During yesterday's sermon, Pastor Hank shared a few stories from some research that he's been doing. You see, he was given a grant from a Christian education group so he could interview seminary students and discover how they weave the biblical narratives into their faith life. One of the examples he brought up was people identifying with a particular biblical character at a certain point in their life.
Well, because I'm all ADHD-like, I never listen to a sermon all the way through, even if I'm the one preaching. Rather, my mind will wander in and out, but it always uses the exit point as a tangent into deeper reflection on what was said. This by the way, is the method I use to determine how I'm going to change a sermon between one service and the next ... a mental tangent in one service will often become a key point in the next (there's a potentially terrifying little insight as to how the mind of Joe works).
Now, because I really enjoy Pastor Hank's preaching, I've found myself trying to limit the lengths of my tangents because I don't want to miss stuff. So, instead of letting it run it's course, I give it a few moments and then whip out my trusty iPhone so I can capture some thoughts on the Evernote application (which will sync the note to my desktop for easy recall later) and then return to the sermon. Then the next morning I'll rediscover the tangent while going through gathered Evernotes and sorting out my Remember the Milk (another sweet "syncs-to-the-cloud" iPhone application) projects for the day.
So, what did I find in my Evernote this morning? Well, yesterday my first tangent dealt with this idea of identifying with a biblical character because of similar life circumstances. As Pastor Hank was talking about this, he started rattling off a number of names including Jonah ... and the tangent began. Now, I could have reflected on having life and priorities out of whack and moving in a direction that God didn't want me to go, or I could have thought about getting spit back up on the beach and restarting ministry, but instead my mind resonated with an oft misunderstood aspect of the book ... Jonah being saved by God as the fish swallowed him.
That's right, in Jonah, salvation isn't being spit back up on the shore and time in the fish's belly isn't seen as torture or punishment. Rather, the fish, which looks horrible to anybody standing on the outside, was his salvation. Read these words from Jonah 2:5-6, words of prayer that Jonah spoke "from the belly of the fish" (Jonah 2:1):
The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God.
The idea of bars and the pit are common Old Testament images for Sheol and death, so Jonah was actually praising God for saving him from death and damnation by sending the great fish to slurp him up and, ultimately, barf him out (as another tangent, it's great to explore the language of the text and see how it was, quite possibly, Jonah's never-ending self-righteousness that caused the fish to hurl).
As for the connection to me, while sending out word of my hiatus to friends, family, and congregations was an incredibly humbling and painful act, from the very beginning there's been this incredible sense of peace about time away, most likely because I've known that it was needed for years, I was just too cowardly to make the move until it was pressed upon me. Sure it's not comfortable being in the belly of my fish, but the alternative is far more terrifying.
However, there's a way I don't want to be like Jonah in all this, after all, he remained self-righteous even after knocking on the gates of hell and never grasped God's love for sinners or mission to bring that love to them. Therefore, having knocked on the gates but being swallowed up before entering, my prayer is that I'm hacked up not because I'm so pompous that I give the fish indigestion, but because God has determined it's time to restore my to what he's called me to do, which, interestingly enough, leads me to the second of my two tangents yesterday.
It wasn't long after returning to the sermon that Pastor Hank began talking about extra-biblical sort of images and callings that people he's interviewing have shared with him, something he linked to Joel 2:28:
And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.
As he shared some of these stories, my mind began to wander once again, this time to an incident that I've rarely mentioned since it happened 25+ years ago. Why haven't I said anything or allowed it to have greater impact on my life? Because it's one of those vision type things where you hear a voice that nobody else hears and, well, let's face it, in the Lutheran world, that freaks people out. Who cares if it happened to people like Joseph or Moses or Samuel or Paul, we're not comfortable with it so God must not do those things anymore.
Anyway, the incident occurred sometime in mid-elementary school and happened one night as my family was driving home from my grandparent's house in Colorado Springs. We were north of the Springs but south of Castle Rock on I-25. I was looking out into the darkness and watching the moon cast shadows on the hills to the east. Suddenly, the hills were no longer cast in shadows, but they were lit up by something in the night sky. I was entranced and so consumed by what I saw that I never took time to discover if anyone else in the car noticed what was happening.
Then I heard the voice. It wasn't loud or resounding, rather, it was peaceful, calm, and loving. Moreover, I sounded like it was speaking inside of me rather than externally. I couldn't tell you exactly what it said other than having the encounter end with a firm conviction that God had something wonderful in store for me ... that he was going to use me to accomplish something. And while he says this same thing to me in far less mystical ways on a regular basis through his Word and his Supper, as I look back on it now, there was something potent about the individual nature of this experience, and since it doesn't challenge the Scripture, it seems that rather than ignoring it, I should have spent the past quarter century embracing it for what it was.
As I drifted back into the sermon, Pastor Hank was wrapping up his point and explained how, in each of the people he'd interviewed, these stories spoke deeply into their life circumstances at the moment. Instantly my mind was back to that night, only this time, it was centered on my life at the time, it was a reliving of painful younger years that went by largely without friends or belonging among my peers. It was years of longing to be accepted and embraced. Years of wishing I could be something or somebody. It was into the midst of that brokenness that God spoke in a way that would have brought healing to my pain ... had I listened and embraced the message rather than tuck it away because, "We Lutherans don't do that stuff."
I wonder, some 25 years later, would I have needed salvation in the belly of a fish had I embraced the word that night? Or maybe it was God's purpose all along that I would recall that embrace from the belly of the fish.
