What a DUMP!

Jonah 3:1-5,10 and Mark 1: 14-20

Ghirlandaio, Domenico; Calling of the Apostles 1481 (PD)

My post Christmas “vacation” has come and gone and I have to admit, I am quite glad that it has gone. 

When my family and I first arrived in Florida, my father and I went out to pick up some groceries. 

On the elevator ride back up to the room where we were staying I ran into a man about my age, appearing to be in similar health. 

He had two children at his side wearing Disney themed clothing, which we complimented them on before asking if they had been to Disney World yet. 

The father looked up at me with an ominous stare as he exclaimed in a foreboding tone,

“We just made it through our third day. I only have one left to go.”

I should have taken this as a warning. 

I should have taken the snow storm we drove through as a warning.

In fact there were many signs that foreshadowed the difficult week that lay ahead that I ignored. Yet we pushed onward far too financially committed to our trip to Disney World to turn back now. 

My parents, my wife’s parents, and our children had the time of their lives. 

Yet, after an 11 hour drive to Florida, greeted by a sore throat and a head cold upon our arrival, I didn’t start out the trip very optimistically. 

By the fourth day, after putting a nice dent in my father-in-laws car, having another family’s child literally get sick on one of my children, trying to figure out what mystery ailment another one of my children had contracted, and putting a nice crack in my own windshield, 

I decided that Disney World was in fact NOT the happiest place on earth, at least not for me. 

In fact I have told many that if Disney World is the happiest place on earth, then certainly hell must be a mere religious construct. 

By the end of the week, I found myself resenting Disney World, not only as a place but even the collection of people that gather there, cutting through lines, pushing, cursing, and head butting you as they stare at their phones. 

I felt incredibly judgmental of the entire place and I would by lying if I said that I do not still harbor some resentment towards this most “magical” of kingdoms.

The "Magical" Kingdom

Last week, John’s Gospel told the story of Jesus’ calling of Phillip and Nathanael to a life of discipleship. 

A major insight into the character of one of the disciples was emphasized by both the writer of John’s Gospel and by Pastor Stephen in his sermon last week. 

It is Nathanael’s snide remark about Jesus, proclaiming that “nothing good can come out of Nazareth.”

This week, as I was working through the texts I started laughing out loud as I reflected on Nathanael’s words with this week’s text. 

As Stephen and I were getting the van ready for Winter Celebration, we both started laughing on my reflection. 

Because, frankly, Nathanael’s comment is the most ironic remark imaginable. 

He’s right!

Nazareth is a dump!

But to any self respecting Jew, so is Decapolis, Tiberius, the Geresenes, Cana, and Bethsaida, the very place in which Phillip and Nathanael met Jesus in the story last week. 

These are all lands and cities surrounding the sea of Galilee. 

They are not just considered dumps in those days, 

They were dumpster fires!

These are lands occupied by both Jews and Romans. 

Lands that are occupied by unclean people. 

In fact, the only thing more unclean than a Roman gentile, are Hellenized Jews that mix with the Romans!

But that is exactly what the entire region of Galilee was known for. 

It was a melting pot of many different peoples who adapted to one another’s culture in order to take part in trade and in business. 

A lifestyle that placed success ahead of spiritual purity. 

This was a practice frowned upon within the Jewish community, so for ANY itinerant preacher, rabbi, or the most remotely devout Jew, there are very few areas around the sea of Galilee that could be seen as a jewel in anyone’s crown. 

The region around Galilee is, in many situations literally, a pig stye. 

Yet, THIS is where Jesus spends the bulk of his ministry!

While the region that John performed his ministry may seem less than ideal, it was actually a more ideal location for a spiritual calling, because in John’s wilderness people were removed from the evils of the material world. 

They were also freed from the sight of unclean pagan practices, not to mention Roman occupation. 

But the bulk of Jesus’ ministry, if not the most notable moments in his ministry, occur in the dumps and dives of Galilee. 

Healing in Capernuam, the dump of a fishing town. (Mark 2:1-12)

Casting out a demon in the dumpy Gentile pigsties of the Gerasenes (Mark 5:1-21)

And when Galilee isn’t dumpy enough, Jesus even heads out on the road, going to Tyre where he ends up healing the child of a Syrophoenician, the most despicable people imaginable to Jesus and the Jewish people in those days! (Mark 7:24-30)

What is even more fascinating about where Jesus chooses to share his ministry is how people come to him, abandoning the larger and wealthier towns, just to see and hear Jesus for themselves. 

