The United States of Nineveh: The Reverend Jeremiah Wright Plays Jonah

Transcribed from the sermon preached January 25, 2009

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Jonah 3: 1-10

The story of Jonah is fun and full of significant theological points.  You will remember that in the first chapter God appoints Jonah as the prophet he wants to go to Nineveh to  “cry out against it.”  Now Jonah doesn’t like that idea at all and heads in the opposite direction.  We might wonder why Jonah ran.  Was it fear or anger?  A sense of danger and inadequacy: “Why should I stick my neck out for those folks when they will probably cut it off? "  Nineveh was a key city of the Assyrian Empire, which had sacked Israel and sent many of Israel’s key leaders off to exile.  Regardless of whether or not Nineveh was actually such a large and magnificent city at the time our story is written, the hearers know that it represents the seat of a large, oppressive imperial power.  Hearers would have known that Jonah had reason to hate their guts and want them to perish.  Why warn someone of imminent danger if you don’t like them?  Jonah doesn’t want to waste his time helping people who have hurt and oppressed Israel. 

So, he hops on a ship to run away; a storm comes up; the crew tosses Jonah into the sea.  God saves him by sending a whale to eat him.  Clearly God doesn’t save us according to our order, as if our prayers were like placing an order through a drive up microphone.  Ah, yeh, I’ll have one salvation by cruise ship and an order of fries on the side.  Yeh, and could you super size that?  Still, Jonah repents in the belly of the whale and God forgives him and gives him another chance.  Jonah goes to Nineveh, walks one third of the way across the city and proclaims, “in forty days you guys are going down.”  God has damned Nineveh and the clock is ticking.

That part of the city repents and it makes an impression on the king who orders the entire city to repent, while the king leads the way.  “Cry mightily to God.  All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands.  Who knows? God may relent and change his mind.  He may turn from his fierce anger so that we do not perish.”  It worked; God did change his mind and chose not to destroy the city.  Well, that just did it. Jonah was angry.  He didn’t want forgiveness for the Ninevites. He wanted justice. 

Now there are several lessons we can take from this story. 1. God may ask us to get together and help someone or group who has done us wrong in the past. 2. Sometimes even the message of someone who doesn’t like us can be from God.  3. A small group of people can affect big changes.  One man comes with a message and then, only a portion of the city hears it and acts.  But the action of repentance snow balls until the king and the entire city are caught up in doing the right thing.  4.  An angry, damning prophet may be harsh and negative, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t preaching the word of God.  5. With true repentance, God is merciful.  6. Sometimes, while neither may want to admit it, the reformers need the radicals.

Regardless how we feel about donkeys or elephants, taxes or job creation, we all know Tuesday’s inauguration was a culmination of a long campaign and historical struggle for America to live up to its values.  For me, the most fascinating and troubling portion of the presidential campaign was the explosion of the Reverend Wright story.  The development of that story felt to me like someone ripping off an old scab, like the skeletons too crammed into the closet for the door to shut came tumbling out, a nightmare of American sin that threatened to derail the dream of American virtue.  I cried, will we never get beyond this issue of race, hearing echoes of Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether'.”

Yet, ostensibly, people couldn’t stomach the fact that God might damn America, and anyone who said so must be a false prophet.  And who was this Barack Hussein Obama, that he would attend this America-hating false prophet’s church?

Most of us would have loved to dismiss the issue by blowing off on the hot button media and conservatives grabbing sound bites out of context and exploiting them for material and political gain.  And that is what it was, but it was also more than that, and that is why it didn’t go away until Barack addressed the underlying issues head on.

It may have been perfectly legitimate to question why Barack was attending such a radical sounding church, but it was amazing to me that the Christian right, the so called defenders of the Bible, couldn’t seem to imagine that Jeremiah Wright might actually be exegetically and theologically accurate, that is, that his harsh judgment might in fact be the Word of God. 

But it is not just a conservative white thing, for middle class Americans in general tend to have a hard time with the notion of sin and God’s judgment. 

