August 23, 2026

The Lord be with you.

Thank you so much.

And can we just say thank you, Lord, again for Sophia?

What a.

Thanks for letting us be on the journey with you.

You did a great job.

Forgetting now what we're doing.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, that's right.

Lacey and I, this is Lacey, by the way.

Maybe you've met Lacey.

She asked me to say this.

She is the uh intern equivalent of a five-star athlete.

I was gonna say three-star, but she was like.

We're gonna ask you to do something with us that I like to do, but we don't do very often.

We're gonna ask you to listen with us to a story that might be very familiar to you.

You may have heard this story recently.

Uh it's a good story, it's a true story, it's a Bible story.

Uh the Bible's unlike any other book.

It's got a cover, uh, but there's no bounds.

Um It's got a first chapter and a last chapter, but it doesn't end.

It has 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,000 approximately, depending on your translation, 100 verses, but it's infinite in the ways God chooses to speak to us through it.

So we're gonna ask you to do a tough task.

We want you to listen again to a story that may be very familiar to you and ask you to sort of look past the gloss of familiarity to the possibility God might have something new for you.

Here today.

So we're gonna offer the book of Jonah.

Anyone heard the book of Jonah recently?

We're gonna we're gonna do our best uh to share it well if you promise to you to do your best to listen well.

That sound like a fair deal.

I don't think they didn't respond particularly well.

So this is the book of Jonah.

The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amitai, saying, get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.

But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

He went down to Joppa, found a ship sailing to Tarshish, paid his fare, went on board to go with them to Tarshish away from the presence of the Lord.

But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and a great storm came upon the sea, so the ship threatened to break apart.

The sailors were afraid, and each cried to his God.

They took the cargo that was in the ship and threw it into the sea to lighten the load for them.

Jonah, meanwhile, had gone into the hold of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep.

The captain of the ship came and said, What are you doing, sound asleep?

Get up! Call on your God.

Perhaps the God will spare us a thought so that we do not perish.

The sailors said to one another, Let's cast lots, so that we may know on whose account this calamity has come upon us.

So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.

So they came and said to him, What have you done that this calamity has come upon us?

What is your occupation?

What's your country?

Where do you come from?

Of what people are you?

I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea as well as the dry land.

They said, What is this that you've done?

For they knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord because he had told them so.

So they said, What shall we do to you so that the sea quiets down for us?

For the sea had grown more and more tempestuous against them.

And he said, Pick me up and throw me into the sea, and the sea will quiet down for you, for it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.

Nevertheless, the men rode hard to bring the ship back to dry land, but they could not, because the sea grew more and more stormy against them.

Then the men prayed to the Lord, O Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man's life.

Don't make us guilty of shedding innocent blood.

For you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.

And they picked Jonah up and they threw him into the sea.

And the sea ceased from its raging.

And the men were more afraid.

And they offered sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

And the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah.

And he was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.

And out of the belly of the fish, he prayed to the Lord his God.

I called to the Lord out of my distress and he answered me.

Out of the belly of Shaol, I cried, and you heard my prayer.

You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the sea, your flood surrounded me, all of your waves and your billows passed over me.

Then I said, I am cast away from your sight.

How am I to look again at your holy temple?

The waters closed in over me.

The deep surrounded me.

Weeds were wrapped around my neck at the roots of the mountains.

Then I went down to the dry land and its bars raised upon me forever.

But you brought up my life from the pit.

Oh Lord, my God.

As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord.

And my prayer came to you into your holy temple.

Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty.

But I, with a voice of thanksgiving, I will sacrifice.

What I have vowed, I will pay.

Deliverance belongs to the Lord.

Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out onto dry land.

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 give you.

Now Nineveh was an exceedingly, so Jonah set out to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord.

Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city.

A three days walk across.

And Jonah began to set out a day's journey and cried out against it.

Forty days more in Nineveh shall be overthrown.

And the people of Nineveh believed God.

They proclaimed a fast.

And everyone, both great and small, put on sackcloth.

When news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his robe, covered himself in sackcloth, and sat in ashes.

He made a proclamation in Nineveh.

By decree of the king and his nobles, no human being or animal, no herder flock shall taste anything.

They shall not feed or drink any water.

They shall cover themselves in sackcloth and cry mightily to God.

Who knows?

God may relent and change his mind and turn from his fierce anger so that we do not perish.

And when God saw what they did, how they turned from their wicked ways, God changed his mind about the calamity he said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it.

And this was very displeasing to Jonah.

And Jonah became very angry.

And Jonah said, Lord, isn't that what I said when I was still in my own country?

That is why I fled to Tarshish in the beginning, for I knew that you were a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, relenting from punishment.

Now, Lord, take away my life for me, for it is better for me to die than to live.

And the Lord said, Is it right for you to be angry?

