The Minor Prophets | Jonah

So friends, our teaching scripture today comes from Jonah

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

chapter 4, verses 1 to 11. It says, but this was very

displeasing to Jonah and he became angry.

He prayed to the Lord and said, Oh Lord, is this not?

Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country?

That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew

that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and

abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.

And now, oh Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better

for me to die than to live. And the Lord said, Is it right

for you to be angry? Then Jonah went out of the city

and sat down east of the city and made a booth for himself

there. He sat under it in the shade,

waiting to see what would become of the city.

The Lord God appointed a Bush and made it come up over Jonah

to give shade over his head to save him from his discomfort.

So Jonah was very happy about the Bush, but when dawn came up

the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the Bush so

that it withered when the sun rose.

God prepared a sultry E wind and the sun beat down on the head of

Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die.

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

But God said to Jonah, is it right for you to be angry about

the Bush? And he said, yes, angry enough

to die. Then the Lord said, 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. And should I not be concerned

about Nineveh, the great city, in which there are more than

120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their

left, and also many animals? This is the word of the Lord.

It's good to be with you this morning.

I'm going to set this right here.

So we're used to hearing a story of Jonah paired with a little

scene about a whale, and we'll get there.

But the story of Jonah ends with a moment about a Bush providing

shade to Jonah. And then he gets really angry

because the Bush kind of Withers and goes away and disappears.

And God asks Jonah a question that we actually never really

get the answer to. So sorry, I'm not going to be

able to provide too much clarity.

But the Bush is as important a part of the story as the whale

is. And both the Bush and the whale,

when we read the story of Jonah, are reminders of the unrelenting

mercy of God, the unrelenting mercy of God.

And we're going to get there into the story, but first we

have to get the proper context. So between 1969 and 1973, the

United States Air Force dropped more than 1/2 a million tons of

bombs on the countryside of Cambodia.

And this campaign was a secret. Congress hadn't authorized it.

The Cambodia people hadn't really done anything to provoke

it. It was a spillover from the war

in Vietnam. And North Vietnam was using the

Cambodian territory along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, you know, to

bring their supplies. There were supplies.

And Richard Nixon authorized what came to be known as

corporate bombing, indiscriminate, indiscriminate

bombing of rural Cambodian territory.

So this bombing completely destabilized the country, as you

can imagine. It drove rural populations into

the cities. It sort of shattered civil

society and created the conditions of desperation and

chaos. There were more bombs dropped in

this small region of Cambodia in that period than all of the

bombs dropped by the Allied forces in World War Two.

You can only imagine how destabilizing this was for the

Cambodian people. So when the Khmer Rouge and

authoritarian style government sort of entered into Phnom Penh

in April of 1975, they were walking into an A situation that

the United States had already broken.

And on the heels of all of this, what followed was one of the

most concentrated episodes of genocide in the 20th century.

In less than four years, the Khmer Rouge killed between

somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people, roughly 1/4 of

Cambodia's population. Forgive me, I'm having a little

hard time. They emptied the cities.

They abolished money and religion.

They snuffed out family loyalty. They sent children to spy on

their parents. And in a former high school in

Phnom Penh, they built a prison called Tul Slang, or An

estimated number of 17,000 people passed through, and fewer

than a dozen survived. The rest were tortured until

they confessed to whatever their interrogators needed them to

confess to, and then taking them to the killing fields and

executed. The prisoners kept meticulous

the The prison kept meticulous records, an effort overseen by a

former math teacher who took on the name of Comrade Doik.

We're going to come back to him. There are photographs of nearly

every prisoner, face forward, face to the side, sometimes with

a number hung around their neck. The photographs are still there

and thousands of faces looking back at you from the walls.

