourself, he cannot deny Christ when bring him. He cannot, does not, and will not deny Christ. When you hold up Christ to God, it’s never you that gets overthrown its always God’s anger. That is what Christians have always believed. Let me prove this with what I think is one of the best explanations of where repentances always lands in something called the Augsburg Confession. “Now, repentance consists properly of these two parts: One is contrition… The other is faith, which is born of the Gospel, or of absolution, and believes that for Christ’s sake, sins are forgiven, comforts the conscience, and delivers it from terrors.” And that is the goal of repentance Repentance always arrives at and ends with Christ. This is why Peter when he preached one of the first Christian sermons ever preached repentance. And in that sermon he said repentance is like sweet tea on a summer day or a nice pool when it’s in the 90’s. No, he didn’t quite say it that way, but he did say repentance is “refreshing.” (Acts 3:19) Because it brings you to Christ and there your fear turns to faith. And there your terror turns to confidence. And there your sin turns to forgiveness.

And that is refreshing. It’s the taking off of the sackcloth of sin and putting on the kingly robe of Christ. It’s the leaving behind of the thirst that comes from trying to appease God’s anger and the sipping of the sweet tea of God’s forgiveness in Christ. That’s what God is after for you just as he was with the Ninevites. God always meant to end with relent. God never meant for his law or for his judgment to be his last word. He did mean for it to terrify you. He did mean it to turn you from you. He did mean to move you from despair to faith. So once he has you turning from yourself, he holds up his Christ before your eyes and draws you in. So you believe and you’re comforted. So you don’t have to hope against hope. So you don’t have to say, “Who knows? God may relent.” But so you can say, “I know. Christ was overthrown on the cross so I never will be.” And once you’re there – and only once you’re there – does he allow the mic to drop and the preaching to stop and his final word to be spoken over you –  the word of life, forgiveness, and peace that he literally died to speak over you: Christ. Bourman out. Amen.

Jonah 3:1–10 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.” 3 Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. 4 Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” 5 The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. 6 When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. 7 This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” 10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.

Sometimes I get sermon ideas and I’m pretty sure they’re bad so I run them past my wife to get her reaction. This week I said to her, “What do you think of this one? I pretend to be Jonah. I hold a mic in my hand. (I figured out that it was a bad idea already by this point because she kept saying, “You don’t ever hold a mic. It’s on your ear.” Stubbornly I pushed on saying, “But I could this time.”) So I hold a mic in my hand. I have a pillow up there so I can do a mic drop without wrecking the mic. (She’s rolling her eyes by this point and telling me it’s cheesy. But I still push on.) I hold the mic in my hand and I preach a five-word sermon just like Jonah. Deadly seriously say, ’40 more days and Aiken will be overthrown, Bourman out.’ I then walk off the stage, sit down, and I act like the sermon’s over. That was my idea. Well, sort of, really it wasn’t my idea at all. It was Jonah’s, but it wasn’t just his idea. It was his prophetic practice. It was what he did. And I thought maybe just maybe this church should have a real experience of that.

At any rate, Jonah did an ancient mic drop and there was nothing cheesy about it. It was terrifying. For its solemnity. For its sureness. For its death. “40 more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” (v. 4) Jonah out. That’s the sermon that Jonah preached in its entirety. In Hebrew it’s just five words. Think of that. Jonah trudged probably in a caravan for well over a month to get to Nineveh. And for what? A five-word sermon. Just five little words. That should probably tell us something. And more than just that the Word of God is effective. It should tell us that for sure, but it should also clue us to what’s going on with this prophet. He’s not really into this thing. This is something the narrator has already begun hinting at. The narrator has told us that this time Jonah gets up and he does head to Nineveh. He gets up. Check one. He goes to Nineveh. Check two. But suspiciously the narrator never tells us right away whether or not Jonah preached exactly what God wanted. We do end up finally hearing him preach though and oddly it’s only a five-word sermon.

And, yes, that is odd. You’re not going to find other great examples of this in the Scriptures. You’re just not. Short sermons? Sure. But this short? Hmmmm. It should at least make us scratch our heads a little bit. How much? Well, let me tell you this. There is some speculation that Jonah had a connection to an ancient seminary called the company of the prophets. I’m willing to bet that if he had turned in this sermon to his professors there they would have told him to head back to the drawing board. That’s what my seminary professors would’ve done that to me. I’m dead serious. They would’ve looked at me with darts in their eyes. In fact, they would’ve not only sent it back to be redone, but they would’ve sat me down, told me to get serious, that souls were at stake, and to get down to properly dividing law and gospel. I know that beyond a shadow of a doubt. 40 more days and Nineveh will be overthrown is probably not the best example of preaching you’d ever hear.

There are other problems with it too beyond just that it’s short and not a great example of Christ-centered preaching. It’s that it’s uncaring. Brutally so. Did Jonah tell the people who he was? No. Did Jonah tell the people what they had done wrong? No. Did Jonah seem to care at all? No. There was nothing impassioned or loving or helpful about this warning at all. From the looks of it he showed up like some kind of prophetic Eeyore and corner by corner of the city very glumly preached, “In 40 days you’re all going to die.” Then he just walks off. Like that was the Lord’s last word on the issue. Like that’s how the Lord wanted himself represented. But let me tell you something about what happened despite this brutally short brutal message. Not a single person said, “Uh, guy who won’t tell us his name, what did we do wrong?” And not a single one of them piped up and said, “Hey haggard, glum looking prophet, we totally don’t deserve this. Why is the Lord going to rain down fire and brimstone on us? We don’t understand.”

And can I tell you this? Not everybody in ancient Nineveh was a member of ancient ISIS. There were almost certainly some with consciences. Some that ran upright businesses and tried to take care of their husbands. Some that played the ancient version of Rummy with friends and tried to help others when they were sick. Some that got their kids a good education and tried to be decent citizens. I mean this was a great, great city in the day. Nobody is all bad in a city more than four times the size of Aiken are they? Or are they? The Ninevites believed the latter. You know why? These people feared God. They saw God for who God was. They didn’t see him as Santa saying, “Yeah, there was that one guy you thought some nasty things about. No biggie. I’ll still give you presents this year.” And they didn’t treat him like he was an old grandpa who winks at sin and says, “I know how you slept with that girl in your 20’s. I know how the hormones rage. I get it.” Nor did they see him as some sort of spineless divinity who says, “Do whatever you want. Believe whatever you want. As long as you don’t hurt anybody I’m good.” No, God was feared.

And so not a one of them fought the verdict. I’m not sure that’s how it’d go down with us. I think there’d be a voice in my head saying Jonah’s either A) a wing nut or B) couldn’t possibly be talking about me. You know why? You know what I think our besetting modern sin is? We don’t fear God. We treat God like he’s a projection of our minds. He’s some Santa in the sky who’s good with us doing with our bodies whatever will make us happy. He’s some celestial grandpa who’s good with whatever I want to believe and whatever I want to do. He’s some heavenly life coach, who doesn’t give ten commands which show us our felonies, crimes and high treasons against the High King. Our spineless, go-with-the-flow divine therapist just gives 10 good suggestions. Because I love you let me be clear. If you think your body is so yours and you can do whatever you want it, go ahead and raise it from the dead too. Then you’ll figure out how yours your body really is.  And if you think they’re just 10 suggestions go ahead and just imagine if you really want to say it just that way to the God who made the universe in your upcoming court day with him. And if you think that God’s just going to go ahead and let you define morality – well – Sodom and Gomorrah thought that too.

But Nineveh didn’t. Nineveh didn’t. “The Ninevites believed God.” (v. 5) They didn’t get all huffy and offended and say, “How dare God impugn us in the least!” In fact, when God came to them and said, “you’re going to be overthrown,” they thought, “That’s totally fair. I’ve done this and this and this. I’ve believed this and this and this. I’m totally only getting what I had coming.” They believed God. How much did they believe him? From the greatest to the least. From the king to the cow. From robe to sackcloth. From throne to ashes. That’s how much they believed God. They believed God so much that they wanted to wear on their bodies how they felt about themselves and their judgment. They believed God so much that they didn’t just want to wear it. They wanted to feel it. They wanted their mouths slaked with the thirst they knew they deserved. So they didn’t drink. And they wanted their stomachs to growl with the growl that God felt toward them. So they didn’t eat. That’s how much they believed God about themselves. You know what that’s called? Contrition. Contrition is terrors smiting the conscience through the knowledge of sin.

There was just one big problem. The Lord did manage to use Jonah’s impersonal, uncaring, glum, five-word sermon for so much good. So much good. The Ninevites had come to know themselves. Not who they wanted to be, but who they actually were as God saw them. And that was a great good. In fact, I should probably point out that this still is the greatest and largest ever conversion on that front ever in the history of the world. I’m not sure Paul, Peter, or even Jesus ever accomplished so much in a single sermon. Well over a 100,000 people came to see themselves as they were. This was amazing, amazing, amazing. There was just one massive, awful problem with Jonah’s sermon. It had turned the Ninevites away from themselves, but it had given them nowhere to turn to. It had convicted them that they were sinners, but it hadn’t told them where to find forgiveness. It had worked contrition, but it hadn’t given them a place to put their faith. Contrition is good, but never by itself. By itself it leads to despair – to the spiritual black hole of being convinced that you’re headed to a very bad place and you’re never coming back. Ever.

Contrition happens along God’s way, but it’s never his destination. So the law and condemnation is never God’s last word. It’s his starting word, his humbling word, his terrifying word; but it’s never his final word. The gospel is always and only that. You know who got that when Jonah didn’t? The king did. At least, sort of. In his edict to all of Nineveh he said, “Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” (v. 9) You can see where Jonah left them with his preaching. Not knowing. They literally had no idea from Jonah what would happen when they turned away from themselves to God. They had no idea. The King seemed to. Why? I can’t tell you. Had he heard the story about a bad prophet getting mercy in a fish? Did he think to himself, “Why in the world would God send his prophet to us just to let us know we’re all going down in flames? Perhaps what God really wants is for us to turn to him.” I have no idea. What I do know is that the king pointed them to repentance. He told people to turn from themselves to God for compassion and for mercy.

And such is the mercy of God that that teensy, teensy bit of hope against hope kind of gospel was there and it was believed. It was barely there, but it was there and the Spirit must’ve worked with that. Because then it happened. “He (God) relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.” (v. 10) You know why that worked? Let me tell you what’s not happening here. This isn’t God thinking, “You’ve sackclothed and ashed this thing good enough. You’ve felt enough terror. That’s compensated me for your sin.” That’s not what’s happening here. God can, does, and will deny you anything that’s about you. If you come to him and say, “I’ve sackclothed and ashed this thing awesome, Lord, check it out.” He’ll deny it. Why? Because using sackcloth and ashes that way is sin. You know why? You know what the biggest sin is? The essence of sin is being turned in on yourself. You know how you do that in the most profound way? You try to save yourself. You forget about God’s Christ and you try to save yourself. “Lord, I’ve beat myself up enough now. I’ve made up for my sin.” Not going to work. Repentance is the exact opposite. It’s turning from you to God for his pure mercy.

And that works. You know why? Because while God can, does, and will deny you when you bring yourself, he cannot deny Christ when bring him. He cannot, does not, and will not deny Christ. When you hold up Christ to God, it’s never you that gets overthrown its always God’s anger. That is what Christians have always believed. Let me prove this with what I think is one of the best explanations of where repentances always lands in something called the Augsburg Confession. “Now, repentance consists properly of these two parts: One is contrition… The other is faith, which is born of the Gospel, or of absolution, and believes that for Christ’s sake, sins are forgiven, comforts the conscience, and delivers it from terrors.” And that is the goal of repentance Repentance always arrives at and ends with Christ. This is why Peter when he preached one of the first Christian sermons ever preached repentance. And in that sermon he said repentance is like sweet tea on a summer day or a nice pool when it’s in the 90’s. No, he didn’t quite say it that way, but he did say repentance is “refreshing.” (Acts 3:19) Because it brings you to Christ and there your fear turns to faith. And there your terror turns to confidence. And there your sin turns to forgiveness.

