So friends, our teaching scripture today comes from Jonah
chapter 4, verses 1 to 11. It says, but this was very
displeasing to Jonah and he became angry.
He prayed to the Lord and said, Oh Lord, is this not?
Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country?
That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew
that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and
abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.
And now, oh Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better
for me to die than to live. And the Lord said, Is it right
for you to be angry? Then Jonah went out of the city
and sat down east of the city and made a booth for himself
there. He sat under it in the shade,
waiting to see what would become of the city.
The Lord God appointed a Bush and made it come up over Jonah
to give shade over his head to save him from his discomfort.
So Jonah was very happy about the Bush, but when dawn came up
the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the Bush so
that it withered when the sun rose.
God prepared a sultry E wind and the sun beat down on the head of
Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die.
He said It is better for me to die than to live.
But God said to Jonah, is it right for you to be angry about
the Bush? And he said, yes, angry enough
to die. Then the Lord said, You are
concerned about the Bush for which you did not labor, and
which you did not grow. It came into being in a night
and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned
about Nineveh, the great city, in which there are more than
120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their
left, and also many animals? This is the word of the Lord.
It's good to be with you this morning.
I'm going to set this right here.
So we're used to hearing a story of Jonah paired with a little
scene about a whale, and we'll get there.
But the story of Jonah ends with a moment about a Bush providing
shade to Jonah. And then he gets really angry
because the Bush kind of Withers and goes away and disappears.
And God asks Jonah a question that we actually never really
get the answer to. So sorry, I'm not going to be
able to provide too much clarity.
But the Bush is as important a part of the story as the whale
is. And both the Bush and the whale,
when we read the story of Jonah, are reminders of the unrelenting
mercy of God, the unrelenting mercy of God.
And we're going to get there into the story, but first we
have to get the proper context. So between 1969 and 1973, the
United States Air Force dropped more than 1/2 a million tons of
bombs on the countryside of Cambodia.
And this campaign was a secret. Congress hadn't authorized it.
The Cambodia people hadn't really done anything to provoke
it. It was a spillover from the war
in Vietnam. And North Vietnam was using the
Cambodian territory along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, you know, to
bring their supplies. There were supplies.
And Richard Nixon authorized what came to be known as
corporate bombing, indiscriminate, indiscriminate
bombing of rural Cambodian territory.
So this bombing completely destabilized the country, as you
can imagine. It drove rural populations into
the cities. It sort of shattered civil
society and created the conditions of desperation and
chaos. There were more bombs dropped in
this small region of Cambodia in that period than all of the
bombs dropped by the Allied forces in World War Two.
You can only imagine how destabilizing this was for the
Cambodian people. So when the Khmer Rouge and
authoritarian style government sort of entered into Phnom Penh
in April of 1975, they were walking into an A situation that
the United States had already broken.
And on the heels of all of this, what followed was one of the
most concentrated episodes of genocide in the 20th century.
In less than four years, the Khmer Rouge killed between
somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people, roughly 1/4 of
Cambodia's population. Forgive me, I'm having a little
hard time. They emptied the cities.
They abolished money and religion.
They snuffed out family loyalty. They sent children to spy on
their parents. And in a former high school in
Phnom Penh, they built a prison called Tul Slang, or An
estimated number of 17,000 people passed through, and fewer
than a dozen survived. The rest were tortured until
they confessed to whatever their interrogators needed them to
confess to, and then taking them to the killing fields and
executed. The prisoners kept meticulous
the The prison kept meticulous records, an effort overseen by a
former math teacher who took on the name of Comrade Doik.
We're going to come back to him. There are photographs of nearly
every prisoner, face forward, face to the side, sometimes with
a number hung around their neck. The photographs are still there
and thousands of faces looking back at you from the walls.
