September 21, 2008 + Rejecting Grace + Frank Alton

Jonah 3:10-4:11; Matthew 20: 1-16



MP3 File


I’ve entitled this sermon, “rejecting grace.” The more Presbyterian version would be “resisting grace” because one of John Calvin’s core teachings is that grace is “irresistible.” Rejecting is a stronger word, and I think today’s Scriptures warrant that word. Have you ever rejected grace? Why would you? We all love grace – at least when it applies to us. Who doesn’t like getting free stuff – whether it’s winning the lottery, finding a $10 bill on the ground, or receiving a gift totally out of the blue? We may eventually get uncomfortable being on the dole too long, but most of us think we could get used to it. We also love stories of grace in which someone helps out another person in need without any conditions – maybe not as much as the first kind, but we like them. We’re not bad people. We’re actually quite compassionate. Of course, when we hear a story like the one about the laborers in the vineyard we’re not so sure grace hasn’t gotten a little out of hand. And when the bill comes to $700 billion, the recipients are large corporations, and we’re actually the ones securing the loan, our feelings are also more mixed. But, as Willam Baxa likes to say, “That’s another story.”

The bottom line is we do struggle with grace. On the one hand we’re attracted to it – it feels good, life seems to be better when grace abounds, and we know that sometimes we couldn’t live without it. On the other hand it offends our sense of righteousness – it doesn’t seem fair, it doesn’t seem responsible, and it doesn’t work as public policy. How do we hold the two together? That was Jonah’s issue and that was the issue for the workers who had worked all day in the parable.

Jesus revealed in his life and his teaching how God holds all of this together and it got him into big trouble. The religious leaders of his day had allowed their pride to make them defend orthodoxy more than God does. When that happens, we actually twist orthodoxy into what it is not. The lessons in Jonah’s story and that of the laborers in the vineyard, offer a way to hold truth that allows us to experience grace ourselves, permit others to receive it as well, and live with the ambiguity it exposes in our belief system. We don’t know if Jonah ever got it, because the story ends with an accusation and a question: “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” We don’t know about Jonah, but we are left with the opportunity to get it right.

I’ve observed something for years at Immanuel I think Jonah’s story can help us deal with. Immanuel has a reputation for being a community of grace. Some people who know that have taken advantage of us. Certain members see that happen and resent it; they wish we’d be more careful about whom we help and whom we include. At the same time, most folks have come to be very grateful for what they have received here. But I’ve also known a number of people over the years that have initially been drawn into this community because they are attracted to the grace they find here. They’ve told me that they had never experienced such welcome, such acceptance in a church.

But after a while some folks struggle or even end up leaving because they discover that we accept a particular group of people that they disapprove of – some left ten years ago when they realized that Hispanics were now a permanent part of the congregation; others disapproved of our welcoming illegal immigrants because they were breaking the law; still others could not accept that we refused to insist that people learn English in order to be members here; others couldn’t believe we welcome gays and lesbians, or Catholics, or some other group. Sometimes people are actually okay with the fact that we welcome these groups; the real struggle comes when they come to understand that we don’t just accept them because we’re nice people but because our theology – what we believe the Bible teaches – says that those groups may even have a special place in God’s heart precisely because they are so often rejected by religious people. So, like Jonah and Jesus’ contemporaries, we need to learn how to hold our righteousness more like God does.

Jonah got angry at God for being so indiscriminate in spreading grace around. Like Jonah, we need to understand why we can both love and reject grace at the same time, and how we might unify these different reactions in our bodies. Today’s passage is the tail end of Jonah’s story. The first three chapters tell the rest of the story. God called Jonah to go tell the Ninevites that their wickedness had come to God’s attention. Jonah responded by going in the exact opposite direction to Tarshish. A storm arose that almost capsized the boat he was on. He was thrown overboard when it was determined that he was the reason for the storm. He was swallowed by a big fish, in whose belly he spent three days and nights. The fish spewed him onto the beach, and Jonah heard God call him once again. Hmmm. This time he decided maybe he would go to Nineveh after all. Imagine that. In fact, imagine this foreigner walking up and down the city streets shouting, “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” To his dismay and utter disgust, the people actually repented. So God decided not to overthrow the city. Jonah was furious. That’s why he hadn’t wanted to go to Nineveh in the first place. He knew God was like that. Jonah was a righteous man and he hated unrighteousness. He loved God except for that annoying overly permissive part of God’s nature.

