4 The Lord responded, “Is your anger a good thing?” 5 But Jonah went out from the city and sat down east of the city. There he made himself a hut and sat under it, in the shade, to see what would happen to the city.
6 Then the Lord God provided a shrub,
and it grew up over Jonah, providing shade for his head and saving him from his misery. Jonah was very happy about the shrub. 7 But God provided a worm the next day at dawn, and it attacked the shrub so that it died. 8 Then as the sun rose God provided a dry east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint. He begged that he might die, saying, “It’s better for me to die than to live.”
9 God said to Jonah, “Is your anger about the shrub a good thing?”
Jonah said, “Yes, my anger is good—even to the point of death!”
10 But the Lord said, “You ‘pitied’ the shrub, for which you didn’t work and which you didn’t raise; it grew in a night and perished in a night. 11 Yet for my part, can’t I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than one hundred twenty thousand people who can’t tell their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (Common English Bible)
“The Minor Leagues: The “Minor” Prophets of the Bible,” Week Six
Seeing the book’s availability hit me like a thunderbolt. A book that had been written sixty years ago, by my great-uncle whom I had never met about his survival and escape from the genocide, had copies available through a couple of different online sellers.
Thank goodness Al Gore invented the internet (it has been 20-plus years, I can make that joke, yes?).
Harry Toomajan was the brother of my great-grandmother Satenig Toomajan Mouradian, whom our Sadie is named after. He wrote Exit from Inferno even before my own parents were born, and I had no idea a book like that existed out there until recently, and I had managed to hunt down a copy.
My great-uncle Harry covers a great many topics in his memoir, but devotes the lion’s share of the space to documenting his experience of the Armenian Genocide, so that there was a permanent record of it. And I want to share just this short excerpt, about a man named Mehmed Agha who saved Harry’s life during the genocide when the gendarmes came to Mehmed Agha’s property to collect Armenians for slaughter:
I…express my sincere appreciation for such a man as Mehmed Agha, and for many others of the (Muslim) faith, because I am convinced that, were it not for them, I would not be alive today…I know it to be true that many others of my race under the same circumstances as mine would not be alive today were it not for the fact that some sympathetic, understanding Turk with a golden heart at some time or another, perhaps for a few moments, a few hours, or a few days, extended a warm, friendly hand, giving food, shelter, and comfort to an otherwise doomed person.
As we turn to the story of so fiercely nationalistic and prejudiced a prophet as Jonah, I hope my great-uncle’s words can be taken to heart in a way that shows us the way forward together.
We have reached July 4, so I do not think we can still call this a *new* sermon series, but it is a series to take us all the way through the summer, from Memorial Day weekend up to Labor Day weekend, and truthfully, it is a series that I have wanted to give for a long time now, almost a decade. But it never quite fit into the arc of my ministry until now. After all the work that we as a team put into resuming in-person worship services after fourteen months of online-only worship, a few months of a relatively simple series has, I know, helped me get back in the rhythm of preaching to a sanctuary of people and not a computer screen of faces!
So, this sermon series was born. Each Sunday, we will hear from one of the twelve (or thirteen) minor prophets of the Tanakh (Old Testament), so-called because the books attributed to them are much shorter in length than those of the three “major” prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. As a group, I have found the minor prophets especially dear and compelling, but I acknowledge for some, maybe many, of you they may seem unfamiliar or even intimidating, and this series is meant to help chip away at that. The sermons are designed to be standalone, so that if you do some traveling this summer and miss a Sunday or three, I do not want you to feel like you have fallen behind everyone else. So I hope by the end of this series come Labor Day, we have discovered newfound affinity for these so-called minor prophets, and elevated them closer to major status in our faith.
To best facilitate everyone following along, we will read the prophets in the order they appear in the Protestant versions of the Tanakh. So, we began with Daniel, and followed him up with Hosea, Joel, Amos, and Obadiah. Today we move once more from one of the more obscure books to one of the more well-known and well-loved books—that of the prophet Jonah.
Jonah is well-known and well-loved to us for his three-day escapade in the GI tract of a whale. But two common misconceptions to that story are that it was some sort of punishment, and that it represents the climactic point of Jonah’s story. In reality, the crew of the ship Jonah was on threw him overboard at his own behest, and God sent the whale to save Jonah from drowning. And all that drama takes place in the first two chapter of Jonah’s four-chapter book. His seventy-two hours in the whale is the end of act one that is meant to get you through intermission eager for act two.
