Whale
Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church
A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today.
As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.
943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org
Order of Worship
January 21, 2024
10:00 a.m.
*You are invited to rise in body or spirit.
Prelude
Greeting and Announcements
Mission Statement: We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.
Call to Worship:
Wait for the Lord. Our souls wait in silent longing.
God is our rock and our salvation!
Wait for the Lord. God is our fortress against the storm.
God is our rock and our salvation!
Wait for the Lord. God is our refuge and our strength.
God is our rock and our salvation!
*Hymn Open My Eyes, that I May See #454
Prayer of Confession:
Holy God,
we would rather proclaim death to our enemies,
than see them forgiven and redeemed.
Forgive our hardness of heart, O God,
and our reluctance to see your divine image
in those who hate and despise us.
Teach us to love our enemies,
that our lives may proclaim your truth—
that love is stronger than hate,
and mercy is greater than vengeance.
We ask this in the name of the Prince of Peace. Amen.
Assurance:
Hear the good news: Jesus came to save us,
not condemn us.
We who were dead have been raised
to newness of life through Jesus
who is the Lord of Life.
Scripture Reading Jonah 3: 1-5, 10
The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days' walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
Sermon Whale
Friends, today, like last week, I’m simply pulling from the lectionary, and you’re hearing the Old Testament passage it recommends for the third Sunday in January. And it just so happens that out of all the stories in the Bible, today we get to talk about Jonah.
In my experience, most of us think we know more about Jonah than we actually do. It’s a Sunday school favorite because it involves a whale, and we like telling animal stories to kids. So we colored crayon pictures of the animals going two by two onto Noah’s arc, or Daniel in the lion’s den, of Jesus the good shepherd, and of Jonah and the whale. And we’ll never forget that Jonah was eaten by a whale. But a lot of us walk around pretty fuzzy on how Jonah ended up in a whale’s stomach, and what he did after the whale indelicately vomited him back out.
So what is this story all about? Some of you participated in my Bible study on Jonah a few years ago, so you now know this book a little better. When I was in the process of getting ordained, I had to write a six week Bible Study on any one book of the Bible I wanted, and I chose Jonah, partly because this is a short book and I knew I could go into much greater depth in six weeks studying a book like Jonah, which has only 4 chapters, than, say, Isaiah, which has 66 chapters. I also had a lot of background with Jonah, because I translated the entire story in my Hebrew class in seminary.
We call the book of Jonah a prophetic text, and we put Jonah with the shorter prophet books, the ones we call “minor prophets”. However, there’s a fair amount of evidence to suggest that we should never have thought of this story as the story of a prophet. This is an odd story, with funny and exaggerated details, that was likely written long after the other prophetic texts of the Old Testament. More than likely, the author of Jonah meant for this story to be a satiric commentary on prophetic texts, rather than a serious story about a prophet. Imagine if, 3,000 years from now, our descendants put “The Simpsons” alongside “Full House” in the genre of “shows about a family”, and that’s what we have going on with Jonah.
That said, this is a wonderful story, rich with imagination, with many lessons to teach us. Jonah was a prophet, and likely a made up one. He had the job of receiving news from God and sharing it with the greater world, whether they wanted to hear from God or not. Jonah had no problem with being a prophet when it meant giving news to people he liked, and people who were already near him. His closest friends, family, and neighbors. But when God told him to go warn Nineveh that their city would perish if they didn’t repent of their evil, Jonah freaked out and found a ship headed as far in the opposite direction as he could go–to Tarshish, to be more specific. Then God sent a big storm after Jonah, and when the rest of the passengers on his ship were going to die at sea and demanded answers, he finally fessed up to being an Israelite prophet fleeing from the Divine. He then jumped overboard, knowing God would calm the storm if he were no longer on the boat. The storm, indeed, calmed down, and God provided a totally out of place large fish to swallow Jonah so he wouldn’t die. Um…thanks, God? The giant fish, wouldn’t you know it, delivered Jonah to Nineveh and vomited him up at their shore. I think this is as good a time as any to remind y’all that when God calls us, she means business.