And that is refreshing. It’s the taking off of the sackcloth of sin and putting on the kingly robe of Christ. It’s the leaving behind of the thirst that comes from trying to appease God’s anger and the sipping of the sweet tea of God’s forgiveness in Christ. That’s what God is after for you just as he was with the Ninevites. God always meant to end with relent. God never meant for his law or for his judgment to be his last word. He did mean for it to terrify you. He did mean it to turn you from you. He did mean to move you from despair to faith. So once he has you turning from yourself, he holds up his Christ before your eyes and draws you in. So you believe and you’re comforted. So you don’t have to hope against hope. So you don’t have to say, “Who knows? God may relent.” But so you can say, “I know. Christ was overthrown on the cross so I never will be.” And once you’re there – and only once you’re there – does he allow the mic to drop and the preaching to stop and his final word to be spoken over you –  the word of life, forgiveness, and peace that he literally died to speak over you: Christ. Bourman out. Amen.

Jonah 1:17–2:10 Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. 2 He said: “In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry. 3 You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me. 4 I said, ‘I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple.’ 5 The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head. 6 To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever. But you, Lord my God, brought my life up from the pit. 7 “When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple. 8 “Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them. 9 But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord.’ ” 10 And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.

Ok. Let’s just get the uncomfortable part over with. Let’s talk about vomiting. I’m not trying to be sensationalistic by bringing up a word that for all of us is stuffed with the meaning of 2 am nausea, sick children, or the way you feel after riding a roller coaster. I’m bringing up the word right now because really it’s an interpretive key to what’s going here in Jonah chapter two. You noticed how it ended right? “And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.” (v. 10) That’s not, “And the Lord told the fish to give up Jonah, and Jonah walked calmly out onto dry land.” Or, “And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it gentled deposited him onto the shore with a nice fin on the back.” There’s none of that. What is there? There is one nauseous fish – one that’s poor and sick and desperately needs to get Jonah out of his system. And that tells you something. Not biological by the way. The Lord’s not trying to turn us into marine biologists that study Jonah two to discover what kind of terrible indigestion a sperm whale or great shark might after they swallow and house a human for a few days. The Lord is signaling something massive and critical about Jonah’s prayer that happened inside that great fish.  

What is he signaling? Well, that for the most the prayer is nauseating. I know. I know. It’s no fun critiquing anybody’s prayer. But we have to. That’s in this case what it’s there for. Did you know that? There is just no world where Jonah here functions as a model Christian. He’s a sort of antitype – the Christian we never want to be. We looked at that just like week. In Jonah one you have pagans outperforming Jonah in prayer. Lots outperforming Jonah in prophecy. And you have the wind, the waves, the boat, the pagans, and even a great whale doing exactly what the Lord says. Everything is following orders. Everything except Jonah. In fact, did you know that commentators call Jonah biblical satire? Jonah is like The Onion of the Old Testament. He’s the Saturday Night Live caricature of Christianity. He’s the punch line to every true and bad thing you could say about Christians. He’s hypocritical, unloving, selfish, self-righteous, and disobedient. In fact, there’s a slave song that comes from All Saints Parish right here in South Carolina that says, “God sent Jonah to Ninevy land. Jonah disobey my God command. Don’t you do that!” And that refrain repeats itself to make the point quite strongly.

And so it shouldn’t surprise us to find a prayer from Jonah here in Jonah 2 that’s nauseating for the Lord to deal with. What’s sickening about it? If you look at it from afar you notice right away that it’s incredibly narcissistic. In fact, what he does in the prayer is take Psalms, songs that were used for worship, and replace the Lord in them for himself as the main character. How much does he do this? Twenty-four times in Jonah’s prayer Jonah emphasizes himself with words like, “I,” and, “me.” Twenty-four times. And the prayer is eight verses long. So do the math. On average Jonah is finding a way three times per verse to insert himself into the prayer. Not positive. The Lord himself manages to make it into a prayer a full third less than Jonah. Again. Not positive. But, really, I’m just getting started here. There are other massive problems with what’s going on here. Consider, for example, how long it took Jonah to get to prayer. There he was marinating in that fish. Just stewing there. Can you imagine? The narrator lets us because he doesn’t tell us what it was like. There Jonah sat in the darkness, in the sludge, in the humidity. So depressing and so bad. It takes Jonah three days – three days! – to concoct any sort of prayer at all. Three days.

And then when he does? The prayer’s nothing like you might expect. You know what we’d expect? I’ll tell you what we’d expect. We’d expect him to be pouring himself out before the Lord with tears saying, “Lord, I really messed this up. I’m sorry. Forgive me for running. Thank you for your mercy and not destroying me in the storm. I see how merciful you want to be. I’ll go give the Ninevites mercy now. Amen.” Boom. Mic drop. That’s a way better prayer. Way better and I didn’t spend close to three days trying to come up with it. But what comes instead? Is there repentance? Did he change his mind at all? Well, you tell me. Take this first part of his prayer for example, “You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me.” (v. 3) You’re probably noticing something that sounds familiar. He’s directly quoting Psalm 42, which is awesome. Except did you notice how he’s using it? “God, you did this. God, you put me here. God, it’s your fault.” Now I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the best way to approach this issue. In fact, if I’m God I’d be saying, “Yeah, Jonah, buddy, you did this. I never wanted you here. I wanted you in Nineveh. When are you going to get that?”

And then as if that weren’t bad enough, Jonah then goes after former pagan sailors who had actually become more obedient than him. Those pagan sailors had heard one Word from the Lord, converted, and started immediately praying to him and living for him. But what does Jonah do in his prayer? He throws the good guys under the bus like he’s better. “Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them.” (v. 8) Do you see what he’s saying? “Lord, I’m better than those guys. I never worshipped those worthless idols like those guys. I deserve your faithfulness and your love.” Unsurprisingly, the Lord doesn’t answer that prayer. So Jonah ramps up his nauseating prayer even more. He says, “But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good.” (v. 9) You know – the tried (but not true) attempt to bargain and barter your way to salvation with God. “God if I do this, then you have to do that.” “Lord, just get me out of here and I’ll keep my vows. I’ll go to Jerusalem. I’ll complete my sacrifices. You just need to let me out of this fish.” What a deal, right? “God, I’ll go to Jerusalem when you told me to go to Nineveh.” Smashing prayer. Incredible bargain, right? Not so much.

Now if you’re still with me, you’re beginning to get it. There was no way that Jonah is going to go walking out that fish. This was nauseating. The bad comparisons. The pious sounding words from Scripture that Jonah had reshaped with his narcissism. The attempts to bargain and barter his way to salvation. All nauseating. And I think Jonah would’ve stayed in that great fish except that after he had gotten all the sickening words out of his system he finally said two true ones. In Hebrew they’re just two little words. Yeshuata Ladonai. “Salvation comes from the Lord.” (v. 9) Yeshuata. Joshua. Joshua is Hebrew equivalent to the New Testament word Jesus. Salvation comes from the Lord. Salvation comes, yes, finally from Jesus. And that’s when it happened. It’s like the Lord was saying, “Ding. Ding. Ding.” And finally the fish’s jaws spring open and no matter how nauseating Jonah had personally been he was saved. All the way saved. All the way saved. Despite his misuses of Scripture. Despite his desperate attempts to be better than others. Despite his attempts to bargain and barter his way to salvation. He was saved. Because ultimately the Lord brought him to Jesus.

This, by the way, is not my private interpretation of Jonah 2. You know where this interpretation shows up most magnificently in the life of the church? It shows up in a Christ-centered confession that was written about 500 years ago called the Apology to the Augsburg Confession. Commenting on Jonah 2 that confession says, “Every confidence is futile except a confidence in mercy. Mercy preserves us; our own merits and our own effort do not preserve us.” Do you see how brilliant that is? And do you see how in line that is with what happened? Right here in Jonah two you can make a list. And you will see that Jonah’s works didn’t get him one ounce of mercy. Not a lick. Jonah prayed hard. Didn’t work. Jonah quoted the Bible. Didn’t work. Jonah compared himself to other sinners. Didn’t work. Jonah bargained and bartered for his salvation by promising to be good. Didn’t work. Jonah tried everything! There is one thing and one thing alone that worked. When Jonah finally had stewed long enough and tried hard enough to figure that he wasn’t going to do it. That he couldn’t. That his proper liturgical prayers and his promises to be good and his supposedly better adherence to the Lord than others were bunk. That there was just one thing left. Yeshuata Ladonai. “Lord, you have to do this.” That’s when the Lord sprung him.

I hope you realize by now that’s why this prayer is in here. It’s here to teach, but not in the way you might think. It’s not here so we can learn the perfect words to make God happy or to discover just the right bargain or just the right comparison to get us mercy. It’s so that we’ll just quit all that. That we’ll see it for what it is:  junk. We’ll see that even our best prayers aren’t all that great. They come from hearts with twisted motives. They occasionally make poor use of Scripture. And our comparisons to other people aren’t nearly as clear-eyed as we want to think. We all have hidden hypocrisies. And bargaining? Well, I’m pretty sure that whatever we think we can offer the Lord he already has. And so what’s left for us? There is only mercy. There is only believing that the Lord takes deep rebellion and forgives it. There is only trusting that the Lord takes outright denial of him and covers it when we sit under his salvation. There is only being confident not that we’re great people, but that the Lord’s one great, giving, self-sacrificing God who gives mercy.

Mercy that would need to be quite large in this case. You realize that’s what this prayer got right? The extent of mercy; how low it would have to come. Jonah got that part right. He understood that he was “banished from your sight.” (v. 4) That his deserved banishment was to the lowest of the lows. “To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever.” (v. 6) Forever. That was not Jonah being overly dramatic. This was Jonah thinking clearly. This was forever. Jonah had a concept of a forever underworld that was a forever barring in – an eternal prison. In a very real way in that great fish, he was living that. He didn’t know if he’d ever get out. Do you see that? The Lord’s teaching us something huge here. This isn’t just a fish story. And it’s not just a story about how to get spit out of a fish. This is a story about how to get sprung from being six feet under; about how to escape the very real Davey Jones’ Locker. But it’s more than that too. It’s a heaven and hell story. It’s a story about how to get sprung from an eternal underworld that threatens to bar one in forever; and it’s a story about how to take a forever banishment from real life off the table.

And the answer couldn’t be clearer. It doesn’t come from praying proper prayers. It doesn’t come from quoting Scripture. It doesn’t come from being better than somebody else. And it doesn’t come from bargaining or bartering your way to heaven. Mercy only comes through faith in the Lord’s mercy. The sort that the Spirit so wants you to see here. Do you think it was just some kind of historical fluke that Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights? Don’t you see that that’s why Jesus obsessed and preached and taught his three-day journey in and out of the grave so many times? Because he is the reason for Yeshuata Ladonai. He is the “something greater than Jonah” (Matt. 12:41) that he himself talked about. Jonah said he wore seaweed as a crown. Jesus wore thorns. Jonah described how he sank under the weight of his own personal sin. Jesus sank under the weight of the sins of the world. Jonah told us how he sank to the depths of the ocean. Jesus sank to the depths of hell. Jonah made the fish sick and was spit out onto dry land. Jesus was so great that after three days when death spit him out onto the shore of eternal resurrection life, it wasn’t because death was sick of Jesus. It was because death was dead because of Jesus. Jesus is the Greater Jonah. He is the one who saves with mercy that goes as low and as far as it must.

