Words'nTone

A former pastor was preaching on Jonah and uttered an unusual take on the story.  He referred to Jonah hiding in the hills rather than “hitting the streets.” The cliché phrase, “Hitting the streets,” was uttered and I asked myself, “Why is the church, especially the evangelical church community, reluctant to ‘hit the streets’?” I had my answer, at least partially from the very text pastor was referring to.  The text in the Jonah story that scares the living day-lights out of good clean, God-fearing, Bible-believing people of faith is, “Then the people of Nineveh believed in God” (Jonah 3:5).  The dirty-rotten, no-good, Israelite-hating, immoral, corrupted, but now repentant Ninevites became believers.  How dare they!  Listen to Jonah himself.  We should be extremely surprised that God allowed this to be placed in His sacred text—how honest can we be, even showing one of God’s prophets and holy men struggling with God’s grace and despairing that His mercy was being extended to the unclean, those nasty, dirty, unbelieving goiim.  Listen to the writer’s confession and Jonah’s attitude:

“But it greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry. He prayed to the LORD and said, ‘Please LORD, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity. Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life’” (Jonah 4:1-3).

Jonah would rather die than see the Ninevites repent and God shed his mercy on them.  He’d rather see God fulfill His wrathful promises on these people than see them believe in God and become part of the family.

We’re moved by compassion to give for relief-work halfway-round the world—maybe.  Pictures and political rhetoric move us to collect goods and send funds to the relief efforts in far away places, to famine stricken parts of the world—anywhere but next store or in nearby urban or rural areas that smack of being impoverished.  We move very few fingers to relieve poverty, feed hungry children, help the undesirable to find work within the very communities that touch ours right here, right now, every day, twelve months a year.  We are just not moved by the unchurched nearby, especially the poor and the urban.  Hitting the streets, moving our church activity center away from our comfort zones and refocusing on the territories currently owned by the enemy, the places where the unchurched, non-believers live, work, and play would make us very uncomfortable, even maybe wishing we were dead.

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