JONAH’S CURSE

A sermon by James Ishmael Ford

4 November 2001

Last Sunday I had the honor of delivering the sermon at the ordination of my dear friend Sara Zimmerman. Adding incredibly to the experience for me, was how this occasion was a scant three weeks off the tenth anniversary of my own ordination, in the very same place by the same congregation, the Unitarian Church North of Mequon, Wisconsin.

For this talk I wanted to do the best I could for Sara. I wanted to speak from the depths of my experience and reflection, to offer hope and a little challenge. Most of all I wanted to address how one might find the threads that weave health and wisdom into our lives. Important things for anyone who wishes to serve as a minister. To serve: to minister is to serve.

To provide that central thread which we might follow to the depths, I cited the Book of Jonah. I reflected on how he tried to avoid a call from mysterious reality, how it tracked him down and cast him into the darkness. Then if you’re willing, to shift the image from weaving to the alchemist’s furnace, in that place where inner urges, great fears, and profound need met, burned, and reduced; he found his life transformed into something. As I see it that something is ministry.

Now we are not the most biblically literate people, so let me quickly remind you of the broad outlines of the story of Jonah. God decided he needed to send a prophet to the people of Nineveh to call them to repent of their evil ways. He chose Jonah. Jonah, as you remember, did not want to go. Instead he fled to the farthest reaches of the world. But, that proved not far enough to avoid the lure of the divine.

God caused a great storm to rise up and Jonah was cast into the sea where he was swallowed by some great fish. Within the belly of that beast he repented and agreed to be a prophet, a minister, a servant. He was vomited up, went to Nineveh, preached repentance, the people heard and changed their ways.

The story continues to explore other themes. But, for our purposes I want to hold us back to that time within the belly of the beast, in that moment of darkness and heat. I suggest should we hope to have authentic ministries; we need to know that place in the belly of the beast. For our desires to serve to be complete, we need to understand our common experience in the belly of the beast.

Now I want to underscore that this call to ministry is in fact one we all share, everyone one of us in this room. Service is our common path, what we are about, each of us, when we join this society. We just demonstrated how we are all caught up in the acts of ministry when we received young Matthew into our gathered Society. We promised service. So, what is this call to serve? What motivates us to make such commitments as we did with Matthew and his family?

Let’s reflect on what it might mean. When Jonah is sitting in that vile belly, his realization of his call, whatever else may be said about him, and actually as the story goes on he proves to be a very unpleasant person; still as he realizes his call, he sings a song of praise. From the belly of the beast, from the pit of hell, he sings a song of joy.

This is pure praise. "Out of my distress I called to my God, and the divine answered me; from the midst of hell I cried for help and you heard my voice." The fact that this poem is placed when Jonah is in the belly of the beast has actually unsettled many commentators. For instance a fair number opine that Jonah can’t be singing praise from within the fish, it isn’t possible for praise to rise within such a condition, it doesn’t scan; so this must be some interpolation.

I disagree. Here, I suggest, we find something important about our purpose as human beings, as spiritual pilgrims on this planet. For us, that is we Unitarian Universalists in general, the qualities that may best be called divine are seen as arising primarily within our human relationships. This arises from our sense or intuition that there is a mysterious interconnection among all things, which we celebrate in the image of the interdependent web.

This intimation is the first step to wisdom. And it is powerful. But, it is in fact only a step into the ocean, a mere wetting of our feet. From that intimation or deduction of connection, we need to continue on. The ocean is deep, and at such a moment we are only playing at the shore. We find we must in fact throw ourselves into the deep waters, all the way, if we wish to know our true heritage, our true place within the cosmos.

Now here is how I see all of this. It is my belief, my observation, my experience; that we only find our deepest perspective when we’ve stepped for a moment beyond the belief that what we call "I" ends at our skin. The sense of self that we all have, of an isolated identity, needs to be shaken for us to really feel the mysterious truth of our being.