And I visited Tul Slang in January as part of my trip with
Parker and and John to visit the campuses of Asia's Hope in Phnom
Penh and Baatenbong. If you're new with us, you
should know that we have a very deep partnership with an
organization called Asia's Hope that provides family style
orphan care in Bata Bong, Cambodia, Phnom Penh, Northern
India, Thailand. Over the past 20 years, this
ministry, which was birthed out of this church and on the
leadership of John McCollum, has rescued more than 1000 kids who
have been caught up in sort of the fray of what followed from
this incident. So the wonderful work that
Asia's Hope families get to participate in.
And, and by the way, in the upcoming months, we're going to
update you a little bit about what our involvement will be
there moving forward. That's part of why I'm
highlighting it here. But this wonderful work that
Asia's Hope families get to participate in and what we get
to support it comes on the heels of US foreign policy decisions
for more than 50 years ago. 50 years later, there is still
enough destabilizing force in the region that every single
week, the national director of Cambodia's Asia's Hope, Savorn,
who I hope will be with us this summer, that's him in the
middle. You can see Parker and I there.
Apparently even in Cambodia, we still kind of dressed alike.
But every week, Savorn gets a call from somewhere in the
country, wondering if he has room to take in a kid from
someone who's trying to find them a home.
And as I toured the halls of Tuleslang and saw the pictures
of people turned into the the prisoners onto the wall and
walked past the display of skulls from the people who'd
been brutalized in this place, I found myself asking that a
question that a place memorialized, such as it is, is
designed to help us ask, how could this happen?
Like, how does this happen? And being somewhat of prayer, I
didn't ask that question into an empty space.
I found myself praying this question, Lord, how can this
possibly happen? I found myself repeating a
prayer that I pray often. And it's a prayer that we're
trying to lean in together into this community.
Lord have mercy, how can this happen?
How can something like this be happening?
And friends, I'm now squarely into midlife.
I turned 48 on Tuesday, which is your is your notification that I
have a birthday coming up this week.
And I've been a pastor just shy of two decades.
And I have heard enough stories to know that everyone has that
kind of question about something.
How does this happen? Why is this happening?
You read in the history books, you shake your head in disbelief
about the way that some people were treated.
Or you watch the news and you see in real time the way that
people have been treated, the way people are presently being
treated. Or some of you, you get a little
bit more up close and personal in your own story.
You know, you sit down with your grandfather a few weeks before
he died, and you know, he tells you that he left home at the age
of 16 because his father took him out to the barn and whipped
him like a horse. And then you realize that this
is the man who, just a decade and a half later, fathered your
mother. Every single one of us has a
story that surfaces, a question, How could this happen?
Why does this happen? And, Lord, when are you going to
make it right? And some of you have this kind
of question about injustice and oppression that has been done to
you or to your loved ones. And I open with this story about
Cambodia because we have a deep and growing connection there.
And I think it might be the closest shot we have at getting
our hearts close to what it feels like to be on the
receiving end of geopolitical machinery that oppresses the
weak. This is the context of the book
of Jonah. We've been in a series on the
minor Prophets called the Book of the 12.
And one of the things that we've been trying to do in our reading
of the prophets, one of the things that our teaching team
has been trying to do is to help us get present to the particular
handicap that we sort of have in reading the prophets from our
place in history and from our place as part of empire.
So the prophets are mostly writing to a people who have
been under the boot of the oppressors, the Egyptians and
the Assyrians and the Babylonians.
These are the empires that have wreaked havoc on the people of
God. The prophets are the one who
find themselves leaning deeply into the whisper of God and they
hear things from God and God gives them things to say to
people. And there are three scenes for
us this morning from the book of Jonah and maybe a short 4th one
if we have the time. But the three scenes are this
running, the rescue and unending mercy.
OK, you guys with me recovered from the opening maybe.
OK, first up is the running. God comes to Jonah, and he asked
Jonah to go and preach to the people in the city of Nineveh.
And if you haven't read the story of Jonah, I will say that
there are going to be some spoilers.
But you know, it's been around since the 18th century BC.
So you've had a minute. It's 4 short chapters.
You can go read it in about 6 minutes.
