A Reflection for Wednesday of 1st Week of Lent North Dare Ministerial Association Lenten Series
February 21, 2024 Outer Banks Presbyterian Church
Thomas E. Wilson, Guest Preacher
Fiddling With Fate, Dancing With Destiny, Part 2
A couple weeks ago someone asked me if I ever recycle sermons. I harrumphed that I had never stooped so low. So much for pride! A couple weeks ago the Lectionary had a passage from Jonah as the Hebrew Testament Lesson and then this Wednesday there was another passage from Jonah in the Lectionary. I re-read the poem I had written for that Sunday and I decided that this would be Part Two of the same poem as the same theme was here as the lesson for today; a story about the difference between Destiny and Fate.
In the Hebrew Testament lesson from the legend of Jonah, the Hero and the Butt of the story that bears his name. Jonah wants a God of Fate like all of the other first class Gods are. When these other Gods speak, they set in motion a series of events that will come about the ways the God wants them to come out; that is Fate; it cannot be changed. The Greek and other first class Gods speak; and as the modern day prophet, Porky Pig, used to say, “That's all folks!” But Jonah is ticked off that his God calls on people to change their Destiny: Fate cannot be changed, Destiny can. Under Jonah's God, people have the gift of being able to change Destiny. We are not stupid, we know if we keep doing what we are doing; it is not going to end well – that is the Destiny. But we can change; calling upon our faith to help us, instead of looking passively at the wreck that will come, unless we change our way of thinking and acting.
Wilson's personal theory, for the day, is that the Book of Jonah was originally a song, a saga, sung at Public occasions to remind us who we were and are. Look at when the story refers to Nineveh, and it usually has an epithet, a descriptive term “that great city”. Greek saga would use epithets like Homer using “Rosy finger Dawn”, or “Swift footed Achilles”, or “Peace loving Hector”. Usually epithets were used in sung sagas to help the line have a better rhyme and meter sound. If we look at the Iliad there are twenty adjectives to every ten words, and twelve verbs for every ten lines written,. An epithet was a good way to take a drink of wine, or act as a way for the audience to partake of their bowls of wine, or for the singer to take a pause to remember where he or she really was in the song. I think, much of the Hebrew Testament was sung for centuries before they were put into writing in Hebrew. The oldest document we have unearthed is a Biblical fragment written in Hebrew from the 10th Century BC. Writing is something we do to use our brain to reflect upon something, “Put it down on Paper”, so we can study it later. Listening, on the other hand, involves encountering the experience, at that moment; before our brain reduces it to knowledge. Listening to a song is to let the song come into our imagination and memory, caressing our ears, and dwell there to be repeated over and over again.
The Book of Jonah is different than any other book in scripture for it is a book of satire, told in slapstick. Jonah the Hero is a whiner and is not a good representative of the Hebrew God. The good people in the book are the standard villains, people the Jewish people distrusted. Or to say it another way, the Hero is the Villain and the villains are the heroes.
Jonah, is called by God to go Nineveh, that Great City, and bring the people to repent, and thereby changing their destiny. Jonah tells God that God is too soft hearted, and nothing could change the fate the people of Nineveh, that Great City, richly deserved. Jonah is afraid that Fate, the will of the Gods, will be changed by this God into destiny. So, instead of going East to Nineveh, that Great city, Jonah went West to the coast, onto a boat heading due West to Spain, the end of the earth. During a storm that threatens to wreck his escape plan, he said he would rather die than lift a hand to help the dwellers of that accursed city. He asks the crew to throw him into the deep to drown, and the crew is glad to toss him over board if only that would shut him up.. God undermines Jonah's desire to be a martyr to Fate and challenges him to be a child of destiny with God. Through God's mercy, Jonah gets swallowed by a large fish, where he is protected. Alone in the fish, he prays. However, the prayer is not a praise of God but a sort of “Okay, Okay, I'll follow the instructions”. He becomes a passenger, in the belly of the fish, to the east and then regurgitated up at Nineveh, that great city's, shore. So here is this comic figure covered and dripping, stinking to high heaven with fish vomit as the chosen representative of the Hebrew God. God sings to him “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city . . ,” Arise- KUM in Hebrew, that same word Jesus uses when he heals the young girl:”Talitha KUM!” Our faith is not about lying down but about arising!
