Sermons

January 22 2006

Swallowed Up, Spit up, Unemployed…True Disciples

Reverend Dr Cheri DiNovo

The story that you didn’t hear because we just heard the end of the story of Jonah was really meant to be a humourous story, the sort told around campfires. It was a kind of Charlie Chaplin-esque story. It’s a story of this little man Jonah who does everything and I mean everything, humanly possible to avoid the call of God. God wants him to go and preach to Ninevah, which was in Assiriya, the headquarters of the enemies of Israel. God wanted Jonah to help them and Jonah didn’t want to go. He ended up as we all know, being swallowed by a whale, spit out, tries going in the opposite direction to Tarshish. In Midrashim in the thirteenth century, the meaning of Tarshish is "wealth". Jonah goes in the direction of wealth away from the direction of God’s call. He doesn’t want to go where God calls him which is into danger and difficulty.

Before however, I speak more about that, let me share with you a Zen parable. It’s a story about the difference between "holiness" and answering the call of God. There were two priests making their way back to their monastery when they came to a river. At the edge of the river a woman sat weeping. When asked, she shared that she could not swim and she was frightened that she might get to the middle of the river and drown. One of the priests picked her up and carried her in safety to the other side where she gratefully continued on her journey. The two priests continued their long walk home but after a few hours, the priest who had carried the woman became aware that the other priest was abnormally silent and seemed upset. "What’s wrong, my brother?" He asked. The other priest answered, "You know the rules of our order. We cannot speak to women never mind touch them and yet you carried that woman across the river. You should be ashamed!" "But my brother…" answered the one who had carried the woman, "…I set the woman down hours back on the edge of the river and you, you are still carrying her." That is a story about the difference between "holiness" and "call". The one who is called by God picks up the woman, the one who believes in holiness, doesn’t.

Another story: There are two people sitting in an airliner, a man and a woman. The woman is dutifully reading her Bible and the man leans over and says, "You don’t actually believe all that stuff in there do you?" She answers, "Of course, it’s the Holy word of God. It’s the Bible." "Even the story of Jonah and the whale?" he pushes. "Yes" she responds, "If it’s in the Bible, it’s the word of God." "So you mean to say…" the man continues, "…that you believe that Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and then was spit out unharmed?" "It’s in the Bible," the woman answered again. "How is that possible?" he asks. "I don’t know but when I get to Heaven I’ll ask Jonah." She responds with certainty. "And what if he’s not in heaven?" The man isn’t giving up. "Then you’ll ask him", she says.

So what is Jonah and how are we supposed to read it and how are we supposed to read the story of call that Jesus tells us. Jonah is meant as a parable as I’ve said and was never meant to be taken as factual, historical truth. What it means to say to us is simply, every single one of us was called here by God this morning. You may not know that about yourself. You may have thought that you came of your own volition, but you didn’t. You were called here. Every single one of you here was called here to perform a ministry, by God. There are three things I know about the ministry that you were all called to perform: 1) When you’re called there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it! You can run in the other direction, you can hide, you can try to stay home but you won’t be able to for long. 2) The fact that you were called by God has absolutely nothing to do with how good you are or aren’t. It doesn’t have anything to do with your own holiness. If you read about all the prophets and disciples in the Bible you read about a collection of misfits and ne’er do wells. People who could have and would have done anything else but follow the will of God. And 3) all the gifts that you need to fulfill your call will be provided to you by God. You don’t have to worry about it. You will be gifted by God so that you can fulfill everything that God calls you to do. That’s the third aspect of the call of the human. That’s perhaps the most difficult one because we don’t want to admit we’re gifted. We don’t want to see ourselves as gifted.
Let me tell you a story about my call. Now depending on who asks me, "How did you get into the ministry?" or "How did you become a Christian rather than going in a different direction?" I tell different stories for different people but this is the "real" story of my call and I realized that this was the real story of my call as I was preparing my sermon this week.

A long time ago I volunteered at Margaret Fraser House, a halfway house for women who had been released from psychiatric facilities but weren’t quite ready to live on their own. We would call this "Assisted Housing" today. I had just graduated and wanted to get into the social services. Margaret Fraser House was run by a wonderful collective of feminist women, one of whom was particularly "holy" to use that term. On her days off, she volunteered to do "death sits". What that entailed was sitting with someone as they were dying, those folk who had no friends or relatives who could or would stay with them. This woman would stay with them (and that was on her days off!) Needless to say, she was getting a little burnt out and confided in me one day that she would love to leave both her jobs and be involved in the opposite end of life for a change. She said she would love to get into midwifery but had no idea how to go about this. My scheming little brain went to work immediately. I realized that if she were to get into midwifery then an opening would come available at Margaret Fraser House and I might be able to get her job. I wasn’t being nice or generous. I wanted her job. So I researched all the schools and places and prerequisites to begin a career in midwifery and dutifully gave all the information to her. Now as it turned out I left Margaret Fraser House and went on to do other things and completely forgot about this incident. Many, many years later I received a card in the mail inviting me to the opening of a new midwifery clinic on the Danforth that this same woman had started. A little note attached said, "Please come. If it weren’t for you and everything you did for me this would never have happened." You can imagine my state upon reading that note. In that moment I got what the call of God looks like. You can’t escape it. It has nothing to do with your own goodness and you will be given the gifts you need to accomplish the call, despite yourself. So that’s the real story of my call.

Heroes never admit they’re heroes and they almost always say the same things. We are all heroes here but there’s a particular hero in our midst this morning, Karl Hoeffel. Karl, a member here, saved a person from drowning a few years back and was cited for it. Karl said what all heroes say when I and others asked him about the incident. He said, "Anyone in the same place a t the same time would have done the same thing." You know, he was right and he was wrong. Here’s how he was right. Anyone else who could swim and had the gifts that he did would have done the same thing. But he was wrong because it wasn’t anyone else in that place at that time! It was him. That is the way the call of God works. He was there and he had the gifts needed and he was given the other gifts to do the job God wanted him to do and it was him and not somebody else. Why him and not another person is a mystery we’ll never solve in this life. We’ll just do "it" because we were called by God to do "it" and we were given the gifts by God to do "it". The disciples that Jesus called? Who were they? Who cares? They weren’t special people. They were the most ordinary of people. They weren’t noteworthy in any way, shape or form. They were ordinary, as ordinary as you and I. They did however answer the call. It’s true, that much they did. Jesus in return gave them all the gifts they would need on the journey. It didn’t stop them from betraying him of course. It didn’t stop them from being human but they were given gifts by Jesus to do the ministry that Christ called them to. This is the story of call.

I started with a Zen story. Let’s end with a Zen story. This story is from Suzuki Roshi. One of the commonalities in the readings today is the presence of water. Water is of course all the way through the Bible. It plays the role of spiritual cleansing. It’s also a metaphor for the presence of God. God, like water, is absolutely essential to our lives. Remember of course the God I’m talking about is not an old white guy with a beard but is as First John says, "Love". John writes, "God is love and whoever lives in love, lives in God and God lives in them." Roshi wrote that we are like drops of water, each one of us, and life is like a cascading waterfall. During the point at which the water, at first one body, falls over the cliff, each droplet is sprayed out and for a brief instant is alone. That is like the span of each life.We think we’re different and we are, for an instant, from the great flow that constitutes life before and after death, and then we merge yet again into that great stream that is God. The moment when we ‘think’ we’re alone is profoundly insignificant in the great schema. We are never alone really. From God to God, all is God.

Amen.