Essentially, God comes to Jonah and asks Jonah to go to Nineveh
to give them a word. And we're told that God has
heard of the wickedness that is going on in the city, city of
Nineveh. And God wants to sort of
withhold his judgement from the city.
And he says to Jonah, I want you to go and I want you to be an
ambassador to a place that is outside of my my people.
And I want you to talk to them about the mercy that I have.
And you might think that, you know, this is like what profits
do? Like, what's the big deal,
Jonah? Can you just go to Nineveh and
do the thing that God is asking you to do?
But Jonah books a ticket on a boat heading in the opposite
direction. So this is how the story opens.
Verse 3 writes 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 he went
on board to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence
of the Lord. Three times the text says that
he was going to Tarshish, and which I apparently can't say
this morning, and twice we're told that he was doing so
because he was fleeing the presence of the Lord.
Now, there's some helpful context here.
Tarshish is a real city. But the way it's meant to work
in the story is it's meant to cue the reader or the listener
to the reality that Jonah is trying to get as far away as
possible from the presence of God and whatever it is that God
is trying to do in Nineveh. But why is that?
Well, because Nineveh is the capital city of the Assyrian
people. And Assyria during this time was
known for its aggressive military expansion.
So it was a military machine that was waging war all of the
time. And the Assyrians, friends, they
didn't just conquer people, They really, really conquered people.
Part of their mode of being in the world was to terrorize,
shock and awe. Total destruction.
Their own royal inscriptions, which survive by the way.
You can go read them and have been translated.
They boast about what they do to conquered people, flaying
enemies alive and draping their skins over the city walls.
Sorry if there are tender ears. Probably should have issued a
warning this morning. Impaling prisoners on stakes
outside conquered cities. Cutting off hands, feet, noses,
ears, stacking piles of heads, and within a generation of
Jonah's ministry, Assyria destroyed the northern Kingdom
of Israel entirely. The population was deported, the
10 northern tribes of Israel were destroyed, and the people
were dispersed and scattered and absorbed into other cultures,
never to be consecrated again. Perhaps you've heard of the Lost
Tribes of Israel. That's what's happening right
here. Jonah himself is also from the
Northern Kingdom, and it was just a generation before him
that suffered these losses. And so the empire that is
destroying his people and his land and his tribal territory,
this is the empire that God is asking him to go and preach
mercy to. So this is not an abstract
theological problem for Jonah. It's personal.
His people are being deported and scattered and absorbed and
erased. And God says, go tell Nineveh
that I am slow to anger, that they should stop their campaign,
that they should repent, and that I will withhold my
judgement from them. And you're like, what?
It would be like God coming to one of our older boys in the
Botzenbaum Student Center whose parents parents were likely
killed by the Khmer Rouge. I think we have a picture of no
his his parents were likely killed by the Khmer Rouge and
asking him to go and preach a word of mercy and the love of
God to the guy that ran the prison at Tul slain.
That's what this would be like. This is our our present day
Jonah. So Jonah leaves.
He doesn't want to be a part of it.
The thing that is presently in Jonah's heart is a cry for God
to bring justice to the whole thing.
He wants God to make right the wrongs that his people had
experienced at the hands of these people.
And so he leaves. And we don't actually find out
why Jonah flees to Tarshish on a boat until chapter 4, where
Jonah himself tells God exactly why he left and exactly why he
didn't want to come to Nineveh. Chapter 4, Verse 2 Oh Lord, is
not this what I said while I was still in my own country?
That is why I fled to Tarshis at the beginning.
For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow
to anger and abounding in steadfast love and ready to
relent from punishing. I didn't want to go because I
knew that you would be merciful to them.
And this is where we start to feel the tension of this story.
We start to see the way that the story is meant to work on us.
And this is a story that buries the lead.
We get almost all the way through the story before we find
out why Jonah doesn't want to be a part of it.
I knew that you would be gracious to them, which is why I
went the other way. And friends, I suspect that you
and I all have had some kind of moment like this.
