Texts: Jonah 1: 1-17; Mark 4: 14-20

Many, if not most, of us have stories about being dragged by our parents to some place we did not want to go. For me, it was the dentist. I would have rather died a thousand deaths rather than go to the dentist. Dr. Stohlman was my father's dentist; I remember he spoke with an accent. At that time I thought it was German and World War II being so close to my childhood, his humorlessness and way of working quite frankly made me think of Nazis. I used to have nightmares the night before a Saturday appointment. Images, however, cloud our minds. Much later, when an adult, I had asked my father about old Dr. Stohlman, my father told me he had been part of the earlier Jewish migration during the early thirties. To say the least, I felt chagrined.

That is, of course, what our reading from Jonah is about: misplaced images that cloud our minds and keep us from reaching beyond our self-imposed boundaries. Elie Wiesel, who certainly more than most of us, understands the consequences of imposed boundaries, in his book Five Biblical Portraits, wrote that whoever hates one group "does in fact" hate all humankind. What was it about Ninevah that made Jonah, the character in this marvelous allegorical tale, not want to go to Ninevah?

Ninevah was the largest and most populous city of the ancient Assyrian Empire. First, a small village where the Tigris meets the Khosar River, some of the ruins are now part of suburbs of Mosul – yes, the same Mosul that is in present day Iraq. Scholars believe that its name derives from one of the names of Ishtar, Nina, who was the patron goddess of the city. According to Hellenistic sources, the city was founded by Ninus, a mythological person supposedly the son of Ba'al, the major Canaanite deity and one who is always juxtaposed against the Lord God in ancient texts.

Ninevah rose and fell in the third millennium BCE and rose again under Adad-nirari II who was a contemporary of Jeroboam, one of Solomon's many progeny, and half brother of Rehoboam, who was first king of a united kingdom of Israel before the revolt that led to the two kingdoms of Israel in the south and Judah in the north. The 17 year civil war weakened both kingdoms, opening them to the expansionist interests of Egypt to the south and Assyria to the north. It was in this period that the book of Kings places a figure called Jonah. Ninevah stood for all that Judah and Jeroboam were supposed to be against: corruption, licentiousness, and the worship of Ishtar, associated with sexuality and death.

The figure Jonah, being called to go to Ninevah, calling them to repent, could be compared to, instead of declaring war on Japan after Pearl Harbor or on Afghanistan's Taliban after 9-11, instead offering an olive branch of peace – tied to repentance, of course. No wonder Jonah went the other way. He was no fool, figuring that he would end up dead, or worse. And there are worse things than a quick death. No, Jonah, in his wisdom, headed the opposite direction, to Tarshish, a city in Phoenician Spain, in other words, the end of the known world in the other direction. That's what we do, of course, when we are called to go where we do not want to go. We run the other way. It's natural and very human.

Sometimes it takes someone or something else to give us courage to face what we need to face. There was a time – probably many times-- in my life when I have not felt particularly proud of my own actions, my own responses to what I knew had to be done. Right now I am thinking of one particular time when I turned and ran the other way. It was 1961 and I was a freshman at the University of Maryland. A group of us wanted to form a SNCC – Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – chapter on campus. We had every right to do that. The University administration was, to say the least, upset at our plans. We were called in to see the Dean, not as a group, but one by one, each of us alone and separated from the others who would have given us courage.

"It would be a shame if you were expelled," came the words. I blanched. I knew my parents would be beyond consoling. They didn't agree with my politics and an expelled student would never, ever be able to go to any university – at least back then. I turned my own face to Tarshish and I turned and figuratively ran. I felt like such a coward and to even think about it now still makes me shrink from what was my cowardice. However, rather than a sea monster bringing me to repentance and going back to face the administration, it was the grace of God that intervened through the Episcopalian campus minister who, when he heard about the threat to expel us all from a student member of his chapel meetings, offered us Canterbury House as a meeting place. As a unit, we were able to give each other the support we needed to deal with the campus administration.

Each of us in our lives have had our Jonah moments, those times when we have not been able to do what we knew needed to be done. The question is what we do afterwords. The question becomes how we face our own failures to respond to what we know we should have done and turn ourselves around to be able to move on to do what needs to be done. It's really difficult to do that in isolation by yourself. The support of friends, of a community of faith and care – these are really important.

We all have places in our lives we don't want to go. None of us is an instant disciple; not even Simon Peter and Andrew or James and John became instant disciples. This morning's reading in Mark tells us that when called by Jesus, the four instantly dropped their nets and followed him. But as we will read on later, Peter denies Jesus, James and John argue about who's going to get the best spot in the kingdom and Andrew just sort of lumps along. And they all went places they did not want to go. Just because they dropped their nets hardly means that they were happy, even just satisfied, with their decision. We get the story in hindsight. They made their choices without that benefit.

Struggling alone with tough choices and making hard decisions about future paths require a community that cares about one another. And building that community is not an easy task. It takes hard work and, even more, consistent hard work, not just spurts and starts. It also means looking beyond ourselves as Jonah had to do. He had to overcome his hatred, for Ninevah, capital of an empire that was destroying his nation.

In the final analysis, this allegory tells us what happens when we pull away from God. We need no sea monsters; we actually become consumed by monsters of our own making, whether anger, hatred, greed, or something else. Resisting those monsters is not easy, but when we open ourselves to God's presence where we least expect it, we are able to then turn our faces toward Ninevah even though we may not want to go there.

Let us pray: Embracing God, open us to your surprising presence, helping us to find those paths where you call us to go. Amen.