Jonah and the Ethic of Gratitude

Passage— Jonah 4

Today we are continuing our series on gratitude. Last week you got some homework from me-- to write notes of thanks to something new. Something that you wouldn’t normally thank. I gave you some ideas-- like a traffic jam, a frustrating project, or even a kind word. Seeing that there’s a way for us to have the feeling of gratitude, even in the face of a reality that is showing us all the ways we could be discontent--this is our work as a church. I hope you were able to do that practice and I look forward to hearing your stories of thank you notes.

This week, we will be looking at how this gratitude that we are practicing can move outside ourselves-- into the world-- and become action. Our passage today comes from the funniest book of the Bible. Listen, I know I’m probably not supposed to say that a book of the Bible is funny, but I think you all can keep a secret. But also, let’s call a spade a spade-- Jonah is hilarious. So a prophet--talks for God-- gets told by God to go and preach salvation to a lost people in the city of Ninevah and this is the good news-- you are forgiven! And what does this good guy do? He runs away from God! Like a child that doesn’t want to clean their own room.

This prophet of YHWH thinks, yeah the God of all creation-- the sky, the sea, that God doesn’t reach all the way to Tarshish, which most scholars think was what they called Spain. 

Turns out God does in fact go all the way to Spain. And then he gets eaten by a fish. Which, that’s funny to me. Personally, I don’t know about you. And then-- he preaches and because of God’s love it works! He halfheartedly talks about God’s grace and everyone repents.

And then let’s talk about how it all ends-- Jonah has a hissy fit about a shrub and tries to watch the destruction of a whole civilization.

Our passage today is a whole chapter-- if you have your bibles, you’ll see something very important. It is also the last chapter of Jonah-- that’s how the whole thing ends! Jonah, a prophet of God, is eternally remembered in the Word of God as a whiner who wishes a shrub lived more than a whole city. This is quite the legacy… and yet God uses it.

So today when we are talking about our own personal ethic of gratitude, I want us to see Jonah as an example. I don’t know about you but I love projecting myself into every single story that I hear or see. I am the main character in my own life story so of course I would also be the main character of the stories that I see on TV or read in the Bible. And normally that’s great. I am brave like Indiana Jones, I am strong like Superman, I am faithful like Ruth, right?

And as we get to know more about each other I think it’s important for you all to know something about me. I am, by all rights, a pretty big nerd. Now, I am not a mega nerd or an ultra nerd, but I am a middle of the road, Harry Potter loving, comic book reading, table top game playing nerd. So I love a story. A story that has no bearing in reality and helps me see the world around me through different and wild narrative is my bread and butter. Now that you all know this about me, let’s think about Jonah.

It’s harder to find ourselves in the story of Jonah, right?

The thing is, everyone is the hero of their own story, even if it’s just imagined. Even Jonah, after all that happened, probably saw himself as a hero. Our task as Christians is to begin to see our heroic actions as a result of God’s grace and try to use that story to further the Kingdom of God. It is gratitude that makes it possible for us to see our role in the story as a grace from God.

We are also continuing our walk through “Grateful,” by Diana Butler Bass. We are working through this book in order to see what God can teach us when it comes to choosing gratitude. This week we are going to be looking at our own definition of what gratitude is for us. You’ll see you have a little sheet with some fill in the blanks. Don’t do the work ahead--this is something for you to take with you.

When we talk about our definition we are talking about our ethics. Ethics are just the feelings we have lived out in front of people. What bothers us, what we love, and what we are grateful for. Who we are when no one sees us is what matters when it comes to what we think of the things we learn about in church. We might think that gratitude is an important thing for us to practice, but if we never practice it, why does it matter what we think? We can have all these happy thoughts about the world around us, but if it doesn’t manifest as action, then what actual good is it?

Let’s let Jonah explain this definition of ethics in gratitude. So Jonah was a prophet of the Lord, he was bought into the Law of Moses, the teachings and devotion to YHWH. This is what Jonah would have told you if you asked him about what he believed.

But when it came to putting sandals on the ground, for his thoughts to become words, he showed his ethics were not rooted in gratitude. His thoughts and best efforts said that the God of Israel was a merciful God, BUT his ethics said God hated the same people he hated.

And so we aren’t going to be a church that talks about big ideas and doesn’t put them into action, right? That’s not in our DNA. We are the kind of church that talks about loving our neighbor and then goes out there and does it. The same with gratitude. As a church, our ethics must be rooted and based on our gratitude to God and for all of the ways God has shown up in our lives.

So by the end of our time together today, my goal will be for all of us to identify what story we tell about our lives. Is gratitude a main character? Is it a supporting character? Or is it missing from the tale entirely?

The first step to defining how we see gratitude is to talk about how we see. Perspective is a myriad of different things and no one person sees the same thing the same way. If our current culture of discord one to another has taught us anything is that two people can witness the same event and perceive it in a myriad of ways.

All of us have seen events, heard stories or felt in a way that was completely unique to us. A part of that is just the human experience--our sight is not nearly as reliable as we like to believe it is. We are the heroes of our story, so it is us versus the bad guys, right? 

Also as human beings, we are perpetually running through a script of our lives. Our defaults are to perpetually remember things or to constantly run through scenarios of what could be. Now, listen-- these points alone are not bad. This is human! We have this ability to keep us alive. These human tendencies help us function in a world that is difficult and where new challenges arrive daily. We have to remember and we should plan. The problem of course arises when we live in either the past or the future. This can cause us to miss the blessings in front of us right now, and put the people around us in little tidy boxes.