And he’s always had that kind of mercy for you. He was merciful to you before you made a single vow to him. He was merciful to you before you prayed a single prayer to him. He was merciful to you before you quoted a single Bible verse or confessed a single sin. He was merciful to you before you followed him, obeyed him, or ever even knew who he was. And you know what’s even better? He’s that same Jesus. He’s merciful to you when your prayers kind of stink. He’s merciful to you when your confessions are a bit half-hearted. He’s merciful to you and to anyone whose life looks a bit like it’s been modeled after Jonah’s badly concocted prayer, but who right there in the mess simply trust. To you the Lord says, “Ding. Ding. Ding.” And you get tossed back out into the land of living. Perhaps not from Davey Jones’ Locker, but definitely from the belly of the earth. Perhaps not from the stinking, soupy mess of the guts of a fish, but certainly from an eternal barring in – from the place that makes fish guts look like a luxury hotel. Jesus springs us from that. And he springs us to the shores of eternal resurrection life. That is what the lesser Jonah finally came to. He came to rely only on the essence of God; who he is and what he does. The Lord took him away from his sputtering and his trying and his committing and brought him to Jesus about whom he preached a brilliant two-word sermon. “Yeshuata Ladonai.” Salvation comes from the Lord. And then do you know what happened? It did. Amen. 

Jonah 1:17–2:10 Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. 2 He said: “In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry. 3 You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me. 4 I said, ‘I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple.’ 5 The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me; seaweed was wrapped around my head. 6 To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever. But you, Lord my God, brought my life up from the pit. 7 “When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple. 8 “Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them. 9 But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the Lord.’ ” 10 And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.

Ok. Let’s just get the uncomfortable part over with. Let’s talk about vomiting. I’m not trying to be sensationalistic by bringing up a word that for all of us is stuffed with the meaning of 2 am nausea, sick children, or the way you feel after riding a roller coaster. I’m bringing up the word right now because really it’s an interpretive key to what’s going here in Jonah chapter two. You noticed how it ended right? “And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.” (v. 10) That’s not, “And the Lord told the fish to give up Jonah, and Jonah walked calmly out onto dry land.” Or, “And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it gentled deposited him onto the shore with a nice fin on the back.” There’s none of that. What is there? There is one nauseous fish – one that’s poor and sick and desperately needs to get Jonah out of his system. And that tells you something. Not biological by the way. The Lord’s not trying to turn us into marine biologists that study Jonah two to discover what kind of terrible indigestion a sperm whale or great shark might after they swallow and house a human for a few days. The Lord is signaling something massive and critical about Jonah’s prayer that happened inside that great fish.  

What is he signaling? Well, that for the most the prayer is nauseating. I know. I know. It’s no fun critiquing anybody’s prayer. But we have to. That’s in this case what it’s there for. Did you know that? There is just no world where Jonah here functions as a model Christian. He’s a sort of antitype – the Christian we never want to be. We looked at that just like week. In Jonah one you have pagans outperforming Jonah in prayer. Lots outperforming Jonah in prophecy. And you have the wind, the waves, the boat, the pagans, and even a great whale doing exactly what the Lord says. Everything is following orders. Everything except Jonah. In fact, did you know that commentators call Jonah biblical satire? Jonah is like The Onion of the Old Testament. He’s the Saturday Night Live caricature of Christianity. He’s the punch line to every true and bad thing you could say about Christians. He’s hypocritical, unloving, selfish, self-righteous, and disobedient. In fact, there’s a slave song that comes from All Saints Parish right here in South Carolina that says, “God sent Jonah to Ninevy land. Jonah disobey my God command. Don’t you do that!” And that refrain repeats itself to make the point quite strongly.

And so it shouldn’t surprise us to find a prayer from Jonah here in Jonah 2 that’s nauseating for the Lord to deal with. What’s sickening about it? If you look at it from afar you notice right away that it’s incredibly narcissistic. In fact, what he does in the prayer is take Psalms, songs that were used for worship, and replace the Lord in them for himself as the main character. How much does he do this? Twenty-four times in Jonah’s prayer Jonah emphasizes himself with words like, “I,” and, “me.” Twenty-four times. And the prayer is eight verses long. So do the math. On average Jonah is finding a way three times per verse to insert himself into the prayer. Not positive. The Lord himself manages to make it into a prayer a full third less than Jonah. Again. Not positive. But, really, I’m just getting started here. There are other massive problems with what’s going on here. Consider, for example, how long it took Jonah to get to prayer. There he was marinating in that fish. Just stewing there. Can you imagine? The narrator lets us because he doesn’t tell us what it was like. There Jonah sat in the darkness, in the sludge, in the humidity. So depressing and so bad. It takes Jonah three days – three days! – to concoct any sort of prayer at all. Three days.

And then when he does? The prayer’s nothing like you might expect. You know what we’d expect? I’ll tell you what we’d expect. We’d expect him to be pouring himself out before the Lord with tears saying, “Lord, I really messed this up. I’m sorry. Forgive me for running. Thank you for your mercy and not destroying me in the storm. I see how merciful you want to be. I’ll go give the Ninevites mercy now. Amen.” Boom. Mic drop. That’s a way better prayer. Way better and I didn’t spend close to three days trying to come up with it. But what comes instead? Is there repentance? Did he change his mind at all? Well, you tell me. Take this first part of his prayer for example, “You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me.” (v. 3) You’re probably noticing something that sounds familiar. He’s directly quoting Psalm 42, which is awesome. Except did you notice how he’s using it? “God, you did this. God, you put me here. God, it’s your fault.” Now I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the best way to approach this issue. In fact, if I’m God I’d be saying, “Yeah, Jonah, buddy, you did this. I never wanted you here. I wanted you in Nineveh. When are you going to get that?”

And then as if that weren’t bad enough, Jonah then goes after former pagan sailors who had actually become more obedient than him. Those pagan sailors had heard one Word from the Lord, converted, and started immediately praying to him and living for him. But what does Jonah do in his prayer? He throws the good guys under the bus like he’s better. “Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them.” (v. 8) Do you see what he’s saying? “Lord, I’m better than those guys. I never worshipped those worthless idols like those guys. I deserve your faithfulness and your love.” Unsurprisingly, the Lord doesn’t answer that prayer. So Jonah ramps up his nauseating prayer even more. He says, “But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good.” (v. 9) You know – the tried (but not true) attempt to bargain and barter your way to salvation with God. “God if I do this, then you have to do that.” “Lord, just get me out of here and I’ll keep my vows. I’ll go to Jerusalem. I’ll complete my sacrifices. You just need to let me out of this fish.” What a deal, right? “God, I’ll go to Jerusalem when you told me to go to Nineveh.” Smashing prayer. Incredible bargain, right? Not so much.

Now if you’re still with me, you’re beginning to get it. There was no way that Jonah is going to go walking out that fish. This was nauseating. The bad comparisons. The pious sounding words from Scripture that Jonah had reshaped with his narcissism. The attempts to bargain and barter his way to salvation. All nauseating. And I think Jonah would’ve stayed in that great fish except that after he had gotten all the sickening words out of his system he finally said two true ones. In Hebrew they’re just two little words. Yeshuata Ladonai. “Salvation comes from the Lord.” (v. 9) Yeshuata. Joshua. Joshua is Hebrew equivalent to the New Testament word Jesus. Salvation comes from the Lord. Salvation comes, yes, finally from Jesus. And that’s when it happened. It’s like the Lord was saying, “Ding. Ding. Ding.” And finally the fish’s jaws spring open and no matter how nauseating Jonah had personally been he was saved. All the way saved. All the way saved. Despite his misuses of Scripture. Despite his desperate attempts to be better than others. Despite his attempts to bargain and barter his way to salvation. He was saved. Because ultimately the Lord brought him to Jesus.

This, by the way, is not my private interpretation of Jonah 2. You know where this interpretation shows up most magnificently in the life of the church? It shows up in a Christ-centered confession that was written about 500 years ago called the Apology to the Augsburg Confession. Commenting on Jonah 2 that confession says, “Every confidence is futile except a confidence in mercy. Mercy preserves us; our own merits and our own effort do not preserve us.” Do you see how brilliant that is? And do you see how in line that is with what happened? Right here in Jonah two you can make a list. And you will see that Jonah’s works didn’t get him one ounce of mercy. Not a lick. Jonah prayed hard. Didn’t work. Jonah quoted the Bible. Didn’t work. Jonah compared himself to other sinners. Didn’t work. Jonah bargained and bartered for his salvation by promising to be good. Didn’t work. Jonah tried everything! There is one thing and one thing alone that worked. When Jonah finally had stewed long enough and tried hard enough to figure that he wasn’t going to do it. That he couldn’t. That his proper liturgical prayers and his promises to be good and his supposedly better adherence to the Lord than others were bunk. That there was just one thing left. Yeshuata Ladonai. “Lord, you have to do this.” That’s when the Lord sprung him.

I hope you realize by now that’s why this prayer is in here. It’s here to teach, but not in the way you might think. It’s not here so we can learn the perfect words to make God happy or to discover just the right bargain or just the right comparison to get us mercy. It’s so that we’ll just quit all that. That we’ll see it for what it is:  junk. We’ll see that even our best prayers aren’t all that great. They come from hearts with twisted motives. They occasionally make poor use of Scripture. And our comparisons to other people aren’t nearly as clear-eyed as we want to think. We all have hidden hypocrisies. And bargaining? Well, I’m pretty sure that whatever we think we can offer the Lord he already has. And so what’s left for us? There is only mercy. There is only believing that the Lord takes deep rebellion and forgives it. There is only trusting that the Lord takes outright denial of him and covers it when we sit under his salvation. There is only being confident not that we’re great people, but that the Lord’s one great, giving, self-sacrificing God who gives mercy.

Mercy that would need to be quite large in this case. You realize that’s what this prayer got right? The extent of mercy; how low it would have to come. Jonah got that part right. He understood that he was “banished from your sight.” (v. 4) That his deserved banishment was to the lowest of the lows. “To the roots of the mountains I sank down; the earth beneath barred me in forever.” (v. 6) Forever. That was not Jonah being overly dramatic. This was Jonah thinking clearly. This was forever. Jonah had a concept of a forever underworld that was a forever barring in – an eternal prison. In a very real way in that great fish, he was living that. He didn’t know if he’d ever get out. Do you see that? The Lord’s teaching us something huge here. This isn’t just a fish story. And it’s not just a story about how to get spit out of a fish. This is a story about how to get sprung from being six feet under; about how to escape the very real Davey Jones’ Locker. But it’s more than that too. It’s a heaven and hell story. It’s a story about how to get sprung from an eternal underworld that threatens to bar one in forever; and it’s a story about how to take a forever banishment from real life off the table.

And the answer couldn’t be clearer. It doesn’t come from praying proper prayers. It doesn’t come from quoting Scripture. It doesn’t come from being better than somebody else. And it doesn’t come from bargaining or bartering your way to heaven. Mercy only comes through faith in the Lord’s mercy. The sort that the Spirit so wants you to see here. Do you think it was just some kind of historical fluke that Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights? Don’t you see that that’s why Jesus obsessed and preached and taught his three-day journey in and out of the grave so many times? Because he is the reason for Yeshuata Ladonai. He is the “something greater than Jonah” (Matt. 12:41) that he himself talked about. Jonah said he wore seaweed as a crown. Jesus wore thorns. Jonah described how he sank under the weight of his own personal sin. Jesus sank under the weight of the sins of the world. Jonah told us how he sank to the depths of the ocean. Jesus sank to the depths of hell. Jonah made the fish sick and was spit out onto dry land. Jesus was so great that after three days when death spit him out onto the shore of eternal resurrection life, it wasn’t because death was sick of Jesus. It was because death was dead because of Jesus. Jesus is the Greater Jonah. He is the one who saves with mercy that goes as low and as far as it must.