All of it—being thrown overboard, the whale, the tree that gives Jonah shade before wilting—comes from Jonah’s recalcitrance at the prospect of prophesying on behalf of God in Nineveh, Assyria. God calls Jonah there, and Jonah not only refuses to go, Jonah flees in the exact opposite direction of Nineveh, towards Tarshish. It would be like if when God called me here to Birmingham, I said, “No way, God, I’m headed for the North Pole to see Santa Claus instead.”
That is when Jonah is thrown overboard—as he is fleeing from God’s call—and he prays during his three days as reverse sushi. The whale belches Jonah onto land, and Jonah makes his way to Nineveh and preaches God’s message to them. That message reaches the Assyrian king, who responds accordingly and faithfully, proclaiming acts of repentance for himself and the whole of Nineveh, and that is where we pick up, with God seeing the faithfulness of the Assyrians and sparing them.
That does not make Jonah very happy, though. Jonah had prophesied destruction to Nineveh, and it turns out in chapter four that Jonah actually wanted to see that destruction happen! Jonah was not happy that God is, as he put it, “very patient and full of faithful love.” He tells God that this patience and love is why Jonah did not want to go in the first place—because Jonah knew that God did not really want to destroy the Assyrians, and even as Jonah really wanted God to.
So Jonah plunks himself down outside of Nineveh to wait and see if God really will destroy the city like Jonah wants. And instead, God shows mercy to Jonah yet again, by giving Jonah shade in the form of a tree before then letting the tree wilt. God does this to try to reach Jonah again, to show Jonah that even though God created the plant, Jonah only cared about the plant for what it could give him—as a means to an end. The plant is an object lesson for Jonah about how he sees the rest of God’s creation, plants and humans alike, as worth only what he, personally, can gain from them.
There is selfishness, then, in Jonah, even after his repentance as a whale-snack. But in the case of the Assyrians of Nineveh, it is selfishness tinged heavily with prejudice. To him, the Assyrians not only are a people unworthy of God’s mercy, but they are worthy only of happily watching their demise.
Jonah may be a prophet, but he is not a good person. In modern terms, we would call him a bigot, or a nationalist, and we would not be wrong in doing so.
Both then and now Jonah serves as a cautionary tale rather than as a teacher or role model, and in that way he is a bit unique among the prophets, major and minor alike. He teaches us not by word or example, but by what not to do, and how not to be. C.S. Lewis talks about this, that a good person can serve God as a loving and loved child, while an evil person can still serve God as an unwilling and unwitting tool. By showing us the fruits of nationalism and prejudice, Jonah is emphasizing to us the need to exhibit the exact opposite in our own lives.
Today seems like an opportune, even important, time to say that, to warn us against ever letting patriotism become nationalism. Nationalism is what happens when love of country enables hatred of other nations and peoples. It fuels beliefs of innate superiority and entitlement that lead to things like the genocide that killed my relatives and my people. It whipped up an entire empire, even as individuals within that empire, like Mehmed Agha, resisted it and saved the lives of their neighbors. But even in less extreme forms it still turns us into the person who stands in the middle of the sanctuary and tells God, “Thank you for not making me like that tax collector over there.”
In the Deep South, I think we experience that attitude on the basis of regional geography—other areas of the country looking here and saying that, especially as a way to avoid reckoning with their own painful histories of racism and prejudice.
And therein lies how tempting nationalism is, just like most any sin is tempting—it can be so much easier to look at another people and say “Thank you, God, for not making me like them” instead of asking, “What do I need to do, or even what do I need to give up, so that you can live freely, equally, and equitably with me?”
I hope—I pray—that we can recognize that need in every person, of every nation, because our natural state is not subjugation, but freedom. And that makes freedom not an exclusively American virtue. Instead of defining us as Americans, freedom should connect us to the rest of the world. Our freedom to worship God is a part of that. Jonah’s freedom to follow God—or not—is what defines a prophet, not hatred for another people. And our freedom to follow God should define us as well.
We are here, gathered at church, to be the church. But the church universal is not American.
We are here to worship and praise God. But God is not American.
We are here to follow and glorify Christ. But Christ is not American.
We are here to listen to and be guided by the Bible. But the Bible is not American.
May we, then, take our love of freedom—the freedom that Jonah exercised first to run from God but then to follow God, and the freedom we exercise too—and allow it to deepen our connection to one another, around the world, rather than to set us apart.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
July 4, 2021