You know, you're on your way following Jesus.
You're learning how to love by reading about Jesus and the
gospels. You're getting into the
teachings about forgiveness and reconciliation.
You're getting some healing. You're in community.
And then you have this moment that you realize that if this
story is true, I'm going to have to talk to my mom or my dad or
your wife or your ex-husband or your roommate from 10 years ago,
or the kids that left home and moved the grandkids to another
city and cut you off because that pattern in you from so long
ago never got healed. And now there's unreconciled
stuff. So the way that the book of
Jonah works, and it's where we're headed next in the story
is that the scene is set with an outlandish request, which
everyone reading the story would have picked up right away.
Go, says God, and extend my mercy to the city that was built
on the blood of your people. Imagine, says God, how much
mercy there must be inside of me and at my disposal such that I
could ask you to do such a thing.
And Jonah is like, no, thank you.
He's super angry. I'm not here for it, he says.
I'm headed to Tarshish on a ship and after a couple of reads of
the story, you start getting to this spot back at the beginning.
It's short enough to reread and reread and reread.
And at about the 4th or the 5th time you get to this point in
the story where Jonah is on his way to Tarsus, and you begin to
ask yourself, where am I running away from the presence and the
mercy of God? Where's my Joppa?
Where's my Tarshish? Is there any place in my life or
in my story where God's mercy is being extended and I'm inclined
to turn my nose up at it? That is why I fled to Tarshish
at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious God, and
merciful and slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and
ready to relent from punishing. And so the question is, friends,
is there anyone in your life right now where if God asked you
to go and extend to them the mercy of God, there is just
something in you that you would want to go the other direction?
I mean, it makes sense. Like there have been people in
my life who are like Nineveh to me, People that I have trouble
imagining the infinite mercy of God being able to reach, or
parts of people that I assume are beyond the scope of what I
expect to be remedied. What I actually want is justice.
I want them to be punished. It's my confession, and the
story of Jonah is really meant to help us see that most of the
time when we're headed to Tarshish, booking a ticket in
the opposite direction of where the mercy of God is moving
towards, what it means is that we have a deficiency of God's
mercy at work in our own lives. It shrinks our imagination for
the mercy that God could have for others when we have such a
little dose of it ourselves. You know, we can't quite see how
generous God would want to be with others with with God being
so slow to anger and merciful and abounding in love.
It's because we ourselves are in low supply of those things.
We can't see the slowness of God's anger for others because
we constantly are imagining that maybe God is angry with us and
we have this hard time imagining the abundance of mercy that God
has for those who trouble us. Because we have yet to truly
allow ourselves to receive the fullness of God's mercy for us.
We find ourselves at times like the servant in in Jesus's
parable. In Matthew chapter 18, he says
that a king is settling his accounts with his servant and
one of the servants owes him 10,000 talents, which is like an
absurd amount of money to be in debt, and he's unable to pay it.
And the king forgives the entire debt when the servant begs for
mercy. But that same servant goes out
and finds the one that owes him 100 dinero, a not unreasonable
amount of debt, but he grabs him by the throat and he throws him
in prison when he can't pay. The story that Jesus tells is a
telling to Peter, who's saying to Jesus, Lord, how many times
am I required to forgive somebody that offends me?
And Jesus effectively says that the number doesn't really matter
because once you taste the mercy of God, the math doesn't math
anymore. This is part of what the story
of Jonah is about. But, you know, Jonah doesn't
really know this yet. He hasn't encountered the mercy
of God for himself yet. And so his imagination is
shrunk. The idea that God's mercy could
be extended beyond the bounds of his people.
Jonah just doesn't want to have anything to do with it.
And, and in the story, the way that it has been read various
times throughout history, the work that the story was meant to
do for the original audience of God's people was to serve
essentially as a parable in a prophetic form.
You know, Israel has been with the recipient of extraordinary,
unearned Divine Mercy, the Exodus, the covenant, the
patience of God through centuries of unfaithfulness.
