Jonah Runs

God says “Go,” and Jonah says “Absolutely not” then buys a one-way ticket in the opposite direction. That blunt refusal is funny on the surface, but it also lands uncomfortably close to home, because most of us know what it feels like to dodge a calling, delay a hard act of trust, or offer God a carefully measured amount of commitment. We start by reading Jonah 1 straight through, including the storm, the terrified sailors, the cast lots, and Jonah’s reluctant confession that he’s fleeing the Lord. 

From there, we talk about why Jonah works like satire: the prophet is asleep in the belly of the ship while everyone else is fighting for their lives. We trace the surprising theme that the “people of faith” in the chapter are not Jonah but the sailors, who pray, act with conscience, and even ask God not to hold them guilty for innocent blood. We also notice the spiritual atmosphere of the crew, where multiple gods are assumed, yet reverence for the Lord emerges in the middle of the chaos. 

Then we bring Jonah’s pattern into daily life. Running from God is rarely as dramatic as Tarshish, so we name the more common version: nuancing obedience, mediating our response, doing just enough to feel faithful while keeping the deeper call at arm’s length. Finally, we widen the conversation to America at 250 years, wrestling with freedom and equality alongside slavery, exclusion, and stolen land, and we reflect on what growing diversity in spaces like the World Cup and the Dodgers might reveal about our next step. If this conversation challenges you, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review with the question you’re still carrying.

Transcript

Jumping Into Jonah’s Story

SPEAKER_00 0:00

As I said, we're in Jonah, and we're going to have a little bit of um we're going to have some fun, I guess I'll say, in the way we do the scriptures. Because this uh different than a lot of uh of scripture is straight story, is just telling story. And so uh we're gonna have a little fun with it. Everybody knows kind of the story of Jonah. All right, good. We're jumping into the deep end. Here is one. I'm funny without even trying. This is the first chapter of Jonah. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amatai, saying, Go at once to Nineveh, the great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me. But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish, so he paid his fare and went on board to go with them to Tarshish away from the presence of the Lord. But the Lord hurried a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his God, they threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. The captain came and said to him, What are you doing, sound asleep? Get up, call on your God. Perhaps the God will spare us a thought so that we do not perish. The sailors said to one another, Come, let us cast lots, so that we may know on whose account this calamity has come upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell on surprise, surprise Jonah. Then they said to him, Tell us why this calamity has come upon us, what is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you? I am a Hebrew, he replied. I worship the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. Then the men were even more afraid and said to him, What is this that you have done? For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them so. Then they said to him, What shall we do to you that the sea may quiet down for us? For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous. He said to them, Pick me up and throw me into the sea, then the sea will quiet down for you. I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you. Nevertheless, the men rode hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them. Then they cried out to the Lord, Please, O Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man's life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you. So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, from which he wrote the following Yelp review. No view at all, no room service, alone with my thoughts. Two out of ten do not recommend the word of God and a few from me for the people of God. Amen.

Satire And Favorite Moments

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Well, as I told you, these are stories. So we can have a little bit of fun with them, right? And by the time we finish with this series, I hope you're comfortable seeing that this is a story uh that is told in kind of a satire style, right? The message is getting across and using satire, or at least it's kind of more of an exercise in faith uh as opposed to something more straightforward. So I'm going to give you my favorite parts of that chapter of the story. Are you ready? Here are my favorite parts. First, he does the absolute opposite of what God wants him to do. No thinking about it, no wavering. God says, do this, and he goes and does that. Completely the opposite, and he doesn't even really think about it. He just does it. This to me, it says satire. It says, okay, we're setting this up as some sort of exercise. Like we're asking the question, well, you know, what happens when we don't follow God? That's the context I see anyway. Somehow he's able to sleep during a storm that has the sailors bailing cargo it's so bad. Somehow he's sleeping. Some of you may recognize uh a similarity to a story with Jesus, right? Where the storm is raging and he's down sleeping. That is actually in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. So if you're looking at a comparison or presuming that there is a comparison of Jesus to Jonah, you're probably not too far off. Here's another interesting thing about this first chapter: the sailors are the people of faith. Not Jonah, the prophet, the sailors. They want him to talk to his God, presuming that they believe in this God to help them to get saved by this God. Also, you might understand a little bit of polytheism here, which I know Stephen did, because he's got feelers for that kind of thing. By that I mean they were living in a community where it uh people understood that there might be or believed that there might be multiple gods. Even if you were Hebrew and believed your God was the best God, you could still be a polytheist thinking there's other gods. This community is implied. We're kind of polytheistic as they're asking, go talk to your God. No, you talk to your God. Let's get all the gods on our side. Let's see, rather than jump in the ocean, he tells them to throw him in. Is he trying to be selfless or not? Is what I'm trying to understand there. Did anybody else catch that? It's like, oh, it must be me. I guess you're gonna have to throw me in. I'd be like, well, if it's you, you know. You know, that's what I'm asking. But uh these people don't really want to do that, do they? They were hesitant to be the ones who throw him to his death. Finally, they asked God not to punish them for the innocent blood they spill. They even make sacrifices to God afterwards in gratefulness. Again, we're reminded they are the believers in the story. This is uh a different kind of uh uh book from our uh uh area of the prophets, where most of them are coming in and speaking God's word to the people and letting them know what God wants them to know. In this case, Jonah is more than a reluctant prophet. He might be the one of least faith amidst the community. He's supposed to be uh, well, the one he's uh um sitting in here on this ship. Uh obviously,