And he’s always had that kind of mercy for you. He was merciful to you before you made a single vow to him. He was merciful to you before you prayed a single prayer to him. He was merciful to you before you quoted a single Bible verse or confessed a single sin. He was merciful to you before you followed him, obeyed him, or ever even knew who he was. And you know what’s even better? He’s that same Jesus. He’s merciful to you when your prayers kind of stink. He’s merciful to you when your confessions are a bit half-hearted. He’s merciful to you and to anyone whose life looks a bit like it’s been modeled after Jonah’s badly concocted prayer, but who right there in the mess simply trust. To you the Lord says, “Ding. Ding. Ding.” And you get tossed back out into the land of living. Perhaps not from Davey Jones’ Locker, but definitely from the belly of the earth. Perhaps not from the stinking, soupy mess of the guts of a fish, but certainly from an eternal barring in – from the place that makes fish guts look like a luxury hotel. Jesus springs us from that. And he springs us to the shores of eternal resurrection life. That is what the lesser Jonah finally came to. He came to rely only on the essence of God; who he is and what he does. The Lord took him away from his sputtering and his trying and his committing and brought him to Jesus about whom he preached a brilliant two-word sermon. “Yeshuata Ladonai.” Salvation comes from the Lord. And then do you know what happened? It did. Amen. 

Numbers 6:22–27 The Lord said to Moses, 23 “Tell Aaron and his sons, ‘This is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them: 24 “‘“The Lord bless you and keep you; 25 the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; 26 the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”’ 27 “So they will put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.”

We have buckets of old, old bits of Scripture especially since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s amazing. Scrolls of Isaiah. Scraps of the Torah. Amazing. But you know what the very oldest inscription we have of something from the Bible is? I don’t think it’s an accident for a second. You know what the oldest piece of Scripture we have is? It makes an awful lot of sense why it is when you think about it. There was one piece of Scripture that wasn’t only placed on papyri or animal skins that just won’t last unless you somehow manage to preserve them in the perfect environmental conditions. There was one piece of Scripture that was so important that people also inscribed it on silver amulets. So important that they wanted to see it first when they started their day; notice it through the day; and see it last before they closed their eyes at night. We have those amulets today. But you know what’s even better? We have that Scripture. The Aaronic Blessing. The oldest preserved Scripture on earth.

It’s not hard to understand why. It’s stunning Scripture. If you’re reading along in Numbers it’s rule after rule and law after law until you get to something called the Nazarite vow, which was the strictest law of all. In fact, the Jews mistakenly came to believe that the people who took the vow were the holiest of the holy. That if you abstained from wine and let your hair grow wild and never got involved with funerals even if they were for close relatives that you were especially special to God. You were the height of holiness. And that, therefore, God would give you his full attention because he apparently had yours. That was the idea Moses knew people would immediately go to. So it’s right after this vow and right after these supposedly uber holy people get talked about that the Aaronic Blessing comes. And it’s stunning. It’s stunning because in it the Lord indiscriminately gives his full and unfettered love and attention to everybody. It’s like by it he’s throwing out all the wrong ideas about God that we so easily get in our heads. That if we pay attention to him enough and if we worship him enough and if we’re uber holy, he’ll pay attention to us in return. In Aaron’s blessing God’s saying, “Nazarite or not. Holy or not. I’m blessing you.”

And that’s stunning. And not just stunning for where it sits in Numbers, but also for the way it speaks to our souls. You know who might have known this better than anybody in the modern world? Bob Dylan. No joke. Bob Dylan. He knew this so well that he recorded not just one, but two versions of a song that unapologetically ripped off the Aaronic Blessing. Did you know that? The song became such a mega hit that another person came along with a song by the same name not so long later and did the exact same thing. You know who did that? Rod Stewart. They both ripped off ideas from the Aaronic Blessing to speak to the American soul. You know what they sang? May God bless and keep you always… May you stay forever young. You know when Bob Dylan wrote Forever Young? When he became a dad. And I was wrong about the song ’til now. I always thought it was a song about physical youth. About physical immortality. About the chase for the youthful energy and spunk, but I was wrong. You know what the song’s really about? Bob Dylan was staring at his young son wanting him to stay spiritually young.

He was praying that as his son physically aged he would still go out into wilderness of this life being courageous, joyful, and true. Jesus actually said he wanted the same thing for all of us when he said that nobody can enter the kingdom of God unless they receive it like little children. In other words, Jesus was saying that the one thing we need for heaven is trust. Trust. Just like a child has. Trust just like a three-year-old has. Never does mine get up wondering what she’ll eat. Never does mine go into a day worrying about what could go wrong next or anxious about what already did. She’s in every moment and she’s trusting. It’s adulthood that wrecks that in us. Sin grows up in us and we grow more fully into our natural state of self-reliance, and godlessness, and generally cynical thinking. Bob Dylan must’ve seen that in himself at some level, regretted it, and sung this song over his son praying that it would never happen to him. Not the way it happened to himself or the way it had happened to the people in the book of Numbers. They went out in the wilderness of life and they worried and they whined and they grumbled. Like God wasn’t there. Like the Lord hadn’t poured out water from a rock, dropped manna from the sky, or flew in quail from the sea.

That’s why the Aaronic Blessing lands in Numbers. Because it’s in Numbers where people are walking the road of this life and dealing with its wilderness that’s so broken. And if we’re anything like those people in Numbers we’re no good at it. We just make God mad. You know how we do that the quickest? We don’t trust. That’s what gets him the hottest. When we are thinking he doesn’t care. Do you see that? Nothing’s more insulting to him. And he does tell us that especially in Numbers. You know why? God knows that as we do this life we’re always believing a trinity. That’s not the question. The question is whether or not its the holy one. And that’s what we’re abysmal at. You know which trinity we’re awesome at trusting – the one we have the most reliable relationship with? The unholy one. We’re innately good at trusting the unholy trinity of fear, worry, and anxiety. Something happens in our wilderness and we say to that unholy trinity, “What bad thing are you going to send me next?” Something good happens and we trust that unholy trinity thinking, “How is he going to wreck it?” Or sometimes nothing happens at all and we’re communing with the unholy trinity anyway. God the Anxiety swirls in us. God the Fear talks to us. And God the Worry makes us trust.

And that’s why this is the oldest piece of the Bible we’ve got. People treasured its grace. And there is grace here. Nobody got carded before receiving this blessing. Nobody. The Lord didn’t have his priests check to see if people were holy enough to have his protection, or trusting enough for his love. The Lord didn’t divide the people up to receive the parts of his blessing that they deserved. They all just stood there and received the exact same blessing. No matter how much they had communed with or trusted or believed the unholy trinity they all still received the exact same blessing. The priest was to be totally indiscriminate with the blessing. You know why he could be? Because the blessing came from the priest. It came from the priest. It came from the guy who had redeemed them before God. It came from the guy who had made sure that all their debts had been paid. It came from the guy who was responsible for the blood and the dying and the altar. And it had to be that way. Because not a one of them deserved it. In fact, grace is implicit in the whole idea of blessing. They needed blessing so they wouldn’t receive their deserved cursed. So the Lord wouldn’t turn away. So the Lord wouldn’t glower at them.

So the blessing comes from the priest who has redeemed people: the priest who never checks ID’s. The priest who never divides people into classes of holiness or levels of worthiness. It comes from that priest. Always did. Always will. You know who that is? Christ. I don’t think it’s an accident that the last glimpse we ever got of Christ was of his hands. And what was he doing with those nail marked hands? He was blessing. Quite indiscriminately, I might add. He was blessing people who thought their fears had more control of their lives than he did. He was blessing people who thought their anxiety was better than his love. He was blessing people who believed their worry was better at forecasting than his faithfulness. He was blessing exactly those kinds of people. You know why he did? Because he was their priest. And he was their blood. And he was their sacrifice and their redemption and their salvation. He was the one who made the Lord’s face beam in our direction with unbroken and unchanging rays of grace. He’s was the one who made the Lord’s face turn to you with a determination to love you and be faithful to you no matter how life thundered around you. He’s the one whose priestly work was so perfect, so good, and so powerful that what you have here in the Aaronic Blessing is this holy, mighty God cooing over you. And wooing you. And loving you.

Make no mistake. That’s what he’s doing. This is no one-liner of a blessing. Like he can’t wait to be done with it and get out it out of this mouth. This is a three-liner. Every person of the Trinity has it on his heart to gush over you. Just so you know. Just so you get it. He’s totally got you in life. Comprehensively. You’ve got this God here who says he’s going to “bless you and keep you.” (v. 24) Totally abstract terms. And that’s the point. He wants you making applications everywhere and to everything in your life. From the spoon that’s hitting your mouth in the morning to the shut eye you need at night. From the income stream you need for necessities to the relationships that keep you fulfilled. And he will, “be gracious to you.” (v. 25) Always and in spades. You need forgiveness for trusting the unholy trinity? Already done. You feel guilt for your lust or your greed or the incessant way you put people down in your head? He’s already got it gone. And the help you’re going to need along the way in this wilderness? “The Lord will turn his face toward you.” (v. 26) And he won’t ever look away. He’ll send you exactly the doctors, the health, the wealth he knows you need. Because he’s the Holy Trinity and that’s what he does.

We need to understand that. Every abstraction in this blessing is some concrete reality he promising. We’re talking real-time, rubber-meets-the-road providing that’s coming. He’s promising that. Not praying. Not wishing. He’s promising. A lot of people get that wrong about this blessing. They think of it as a churchy good-bye or a pious Christian wish or prayer. Nothing could be farther from the truth. These are words that do what they say. They give to you the Lord’s comprehensive blessing as they’re being said. That’s what God’s people have always believed about these words. Did you know that’s where Spock’s international symbol comes from? The actor, Leonard Nimoy, created the Vulcan salute saying, “Live long and prosper,” because he grew up in a traditional Jewish home in which he attended synagogue where the priest would lift up his hands split them to signify the name of the Lord and speak the Aaronic Blessing. The people believed so firmly that it was the Lord speaking those words over them that they wouldn’t even look at the priest out of respect. One day little Leonard Nimoy looked up and saw the priests hands looking like this.

The point is that people have always believed that Aaron’s blessing is blessing. Not Aaron’s prayer. Let’s be clear. The blessing is not something we’re asking God to do. It’s something God is doing. People talk about that reality in all kinds of ways. Sometimes they call this a performative promise. Sometimes they talk about how these words bring to pass what they say. I don’t really care how you talk about it. The point is this: The Lord is doing what he says in this blessing. But I think you knew that. I think you knew that when I say the blessing it’s not really me saying it. It’s your priest, Christ. I think you knew that Aaron’s blessing wasn’t just a churchy goodbye. That’s it’s Jesus’ promise to stay with you even as you go. That the promise has the power and the backing of the Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified, died, rose, and ascended with nail marked hands raised in blessing showing us that every single word of this blessing is a point of fact that was written with the quill of his body and with the ink of his blood. I think you knew that. And that’s why I see you receiving the blessing the way you do. I see your eyes light. I see hands upraised. I see your faces lift. Because you believe the Holy Trinity will do what he says.