And what God is trying to say is that the same amount of mercy
that I have extended to you, I'm extending beyond the boundaries
of your imagination. Who is that for you friends?
Somebody in your family, like a old friend.
And before Jonah is going to be able to preach a word in
Nineveh, he's going to have to experience the mercy of God in a
way that is personal and tangible.
And so Jonah is running, and what does God do?
Well, God does what God does. Whenever someone runs from God,
he goes after. And this brings us to the
rescue. So there's this section in the
story of Jonah that doesn't really seem very real.
It's actually quite hard to tell what kind of book Jonah is.
And we're about to get into some strange parts with, you know,
weird swallowing of a whale and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, Jonah doesn't swallow a whale.
He gets swallowed. You get it.
The Jonah buys a ticket to Tarshish to escape the presence
of the Lord. And then the text said that the
Lord and his pursuit after Jonah hurled a great wind upon the
sea. And before we get to the part of
the whale, let me just say that most scholars do not believe
that the text of Jonah is historical or biographical
because of how the text is written and when it's written,
Most scholars would place Jonah in something like a blend of
historical fiction and a really long parable.
There's this guy named Jonah. There's a real city of Nineveh.
And some of this stuff probably happened, but the story is told
more like Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son.
There's enough details in the story where you just like, did
this happen? But then it's weird enough where
you're just like, this probably did not happen.
So I just want to say that on the outset is that, you know, if
you're new to reading the Scriptures, you have some
questions about even why I would say that this probably actually
maybe didn't happen. I'm happy to meet with you and
talk with you a little bit about our imagination for the
scriptures and how we read in line with the history of the
church. But I just want to say to you
that the way that the story works is a little bit more like
a parable. The important thing in this
story is not whether or not Jonah was swallowed by a whale.
The important thing in the story is the function that the whale
plays. The point of this part of the
story is that God is a God who comes after us and rescues us.
That's what we should get. And so Jonah books his ticket,
and he gets on the boat, and he's headed to Tarshish.
And God, in pursuit of his prophet, hurls a great wind onto
the sea. And the storm is so violent that
the sailors, I mean, like rough Mediterranean men who've seen
everything, are terrified. They're throwing cargo
overboard. They're crying out to their
guns. And Jonah is below deck asleep.
And so the captain comes down, makes his way down, and he wakes
Jonah up. And he's like, listen, man,
everybody is praying. Why are you not praying?
And eventually they cast lots to figure out whose fault this is.
And the lot falls on Jonah. And they ask him, who are you?
Where are you from, and what have you done?
Like, why have you put us in this situation?
And Jonah tells them, he says, I'm a Hebrew.
I worship the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the
dry land, and I am running from him.
And the sailors are terrified because they understand
immediately what Jonah apparently does not, that you
cannot outrun the God who made the sea by getting on a boat.
So Jonah tells them to throw them overboard.
And here's one of those details in the text that's easy to miss.
Hang with me here. The sailors don't want to throw
Jonah overboard. They they have no covenant
relationship with Yahweh. There's no history with Israel.
There's no reason for them to care about what happens with
this man. And yet they try everything they
can to row to shore before they finally, reluctantly throw Jonah
overboard. And the moment Jonah hits the
water, the storm stops. It's a parable.
It's a funny story, isn't it? But the text says something
quite extraordinary, a little foreshadowing of what is to
come. These sailors, these outsiders,
these people who were never supposed to be part of the
story, they offer sacrifices to God and begin to make vows to
Yahweh. The people Jonah would have said
are outside the bounds of God's mercy are worshipping God on the
very boat Jonah boarded to escape being the carrier of
God's mercy to those who are inside or outside the
boundaries. You can see the irony here,
right? The story is already doing what
Jonah doesn't want it to do. The mercy of God is already
moving beyond the borders that Jonah has drawn for it.
And Jonah isn't even in Nineveh yet.