Some even leaving the heart of the Jewish faith, Jerusalem, to seek God, not in the temple but in the dumps of Galilee. (Mark 3:8)

If it was all about location, location, location, 

Jesus’ needed a better realtor. 

Because all of Galilee is a bad location, filled with less than desirable people. 

Certainly the most unlikely place to share any ministry, much less begin a religious movement that could ever reach beyond these towns, towns best left to their own uncleanliness and sin. 

Jesus doesn’t necessarily share his ministry with unclean people and sinners because he is seeking them out, it may just have been that unclean people and sinners were all he really had to choose from in Galilee!

Entrance into the fishing village at Bethsaida.
Evidence of pagan worship in the very town
in which Nathanael and Phillip were called. 

And so, how can we talk about location, location, location without considering our first lesson as well?

Nineveh. 

If you looked that place up in a Bible dictionary, they really should have a picture of a dumpster on fire!

Nineveh is described as the capital, or at least a major city, in Assyria, the very empire that has destroyed the entire northern Kingdom of Israel, and very nearly did the same to the southern Kingdom as well. 

A people that laid waste to Israel and committed the most vile atrocities imaginable. 

They are Assyrians, which are not only a blight on the people of Israel, but the entire known world!

Attracting the hatred of many nations, to include Egypt, which had no choice but to submit to the rule of King Sargon the leader of this Assyrian superpower. 

Sound like a nation Jonah, or we, would want to share the Word of God with?

Jonah isn’t lazy as some children’s bibles depict him. 

He isn’t unwilling to serve the call that God has given him. 

He’s just unwilling to offer any kind of ministry to the people of Nineveh, because he sees nothing of value in them or in the city in which they live. 

Today’s first lesson is round two for Jonah, round one landed him in the belly of a fish only to be yacked out and sent back to Nineveh. 

So, one can only imagine how motivated he must be feeling to share the news of God with Nineveh. 

The only hope he is holding to, is that he aspires to be the Lord’s harbinger of Nineveh’s death and destruction. 

To be the voice that announces their destruction must have been a bit of a consolation for Jonah, but his motivation still seems lacking. 

It’s hard to tell whether or not his message is directly from God. 

The message is short and to the point, “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”

No possibility of redemption in that sermon. 

Short, sweet, and to the point. 

Only five words in Hebrew, believe it or not. 

Yet those five words reverse the very course that Nineveh is on, both for themselves but most importantly for God. 

What we don’t get to hear today is Jonah’s frustration with God’s decision to forgive Nineveh. 

After all, this is not Nineveh’s God, it is Israel’s God. 

To Jonah, Nineveh has no redemptive qualities.

It has no inhabitants worthy of forgiveness or redemption, spiritual or otherwise, so how and why would God ever redeem them?

~

I always look for the red thread that goes through the texts for any given Sunday. 

Today’s is undeniable.

God may be the One who decides where the Word is heard and where redemption is received, but rarely are those the places we find worthy. 

We like to think that we know which places are the best, which places are dumps and which places are ideal. 

We look to our own homes, congregations, states, and countries, rarely giving a second thought to our neighbor. 

Perhaps that is why God seeks out places like Nineveh and Galilee, because if not God, then who will?

If we are truly honest with ourselves, perhaps we should think on the places we least love, the people we most despise and ask ourselves, 

"What if we, too, were called to go there?"

Rembrandt; The Prophet Jonah before the Walls of Nineveh 1655 (PD) 

The last day we spent in Disney, I reluctantly left my child at the resort after giving all the kids a bath. 

She had a fever, didn’t want to go back to the park, and she asked my mom to stay with her. 

I didn’t want to go back either. I was done. 

I asked my mom one more time if she wanted to go back, happily volunteering to stay myself, seeing nothing of value in one more trip to a place I had grown to resent so much. 

She insisted on staying, so I wrapped my arms around the little one and asked her what souvenir I should pickup for her, after having promised each of them they could get one souvenir before we left. 

“A souvenir from Disney World?” she asked.

“Yes” I replied in defeat and exhaustion.

She wrapped her arms around my neck, kissed me on the cheek, and she told me “I just want you, Daddy”.

I’m still not a fan of Disney World, but it was in that moment that I realized that even in the places we most despise there are precious gifts there. 

It doesn’t matter where it may be or how we perceive those who call such places home, they are all precious gifts to someone, even if that someone is God alone. 

And let us not forget, that whether we realize it or not, we, too, are all someone’s Ninevites, just as we are all precious in someone’s eyes. 

Amen

Photo by Liv Bruce on Unsplash