And that will never change for you no matter where you go in the wilderness of this life. I’m not sure what rocks will have to gush water for you as you go, but I do know they will. I’m not sure what snakes may bite so that the only antidote that will save you is the grace of Jesus and his cross. I just know Jesus will give it. I’m not sure what deserts you’ll have to pass through so that manna will have to come. I just know the manna will come. To you. To me that might be the most surprising and grace-filled part of this blessing. Did you know that the “you,” in the blessing is singular? It’s singular. I know that sounds like a funny grammatical point in English because in English you can be talking about just one you (singular) or you (group). But not in Hebrew. In Hebrew it’s either or. And here it’s singular. Do you see the point? The blessing may be always spoken to a group, but it always seeks the individual, the you, and it burrows into your circumstances and weeds out the circumstances of others. It comes to your grief and says, “The Lord bless you and keep you.” It comes to your worry and your sin and says, “The Lord be gracious to you.” It comes to your heart and your life and promises just to you, “The Lord look on you with favor.” Just you.

And that’s how the Lord makes you forever spiritually young. He sings Aaron’s blessing into your heart. And you become a trusting child as you do life. Never do you get up wondering what you’ll eat. Never do you go into a day worrying about what might go wrong next or become anxious about what already did. You’re there in every moment trusting. You’re joyful in the morning that you’re not facing the day alone. You’re courageous in the afternoon knowing the Lord is keeping you. And you’re peaceful in the evening celebrating his blessing on another day. And there it is. Peace. Shalom. This profound sense of wholeness and well-being. Peace. The same word the angels sang at Jesus’ birth. The same word Jesus spoke to his disciples after he rose from the dead. And always the last word you hear at a church called Peace. Peace that defies the unholy trinity of worry, anxiety and fear. Peace that trusts that the Lord’s constructing something in you even as your world deconstructs around you. Peace that promises that life’s deserts won’t leave you spiritually malnourished or dehydrated. Peace that comes from a promise so precious its worth wearing as the amulet of your soul. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord look on you with favor and give you peace. Amen.

Numbers 6:22–27 The Lord said to Moses, 23 “Tell Aaron and his sons, ‘This is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them: 24 “‘“The Lord bless you and keep you; 25 the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; 26 the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”’ 27 “So they will put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.”

We have buckets of old, old bits of Scripture especially since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s amazing. Scrolls of Isaiah. Scraps of the Torah. Amazing. But you know what the very oldest inscription we have of something from the Bible is? I don’t think it’s an accident for a second. You know what the oldest piece of Scripture we have is? It makes an awful lot of sense why it is when you think about it. There was one piece of Scripture that wasn’t only placed on papyri or animal skins that just won’t last unless you somehow manage to preserve them in the perfect environmental conditions. There was one piece of Scripture that was so important that people also inscribed it on silver amulets. So important that they wanted to see it first when they started their day; notice it through the day; and see it last before they closed their eyes at night. We have those amulets today. But you know what’s even better? We have that Scripture. The Aaronic Blessing. The oldest preserved Scripture on earth.

It’s not hard to understand why. It’s stunning Scripture. If you’re reading along in Numbers it’s rule after rule and law after law until you get to something called the Nazarite vow, which was the strictest law of all. In fact, the Jews mistakenly came to believe that the people who took the vow were the holiest of the holy. That if you abstained from wine and let your hair grow wild and never got involved with funerals even if they were for close relatives that you were especially special to God. You were the height of holiness. And that, therefore, God would give you his full attention because he apparently had yours. That was the idea Moses knew people would immediately go to. So it’s right after this vow and right after these supposedly uber holy people get talked about that the Aaronic Blessing comes. And it’s stunning. It’s stunning because in it the Lord indiscriminately gives his full and unfettered love and attention to everybody. It’s like by it he’s throwing out all the wrong ideas about God that we so easily get in our heads. That if we pay attention to him enough and if we worship him enough and if we’re uber holy, he’ll pay attention to us in return. In Aaron’s blessing God’s saying, “Nazarite or not. Holy or not. I’m blessing you.”

And that’s stunning. And not just stunning for where it sits in Numbers, but also for the way it speaks to our souls. You know who might have known this better than anybody in the modern world? Bob Dylan. No joke. Bob Dylan. He knew this so well that he recorded not just one, but two versions of a song that unapologetically ripped off the Aaronic Blessing. Did you know that? The song became such a mega hit that another person came along with a song by the same name not so long later and did the exact same thing. You know who did that? Rod Stewart. They both ripped off ideas from the Aaronic Blessing to speak to the American soul. You know what they sang? May God bless and keep you always… May you stay forever young. You know when Bob Dylan wrote Forever Young? When he became a dad. And I was wrong about the song ’til now. I always thought it was a song about physical youth. About physical immortality. About the chase for the youthful energy and spunk, but I was wrong. You know what the song’s really about? Bob Dylan was staring at his young son wanting him to stay spiritually young.

He was praying that as his son physically aged he would still go out into wilderness of this life being courageous, joyful, and true. Jesus actually said he wanted the same thing for all of us when he said that nobody can enter the kingdom of God unless they receive it like little children. In other words, Jesus was saying that the one thing we need for heaven is trust. Trust. Just like a child has. Trust just like a three-year-old has. Never does mine get up wondering what she’ll eat. Never does mine go into a day worrying about what could go wrong next or anxious about what already did. She’s in every moment and she’s trusting. It’s adulthood that wrecks that in us. Sin grows up in us and we grow more fully into our natural state of self-reliance, and godlessness, and generally cynical thinking. Bob Dylan must’ve seen that in himself at some level, regretted it, and sung this song over his son praying that it would never happen to him. Not the way it happened to himself or the way it had happened to the people in the book of Numbers. They went out in the wilderness of life and they worried and they whined and they grumbled. Like God wasn’t there. Like the Lord hadn’t poured out water from a rock, dropped manna from the sky, or flew in quail from the sea.

That’s why the Aaronic Blessing lands in Numbers. Because it’s in Numbers where people are walking the road of this life and dealing with its wilderness that’s so broken. And if we’re anything like those people in Numbers we’re no good at it. We just make God mad. You know how we do that the quickest? We don’t trust. That’s what gets him the hottest. When we are thinking he doesn’t care. Do you see that? Nothing’s more insulting to him. And he does tell us that especially in Numbers. You know why? God knows that as we do this life we’re always believing a trinity. That’s not the question. The question is whether or not its the holy one. And that’s what we’re abysmal at. You know which trinity we’re awesome at trusting – the one we have the most reliable relationship with? The unholy one. We’re innately good at trusting the unholy trinity of fear, worry, and anxiety. Something happens in our wilderness and we say to that unholy trinity, “What bad thing are you going to send me next?” Something good happens and we trust that unholy trinity thinking, “How is he going to wreck it?” Or sometimes nothing happens at all and we’re communing with the unholy trinity anyway. God the Anxiety swirls in us. God the Fear talks to us. And God the Worry makes us trust.

And that’s why this is the oldest piece of the Bible we’ve got. People treasured its grace. And there is grace here. Nobody got carded before receiving this blessing. Nobody. The Lord didn’t have his priests check to see if people were holy enough to have his protection, or trusting enough for his love. The Lord didn’t divide the people up to receive the parts of his blessing that they deserved. They all just stood there and received the exact same blessing. No matter how much they had communed with or trusted or believed the unholy trinity they all still received the exact same blessing. The priest was to be totally indiscriminate with the blessing. You know why he could be? Because the blessing came from the priest. It came from the priest. It came from the guy who had redeemed them before God. It came from the guy who had made sure that all their debts had been paid. It came from the guy who was responsible for the blood and the dying and the altar. And it had to be that way. Because not a one of them deserved it. In fact, grace is implicit in the whole idea of blessing. They needed blessing so they wouldn’t receive their deserved cursed. So the Lord wouldn’t turn away. So the Lord wouldn’t glower at them.

So the blessing comes from the priest who has redeemed people: the priest who never checks ID’s. The priest who never divides people into classes of holiness or levels of worthiness. It comes from that priest. Always did. Always will. You know who that is? Christ. I don’t think it’s an accident that the last glimpse we ever got of Christ was of his hands. And what was he doing with those nail marked hands? He was blessing. Quite indiscriminately, I might add. He was blessing people who thought their fears had more control of their lives than he did. He was blessing people who thought their anxiety was better than his love. He was blessing people who believed their worry was better at forecasting than his faithfulness. He was blessing exactly those kinds of people. You know why he did? Because he was their priest. And he was their blood. And he was their sacrifice and their redemption and their salvation. He was the one who made the Lord’s face beam in our direction with unbroken and unchanging rays of grace. He’s was the one who made the Lord’s face turn to you with a determination to love you and be faithful to you no matter how life thundered around you. He’s the one whose priestly work was so perfect, so good, and so powerful that what you have here in the Aaronic Blessing is this holy, mighty God cooing over you. And wooing you. And loving you.

Make no mistake. That’s what he’s doing. This is no one-liner of a blessing. Like he can’t wait to be done with it and get out it out of this mouth. This is a three-liner. Every person of the Trinity has it on his heart to gush over you. Just so you know. Just so you get it. He’s totally got you in life. Comprehensively. You’ve got this God here who says he’s going to “bless you and keep you.” (v. 24) Totally abstract terms. And that’s the point. He wants you making applications everywhere and to everything in your life. From the spoon that’s hitting your mouth in the morning to the shut eye you need at night. From the income stream you need for necessities to the relationships that keep you fulfilled. And he will, “be gracious to you.” (v. 25) Always and in spades. You need forgiveness for trusting the unholy trinity? Already done. You feel guilt for your lust or your greed or the incessant way you put people down in your head? He’s already got it gone. And the help you’re going to need along the way in this wilderness? “The Lord will turn his face toward you.” (v. 26) And he won’t ever look away. He’ll send you exactly the doctors, the health, the wealth he knows you need. Because he’s the Holy Trinity and that’s what he does.

We need to understand that. Every abstraction in this blessing is some concrete reality he promising. We’re talking real-time, rubber-meets-the-road providing that’s coming. He’s promising that. Not praying. Not wishing. He’s promising. A lot of people get that wrong about this blessing. They think of it as a churchy good-bye or a pious Christian wish or prayer. Nothing could be farther from the truth. These are words that do what they say. They give to you the Lord’s comprehensive blessing as they’re being said. That’s what God’s people have always believed about these words. Did you know that’s where Spock’s international symbol comes from? The actor, Leonard Nimoy, created the Vulcan salute saying, “Live long and prosper,” because he grew up in a traditional Jewish home in which he attended synagogue where the priest would lift up his hands split them to signify the name of the Lord and speak the Aaronic Blessing. The people believed so firmly that it was the Lord speaking those words over them that they wouldn’t even look at the priest out of respect. One day little Leonard Nimoy looked up and saw the priests hands looking like this.

The point is that people have always believed that Aaron’s blessing is blessing. Not Aaron’s prayer. Let’s be clear. The blessing is not something we’re asking God to do. It’s something God is doing. People talk about that reality in all kinds of ways. Sometimes they call this a performative promise. Sometimes they talk about how these words bring to pass what they say. I don’t really care how you talk about it. The point is this: The Lord is doing what he says in this blessing. But I think you knew that. I think you knew that when I say the blessing it’s not really me saying it. It’s your priest, Christ. I think you knew that Aaron’s blessing wasn’t just a churchy goodbye. That’s it’s Jesus’ promise to stay with you even as you go. That the promise has the power and the backing of the Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified, died, rose, and ascended with nail marked hands raised in blessing showing us that every single word of this blessing is a point of fact that was written with the quill of his body and with the ink of his blood. I think you knew that. And that’s why I see you receiving the blessing the way you do. I see your eyes light. I see hands upraised. I see your faces lift. Because you believe the Holy Trinity will do what he says.