And I visited Tul Slang in January as part of my trip with

Parker and and John to visit the campuses of Asia's Hope in Phnom

Penh and Baatenbong. If you're new with us, you

should know that we have a very deep partnership with an

organization called Asia's Hope that provides family style

orphan care in Bata Bong, Cambodia, Phnom Penh, Northern

India, Thailand. Over the past 20 years, this

ministry, which was birthed out of this church and on the

leadership of John McCollum, has rescued more than 1000 kids who

have been caught up in sort of the fray of what followed from

this incident. So the wonderful work that

Asia's Hope families get to participate in.

And, and by the way, in the upcoming months, we're going to

update you a little bit about what our involvement will be

there moving forward. That's part of why I'm

highlighting it here. But this wonderful work that

Asia's Hope families get to participate in and what we get

to support it comes on the heels of US foreign policy decisions

for more than 50 years ago. 50 years later, there is still

enough destabilizing force in the region that every single

week, the national director of Cambodia's Asia's Hope, Savorn,

who I hope will be with us this summer, that's him in the

middle. You can see Parker and I there.

Apparently even in Cambodia, we still kind of dressed alike.

But every week, Savorn gets a call from somewhere in the

country, wondering if he has room to take in a kid from

someone who's trying to find them a home.

And as I toured the halls of Tuleslang and saw the pictures

of people turned into the the prisoners onto the wall and

walked past the display of skulls from the people who'd

been brutalized in this place, I found myself asking that a

question that a place memorialized, such as it is, is

designed to help us ask, how could this happen?

Like, how does this happen? And being somewhat of prayer, I

didn't ask that question into an empty space.

I found myself praying this question, Lord, how can this

possibly happen? I found myself repeating a

prayer that I pray often. And it's a prayer that we're

trying to lean in together into this community.

Lord have mercy, how can this happen?

How can something like this be happening?

And friends, I'm now squarely into midlife.

I turned 48 on Tuesday, which is your is your notification that I

have a birthday coming up this week.

And I've been a pastor just shy of two decades.

And I have heard enough stories to know that everyone has that

kind of question about something.

How does this happen? Why is this happening?

You read in the history books, you shake your head in disbelief

about the way that some people were treated.

Or you watch the news and you see in real time the way that

people have been treated, the way people are presently being

treated. Or some of you, you get a little

bit more up close and personal in your own story.

You know, you sit down with your grandfather a few weeks before

he died, and you know, he tells you that he left home at the age

of 16 because his father took him out to the barn and whipped

him like a horse. And then you realize that this

is the man who, just a decade and a half later, fathered your

mother. Every single one of us has a

story that surfaces, a question, How could this happen?

Why does this happen? And, Lord, when are you going to

make it right? And some of you have this kind

of question about injustice and oppression that has been done to

you or to your loved ones. And I open with this story about

Cambodia because we have a deep and growing connection there.

And I think it might be the closest shot we have at getting

our hearts close to what it feels like to be on the

receiving end of geopolitical machinery that oppresses the

weak. This is the context of the book

of Jonah. We've been in a series on the

minor Prophets called the Book of the 12.

And one of the things that we've been trying to do in our reading

of the prophets, one of the things that our teaching team

has been trying to do is to help us get present to the particular

handicap that we sort of have in reading the prophets from our

place in history and from our place as part of empire.

So the prophets are mostly writing to a people who have

been under the boot of the oppressors, the Egyptians and

the Assyrians and the Babylonians.

These are the empires that have wreaked havoc on the people of

God. The prophets are the one who

find themselves leaning deeply into the whisper of God and they

hear things from God and God gives them things to say to

people. And there are three scenes for

us this morning from the book of Jonah and maybe a short 4th one

if we have the time. But the three scenes are this

running, the rescue and unending mercy.

OK, you guys with me recovered from the opening maybe.

OK, first up is the running. God comes to Jonah, and he asked

Jonah to go and preach to the people in the city of Nineveh.

And if you haven't read the story of Jonah, I will say that

there are going to be some spoilers.

But you know, it's been around since the 18th century BC.

So you've had a minute. It's 4 short chapters.

You can go read it in about 6 minutes.