He's in the opposite direction. Do you guys see this?
It's a little bit of comic sprinkled in there.
So friends, then as you know, Jonah sinks and the text says,
and this is the line that the whole story turns on.
The Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah.
God sends a storm. He sends a fish, and the same
God Jonah is running from is the God who comes after him in the
depth of the water. Jonah is in the belly of a fish
for three days and three nights. And this is where the story
slows down and we see that Jonah himself begins to experience the
mercy of God from the belly of a fish.
He begins to pray. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord
his God from the belly of a fish, saying, I called to the
Lord out of my distress, and he answered me out of the belly of
Sheol. I cried, and you heard my voice.
You cast me into the depth, deep into the heart of the Seas, and
the flood surrounded me. All of your waves and your
billows passed over me. Friends, this is the prayer of a
man who is experiencing the mercy of God for himself.
I went as far down as a person could possibly go, and you were
found there. You found me there.
And you know, I'm reading this in the primary sort of pastoral
question that comes to my mind that I want to invite you to
consider is, have you allowed yourself to sink into the waters
and receive the mercy of God, or are you still treading water?
Have you been down to the deep? I mean, this is what our friends
in a A. They know really well, don't
they? If you do not have a friend who
is in a A, you should find one because they know this really
well. That whole rock bottom thing is
real. And my question for us this
morning is, have you let yourself sink and be rescued by
the mercy of God? Friends, the belly of the whale
in this story is not an angry God punishing or forcing or
shaming Jonah into compliance. The whale is the life raft, a
place of refuge in the chaos for the situation that Jonah has put
himself in, running from the presence of God.
Most of us, when we, you know, find ourselves in troubled
waters, we tend to swim away from the things in our life that
are designed to hold us long enough for God to show us his
unrelenting mercy. And, you know, things like
community and vulnerability and deep friendship that can wound
from time to time, or marriages that do more than their fair
share of revealing what is wounded and maybe a bit
problematic inside of us. We tend to flee these things.
You know, we pull back from the friendships.
We bounce from friendship to friendship.
Just dosing out enough, little vulnerability in each one.
You guys know this little trick. You just a little bit vulnerable
in each of your friendships. It begins to feel like you're
being known, but you never let one single person in on the
whole thing. That's not good, but that's what
we tend to do. Just a quick aside, you know,
for my married, my married friends, your marriage is a
whale and you are in the belly of it.
But it is a lifeboat that is meant to be the place where you
come to the end of yourself and receive the mercy of God.
And the same is true of you single people, your singleness
and your actual need for deep, deep community.
This is a whale for you and you are in the belly of it, and it
is meant to be a thing that can hold you long enough for you to
notice where the mercy of God is in it.
So I went as far down as a person can go and you were
there, says Jonah. And then the fish deposits him
on dry land. The the fish in the story of
Jonah is the mercy of God for Jonah foreshadowing by the way,
the tomb from Good Friday and Easter morning.
And so on the dry land, God comes to Jonah again and the
word of the Lord comes to Jonah a second time saying, get up,
get yourself to Nineveh, that great city that I'm trying to
get a message to proclaim to it, the message that I tell you.
And so Jonah gets up and he, he sets out and he went to Nineveh
according to the word of the Lord.
He comes to Nineveh. He preaches basically a meh
sermon, doesn't really say much, but everybody repents and
believes in God. They proclaim a fast.
The king gets everybody in on it.
He says we are going to go all in on this.
Even the animals begin to fast. The animals put on sackcloth and
ashes. The people put on sackcloth and
ashes. Remembers.
Works like a parable. Everyone in the whole city turns
towards God and repentance in hopes that God who has sent them
Jonah, would rescue them. And you know what he does?
And this brings us to the unending mercy of God, which is
very displeasing to Jonah. Still we read again.
This was very displeasing to Jonah.
He prayed to the Lord and said, Oh Lord, is not this what I said
while I was still in my own country?