And that will never change for you no matter where you go in the wilderness of this life. I’m not sure what rocks will have to gush water for you as you go, but I do know they will. I’m not sure what snakes may bite so that the only antidote that will save you is the grace of Jesus and his cross. I just know Jesus will give it. I’m not sure what deserts you’ll have to pass through so that manna will have to come. I just know the manna will come. To you. To me that might be the most surprising and grace-filled part of this blessing. Did you know that the “you,” in the blessing is singular? It’s singular. I know that sounds like a funny grammatical point in English because in English you can be talking about just one you (singular) or you (group). But not in Hebrew. In Hebrew it’s either or. And here it’s singular. Do you see the point? The blessing may be always spoken to a group, but it always seeks the individual, the you, and it burrows into your circumstances and weeds out the circumstances of others. It comes to your grief and says, “The Lord bless you and keep you.” It comes to your worry and your sin and says, “The Lord be gracious to you.” It comes to your heart and your life and promises just to you, “The Lord look on you with favor.” Just you.

And that’s how the Lord makes you forever spiritually young. He sings Aaron’s blessing into your heart. And you become a trusting child as you do life. Never do you get up wondering what you’ll eat. Never do you go into a day worrying about what might go wrong next or become anxious about what already did. You’re there in every moment trusting. You’re joyful in the morning that you’re not facing the day alone. You’re courageous in the afternoon knowing the Lord is keeping you. And you’re peaceful in the evening celebrating his blessing on another day. And there it is. Peace. Shalom. This profound sense of wholeness and well-being. Peace. The same word the angels sang at Jesus’ birth. The same word Jesus spoke to his disciples after he rose from the dead. And always the last word you hear at a church called Peace. Peace that defies the unholy trinity of worry, anxiety and fear. Peace that trusts that the Lord’s constructing something in you even as your world deconstructs around you. Peace that promises that life’s deserts won’t leave you spiritually malnourished or dehydrated. Peace that comes from a promise so precious its worth wearing as the amulet of your soul. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord look on you with favor and give you peace. Amen.

Acts 2:1–17 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. 5 Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. 6 When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. 7 Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? 9 Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome 11 (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” 12 Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?” 13 Some, however, made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine.” 14 Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. 15 These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! 16 No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel”: 17 “ ‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.”

At the 2015 Toast Master’s championship Mohammed Quatani walked out onto the stage, pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, stuck it in his mouth, pretended to light it and said, “What?” They all laughed at him. Then he went after them. With words. He said, “Oh, you think smoking kills. Let me tell you something. Did you know that three times as many people die from diabetes than from smoking? Yet if I pulled out a Snickers bar here on stage nobody would say anything. Did you know that the leading cause of lung cancer is not actually a cigarette? It’s your DNA. You could smoke for years and nothing would ever happen to you. This whole war against smoking is just to restrict the farming of tobacco. My friend Nassaq loved his father. He idolized his father. He was always trying to impress his father. First year he went to college and got straight A’s. He thought, “This is it. I will finally make my dad proud.” He picked up the phone. “Dad, I got straight A’s. Are you proud? Please tell me you’re a proud father.” “Yeah, listen, son, I have to call you back. I’m busy.” Then Mohammed Quatani made his point. He said, “Words have power.” That speech which he called The Power of Words gained Mr. Quatani the title of the world’s greatest public speaker.

He got it by showing with unmistakable power that words can shatter our hypocrisy about health threats into a millions pieces or just as adeptly take the soul of your son and bury it before it’s ever really alive. He showed that words have power. And that’s why he won. He won not just because his speech was well-crafted speech, but probably mostly because his speech hit a deep, deep cultural nerve. We all want to believe what he says about words. Because our world is awash in them. Bite sized words that come at us in 144 characters or less. Novels flying off the shelf that are hundreds of pages long. Blogs. Facebook posts. Words. Words. And more words. Deep down we’re all afraid we’re getting numb to them – the kind of numb you feel when your brain has dealt with so many words in a day that it feels like someone’s trying to fill your cup with a fire hydrant. So we do more Instagram and less blogs. More BuzzFeed and less Atlantic Monthly. We just can’t take anymore words. Poor, over used, and underappreciated words.

I’m pretty sure Luke felt badly for words too. You have to understand something about what he’s doing here. He’s no history teacher. He’s an evangelist. He has no interest doing in history for its own sake. His only interest is how history bears on our present. Let me say that another way. Luke wasn’t writing to people in his present day to tell them what had happened. He wrote to tell them what was still happening. And that’s just huge. Pentecost isn’t a dead historical artifact. Pentecost is present power. Luke’s telling us this history so we know where to find it still now. Not to beat a dead horse, but that’s actually how Pentecost has always functioned. It was always only the beginning of what God was up to. Pentecost was the day when the first fruits of the field were brought to God. Not the last fruits. On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit was just getting warmed up. He was bringing in the first fruits of God’s crop. Just the start. Luke isn’t describing a one-off, one hit wonder of the Spirit. The Spirit was just getting started bringing in a massive, multi-cultural, and universal bumper crop of the saved. Luke is telling us that Pentecost isn’t a day; it’s a season that we’re in.

That idea unlocks this whole history. Because there are parts that won’t be repeated. They were one-time way to highlight how the Spirit was going to keep on working. There were there to show us how much we should appreciate what would remain. Maybe you know which parts of the history I’m talking about. That part where, “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.” (v. 2) Just a sound. Not an actual wind. Just a sound. To announce the Spirit’s activity. The perfect way to do it too. Spirit in Greek is the same word as wind. God the Spirit was beginning to violently and powerfully break into human history. The Spirit had come ready to do what he does. And what does he do? Light people on fire for Jesus. “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.” (v. 3) Another one off act to tell us not that a single day of his activity had come, but a whole season of it was here. The Spirit was breaking in. And he was getting to it right there, right then in that moment.

And how? The fires didn’t win any souls to God. Neither did that violent sound of wind. They were pointers to what would. The Spirit pointed us to the one way that he was going to keep Pentecost going: the Word. Did you notice that’s exactly what Luke was leading up to. “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” (v. 4) This wasn’t meaningless babbling or heavenly, angelic words that nobody could understand. This was communication in clearly intelligible language. It was words. In fact, that was the most remarkable thing about it. It was so stunning to hear these words that to everyone there that the NIV translates that everybody was, “Utterly amazed. (v. 7) And that’s a pretty good translation for what Luke originally wrote. Luke wants us to know that everyone’s jaw dropped so hard and so fast that he used to verbs of astonishment to make us point. And again, why? The Spirit had become here like the headphones people put on at the U.N. He undoing Babel. He was un-confusing language. He was uncrossing communication wires. He was telling the people, “the wonders of God,” (v. 11) in their own native language to drive it right into their own hearts.

And what do the people do? Seriously, what do they do with those words? Do they say, “Wow, God poured out an awful lot of power so I could hear these words right now. Maybe I should listen to them. Maybe I should tune in”? Does a single one of them say that? No. Not a single one. What do they do? They ignore the words in favor of a promoting a vicious stereotype. Did you catch that? They said, “Aren’t all these speaking Galileans?” (v. 7) “Aren’t these redneck, hickville, backwoods, uneducated preachers here?” And as if that vicious stereotype wasn’t bad enough, some even began to jeer at them. We might call it a massive diss today. They said, “They have had too much wine.” (v. 13) And that right there is the kick off of the season – the era – of the Spirit’s power. He has people declaring the wonders of God in the clear language of the gospel. And instead of listening to it, they busy their brains with stereotyping the speakers. He has people pointing to Jesus with the gospel. And instead of believing it they point themselves in the direction of silly wine drinking theories.

And, yes, Luke does spend some time looking at the ugly side of that history. You know why? You can jeer at the Word. You can diss it. You really can. Or you can be incredibly excited about its power. You know what the truth is? What you believe about Pentecost will tell you all by itself if you should be way more excited about Jesus’ church than you ever have been before. Or if you should just diss it. Check out of it. Not ever go to it. Whatever. This miracle and its meaning will all by itself determine that for you. You know why? There’s no sudden sound of a violent wind here today. Not even a gentle breeze. Not here. Not in this church. And there’s no unburning fire on my head today. Not on me and not on you either. You know what we do have? The Word. The Word in song. The Word in baptism. The Word in sermons. No fire. No sound of wind. Just the Word from some thirty something guy, who at the end of the day isn’t any smarter or better than a redneck, unsophisticated Galilean preacher. Do you see that? That will either get you incredibly excited and inspired at what God is up to in this very moment and at this church or it will immediately send you heading for the exits disappointedly thinking, “Pentecost is over. The church isn’t headed anywhere.”

I’m pretty sure we’re all guilty at some point of believing the latter. I know I am. I’ve seen sheer unbelief in Pentecost in myself that would probably rank up there with the most hardened of sinners and purest of hypocrites. Maybe for you that looks like not calling any church home right now. Or staying away from the one you do. But for others and for me. It looks like checking out while you’re there. I’ve sat through sermons with my eyes locked on preachers, but with my mind filling my mental March Madness bracket. I’ve gone to evening services where I’m pretty sure I’ve counted more sheep than grace of God. I’ve spent worship more intent on working out my issues in myself than letting the Word do it for me. What I’m trying to show you is that we all need a very desperate sort of forgiveness for our sins against the Spirit’s Word. Think of how many times he’s come to us with the Word and we’ve martyred it. We’ve been more critical of the words coming our way than receptive to them. We’ve sacrificed them on the altar of our inattention or our personal issues. We’ve compartmentalized them, filed them, ignored them, or just plain let them die somewhere between our brain and our eardrums or two feet outside the doors of this church. And why? We haven’t always believed so well in present Pentecost.

And that’s why I love – I love! – Peter’s response to the Word dissing that goes on in our hearts. Did you notice what Peter didn’t do? He didn’t say to that crowd, “So you’re going to diss the Word, huh? We’re out. We’ll go to people with a few less issues than you guys.” None of that. Not ever. Instead, you know what Peter – not totally without irony –  immediately does? He gives more of the Word to people who had already dissed the Word. He gave them the Word. He doesn’t start yelling about the tongues of fire. He doesn’t point to the sound of wind. And that’s called grace. Glorious, powerful grace in the form of words. And this time the Word had to come from Joel. Because you know what Joel said? Joel said that people were going to get God’s thoughts and then they’d be communicated in the form of words. That this, in fact, was the Spirit’s Pentecostal plan. That people would receive the Word and then communicate it. And that’s why we all can be so excited about what the Spirit is doing in the church today. Because the Spirit didn’t check out. I said it once and I’m saying it again. The Spirit didn’t just bring his Pentecostal power to one day. There’s present Pentecostal power too.

Presently. Here. In this church. Do you see the comfort and the glory of that? We are to trust the Word’s Pentecostal power today. It isn’t boring, lifeless, and unimportant. The Word works because it comes with power and energy of the Spirit. Words are powerful all by themselves, but when they’re his? When they come from God? Oh, let me tell you. What did God do to create the universe? Do you remember? How did he do it? He spoke words. Or what did Jesus use to calm the sea when it was raging around him? Did he think it calm? No, he spoke it calm. And how did Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead or make the blind see or even forgive people their sins. He didn’t use ESP or some sixth sense in them. He used words. And on Pentecost how did Peter convert thousands? Was it the fires on the heads? Was it the sound of violent wind? No. Peter used words. Understanding that is understanding Pentecost. That the Spirit is right here in this moment in these very words and by these very words cracking open your heart, stoking the fire of your faith, and giving you a massive, heavy dose of God. That by the Word of God the Spirit is raining down Pentecost on you and in you.