Essentially, God comes to Jonah and asks Jonah to go to Nineveh

to give them a word. And we're told that God has

heard of the wickedness that is going on in the city, city of

Nineveh. And God wants to sort of

withhold his judgement from the city.

And he says to Jonah, I want you to go and I want you to be an

ambassador to a place that is outside of my my people.

And I want you to talk to them about the mercy that I have.

And you might think that, you know, this is like what profits

do? Like, what's the big deal,

Jonah? Can you just go to Nineveh and

do the thing that God is asking you to do?

But Jonah books a ticket on a boat heading in the opposite

direction. So this is how the story opens.

Verse 3 writes Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the

presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found

a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid his fare and he went

on board to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence

of the Lord. Three times the text says that

he was going to Tarshish, and which I apparently can't say

this morning, and twice we're told that he was doing so

because he was fleeing the presence of the Lord.

Now, there's some helpful context here.

Tarshish is a real city. But the way it's meant to work

in the story is it's meant to cue the reader or the listener

to the reality that Jonah is trying to get as far away as

possible from the presence of God and whatever it is that God

is trying to do in Nineveh. But why is that?

Well, because Nineveh is the capital city of the Assyrian

people. And Assyria during this time was

known for its aggressive military expansion.

So it was a military machine that was waging war all of the

time. And the Assyrians, friends, they

didn't just conquer people, They really, really conquered people.

Part of their mode of being in the world was to terrorize,

shock and awe. Total destruction.

Their own royal inscriptions, which survive by the way.

You can go read them and have been translated.

They boast about what they do to conquered people, flaying

enemies alive and draping their skins over the city walls.

Sorry if there are tender ears. Probably should have issued a

warning this morning. Impaling prisoners on stakes

outside conquered cities. Cutting off hands, feet, noses,

ears, stacking piles of heads, and within a generation of

Jonah's ministry, Assyria destroyed the northern Kingdom

of Israel entirely. The population was deported, the

10 northern tribes of Israel were destroyed, and the people

were dispersed and scattered and absorbed into other cultures,

never to be consecrated again. Perhaps you've heard of the Lost

Tribes of Israel. That's what's happening right

here. Jonah himself is also from the

Northern Kingdom, and it was just a generation before him

that suffered these losses. And so the empire that is

destroying his people and his land and his tribal territory,

this is the empire that God is asking him to go and preach

mercy to. So this is not an abstract

theological problem for Jonah. It's personal.

His people are being deported and scattered and absorbed and

erased. And God says, go tell Nineveh

that I am slow to anger, that they should stop their campaign,

that they should repent, and that I will withhold my

judgement from them. And you're like, what?

It would be like God coming to one of our older boys in the

Botzenbaum Student Center whose parents parents were likely

killed by the Khmer Rouge. I think we have a picture of no

his his parents were likely killed by the Khmer Rouge and

asking him to go and preach a word of mercy and the love of

God to the guy that ran the prison at Tul slain.

That's what this would be like. This is our our present day

Jonah. So Jonah leaves.

He doesn't want to be a part of it.

The thing that is presently in Jonah's heart is a cry for God

to bring justice to the whole thing.

He wants God to make right the wrongs that his people had

experienced at the hands of these people.

And so he leaves. And we don't actually find out

why Jonah flees to Tarshish on a boat until chapter 4, where

Jonah himself tells God exactly why he left and exactly why he

didn't want to come to Nineveh. Chapter 4, Verse 2 Oh Lord, is

not this what I said while I was still in my own country?

That is why I fled to Tarshis at the beginning.

For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow

to anger and abounding in steadfast love and ready to

relent from punishing. I didn't want to go because I

knew that you would be merciful to them.

And this is where we start to feel the tension of this story.

We start to see the way that the story is meant to work on us.

And this is a story that buries the lead.

We get almost all the way through the story before we find

out why Jonah doesn't want to be a part of it.

I knew that you would be gracious to them, which is why I

went the other way. And friends, I suspect that you

and I all have had some kind of moment like this.