And Jonah got up and went out of the city and sat down east of the city and built a booth for himself and sat under its shade, waiting to see what would happen to Nineveh.

And the Lord appointed a bush to come up over Jonah, to provide shade, to save him from his discomfort.

And Jonah was very happy about the bush.

And at dawn the Lord appointed a worm to attack the bush, and it withered.

And when the sun rose, the Lord prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah's head so that he became faint, and he asked that he might die.

He said, It is better for me to die than to live.

The Lord said to Jonah, Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?

Yes.

Angry enough to die.

And the Lord said, You're angry about a bush for which you did not labor and which you did not plant.

It sprang up in a night and perished in a night.

Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than one hundred twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

It's the book of Jonah.

Anyone heard the story of Jonah?

Isn't the Bible amazing?

It's got a beginning and an end, but it's unending, you know?

So our hope is that God said something new to you today through that familiar story.

And whatever it was, take it to heart.

There's a couple things.

It's 1119.

School starts this week.

We don't care.

We've just got a couple of things that we would like to show you from the book of Jonah.

Did you notice God's question to Jonah?

Surely you did.

Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?

Is it right for you to be angry?

I'm not convinced it's purely a moral question that God is asking.

God is not surprised by Jonah's displeasure at how all of this has panned out.

His tantrums, his disillusions, vengeance.

No.

Up until this point in the scriptures, Jonah is not the exception to human behavior.

He's the rule.

And Jonah knows this because Jonah knows the scriptures.

Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis, she's down at Duke, she argues that Jonah has a canonical reason to reject the divine command, that Jonah might detect a serious inconsistency in God's behavior.

That Jonah knows God's proclivity to mercy because in the imaginative world of the story, Jonah has read Exodus.

Jonah can be disobedient to God, and God will be gracious and merciful to him because, well, that's what God does.

That's why I fled to Tarshish in the beginning, for I knew that you were a gracious and merciful God, abounding in steadfast love, relenting from punishment.

It's Exodus 34.

You remember.

God's renewed covenant to the Israelites after a legendary series of fumbles on their part.

If God can forgive all those stiff-necked whiners in the desert, well, he's not going to bat an eye at me leaving for Tarshish.

Until he does, until Jonah realizes that God has caught up to him.

And part of my imagination wonders if the very first lines we hear from Jonah, his proclamation of Orthodox faith that he's rattled off a hundred times, that I am a Hebrew, I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea as well as the dry land.

Jonah is realizing that he can't outrun God.

So the sailors throw Jonah into the sea.

God provides a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and there Jonah sits in its belly for three days and proclaims a beautiful psalm of thanksgiving.

That the Lord has heard his prayers, that he's brought up his life from the pit.

That those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty.

But I, I, with a voice of thanksgiving, I will sacrifice what I vowed I will pay.

Deliverance belongs to the Lord.

Well, does it, Jonah?

Because God never asked you to sacrifice, really.

He he just wanted you to do what you were told to do in the first place.

To trust him.

So is it right for you to be angry about the bush?

Have you ever tried to outrun God?

My family and I, we moved out to West Michigan about a year ago so I could fulfill my dream of going to seminary at Western.

A dream I'd had since I was about five years old.

I thought I had succumbed to God's will for my life, that nagging feeling that was following me around.

The feeling that I was born to know Jesus.

So I did it.

My husband Andrew and I, we sold our house in Poughkeepsie.

We drove out west with our two toddlers, we did it.

I had succumbed to God's will.

So I gave myself a firm pat on the back for my great obedience, and you'll never guess what I did next.

I hopped right back into the driver's seat and I laid out my amazing plans.

The first of which being, there is no way that I would be caught dead working in a church.

No, no.

I married a preacher's kid.

Do we have any preacher's kids here?

I'm sure we do.

Okay.

Now, how many of you are married to one?

Okay.

See?

No.

I was going to have work-life boundaries.

I was going to work in a hospital or a cruise ship.

I was going to work anywhere where my home life and my work did not intercept.

I was going to sit in hard, sad, traumatic even spaces.

And that might not seem like a vacation to all of you, but the way my life was oriented to that point in the world, well, that's where the action was.

That's what I knew how to do.

It wasn't scary for me.

So I wasn't going to work in the church, and to be perfectly transparent with you all, I definitely would not be working in this one.

A place where my name was known, my story was heard, my questions are honored.

No thanks.

I had been part of plenty of churches before, whether you could call them that or not.

And once they found out my name and my story, I was labeled, I was categorized, and I was dismissed as one of those that I was that kind that I couldn't possibly belong here.

So no, I wasn't going to tell you my story.

I had no interest in that.

That's not to say I wouldn't put in the work.

I would sacrifice.

I would stay up late when the kids went to bed to finish the readings.