That’s far more power than Mohammed Quahtani ever dreamt of in his championship speech when he said, “A single word can save a life.” Think of the grace of God to know he’s here in his Word still coming for us. Always. No matter what. For you. With power. That’s Pentecostal grace. Just the kind of grace and power you’d expect from the God who sent us Jesus. He’s just the kind of God who would sent truthful words our way that say, “Jesus forgives you for your sins against his Word.” That’s the God who’s showing up right here and right now in this moment. The God who takes those words – the very heart of the gospel – and somehow makes them pass through your neurons and places them deep down in that profound space known as your soul. And that’s power. That’s the power the Spirit brings to that pure gospel. Raw. Pentecostal. Holy Spirit power. Power that just won’t let those sacred, gospel words fall lifeless and unnoticed to the ground like leaves on some cold autumn day in your soul. Power that takes that truth, plants it deep into the soil of your heart, and makes it produce the deep joy and the awesome confidence in God’s heart for you no matter what. The new life we call faith. That’s what we’re celebrating today. Pentecost. Not some dead historical artifact. We’re celebrating present power. Now. Here. And in you. Amen.

Acts 2:1–17 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. 5 Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. 6 When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. 7 Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? 9 Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome 11 (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” 12 Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?” 13 Some, however, made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine.” 14 Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say. 15 These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning! 16 No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel”: 17 “ ‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.”

At the 2015 Toast Master’s championship Mohammed Quatani walked out onto the stage, pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, stuck it in his mouth, pretended to light it and said, “What?” They all laughed at him. Then he went after them. With words. He said, “Oh, you think smoking kills. Let me tell you something. Did you know that three times as many people die from diabetes than from smoking? Yet if I pulled out a Snickers bar here on stage nobody would say anything. Did you know that the leading cause of lung cancer is not actually a cigarette? It’s your DNA. You could smoke for years and nothing would ever happen to you. This whole war against smoking is just to restrict the farming of tobacco. My friend Nassaq loved his father. He idolized his father. He was always trying to impress his father. First year he went to college and got straight A’s. He thought, “This is it. I will finally make my dad proud.” He picked up the phone. “Dad, I got straight A’s. Are you proud? Please tell me you’re a proud father.” “Yeah, listen, son, I have to call you back. I’m busy.” Then Mohammed Quatani made his point. He said, “Words have power.” That speech which he called The Power of Words gained Mr. Quatani the title of the world’s greatest public speaker.

He got it by showing with unmistakable power that words can shatter our hypocrisy about health threats into a millions pieces or just as adeptly take the soul of your son and bury it before it’s ever really alive. He showed that words have power. And that’s why he won. He won not just because his speech was well-crafted speech, but probably mostly because his speech hit a deep, deep cultural nerve. We all want to believe what he says about words. Because our world is awash in them. Bite sized words that come at us in 144 characters or less. Novels flying off the shelf that are hundreds of pages long. Blogs. Facebook posts. Words. Words. And more words. Deep down we’re all afraid we’re getting numb to them – the kind of numb you feel when your brain has dealt with so many words in a day that it feels like someone’s trying to fill your cup with a fire hydrant. So we do more Instagram and less blogs. More BuzzFeed and less Atlantic Monthly. We just can’t take anymore words. Poor, over used, and underappreciated words.

I’m pretty sure Luke felt badly for words too. You have to understand something about what he’s doing here. He’s no history teacher. He’s an evangelist. He has no interest doing in history for its own sake. His only interest is how history bears on our present. Let me say that another way. Luke wasn’t writing to people in his present day to tell them what had happened. He wrote to tell them what was still happening. And that’s just huge. Pentecost isn’t a dead historical artifact. Pentecost is present power. Luke’s telling us this history so we know where to find it still now. Not to beat a dead horse, but that’s actually how Pentecost has always functioned. It was always only the beginning of what God was up to. Pentecost was the day when the first fruits of the field were brought to God. Not the last fruits. On the day of Pentecost, the Spirit was just getting warmed up. He was bringing in the first fruits of God’s crop. Just the start. Luke isn’t describing a one-off, one hit wonder of the Spirit. The Spirit was just getting started bringing in a massive, multi-cultural, and universal bumper crop of the saved. Luke is telling us that Pentecost isn’t a day; it’s a season that we’re in.

That idea unlocks this whole history. Because there are parts that won’t be repeated. They were one-time way to highlight how the Spirit was going to keep on working. There were there to show us how much we should appreciate what would remain. Maybe you know which parts of the history I’m talking about. That part where, “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.” (v. 2) Just a sound. Not an actual wind. Just a sound. To announce the Spirit’s activity. The perfect way to do it too. Spirit in Greek is the same word as wind. God the Spirit was beginning to violently and powerfully break into human history. The Spirit had come ready to do what he does. And what does he do? Light people on fire for Jesus. “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.” (v. 3) Another one off act to tell us not that a single day of his activity had come, but a whole season of it was here. The Spirit was breaking in. And he was getting to it right there, right then in that moment.

And how? The fires didn’t win any souls to God. Neither did that violent sound of wind. They were pointers to what would. The Spirit pointed us to the one way that he was going to keep Pentecost going: the Word. Did you notice that’s exactly what Luke was leading up to. “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” (v. 4) This wasn’t meaningless babbling or heavenly, angelic words that nobody could understand. This was communication in clearly intelligible language. It was words. In fact, that was the most remarkable thing about it. It was so stunning to hear these words that to everyone there that the NIV translates that everybody was, “Utterly amazed. (v. 7) And that’s a pretty good translation for what Luke originally wrote. Luke wants us to know that everyone’s jaw dropped so hard and so fast that he used to verbs of astonishment to make us point. And again, why? The Spirit had become here like the headphones people put on at the U.N. He undoing Babel. He was un-confusing language. He was uncrossing communication wires. He was telling the people, “the wonders of God,” (v. 11) in their own native language to drive it right into their own hearts.

And what do the people do? Seriously, what do they do with those words? Do they say, “Wow, God poured out an awful lot of power so I could hear these words right now. Maybe I should listen to them. Maybe I should tune in”? Does a single one of them say that? No. Not a single one. What do they do? They ignore the words in favor of a promoting a vicious stereotype. Did you catch that? They said, “Aren’t all these speaking Galileans?” (v. 7) “Aren’t these redneck, hickville, backwoods, uneducated preachers here?” And as if that vicious stereotype wasn’t bad enough, some even began to jeer at them. We might call it a massive diss today. They said, “They have had too much wine.” (v. 13) And that right there is the kick off of the season – the era – of the Spirit’s power. He has people declaring the wonders of God in the clear language of the gospel. And instead of listening to it, they busy their brains with stereotyping the speakers. He has people pointing to Jesus with the gospel. And instead of believing it they point themselves in the direction of silly wine drinking theories.

And, yes, Luke does spend some time looking at the ugly side of that history. You know why? You can jeer at the Word. You can diss it. You really can. Or you can be incredibly excited about its power. You know what the truth is? What you believe about Pentecost will tell you all by itself if you should be way more excited about Jesus’ church than you ever have been before. Or if you should just diss it. Check out of it. Not ever go to it. Whatever. This miracle and its meaning will all by itself determine that for you. You know why? There’s no sudden sound of a violent wind here today. Not even a gentle breeze. Not here. Not in this church. And there’s no unburning fire on my head today. Not on me and not on you either. You know what we do have? The Word. The Word in song. The Word in baptism. The Word in sermons. No fire. No sound of wind. Just the Word from some thirty something guy, who at the end of the day isn’t any smarter or better than a redneck, unsophisticated Galilean preacher. Do you see that? That will either get you incredibly excited and inspired at what God is up to in this very moment and at this church or it will immediately send you heading for the exits disappointedly thinking, “Pentecost is over. The church isn’t headed anywhere.”

I’m pretty sure we’re all guilty at some point of believing the latter. I know I am. I’ve seen sheer unbelief in Pentecost in myself that would probably rank up there with the most hardened of sinners and purest of hypocrites. Maybe for you that looks like not calling any church home right now. Or staying away from the one you do. But for others and for me. It looks like checking out while you’re there. I’ve sat through sermons with my eyes locked on preachers, but with my mind filling my mental March Madness bracket. I’ve gone to evening services where I’m pretty sure I’ve counted more sheep than grace of God. I’ve spent worship more intent on working out my issues in myself than letting the Word do it for me. What I’m trying to show you is that we all need a very desperate sort of forgiveness for our sins against the Spirit’s Word. Think of how many times he’s come to us with the Word and we’ve martyred it. We’ve been more critical of the words coming our way than receptive to them. We’ve sacrificed them on the altar of our inattention or our personal issues. We’ve compartmentalized them, filed them, ignored them, or just plain let them die somewhere between our brain and our eardrums or two feet outside the doors of this church. And why? We haven’t always believed so well in present Pentecost.

And that’s why I love – I love! – Peter’s response to the Word dissing that goes on in our hearts. Did you notice what Peter didn’t do? He didn’t say to that crowd, “So you’re going to diss the Word, huh? We’re out. We’ll go to people with a few less issues than you guys.” None of that. Not ever. Instead, you know what Peter – not totally without irony –  immediately does? He gives more of the Word to people who had already dissed the Word. He gave them the Word. He doesn’t start yelling about the tongues of fire. He doesn’t point to the sound of wind. And that’s called grace. Glorious, powerful grace in the form of words. And this time the Word had to come from Joel. Because you know what Joel said? Joel said that people were going to get God’s thoughts and then they’d be communicated in the form of words. That this, in fact, was the Spirit’s Pentecostal plan. That people would receive the Word and then communicate it. And that’s why we all can be so excited about what the Spirit is doing in the church today. Because the Spirit didn’t check out. I said it once and I’m saying it again. The Spirit didn’t just bring his Pentecostal power to one day. There’s present Pentecostal power too.

Presently. Here. In this church. Do you see the comfort and the glory of that? We are to trust the Word’s Pentecostal power today. It isn’t boring, lifeless, and unimportant. The Word works because it comes with power and energy of the Spirit. Words are powerful all by themselves, but when they’re his? When they come from God? Oh, let me tell you. What did God do to create the universe? Do you remember? How did he do it? He spoke words. Or what did Jesus use to calm the sea when it was raging around him? Did he think it calm? No, he spoke it calm. And how did Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead or make the blind see or even forgive people their sins. He didn’t use ESP or some sixth sense in them. He used words. And on Pentecost how did Peter convert thousands? Was it the fires on the heads? Was it the sound of violent wind? No. Peter used words. Understanding that is understanding Pentecost. That the Spirit is right here in this moment in these very words and by these very words cracking open your heart, stoking the fire of your faith, and giving you a massive, heavy dose of God. That by the Word of God the Spirit is raining down Pentecost on you and in you.

That’s far more power than Mohammed Quahtani ever dreamt of in his championship speech when he said, “A single word can save a life.” Think of the grace of God to know he’s here in his Word still coming for us. Always. No matter what. For you. With power. That’s Pentecostal grace. Just the kind of grace and power you’d expect from the God who sent us Jesus. He’s just the kind of God who would sent truthful words our way that say, “Jesus forgives you for your sins against his Word.” That’s the God who’s showing up right here and right now in this moment. The God who takes those words – the very heart of the gospel – and somehow makes them pass through your neurons and places them deep down in that profound space known as your soul. And that’s power. That’s the power the Spirit brings to that pure gospel. Raw. Pentecostal. Holy Spirit power. Power that just won’t let those sacred, gospel words fall lifeless and unnoticed to the ground like leaves on some cold autumn day in your soul. Power that takes that truth, plants it deep into the soil of your heart, and makes it produce the deep joy and the awesome confidence in God’s heart for you no matter what. The new life we call faith. That’s what we’re celebrating today. Pentecost. Not some dead historical artifact. We’re celebrating present power. Now. Here. And in you. Amen.