You know, you're on your way following Jesus.

You're learning how to love by reading about Jesus and the

gospels. You're getting into the

teachings about forgiveness and reconciliation.

You're getting some healing. You're in community.

And then you have this moment that you realize that if this

story is true, I'm going to have to talk to my mom or my dad or

your wife or your ex-husband or your roommate from 10 years ago,

or the kids that left home and moved the grandkids to another

city and cut you off because that pattern in you from so long

ago never got healed. And now there's unreconciled

stuff. So the way that the book of

Jonah works, and it's where we're headed next in the story

is that the scene is set with an outlandish request, which

everyone reading the story would have picked up right away.

Go, says God, and extend my mercy to the city that was built

on the blood of your people. Imagine, says God, how much

mercy there must be inside of me and at my disposal such that I

could ask you to do such a thing.

And Jonah is like, no, thank you.

He's super angry. I'm not here for it, he says.

I'm headed to Tarshish on a ship and after a couple of reads of

the story, you start getting to this spot back at the beginning.

It's short enough to reread and reread and reread.

And at about the 4th or the 5th time you get to this point in

the story where Jonah is on his way to Tarsus, and you begin to

ask yourself, where am I running away from the presence and the

mercy of God? Where's my Joppa?

Where's my Tarshish? Is there any place in my life or

in my story where God's mercy is being extended and I'm inclined

to turn my nose up at it? That is why I fled to Tarshish

at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious God, and

merciful and slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and

ready to relent from punishing. And so the question is, friends,

is there anyone in your life right now where if God asked you

to go and extend to them the mercy of God, there is just

something in you that you would want to go the other direction?

I mean, it makes sense. Like there have been people in

my life who are like Nineveh to me, People that I have trouble

imagining the infinite mercy of God being able to reach, or

parts of people that I assume are beyond the scope of what I

expect to be remedied. What I actually want is justice.

I want them to be punished. It's my confession, and the

story of Jonah is really meant to help us see that most of the

time when we're headed to Tarshish, booking a ticket in

the opposite direction of where the mercy of God is moving

towards, what it means is that we have a deficiency of God's

mercy at work in our own lives. It shrinks our imagination for

the mercy that God could have for others when we have such a

little dose of it ourselves. You know, we can't quite see how

generous God would want to be with others with with God being

so slow to anger and merciful and abounding in love.

It's because we ourselves are in low supply of those things.

We can't see the slowness of God's anger for others because

we constantly are imagining that maybe God is angry with us and

we have this hard time imagining the abundance of mercy that God

has for those who trouble us. Because we have yet to truly

allow ourselves to receive the fullness of God's mercy for us.

We find ourselves at times like the servant in in Jesus's

parable. In Matthew chapter 18, he says

Matthew 18 · chapter mention

that a king is settling his accounts with his servant and

one of the servants owes him 10,000 talents, which is like an

absurd amount of money to be in debt, and he's unable to pay it.

And the king forgives the entire debt when the servant begs for

mercy. But that same servant goes out

and finds the one that owes him 100 dinero, a not unreasonable

amount of debt, but he grabs him by the throat and he throws him

in prison when he can't pay. The story that Jesus tells is a

telling to Peter, who's saying to Jesus, Lord, how many times

am I required to forgive somebody that offends me?

And Jesus effectively says that the number doesn't really matter

because once you taste the mercy of God, the math doesn't math

anymore. This is part of what the story

of Jonah is about. But, you know, Jonah doesn't

really know this yet. He hasn't encountered the mercy

of God for himself yet. And so his imagination is

shrunk. The idea that God's mercy could

be extended beyond the bounds of his people.

Jonah just doesn't want to have anything to do with it.

And, and in the story, the way that it has been read various

times throughout history, the work that the story was meant to

do for the original audience of God's people was to serve

essentially as a parable in a prophetic form.

