Sunday 1 September 2002.  Guilsborough
May the words of my mouth and the mediations of all our hearts be always acceptable top Thee O lord our Strength and our Redeemer. 
There is one thing about being a member of the Lay Band: it does make one do some homework.  I confess that am not very good on the twelve minor prophets of the Old Testament, beyond regarding them as useful names for crossword puzzles.   They are  there at the back of the Old Testament from Hosea to Malachi, inveighing about this or that iniquity of their time, reminding people of their shortcomings  and laying down God’s law.  But I have to confess that I have never studied them in much detail, not least because they do not often feature in the church’s lectionary.  
The exception is Jonah, who as the saying goes, every schoolboy knows  (or used to know) about him and the whale.  It’s a brief story, less than 1400 words, but Jonah makes a big impact on the imagination, especially when you are young and hearing it for the first time. Well, you may say, who wouldn’t make an impression if they were swallowed by a whale and regurgitated?  
 Most of the books of the minor prophets are autobiographical: but Jonah is the exception, being a story told in the third person, written as biography.  It was obviously a well known episode in Jewish history for Jesus mentions it in St. Matthew’s Gospel: “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, so shall the son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” 
Actually, Jonah’s connection with the whale or great fish is more or less incidental to thew overall message of the story. The unique thing about him is that, against his will as a rather nationalistic Jew, Jonah  becomes the first foreign missionary and his book has been described as the greatest missionary tale ever written. He had a mission and it succeeded.  
The tale is nicely told.  Jonah is called by God to a missionary  task. He tries to run away from it and is brought back in the belly of the whale.  He then, somewhat reluctantly one imagines, goes to Nineveh to cry out against the wickedness of its inhabitants and prophesy destruction.  Now that is what Old Testament prophets are supposed to do.  More often than not something bad happens, Sodom and Gomorrah, Babylon being the best examples.  In the case of Nineveh they  people listen to Jonah repent and are spared by God.  
Jonah, finding his prophesy unfulfilled, takes umbrage and leaves the city, feeling one supposes that the wind has been taken out of his sails.  He sits outside to await events in a hut. It’s hot. God provides him with a gourd to shelter him from the sun, only to use a worm to kill it overnight and annoy Jonah even more.  
In response to his complaints, God points out that Jonah had shown more concern for the withered gourd. which, of course, he had done nothing to create, than for the six score ignorant people of Nineveh, and thus teaches him a lesson in mercy in response to repentance. 
At another level, the story can be seen an allegory.  Jonah represents the Jews and the whale that swallows up the Jews represents the Babylonians who forced them into exile, only for them to return, regurgitated one might say, after the captivity. The purpose of the story is also to expose the insularity and nationalism of the Jews and to show God’s interest in the world of the Gentiles. If they had heeded that lesson one could argue they might not have treated Jesus’ message in the way they did.
The other aspect of the Jonah story that strikes me concerns Nineveh itself, the centre of the Assyrian empire when he arrived there.  Although the inhabitants mended their ways on this occasion, in the end the empire fell, Nineveh was destroyed by the Medes and within a couple of hundred years apparently nothing remained except a few semi-derelict villages.  That city,  then has become a somewhat romantic symbol of the transitory nature of man’s pride and glory. 
Some of the best of what is left of  Nineveh can be found exhibited at the British Museum, carried back from Mesopotamia by  archaeologists in the nineteenth century.  It has become, in that passive way,  an awful warning of what happens to the earthly symbols of man’s vanity  “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday”, wrote Kipling in the year if Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee , 
“is one with Nineveh and Tyre!  
“Judge of the Nations spare us yet, Lest we forget.  Lest we forget.”  
Forget what?  The presence of God in our lives.   What Kipling was warning  against was the success that had gone to our heads – just as it had gone to the heads of the Assyrians and other once dominant peoples in world history, Babylonians, Medes, Sumerians, Phoenicians, Romans etc.  He was advocating a bit of humility.  “Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice/ An humble and a contrite heart”.  He could not have foreseen the First World War less than 20 years away in which his only son would be killed whi8hc spelled the end of British dominance. 
Far be it from me to play Jonah and use this pulpit to beat the drum for contrition in the face of the wickedness of our own age. I confess that I don’t have the confident certainty that sin will bring inevitable retribution. My own shortcomings are all too obvious. I heard how  some years ago the Revd. Ian Paisley was  preaching  on sin and the fire, brimstone, wailing and gnashing of teeth would surely come. Suddenly an old man in the front row piped “But, Dr. Paisley  what if you have nae teeth?”  Paisley paused for barely a second  “teeth”, he boomed, “will be provided”. 
Now that’s confidence for you!  By those standards I‘m a wimp.  But I do think that all of us, if we profess to be Chrisitans, ought to subscribe to some basic tenets.
First that God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives. He has, however, given us free will and we are subject only to certain laws of science – of gravity, for example or biology.  
How we make use of our lives is, then, up to us. But he has provided for us a blueprint to follow through the teachings of Jesus.  That is to say, via the two great commandments, to love God and to love our neighbours as ourselves.  
And yet it is extraordinary how difficult it is to do that.  
Love God?  “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth……” Is not science providing the answers to the mysteries of creation and the universe?  DNA, Big Bang and the Human Genome project have put the Garden of Eden where it belongs – firmly in the realms of fantasy, they say. 
And yet and yet….uncertainties remain. 
I don’t suppose two thousand people have gathered in Ely Cathedral for a while.   But when something as awful as the events in Soham occur we seek solace in the house of God.  He is our refuge and strength, as the psalmist says.  He helps us to live with the inexplicable.
 
As for loving our neighbour, even if we have not yet built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land,  at least we have moved away from the Poor Law and the boy chimney sweeps, we can fairly claim.  But the Earth Summit meeting at Johannesburg and the controversy that it has aroused shows that many people regard some Christian beliefs are all very well so long as they don’t affect the private lives of the prosperous. 
In response to that cry for help going up from  the  developing world, there is no need for wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s not a sin to prosper or to seek and enjoy good governance. 
We have clear guidance on what we as individuals can do spelled out the collect for to-day where we asked God to “give unto us the increase of faith, hope and charity”.   
And as we all know, the greatest of these is charity.  If we leave this morning with that prayer a little more prominent in the back of our minds, we shall be on the right track and even Jonah, were he among us,  would  I can’t help thinking be satisfied.
Judge of the Nations spare us  yet  - to do more for You - Lest we forget - lest we forget. 
 