How We “Nuance” Our Obedience

SPEAKER_00 8:56

this opening of the Jonah story, it's about running from God. And we probably all have some story in our lives about avoiding a calling of some kind, or maybe it was an act of faith or an act of trust in God that you weren't really ready to carry all the way out, or maybe kind of nuanced to the point of being a little less than God wanted. What we're gonna find out is that the story really isn't about that running from God as much as it is about making peace with God's grace and God's forgiveness in the world. But that's the story, the journey for our next few weeks. Today, I wanted to focus a little bit on this nuance of uh the running, running from God. Most of the time, when we go against God, it's not quite this clear, right? That God tells us to do something. We don't normally go quickly and just do the exact opposite thing, even when we don't completely follow. We kind of nuance it a little bit. Well, I can do this much and this much. I can get you this far, God. Then you better send somebody else. I've got about this much commitment to what you're doing, God. Thank goodness there's other people, right, God? That's a little more of what our story looks like when we're talking about running away from God. We'll do a certain amount, but for whatever reason, we pull back. We mediate our full response to what we know God is calling us to do.

Jonah’s Lens On America At 250

SPEAKER_00 10:45

I'm in the spirit of 250 years of our declaration of independence, our uh age as a country. It's interesting to put the Jonah lens on our country as we celebrate 250 years. In what ways has God called the United States to certain things, to something, and in many ways we have carried the weight that God has given us. But in what ways are we like Jonah, where we haven't been quite ready to follow? In what ways have we nuanced or even mediated our response? We'd probably all agree on certain things that we feel God is calling our nation to. I can think of one main one. Our country emerged from an era of monarchies, right? Kings or queens, solo control of everything. We are the ones who put the democratic thinking of the French into action, and we were seeking to create a country in which everybody had a voice. And that to us has been our call to freedom, the freedom that we have some say-so in the country that we live in. At the same time, we've wrestled with some of that too. We actually use the phrase all men are created equal. The problem is that didn't include half of our population. Just the very phrase itself sort of missed the point just a little bit. And we said it while we were enslaving other people that we had forced to come here. We should probably also mention we took land from people who were already here. So it hasn't been all perfect, even when we were living out this call. We feel like God has given this country. There is some Jonah in the middle there where our country wasn't fully ready to make all people equal. At the same time, on our journey as a country, we've been able to make our laws more inclusive of everyone. We've moved that far.

Diversity In Sports And Human Worth

SPEAKER_00 13:26

And I don't know if you're like me, if you've been enjoying the World Cup lately. But have you noticed World Cup people? Anybody watching? Oh, a few of you. All right. Boy, I thought everybody was watching. What else are you doing? Not much else going on. What's that? Oh, the Dodgers. That's true too. That's true. Actually, the Dodgers fit this as well. This whole point that I'm trying to make. Have you noticed how ethnically diverse all the teams have become? I don't know how long ago it was, but you could pretty well, you know, maybe 40, 50 years ago, you could look at a team and go, well, you know, they're from that region, right? They're, you know, you can tell, just you know, they're, oh, they're tall and white. Oh, well, they used to row boats and uh conquer kingdoms, right? You know, or whatever it was, you know, you could kind of guess. I don't know that I could guess all of them this time. If you've been watching World Cup, yeah, it's super diverse, all of this that has been going on. The ethnicity has really uh been able to uh um to blend just a little bit and get mixed a little bit. I really appreciate it because for me personally, on my journey of faith with what I believe, I see all people as God's creation. Everybody is worthy of God's love, God's respect. And so when some of the distinctions that we have created between each other and between our cultures and our ethnicities and all of that, when those start to get a little less significant, I appreciate that. I'm hoping we can do it in a way we don't lose anyone's sense of identity. I hope we don't lose any cultures, but that it becomes sort of that quilt of everybody's patch being in their part as the whole. But before that, before this blending that we're starting to see, an example being World Cup, an example being the Dodgers as well, by the way. Uh before that, we could disguise some of our feelings of uh competitiveness, our feelings of concern for power or fear. We would disguise all that in just looking at difference and giving ourselves permission to treat people differently because they looked differently. That is blurring away. That is moving away. And I like to think that the United States was a model for that. The very way that we were created and developed was diverse. People coming from all over the place looking for different opportunities. We had an ethnic mix right from the beginning. Maybe it's because of the ease of travel today as compared to in the past. More people can move around more than they were able to in earlier times, but it was still us who modeled that diversity and that ethnicity blend.

Where God Calls Us Next

SPEAKER_00 16:56

And I'd like to think that this is part of us learning that Jonah lesson about following God and not running away from God. The rest of the world seems to be following that model as they become more and more diverse. And it makes me wonder where might God be calling our country to lead next? Amen.