You know, Israel has been with the recipient of extraordinary,

unearned Divine Mercy, the Exodus, the covenant, the

patience of God through centuries of unfaithfulness.

And what God is trying to say is that the same amount of mercy

that I have extended to you, I'm extending beyond the boundaries

of your imagination. Who is that for you friends?

Somebody in your family, like a old friend.

And before Jonah is going to be able to preach a word in

Nineveh, he's going to have to experience the mercy of God in a

way that is personal and tangible.

And so Jonah is running, and what does God do?

Well, God does what God does. Whenever someone runs from God,

he goes after. And this brings us to the

rescue. So there's this section in the

story of Jonah that doesn't really seem very real.

It's actually quite hard to tell what kind of book Jonah is.

And we're about to get into some strange parts with, you know,

weird swallowing of a whale and all that kind of stuff.

I mean, Jonah doesn't swallow a whale.

He gets swallowed. You get it.

The Jonah buys a ticket to Tarshish to escape the presence

of the Lord. And then the text said that the

Lord and his pursuit after Jonah hurled a great wind upon the

sea. And before we get to the part of

the whale, let me just say that most scholars do not believe

that the text of Jonah is historical or biographical

because of how the text is written and when it's written,

Most scholars would place Jonah in something like a blend of

historical fiction and a really long parable.

There's this guy named Jonah. There's a real city of Nineveh.

And some of this stuff probably happened, but the story is told

more like Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son.

There's enough details in the story where you just like, did

this happen? But then it's weird enough where

you're just like, this probably did not happen.

So I just want to say that on the outset is that, you know, if

you're new to reading the Scriptures, you have some

questions about even why I would say that this probably actually

maybe didn't happen. I'm happy to meet with you and

talk with you a little bit about our imagination for the

scriptures and how we read in line with the history of the

church. But I just want to say to you

that the way that the story works is a little bit more like

a parable. The important thing in this

story is not whether or not Jonah was swallowed by a whale.

The important thing in the story is the function that the whale

plays. The point of this part of the

story is that God is a God who comes after us and rescues us.

That's what we should get. And so Jonah books his ticket,

and he gets on the boat, and he's headed to Tarshish.

And God, in pursuit of his prophet, hurls a great wind onto

the sea. And the storm is so violent that

the sailors, I mean, like rough Mediterranean men who've seen

everything, are terrified. They're throwing cargo

overboard. They're crying out to their

guns. And Jonah is below deck asleep.

And so the captain comes down, makes his way down, and he wakes

Jonah up. And he's like, listen, man,

everybody is praying. Why are you not praying?

And eventually they cast lots to figure out whose fault this is.

And the lot falls on Jonah. And they ask him, who are you?

Where are you from, and what have you done?

Like, why have you put us in this situation?

And Jonah tells them, he says, I'm a Hebrew.

I worship the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the

dry land, and I am running from him.

And the sailors are terrified because they understand

immediately what Jonah apparently does not, that you

cannot outrun the God who made the sea by getting on a boat.

So Jonah tells them to throw them overboard.

And here's one of those details in the text that's easy to miss.

Hang with me here. The sailors don't want to throw

Jonah overboard. They they have no covenant

relationship with Yahweh. There's no history with Israel.

There's no reason for them to care about what happens with

this man. And yet they try everything they

can to row to shore before they finally, reluctantly throw Jonah

overboard. And the moment Jonah hits the

water, the storm stops. It's a parable.

It's a funny story, isn't it? But the text says something

quite extraordinary, a little foreshadowing of what is to

come. These sailors, these outsiders,

these people who were never supposed to be part of the

story, they offer sacrifices to God and begin to make vows to

Yahweh. The people Jonah would have said

are outside the bounds of God's mercy are worshipping God on the

very boat Jonah boarded to escape being the carrier of

God's mercy to those who are inside or outside the

boundaries. You can see the irony here,

right? The story is already doing what

Jonah doesn't want it to do. The mercy of God is already

moving beyond the borders that Jonah has drawn for it.