Acts 1:1–11 In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach 2 until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. 3 After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. 4 On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. 5 For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” 6 Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” 9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. 10 They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11 “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

I honestly can’t decide what the greater miracle in this account really is. Is it Theophilus or Jesus’ supernatural levitation known as as ascension. It’s a toss-up. A few years ago, I probably wouldn’t have ever wondered that. Because in the past I’ve missed the Spirit’s point. I’ve read Scripture like this. My eyes have glazed over. My brain has gone into some kind of incoherent fog and I’ve totally missed what the Spirit was telling me. It’s happened when I’ve gotten to Matthew chapter one and then again when I’ve headed into Luke three. It’s happened in Genesis too. Probably especially when I’ve gotten to Genesis. Genesis has had my eyes trying to glaze already in its fifth chapter and then again in its tenth. And if I’ve managed to stick with the Spirit that long then it’s chapter thirty-six that has generally gotten my number. You know what the Spirit does in those chapters of the Bible? He lines up person after person after person after person – and all of them by name. All of them by name. When you read those chapters it’s like a scriptural tsunami of names. Name after name after name after name after name. It’s overwhelming.

Sometimes though, the Spirit doesn’t overwhelm you with the volume and the amount of names. Sometimes he impresses you because of how lonesome a name in the Bible is. Sometimes you see how one individual gets named. Just one. One person who gets noticed, and totally and singularly loved by God. That’s the approach Luke takes here. The singular one. The totally personal one. He names just one guy who is known, loved, and spoken to. And he does this as the first thing in Acts. Before he breathes a single syllable about Jesus, he speaks to this one guy and then – and only then – is willing to dive into the history of Jesus. In the English translation here it takes Luke just four little words before he says, “Theophilus,” (v. 1) I’m writing to you and for you.’ That’s at least partly why I’m wondering here what’s more miraculous the ascension of Jesus Christ or the love of God that zeroes in on just one single soul like there was no one else in the entire world. Just him. What’s more miraculous?

Before you answer that question, I suppose I should point out that Theophilus needed some special attention from God. We don’t know much about the problem that Theophilus had with Jesus, but we can guess. We can guess that he had too high an opinion of himself. So high that Jesus seemed unnecessary to him. So high that Luke had to treat him with kid gloves, coddle him, and walk on eggshells with him. You can’t miss that in Luke’s Gospel. He said there, “I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.” (Luke 1:3–4) And so write Luke did and some of it was tough love. None of the other gospels have the lost stories like Luke. That lost sheep, coin, and brother. I’ll bet those stories hit Theophilus like a ton of bricks. Perhaps it was those stories that showed him how lost he was; how critical and uncaring he constantly was of people outside his circle; how he was always chasing stuff not people; how much he had relied on his money and his power to feel something – anything; how he had used his title and his position and authority not for others, but for himself.

And perhaps it was in those very stories that not only revealed to Theophilus his true self, but also saved him. Because he was the one being found. Jesus had just never quit on him. He found Theophilus’ prideful heart so filled with position, status, and success and instead filled it with his cross. He found Theophilus and let him know, “I’m as real and saving as your sins are.” Because Jesus was still real. Still there. Still Alive. Really, he was. Jesus’ life and work was all a matter of historical record now. “After his suffering, he (Jesus) presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive.” (v. 3) Jesus was alive. And all of it was right there in black and white in Luke’s own hand. And better yet all of it was written to him, about him and for him. “Most excellent Theophilus,” Luke had said, “Jesus died and rose for you.” His own name. Written right there in the Scriptures. For Theophilus. For the status seeker in him. For the Pharisee in him. For the money lover and stuff chaser in him. Jesus was for him. Personally. Specifically. Individually.

Just one guy. But that’s totally God. God’s the kind of God who has names and people scrolling through his head like a divine ticker tape – a ticker tape we just get to glimpse in places like Luke three and Genesis five. God knows names. God cares about individuals. And not just in mass either. Jesus’ eyes don’t glaze over when the ticker tape starts running before him. That’s when they start shining. Jesus’ mind doesn’t fog with the mass of humanity. It gains laser like focus. You know how we know that? Because he zeroed in on you. And he picked you. And maybe for you it was just a bit like Theophilus. Maybe it your excellency that he took. Maybe he helped you see the you that was so lost that you didn’t even really realize you were lost. Maybe he helped you see that the ways in which you had been finding yourself – your parenting, your job, your morality – made you more lost than the people who already knew they were lost. But then somehow someway Jesus found you too and inscribed his cross right into your heart. And you were found. Singularly. Specifically. Individually.

I’m telling you that when God takes people and gives them faith that’s huge. HUGE. Remember those eggshells Luke had been walking on with Theophilus? Gone. You know what’s left in Acts? Just plain, “Theophilus.” (v. 1) Theophilus the disciple. Theophilus the believer. Theophilus the man who Jesus personally loved. And that is HUGE. Theophilus is a miracle of the most stunning variety. If you think making the blind see or the lame walk is something, try converting a human. Just try. I promise you that when it came to Theophilus God somehow someway did the spiritual equivalent of make a pig fly. Theophilus is a miracle of the greatest ranking. He ranks up there with the turning of the most hardened criminals, the most prideful of hearts, the most solid of Muslims, the most vocal of atheists, and the most lethargic of souls, even your aunt who the whole family knows swore off Jesus a decade ago. The Spirit here took the most impossible of people, Theophilus, and converted him.  And noticing that massive miracle couldn’t be more important to the rest of Luke’s point.

You know why? If we don’t see that you know what we’ll do in life? We’ll check out. We’ll hit the pause button and just hang out as a country club of the saved until Jesus comes back to get us. We’ll watch too much Netflix. We’ll scroll too much Facebook. We huddle up too often in our houses or in our church. We’ll pull up a lawn chair in life, slap on our sunglasses, and stare into the sky waiting for Jesus to come back. And why? Because we won’t think when Jesus says that “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (v. 8) that it’s going to do a lick of good. You know how the argument looks in your head, right? He’s too backward. She’s too unbelieving. They’re too hardened. He’s too into Buddhism. She’s too stuck on her sexual orientation or too in pursuit of her career or his good work or his easy lifestyle or her scientific studies or what their dad told them about God when they were eight. You know the arguments. And you know what the truth is? You’re right. You’re right about all of them them. Jesus is absolutely unfathomable to folks like that. You’re not turning them around. That’d be like you trying to take the stripes off a Zebra. Or the waddling from a penguin. Or the excellency from Theophilus. Or the unbelief from you.

And that’s why Jesus doesn’t task you with it. You’re not doing the converting. That’s Luke’s huge deal in this entire section. You’re not doing it. Really you’re not. He doesn’t come to you here in Acts 1 and say, “Better get to work at pounding Jesus into your atheist neighbor. It sure is going to take you a while.” Nor does he say, “You better have the exact phrasing for him or it might not work.” Nor does he say, “You better witness enough or people will be lost forever because of you.” Luke isn’t dumping commands on us about witnessing at all. Not in this section. You know what he does say? He says, “You’re going to get, “the gift my Father promised.” (v. 4) And he says, “You will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” And as if that weren’t enough he goes on to promise, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you.” (v. 8) Luke’s all about the promise of power. That’s his big deal. And then – and I might add – and only then does he go on to say, “You will be my witnesses.” (v. 8) Do you see Luke’s point? We don’t convert anybody. We trust the Spirit to do it.

That’s Luke’s big deal. You have God. God. Not Jesus junior. Not God the Father the lesser. You have Pure, High, and Mighty God. God the Miracle Worker. God the Converter. God the Re-birther. God the Regenerator. God the Faith Starter. God the Spirit. And God the Spirit has mind blowing power, soul converting power. The kind of power that can take the stripes right off a Zebra, the waddling away from a penguin, the excellency from Theophilus, and the unbelief from you. Nobody’s too entrenched in their Buddhism that the Spirit can’t entrench them in Christ. Nobody’s too stuck in their sexual orientation that the Spirit can’t reorient them to Jesus. Nobody’s so in love with this life that he won’t have them falling in love with the coming life with Jesus. The Spirit of God has a firm non-discrimination policy. He’s after everyone no matter who they are. Nominal Christian or avowed atheist, comfortable American or religiously unaffiliated, upstanding citizen or hardened criminal. Nobody is too backward for the Spirit. Nobody. You know what the best proof of that is? You are. You’re the Spirit’s best work – his greatest miracle. Look in the mirror. See what you see. You know what I see in myself? The most unlikely of converts. Converted. The one running from him in life. Now chasing him. The unlovable. Loved. You are the work of the mighty Spirit of God. No less than Theophilus.

We must see his power. We must understand his consistency and his love. We must. You know why? Our problem with witnessing isn’t that we don’t know we’re supposed to do it. It isn’t even that we don’t quite know what to say. Our biggest problem is that we’re not sure it works. I mean why say something at the family Christmas party if it’s just going to get everyone stirred up? Why talk to the recent divorcee about the healing Jesus gives if she’ll never believe anyway? Why bring up the faith with that wealthy equestrian when he’ll probably just send it all packing? Why would we? We wouldn’t, but we would if we knew the Convertor was there. But we would if we thought the Regenerator would use it. But we would if we knew that Mighty God the Spirit was going to my voice, my faith thoughts, my love for Jesus to save someone. Then we would. Then we would and we’d stand there waiting to see the fireworks. We would. We stand there expecting results same way we would when we flip a switch, plug in a light, or turn the ignition in a car.

We would witness and then we’d watch. And that’s what Luke wants for us. Luke wants us to trust that the Spirit works through our witnessing. Because he knows that when we do, we’ll witness. We’ll get off Facebook and grab lunch with that hurting soul. We’ll get out of the lawn chairs of our lives and get into the County prison and out into that white collar office. We will. We’ll say what’s true at the book club and that dinner party and that Christmas gathering. We really will. Because we’ll see people as people. We’ll see that they’re a part of God’s ticker tape, a name on his brain. And then our eyes won’t glaze as we look at people and our minds won’t fog as we spend time with them. We’ll be zapped into the potential every moment has to change a person’s eternity. Because I’m standing with or sitting next to or eating with another person who Jesus loves with every fiber of his being. And now the Spirit is just waiting to leap from my thoughts – to use my very words to plug that name, that person, that soul into Jesus so that for the first time in their lives darkness becomes light and unbelief becomes belief and sadness becomes joy and death becomes life.

Theophilus got that. That’s why he bankrolled the writing of Acts. And he did bankroll it. He was the patron of the book. Luke was written because Theophilus wasn’t sure. Acts was written because he was. Theophilus put his checkbook, his resources, his heart on the line for witness. Because he believed a person catches the Spirit through it. Thick skinned Jews and heretical Greeks. Modern skeptics and humanistic Romans. Super religious people and super unreligious people. He knew all of them could be reached through witness. And why? Because God is there. God the Spirit. Lightning in the bottle of your witness. Divinity in the clothes of your words. Salvation coming right from your tongue. For your aunt – you know the one. For the mailman who comes by the house. For the lady in your running club. For the husband you married. For the child you gave birth to and your best friend from high school. I’m not sure which was the greater miracle in this account. Theophilus or Jesus’ supernatural levitation. To me, it’s a toss-up. I’ll tell you what I do know. I’m enjoying all the spiritual miracles sitting right here in front of me right now. You. And I can’t wait to see what miracle the Spirit’s going to do next. Through your witness. Amen.