What’s worse is this looking towards the past or future can often times manifest itself as a false narrative that horribilizes what we have experienced or what is in store. We can look at our past selves or past experiences and make judgments of ourselves and others that just aren’t fair. We cringe when we think about how we acted in our teenage years without acknowledging that we were, well, teenagers! We look at the world around us and we obsess over what could be or what might come towards us. Bass says it this way:

“When we are thankful for the blessings of what was and see the goodness of what is, what can be comes into view with greater hope and possibility…. Gratitude cannot change the past, but it can help us understand the past in ways that give joy and help us flourish.”

Jonah lived in the past and he lived in the future and he completely avoided the present. The only way he knew Ninevah was through their past oppressions. The people of Ninevah oppressed the people of Israel in a horrible fashion. Jonah didn’t need to know anything else about the people of Ninevah other than their past of oppression. And while that wasn’t fair to the people of Ninevah-- look at what it does to Jonah! It causes him to act in fear and hate. It gets him on a boat towards Spain and eventually into the belly of a fish.

It’s this living in the past that robs Jonah of the joy of obedience to what God has called him to. It is living in the past that robs Jonah of the opportunity to follow God’s great salvation. Jonah is trying to be the hero he thinks he should be, based on old information. He is ignoring the possibility that God is trying to teach him something while also teaching those in Ninevah. He can only envision a future of destruction for the villains in his story. He misses the grace. He misses the gratitude.

And then Jonah also lives in the future--he follows God’s direction, barely, and then immediately begins to live into the future of Ninevah’s destruction. He goes to a mountainside to watch Ninevah get destroyed. He skips right past the miraculous work of God in the lives of other people and goes towards what he hopes will happen.

Look at the beautiful present Jonah misses! Mercy! Hope! Repentance!

Now, what does the past and the future have in common? Neither exist! The past doesn’t exist, it’s gone. The future hasn’t been made yet, it doesn’t exist! And just like we can’t tell our pet unicorn what to do-- we cannot control things that do not exist. When we find ourselves meditating and ruminating on the past or the future, without gratitude, we are working at something we literally could never change. Like a sandcastle underwater, we are building things that will never stand. We are trying to be heroes of a story based on old information.

It is the present that deserves most of our attention and requires most of our focus when it comes to gratitude. You see, with gratitude, we are able to see more. Bass talks about the idea of “soft eyes.” Soft eyes comes from the world of martial arts. It’s a concept that teaches adherents to see as much as possible, especially in times of stress. When we are stressed out, we can oftentimes focus in on the thing right in front of us. We miss out on the world around us.

When we go through life with this laser focus we miss the good things, mostly. Because gratitude exists on the margins of our lives. Gratitude makes a home in experiences that are secondary to what is happening in front of us. Gratitude helps us to recognize kind words, generous gestures, and just the best the world has to offer us.

Poet Maya Angelou summarizes it well:

“If you must look back, do so forgivingly. If you must look forward, do so prayerfully. However, the wisest thing you can do is be present in the present… gratefully.”

It is our perception that allows us to take the definition of gratitude we hold in our minds and move it into our hearts. It is how we put feet on the idea of gratitude and how we begin to build or rebuild our ethics around that gratitude.

So what will gratitude feel like? What will it mean to us? What will it do? Well that will come down to your practice. All of us have a practice of gratitude, whether we mean to or not. Jonah did have a practice of gratitude, it was just based on his narrow view-- his own narrative.

You see, when he received the plant that gave him shade, he was grateful. He decided that since God gave him something he wanted, he would be grateful for that thing. And well, we heard this morning how very conditional this gratitude was. Once the weed was gone, the gratitude was gone. This, of course, is a very thin gratitude. It won’t change the world, it won’t lead to freedom, it will lead to a worldview that is one dimensional. Instead, it is a bondage to the world around him. It is a bondage to things outside of his control-- it is a bondage to things that are not God’s grace and it misses the beauty of the story God is telling. It tries to bend our narrative.

So what will your perception be? How will you work to change your perspective on the world around you so that you can see every opportunity to be grateful? How will you work to make your ethics fit your gratitude and how will you work to be the hero in the story that God is writing for you and not the hero you think you should be?

So my homework for you this week is a bit nebulous, and requires you to be intensely honest with yourself. Set aside some quiet time with God and reflect on the story of your life. What role does gratitude play? Are you the hero? Or is God’s indiscriminate, unfailing, unmerited love the hero? Is your gratitude contingent on how you focus on the past or dream about the future? How can deeper gratitude for the present be slowly introduced into your daily life? How can we see the world with honesty, but also deep gratitude for what we have been given? How can we translate these feelings into how we interact with the world?

Your homework says “God is the hero of my story because I am grateful for _____” Your tangible work this week is to fill in that blank. How is God the hero of the story of your life? 

My prayer for all of us this week is that we begin to look at how we see the world around us with a mind towards our gratitude. May we live into the tension that all we have been given is a gift from God. May we lean into the reality that the present is what we have and finding gratitude in that is the only way we can recognize God working in our lives. And may we be known as a people who practice gratitude through a contagious love of God.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Let’s pray

Almighty God you were near to Jonah and he couldn’t see it-- open our eyes

You were close to God and Jonah couldn’t feel it--help us be sensitive

You work within all things-- help us to have gratitude.

We know that everything is a gift. Help us to respond in that way. Amen.