And Jonah isn't even in Nineveh yet.

He's in the opposite direction. Do you guys see this?

It's a little bit of comic sprinkled in there.

So friends, then as you know, Jonah sinks and the text says,

and this is the line that the whole story turns on.

The Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah.

God sends a storm. He sends a fish, and the same

God Jonah is running from is the God who comes after him in the

depth of the water. Jonah is in the belly of a fish

for three days and three nights. And this is where the story

slows down and we see that Jonah himself begins to experience the

mercy of God from the belly of a fish.

He begins to pray. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord

his God from the belly of a fish, saying, I called to the

Lord out of my distress, and he answered me out of the belly of

Sheol. I cried, and you heard my voice.

You cast me into the depth, deep into the heart of the Seas, and

the flood surrounded me. All of your waves and your

billows passed over me. Friends, this is the prayer of a

man who is experiencing the mercy of God for himself.

I went as far down as a person could possibly go, and you were

found there. You found me there.

And you know, I'm reading this in the primary sort of pastoral

question that comes to my mind that I want to invite you to

consider is, have you allowed yourself to sink into the waters

and receive the mercy of God, or are you still treading water?

Have you been down to the deep? I mean, this is what our friends

in a A. They know really well, don't

they? If you do not have a friend who

is in a A, you should find one because they know this really

well. That whole rock bottom thing is

real. And my question for us this

morning is, have you let yourself sink and be rescued by

the mercy of God? Friends, the belly of the whale

in this story is not an angry God punishing or forcing or

shaming Jonah into compliance. The whale is the life raft, a

place of refuge in the chaos for the situation that Jonah has put

himself in, running from the presence of God.

Most of us, when we, you know, find ourselves in troubled

waters, we tend to swim away from the things in our life that

are designed to hold us long enough for God to show us his

unrelenting mercy. And, you know, things like

community and vulnerability and deep friendship that can wound

from time to time, or marriages that do more than their fair

share of revealing what is wounded and maybe a bit

problematic inside of us. We tend to flee these things.

You know, we pull back from the friendships.

We bounce from friendship to friendship.

Just dosing out enough, little vulnerability in each one.

You guys know this little trick. You just a little bit vulnerable

in each of your friendships. It begins to feel like you're

being known, but you never let one single person in on the

whole thing. That's not good, but that's what

we tend to do. Just a quick aside, you know,

for my married, my married friends, your marriage is a

whale and you are in the belly of it.

But it is a lifeboat that is meant to be the place where you

come to the end of yourself and receive the mercy of God.

And the same is true of you single people, your singleness

and your actual need for deep, deep community.

This is a whale for you and you are in the belly of it, and it

is meant to be a thing that can hold you long enough for you to

notice where the mercy of God is in it.

So I went as far down as a person can go and you were

there, says Jonah. And then the fish deposits him

on dry land. The the fish in the story of

Jonah is the mercy of God for Jonah foreshadowing by the way,

the tomb from Good Friday and Easter morning.

And so on the dry land, God comes to Jonah again and the

word of the Lord comes to Jonah a second time saying, get up,

get yourself to Nineveh, that great city that I'm trying to

get a message to proclaim to it, the message that I tell you.

And so Jonah gets up and he, he sets out and he went to Nineveh

according to the word of the Lord.

He comes to Nineveh. He preaches basically a meh

sermon, doesn't really say much, but everybody repents and

believes in God. They proclaim a fast.

The king gets everybody in on it.

He says we are going to go all in on this.

Even the animals begin to fast. The animals put on sackcloth and

ashes. The people put on sackcloth and

ashes. Remembers.

Works like a parable. Everyone in the whole city turns

towards God and repentance in hopes that God who has sent them

Jonah, would rescue them. And you know what he does?

And this brings us to the unending mercy of God, which is

very displeasing to Jonah. Still we read again.

This was very displeasing to Jonah.

He prayed to the Lord and said, Oh Lord, is not this what I said

while I was still in my own country?