It turns out this is fairly common among religious people. We love God, and we’re rightly motivated to try to live according to God’s ways. But sometimes it infuriates us when that doesn’t seem to make any difference. The lives of people who reject God seem to go as well as ours. What’s going on here? The story of Jonah helps us see that what we often fail to see is that God’s way of holding righteousness is not the same as our way of holding it. If you’ll permit me to say it, religious people have an amazing tendency to make an idol out of the law against idolatry. An idol is anything that we make more important than God and God’s freedom. Jonah’s aversion to the idolatry of the Ninevites caused him to idolize his own attitude toward them, leaving no room for the freedom of God to be compassionate. He would rather die than see God seemingly break God's own law against idolatry. Jonah's idolatry of the law against idolatry blinded him to the fact that God can still hold firm against idolatry while having compassion on the idolaters. (Sandor Goodhart, Sacrificing Commentary, ch. 5, "'Out of the Fish's Belly': Prophecy, Sacrifice, and Repentance in the Book of Jonah," pp. 139-167)

The two parts come together when we realize that the greatest danger of idolatrous behavior is that in condemning others we end up condemning ourselves. Jonah states this himself, though he doesn’t know it: "for it is better for me to die than to live." We must have compassion first not upon others but upon ourselves, or, more accurately, upon others precisely as we recognize ourselves in those others. We must give up judging & condemning ourselves and engage in forgiving ourselves.

James Alison has pointed out that what controls all of this in us are pride and shame. He quotes Andrew Sullivan in a line that catches it exactly: "Shame forces you prematurely to run away from yourself; pride forces you prematurely to expose yourself." (Love Undetectable, London: Chatto & Windus, 1998, p. 92) In Jonah’s case, faced with the prospect of shouting at an uncomprehending Nineveh with the hollow pride of those who love neither themselves nor those whom they must convince, Jonah, who knew at the root of his heart that he had been given something to say, went into exile. Shame forced him prematurely to run away from the presence of God. He didn't yet know that the presence of God is where he is as someone loved: in fleeing the presence of God, he was running away from himself. But thank God Jonah fled! Think how much more damage is caused by those who are not vulnerable to their own shame, who really do manage to fool themselves that their righteousness and God's are cut from the same cloth.

We see Jonah’s pride at work in his interaction with the sailors on the boat in the storm. He has the sense of superiority of being God’s man amongst a bunch of pagan sailors. When the worried sailors accuse him, Jonah draws himself up with all the superiority of his birthright and tells them, “I am a Hebrew; I know what is really going on.” After all, in his view, it is the Hebrew God who is in charge of all that surrounds them. The shouts of the panicking sailors summon up in him the "pride" part of his being -- the knowledge of his faith and his privilege in having been addressed by God. He has yet to allow the word of God to get to the deeper part of him, his shame, where he might be loved, and so stop causing all this chaos. At that level he is still running away; he can't act out of the calm of one who is loved. So pride and shame were the conflicting facets of Jonah's soul as he pitched over the side of the vessel, and into death. "And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights."

Maybe the great fish is nothing other than God holding Jonah in the midst of the darkness and fear. It is as if, in the midst of a suicidal depression, there where even a person of faith can find no foothold, where there is no remedy, where ones very being is disintegrating and there is no light, nor even a tunnel at the end of which a light might be, just a downward sucking whirlpool which drags you out of being, even yet you are held in being by a force which is not your own.

Jonah could see and feel the darkness, and yet he was not aware that, in the midst of that, he was being stitched together, reached, held at a depth which he had been unable to imagine.

What has to happen to eventually get it right? Jonah is called the son of Amittai, which means "My Truth." The whole story is set up as one in which someone who is wedded to his own truth comes to learn God's truth the hard way. He knows what’s wrong with the gentile world, but he could only hear half of God’s word: a stern word of rebuke that he was to pass on to others.

Luckily, Jonah knew that were he to obey God, God would certainly break through his ordered adhesion to true religion, and he would come into contact with a much more turbulent, stormy world, the world of shame and pride and fear and hatred that is the underside of all ordered righteousness. That is exactly what happened. Jonah found that he had been reached, that there was a real "he" that could be held and put together, so for the first time he finds himself able to do something utterly new: "Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish" (Jon 2:1)

When we allow ourselves to be broken by the confusion between God’s righteousness and God’s compassion, we are on the road from being wedded to our own truth to learning God’s way of holding these two qualities together. Believe me, I wish there were some other way. But as I read the Scriptures, and as I read my own life, I’m pretty sure there isn’t. It may not sound like good news to say, “let yourself be broken.” But I can assure you that there is Life with a capital L on the other side.