Once in Nineveh, Jonah knows the assignment: proclaim to everyone within earshot that the city is going down if its residents don’t change their idolatrous behavior. The most unexpected twist, from my perspective, is how receptive the folx in Nineveh are to Jonah’ message. We’ve read many, many Old Testament accounts of an Israelite, or the Israelite army, facing an evil enemy that they overthrow by force because they will never change. Not so with Nineveh. Jonah walks a straight path across the city and yells in the general direction of people’s homes that they oughta change, and the next day every resident of Nineveh is sitting in sackcloth and ashes. The author, in his sense of humor, shares that they put their livestock in sackcloth, too, so enjoy that image of repentant cows and sheep wearing potato sacks. Jonah reacts in anger that the Ninevites changed so quickly, and sulks that God forgives them, even though that should mean that he accomplished his job and did very well. But Jonah held deep prejudices, and did not want to accept that people he despised were capable of change. Maybe even more than him. I think a lot of us struggle with that notion, too, that people really are capable of change and deserve grace for it.
That brings me to an inspirational story I stumbled across this week, about a man named Robert Lee. Robert grew up in New York City as the child of Korean immigrants who wanted to see him succeed as far as he possibly could. As a young man, Robert absorbed the toxic cultural message that the most successful men make a lot of money. So he attended college at New York University and majored in finance. When he graduated, he landed a job working on Wall Street, and had a six figure income by the time he was 22. He could have been set for life, and for a while, Robert thought he was. But he developed this nagging feeling that his community needed him to be more than just a young millionaire. He remembered how much it used to frustrate his parents when anyone wasted perfectly good food, and how they would tell him about people who were going hungry while he threw away leftovers. This gave Robert the inspiration to draft an idea and enter a contest for entrepreneurs. He won, and received a modest prize of $1,000 that he used to start a not for profit called Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, or RLC. RLC was a grassroots organization that created a network of restaurants big and small that committed to donating all their unused food to local homeless shelters instead of tossing it out at the end of the business day. As it turns out, many restaurants near Robert had long hated how wasteful their business practices were, and jumped at the chance to help people. Within two years, Robert’s not for profit donated 250,000 pounds of food to shelters. Within only one year of launching RLC, Robert decided to quit his fancy Wall Street job. He now makes vastly less money as the head of a 501 c 3 than he did working as an investment banker, but he knows that he does more good every day at RLC than he would have accomplished in years at the bank.
Think of Wall Street like a modern day Nineveh, that practices the idolatry of worshiping money. Robert had gone full Ninevite. But he completely repented, and has done tremendous good because he did. We may not see it very often in this life, but people really are capable of change. And if it is so rare for someone to abandon evil and embrace good, that’s all the more reason for us to do better than Jonah, and celebrate true transformation when we see it.
Amen.
*Hymn Be Thou My Vision #451
Offering
Offertory
*Doxology #94
*Prayer of dedication
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer
Our gracious, eternal God, we thank you that Jesus’ call to his disciples came in such an uneventful way. Contrary to the wisdom of the world he did not start with the privileged and the wealthy and the powerful. He did not begin with those who had little need and little desire for change. He began with some very simple folk. He began with some fishermen.
We pray that his call, “Come, follow me,” might again reverberate through our souls today.
May we hear again the challenge to be your disciples.
May we hear again the message of this one who brings good news.
May we hear again the invitation to come to you, “all you who are weary and heavy laden.”
May we hear again eternal words of hope which tell us that however dark the world becomes the darkness cannot ever overcome the radiant light of this holy one, Jesus.
May we hear again those simple words: “Come, follow me,” and may we come, just as we are, and know again the depth of your grace and love for us.
Give us the power to bring change and transformation to the peoples of the world as did those early fishermen. Give us the power to provide the same kind of hope for the world-weary as they brought to theirs. Give us the vision of a world transformed.
We pray for those whose health is a constant and major concern. Be especially with those whose health is compromised so much that they have no hope of ever feeling totally well again. For those we ask that you give courage for the frustrating obstacles of life. Amen.
— written by Richard Einerson, and posted on Richard Einerson: Prayers of the People website. Visit that site for other prayers, and to order his book, Prayers of the People.
Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us, not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.
*Hymn Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing #400
Benediction
Postlude
Staff
Natalie Bowerman Pastor
Betsy Lehmann Music Director
Joe White Custodian
Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant
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