In a parenthetical note; this Presbyterian Church is looking for a new Pastor and if anyone shows up covered in smelly fish vomit, you might want to invite him or her in for a talk about the job. Just a thought.
Jonah hates saving the people from what he sees as Fate to be destroyed. But he is called to help people he hates, to be travelers of Destiny into repentance. Jonah hates the whole idea, but goes to work; just going through the motions, not putting his heart into it. His message is five words in Hebrew, eight in English: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.” said over and over again, in probably something like a monotone. However, before he is barely in the city limits, the people are repenting, which really ticks Jonah off. One commentator suggests that the people in Nineveh do not just become overturned, but the people, his hated ones, become TRANSFORMED! In order to be Transformed: one must have one's own ego overturned.
The people of Nineveh, that great city, have been transformed, but Jonah's ego is not overturned. He goes into a pout and sits under a shady tree to sulk and die; thinking that would really show God. Well, God puts a worm into the tree and the tree dies and now Jonah is really ticked off. God suggests that Jonah is worried more about a tree and his own comfort and hatreds, than about the thousands of innocent lives. God sees all people as Creatures of Destiny and not as Prisoners of Fate.
One of the problems is that we feel more comfortable with Fate than we do with Destiny, because Destiny calls us to change, and Fate makes us comfortable of not not having to make hard decisions. Let me give you an example. In the 19th Century, Thomas Malthus, came up with the warning that human population must be controlled or we will in run out of food. Then, Charles Darwin came up with his theories of evolution, where forces from outside caused adaptation. This gave rise to the idea, which swept the world, of “Social Darwinism”, especially under the vision of Herbert Spencer which suggested that we just needed to adapt to the changes of society rather than than help the poor and those who cannot adapt. We see the precursors of these fears in the mid 19th Century contemporary popularity of this idea when we read Dickens, Christmas Carol in the arguments of Scrooge with the do-gooders. It was “survival of the fittest” that was most important. It suggested that if we helped the poor or disadvantaged we were thwarting the Divine Will and we need to treat them as surplus population and that it is God's will that the surplus population just die, because they are not needed. They would pass it off as God's will and the Carnegies, the Frisks, the Mellon's, the Fords, chiefs of Capitalism would prosper. It was used against poor immigrants and became enshrined in our immigration system as most of us people want to hold tightly on to what we have rather than help our neighbor. One reviewer wrote: “Spencer opposed any laws that helped workers, the poor, and those he deemed genetically weak. Such laws, he argued, would go against the evolution of civilization by delaying the extinction of the “unfit.”” Sound familiar?
What we are involved in right now in this series of services is to gather to eat together and raise money so that the poor can be fed. We “KUM”, ARISE, and come together to worship asking that we, the people of the Outer Banks, that great Sandbar, might be transformed as the people of Nineveh, that great city, were transformed; and like Jonah; our original selfishness might be transformed. To be free of drifting into Fate, but to move into our destiny as children of the living God. To be such people, so when our descendants sing about us, living on the Outer Banks, that great Sandbar, before the Tides of the next century took them away: they might use the epithet “faithful” when they come to our names.
Fiddling With Fate, Dancing With Destiny (2nd Use)
It's a little bit easier to just accept any line as truth,
Not having to move thoughts and actions around,
Making decisions that what's said is really sound,
Wanting only surrender to Fate's call to our youth.
Problem is, that we have to listen to quiet refrains,
Calling us to dance in a way out of our usual steps,
Letting go of many of our beloved personal effects,
Allowing more room for new ideas into our brains.
It is then that we're set free from the old thoughts,
Which had hobbled our ancestors ideas and hopes,
Binding us to that once upon time with old ropes.
But faith's swords can sever those Gordian knots.
Set us free to adopt a new, and faith filled, stance,
To be God's partners, by entering Destiny's dance.
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