Heck, I would learn Greek.

I would do anything except tell you who I was and where I'd been.

I'm the helper.

Thank you very much.

I am glad to sit in your pain with you, and you have no business being in mine.

Until about a month in, I started to notice some cracks in my plans.

The criteria I had laid out for my life was doing exactly what it was designed to do.

It kept people out.

I was free.

I was free from the burdens of human relationship, the mundane headaches of listening to people's opinions and psychodrama and anxieties.

I was free.

And I was alone.

I was Jonah headed for Tarshish, and I'm not saying that you all are Nineveh.

No, I would never say that.

I just mean to say that I know a little bit about trying to outrun God, and it does not work.

So my husband, Andrew, seeing a rare opportunity to inch past my hard-headedness, declared one Saturday, Lacey, we're just gonna try going to pillar.

And we did.

And we walked through those doors on July 20th, 2025.

We sat house left three pews from the back on the aisle.

I have a picture, actually.

There's Jonah and Steve Spoolhoff.

You wouldn't know it, but five minutes after that, a guy named John Brown would come up to this stage and stand exactly where I'm standing now and single-handedly ruin all of my plans.

He read Genesis three, and the serpent was more crafty.

He kept doing this.

I'll never forget it.

Really.

And that's what I was afraid of.

That's what I was running from.

That if I stayed in one place long enough, well, you might you might find out about all the things I did back in the desert.

And you might not let me be here.

Well, I have to be here.

There's nowhere else.

The church is the only place I've ever wanted to be.

Since I was five.

So if I stop running, if I tell you who I am and and you don't like it, where does that leave me?

Are you gonna leave me?

Is God going to leave me?

Have you ever tried to outrun God?

Is it right for you to be angry?

Jonah?

I really don't think it's a moral question here.

I think it's a relational one.

I think it's less of God asking Jonah, is it right for you to be angry?

But God asking Jonah, who do you think I am?

See, just as Jonah looks back at the scriptures to defend his anger, God looks forward to their fulfillment.

To tell Jonah who he is, to the proclamation of the king.

That Jonah, if you know me so well, you would know that I've seen the misery of my people.

I've heard their cries, I know their suffering, that I come to deliver them.

That I will send you, yes, but I will be with you to the end of the age, that I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians, I will bring you into the land of milk and honey, that the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob will be sent to you.

I will make myself known to you.

That I will face your enemies who torment and humiliate you, and I will not only spare them, I will put on flesh and I will die for them.

That I will descend far below the belly of Sheol.

That I will conquer darkness once and for all, that death will be no more.

Mourning and crying and pain will be no more.

Don't you know, Jonah?

That I am who I am, that I'm coming to save the world.

So is it right for you to be angry?

Because deliverance belongs to the Lord.

Amen.

Amen.

Who thinks Lacey should be a preacher?

Just one second question.

I'll make this super quick, don't worry.

The book of Jonah ends with a question.

That's a trick the Bible plays on us sometimes.

Like the book of Acts does the same thing.

The prodigal son story does the same thing.

You're concerned about a bush for which you did not labor and you did not grow.

It sprang up in a night, it perished in a night.

Should I not be more concerned about Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 people who do not have the right hand from their left, and also many animals?

The book just stops.

It just ends.

And the question, frankly, from a narrative perspective, is not actually meant for Jonah.

It's meant for you.

If that's who God is, if that's how God is, if that's what God does, what does that mean for you?

What does that mean for the way you treat people?

What does that mean about the way you engage, greet, meet?

What does that mean?

If that's how God is, what about you?

That's the question that Jonah wants us to wonder.

So here's the deal.

The tide is turning.

It's August 23.

By the this time next week, a bunch of you will be have had your first day of schools.

Pumped.

Superintendent Cassidy.

I'm glad you're pumped.

Who's nervous?

Superintendent Cassidy.

So here's what I want to do.

This is this is the you're gonna hate me for this.

I don't care.

Are there any students here?

I want all the students to stand up.

Are there any teachers here?

I wanna if you're on the lawn, you gotta stand up too.

All the teachers have to stand up.

Are there any administrators here?

School administrators, you gotta stand up.

Are there any people who work on furniture here?

Are there any people who sit in furniture here?

You gotta stand up.

Are there any people who work on cars, like little visors, rear view mirrors?

I want you to Are there any people here who drive cars?

Are there any people who have any been in cars?

Are there any people here who like people or don't like people?

Stand up.

You are about to enter every sector of public life to claim it for Christ.

Is it right for you to be concerned about a bush for which you did not labor and you did not plan?

It grew up in the night and perished in the night.

Should I not be more concerned about the school, the hospital, the factory, the office, 8th Street, the apartment, your family, your neighbor?

Should I not be more concerned?

So what are you gonna do?

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.