I mean, This is why I fled to Tarsus at the beginning, for I

knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger,

abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent.

And now, oh Lord, please take my life for me, for it is better

for me to die than live. And the Lord said, is it right

for you to be angry? So Jonah went out of the city

and he sat down east of the city and he made a little booth, a

shelter for himself there. And he sat under it in the

shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.

Jonah is sitting outside of the city.

He's facing the city. And he's like trying to figure

out what's God going to do? Is God going to drop the hammer?

I sure hope so. And I'm going to wait until it

happens. And as he's doing that, the Lord

appoints the Lord. God appointed a Bush, a

shrubbery, a vine, and made it come up over Jonah to give shade

over his head to save him from his discomfort.

And so Jonah was really happy about the Bush.

But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that

attacked the Bush so that it withered.

And when the sun rose, God prepared a sultry E wind, and

the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and

asked that he might die. He said, It is better for me to

die. It is better for me to die than

to live. But God said to Jonah, is it

right for you to be angry about the Bush?

And he says, yes, it's right, I'm angry enough to die.

And then the Lord said, 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.

And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city

in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know

their right hand from their left, and also many animals?

End of text. Curtain closes.

The point of the parable here in the closing, right here at the

end, friends, is that our view of the mercy of God is so small

compared to the actual infinite, unending mercy of God.

We trouble ourselves with things like bushes and shades and oh,

that didn't happen. And we overlook the

expansiveness of God's mercy. I want to come back to Comrade

Doek. That is him many years later.

So the guy who oversaw told saying prison left Phnom Penh.

He escaped and lived on the border of Cambodia and Thailand

in a refugee camp for almost 20 years without being noticed.

And he disappeared until about the late 1990s, when he was

found by a photographer and was the first senior Khmer Rouge

leader to be tried by a tribunal.

And in those intervening 20 years, someone showed up in his

life and shared with him about the mercy and the love of God.

And he, comrade Doric, surrendered his life to Jesus

and received God's mercy. And then he was sentenced to

life in prison. He came into his tribunal

carrying a Bible. He apologized to the victims as

best as he knew how in the time. And this would be a story that

ends like the story of Jonah. We're left sort of wondering,

like, really, Lord, what about the justice part?

For that, you're going to have to go read the prophet Nahum,

because Nahum also writes about the same city.

And what you read in the Prophet Nahum is that somehow God is

both infinite and mercy and will make all things right, that

there is real justice to be had. I don't know what it's like for

this guy right now to be in the presence of the Lord.

But what I do know is that the story that we are in the mercy

of God is infinite even for such a one as this who cries out to

the Lord. Lord have mercy on me and for us

on this side of understanding all of the things.

I would just say that the math doesn't math.

And this is the story that you live in.

And so as we head into a time of ministry, I want to invite those

of you who have parents that are sorry, those of you who are

parents who will have kids coming back into the room.

I'd love for you to go back to greet them and to meet them as

they come in. They're going to be coming in

shortly. We're going to return to this

practice. So if you have a kid that's

going to be coming into the room for worship, just go ahead and

go back to the the pole back here.

We'd love for you to just greet your kid, welcome them into

worship as we do. I want to invite you to stand

and Parker, you're welcome to come up if you have any,

anything by way of ministry time this morning.

But you know, as I was praying this morning, I had a sense

that, you know, for some of you, it is your own self that you

think is beyond the mercy of God, that there is some, you

know, part of you that you are wondering like really, can God's

mercy really, really extend all the way down?

And if you are part of our prayer ministry team, would love

for you to come up and begin making yourself available to

pray for folks. And we're going to worship this

morning. And, and I just want to say to

you, if you are having trouble imagining the endlessness,

unrelenting mercy of God, I think that there is a dose of

mercy for your own life, that God is desiring to pour it out

onto you, and that out of the abundance of mercy for your own

self, God will grow your capacity to have mercy on us.