I mean, This is why I fled to Tarsus at the beginning, for I
knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger,
abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent.
And now, oh Lord, please take my life for me, for it is better
for me to die than live. And the Lord said, is it right
for you to be angry? So Jonah went out of the city
and he sat down east of the city and he made a little booth, a
shelter for himself there. And he sat under it in the
shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.
Jonah is sitting outside of the city.
He's facing the city. And he's like trying to figure
out what's God going to do? Is God going to drop the hammer?
I sure hope so. And I'm going to wait until it
happens. And as he's doing that, the Lord
appoints the Lord. God appointed a Bush, a
shrubbery, a vine, and made it come up over Jonah to give shade
over his head to save him from his discomfort.
And so Jonah was really happy about the Bush.
But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that
attacked the Bush so that it withered.
And when the sun rose, God prepared a sultry E wind, and
the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and
asked that he might die. He said, It is better for me to
die. It is better for me to die than
to live. But God said to Jonah, is it
right for you to be angry about the Bush?
And he says, yes, it's right, I'm angry enough to die.
And then the Lord said, you are concerned about the Bush for
which you did not labor and which you did not grow.
It came into being in a night and perished in a night.
And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city
in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know
their right hand from their left, and also many animals?
End of text. Curtain closes.
The point of the parable here in the closing, right here at the
end, friends, is that our view of the mercy of God is so small
compared to the actual infinite, unending mercy of God.
We trouble ourselves with things like bushes and shades and oh,
that didn't happen. And we overlook the
expansiveness of God's mercy. I want to come back to Comrade
Doek. That is him many years later.
So the guy who oversaw told saying prison left Phnom Penh.
He escaped and lived on the border of Cambodia and Thailand
in a refugee camp for almost 20 years without being noticed.
And he disappeared until about the late 1990s, when he was
found by a photographer and was the first senior Khmer Rouge
leader to be tried by a tribunal.
And in those intervening 20 years, someone showed up in his
life and shared with him about the mercy and the love of God.
And he, comrade Doric, surrendered his life to Jesus
and received God's mercy. And then he was sentenced to
life in prison. He came into his tribunal
carrying a Bible. He apologized to the victims as
best as he knew how in the time. And this would be a story that
ends like the story of Jonah. We're left sort of wondering,
like, really, Lord, what about the justice part?
For that, you're going to have to go read the prophet Nahum,
because Nahum also writes about the same city.
And what you read in the Prophet Nahum is that somehow God is
both infinite and mercy and will make all things right, that
there is real justice to be had. I don't know what it's like for
this guy right now to be in the presence of the Lord.
But what I do know is that the story that we are in the mercy
of God is infinite even for such a one as this who cries out to
the Lord. Lord have mercy on me and for us
on this side of understanding all of the things.
I would just say that the math doesn't math.
And this is the story that you live in.
And so as we head into a time of ministry, I want to invite those
of you who have parents that are sorry, those of you who are
parents who will have kids coming back into the room.
I'd love for you to go back to greet them and to meet them as
they come in. They're going to be coming in
shortly. We're going to return to this
practice. So if you have a kid that's
going to be coming into the room for worship, just go ahead and
go back to the the pole back here.
We'd love for you to just greet your kid, welcome them into
worship as we do. I want to invite you to stand
and Parker, you're welcome to come up if you have any,
anything by way of ministry time this morning.
But you know, as I was praying this morning, I had a sense
that, you know, for some of you, it is your own self that you
think is beyond the mercy of God, that there is some, you
know, part of you that you are wondering like really, can God's
mercy really, really extend all the way down?
And if you are part of our prayer ministry team, would love
for you to come up and begin making yourself available to
pray for folks. And we're going to worship this
morning. And, and I just want to say to
you, if you are having trouble imagining the endlessness,
unrelenting mercy of God, I think that there is a dose of
mercy for your own life, that God is desiring to pour it out
onto you, and that out of the abundance of mercy for your own
self, God will grow your capacity to have mercy on us.