Sermon for September 20, 2020 - The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 20A - The Rev'd Isaac P. Martinez

Lections: Jonah 3:10-4:11; Ps. 145:1-8; Phil. 1:21-30; Matt. 20:1-16

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

So my friends, it may not exactly surprise you to hear that I was what you would call a nerd growing up. I loved reading and learning tons of new facts and I couldn’t help but share them with everyone I could. I would even sit with my grandparents’ encyclopedia set and just spend hours going through each hefty volume. (The fact that it was a 1960s edition only got me in trouble a few times.)

It wasn’t long, however, before my love of learning started to gain the attention of other adults in my life, especially my teachers. And slowly, my intentions shifted from loving to learn for its own sake to loving to seeing my schoolwork marked with As. Starting in middle school, we would get a semesterly report card with our GPA ranking on it and if I wasn’t first, I would be upset for weeks. As I felt like an outsider among my peers in so many ways, “succeeding” academically made me feel valued. And that wasn’t a bad thing in itself. But as I started to internalize the cultural message that academic success simply mattered more, that smarter people were inherently better people, I started to think very highly of myself and to think very little of my classmates. Sometimes, I was even downright mean. And it took many years and some hard times for me to realize that my intellect was not something that made be better than other people but a gift to be used for God’s dream.

This period of my life is not something I’m proud of, but I share it with you because I think it helps to illustrate what our readings are telling us this morning.

First, we have the story of Jonah. As we may remember from our own Church School lessons, Jonah was an Israelite prophet, called by God to preach a message of repentance and forgiveness to Nineveh, the capital city of Israel’s archenemy at the time, the Assyrian Empire. For many reasons, but primarily out of fear, Jonah doesn’t want to go to Nineveh, and so he flees, running in the complete opposite direction. Nineveh is over here on the right, and Jonah gets on a boat headed for Tarshish, all the way in modern Spain. But God is insistent that the people of Nineveh need to hear about God’s dream for right relationship, so He sends a great storm at the boat Jonah is on. As the ship’s crew are terrified of drowning, Jonah reveals that he is the cause of the danger and consents to being thrown overboard. Afterwards, the sea is calmed and the Gentile crew recognize the power of Israel’s god. But God isn’t done with Jonah yet and sends a “big fish” to swallow and save Jonah. For 3 days and nights, Jonah sits in the belly of the fish, alive, but unsure for how long. He prays and in response, God directs the fish to spew Jonah onto dry land and once again, God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and this time, Jonah goes.

Now, the Bible isn’t very specific about the evils the Ninevites were committing, but we can surmise that what God is concerned with is oppression: that the strongest among the Ninevites are taking advantage of their weaker fellow citizens and as a country, that the Assyrians are conquering and oppressing their neighbors. And if they don’t stop, God will act in defense of the weak by overthrowing the Ninevites.

So Jonah gives this message of impending destruction, but only does the bare minimum to persuade the people. He doesn’t perform miraculous acts to prove who he is or who God is. He doesn’t tell the Ninevites about how God saved him twice. Still, the Ninevites are persuaded. And they go to great lengths to turn away from what they were doing in hope that God will spare them, which is where we pick up the story in our first reading, when God sees Nineveh’s repentance and God changes God’s mind about destroying the city.

And Jonah, poor Jonah, gets so mad that God would act according to God’s nature. He is angry that God shows mercy to a dangerous, oppressive enemy. The Ninevites don’t deserve mercy, Jonah tells God; they deserve destruction.

And expecting the very least from the Ninevites, Jonah leaves the city to wait for their true nature to show, for them to revert back to their evil ways, and for God to destroy them after all. And while waiting, God tries once more to show Jonah what exactly divine compassion and mercy are all about by causing a plant to grow and shade Jonah from the sun and just as suddenly to cause it to die, driving Jonah once again to God and the story closes with a question from God: if Jonah cared so much about one plant that was entirely a gift to him, how much more should God care about 120,000 human beings that He made?

The answer, of course, is infinitely more, because God is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great lovingkindness. The story of Jonah is in fact a tragedy, because even after so many divine interventions, after so many times God showed Jonah grace and compassion, Jonah still couldn’t accept that the Ninevites were as deserving of it as he and the Israelites were. And the hard truth from Jonah, as well as from Jesus’s parable about the day laborers in the vineyard is that from our point of view, God is unfair.

When we make ourselves the center of the universe, it is easy to classify some people as worthy and unworthy, good and evil, deserving of all the good things in life and those deserving of, maybe not punishment exactly, but certainly less than ourselves. It is basic human nature.

But to live a spiritual life, to call ourselves Christian and follow Jesus, requires us to transcend that part of our nature; to let go of our narrow conceptions of fairness and to embrace the wideness of God’s justice. Because God’s justice is not about rewarding those we think are good and punishing those we think of as wicked. If that were the case, we would all be in trouble, because as much as we long to think we are the hero of our own story, we are the villain in someone else’s. Instead, God’s dream of justice is about restoring the inherent goodness of every single one of Her children, every human being made in Her image. Such a restoration from God’s perspective requires a radical reversal from ours, that the first be last and the last become first. And so, God’s justice starts to resemble God’s mercy.

Like Jonah are the workers of the vineyard in Jesus’s parable, who have been working since daybreak and get angry that those who only worked for an hour get the same pay. But every laborer is dependent on the owner of the vineyard to be paid. And every person is dependent on God’s grace to live, and that fact alone makes it impossible for us to say some deserve more from this life because we work harder or are smarter or make fewer mistakes than other people.

Now does this mean we should stop working hard or stop learning or stop trying to improve ourselves or our world? No, absolutely not! When we broaden our spiritual vision, St. Paul’s, and realize that all we have, all our privileges, all our blessings, ultimately come from a God who immeasurably and equally loves each person in this world, we also start to really know that using those gifts for God’s dream only deepens our own joy, makes our work less burdensome, and gives us a profound reassurance of our purpose in the midst of a hurting and anxious world. So, beloved, may a gracious God give us the ability to reach beyond ourselves, to trust in Their abundant mercy, and be agents of Their steadfast love. Amen.