But we know the context too well to deny it with integrity: tens of thousands of African Americans stranded in New Orleans while our poor of all colors are fighting war, killing hundreds of thousands to keep the world safe for oil, and the dictators who say nice things about us.  And that is just the tip of the iceberg.  But we couldn’t be Nineveh!  God wouldn’t damn America?

I think it was William Sloan Coffin who said, “God’s judgment is not the last word of the Gospel, but it can be an important first word.” 

The harsh angry prophet gets us moving toward repentance, to where God’s anger turns to grace. 

But in his anger the prophet wants justice.  Nineveh should fry!  Not only that, but in the repentant transformation, the radical prophet seems to be proven wrong.  The prophet plays the fool, the sacrifice for the greater good.  If God does not destroy the city, then the prophecy of destruction must not have been from the mouth of God. 

This role Reverend Wright, like Jonah, didn’t want to play.  It wasn’t fair.  So Reverend Wright came out swinging at Barrack and the American political system, making the situation for him, Barrack, and all the rest of us a hundred times worse. And wasn’t it great that it was the female candidate unable to resist the negative propaganda, making her look like a-you-know-what, allowing the old white guys to sit back and let the woman and two black men battle to the death for a small slice of that elusive American power. 

Barack was not just running a race against Republicans, against Hilary and McCain, but also against the likes of Jonah and Jeremiah, he was also running against fear and wrath of the angry black man; the nightmare of American sin in a campaign against the American dream and the grace of God. 

And so it was the Obama response to the Reverend Wright situation that will go down in history as the speech worthy of a great leader; a king who was not content to lead just a portion of the population but would include all people, plants and animals too in hope that God might be gracious and merciful to these United States of Nineveh.

Obama speaking of our constitution:
“The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery…

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution -- a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States.

What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part -- through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk -- to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign -- to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America.

I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together -- unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction -- towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.”

So in a strange ironic way, Reverend Wright came close to sabotaging the victory of the first African American President, but also, probably made that victory possible by evoking a grace filled leadership we could trust and follow.

But this is a race, not just for Barrack, but for all of us.  It is everybody’s American dream or everybody’s nightmare.  It is time for each of us to step forward to a new day, that day when every person is judged not by the color of their skin, their gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity, but by the content of their character.

As Christians by God’s grace we are called to be fishers of men and women. We may have heard God’s call and run in the opposite direction.  Perhaps we then found ourselves in a storm, in a hurricane; maybe we’ve been tossed overboard by our work, family or nation, and have found ourselves in the belly of a whale, or in the dark attic of a flooded house, in the pit of a whale of a recession, or in a body being swallowed by disease. 

Maybe you have been to afraid to look up, and have just kept your nose to the grindstone of work, throwing that net out for fish day after day after day. 

But God still has a plan for you, places for you to go.  You know when I was in Israel on the Sea of Galilee we got in the tour bus with all the other tourists and went to all the tourist traps.  The cheesiest attraction was the Jesus boat, a supposedly big version of a fishing boat, on which the national anthems of the passengers were played.  After the Jesus boat we were funneled into tourist trap restaurant.  I was fed up so I left my comrades in the restaurant and took a walk down the lakeside road.  As I came to an intersection I met a Palestinian fisherman, selling his fish by the side of the road.  Here are all these wealthy Christians from all over the world stuck together in one tourist attraction after another, hoping to get a feel for the authentic historical Jesus.  And here is this crusty, dirty, poor fisherman, his people discriminated against and his land occupied with the help of our modern Roman Empire, our modern Nineveh.  If Jesus came walking across the water and onto the shore this second, I doubt seriously if he would be heading into the air-conditioned restaurant with all the Christians.  He would be hanging out with some fisherman like this; this is who he would call to be a fisher of men.  But then again, the Ninevites can do God’s will too, and there is roll for us to play in God’s plan for all of us, Israelis and Palestinians, African or Anglo Americans, we are all in this life together.  And thank and praise, the Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.