At some point we need to no longer settle for an idea or intimation of connection. Like Jonah, we feel a call, and the call is to know. At some point we need to actually know the connections, from the bottom of our feet to the farthest strand of our hair. And beyond, vastly beyond. We need to really understand, to know from our bones to the farthest reaches of the stars; how close we all are each of us to the other. We need to know how it is all about intimacy, our whole lives, our birth, our living, our dying, is all about intimacy.

Of course we have separate lives. And we have hierarchies of responsibility. We need most to care for our children, our partners, our parents, our siblings. Beyond that we need communities of mutual support and love, like our church, like villages and cities. Our nations, at their best, speak to the shape of relationships within our knowing our differences, our separate identities. Our desires for a united nations, is another grand hope rising out of this understanding.

We need to see the skin and the other boundaries. They are real. But, in all of this differentiation our moral lives, our spiritual lives, what informs our choices in acting or withholding of action in a healthful manner, ultimately arises from our understanding of connectedness. A knowing of our essential unity must inform that other knowing of separation. Otherwise we are monsters.

We need to really understand how the limits of skin and gene pool are only conventions within the mysteries of the universe. God visits us in our dreams, pulls us toward the deep, whispering how in some very basic and real way, we are not only all related, but we are all each other.

So, let’s talk the alchemy of the heart. The lessons we need to allow us to break through this delusion of essential separation; may come in many ways. The wonderful teacher Pema Chodron tells us how "When I was about six years old… I was walking by (an old woman’s house) one day feeling lonely, unloved, and mad, kicking anything I could find. (Sitting there in the sun, and) Laughing, she said to me, ‘little girl, don’t you go letting life harden your heart.’"

Pema Chodron tells us, "Right there, I received this pith instruction: we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open… We always have this choice."

You and I, we always have this choice. We may have few others in our lives, but this is one that always lies open for us. They will come to us, those awful moments when our certainty is shaken, when our knowing of the boundaries is rattled. The question is our choice; do these experiences shut us down, or do they open us up. If we respond gracefully, we discover our true vastness.

Now let me underscore something very important. In this I’m not saying we need to volunteer for suffering. Nor is our suffering there to teach us things. Things just happen. These things happen through so many threads of causality that any attempt to ascribe human meaning to them, falls flat in the face of the events themselves.

That said we’re also missing something powerful when we don’t fully face these terrible moments that will inevitably happen, and seek what lessons we can dredge out of these horrific moments. We owe ourselves and the great family such an effort of understanding; that beautiful expression of our ability to choose.

I say this because I think we often do miss this opportunity. I suggest all of us have spent a great deal of our lives running away from the mysterious call of the divine, from the great and terrible knowing of how deeply, intimately, we are all connected. The truth be told; for the most part we’re afraid of this knowing. It is, after all, a knowing that our certainties turn out not to be as things really are; our boundaries are not so secure as we wish they were.

Another sadness is that we often just don’t notice. Or, perhaps we notice, but only the suffering, the hurt, the pain. Our lives are not as fulfilled as we wished they were. Our children fail us. Our friends leave us. Careers turn out merely to be jobs. Sometimes we don’t even have those. And death, death always haunts us. So sadness seems to be our lot.

But, some good news, even if it doesn’t at first seem so. Somewhere along the line each and every one of us, we have been cast into the sea, and have been swallowed whole by some terrible beast. That’s why this old story is a metaphor, it is a description of what we actually are, every one of us. This is about our common human calling to know who and what we are, and from that place to speak and to act.

Indeed, as we come to accept our place in the belly of the beast, we instantly like in those old fairy tales, find ourselves transported to a new local. As we see into our selves, as we don’t turn from the dark places, in that very moment we discover we’re atop a wondrous mountain, viewing the whole form of the world. At this moment we awake, we stir from our slumbers and awake.

Black Elk sings of that awakening, of that vision transformed out of the dark and up to the heights. "Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all. And round beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell. And I understood more than I saw. For I was seeing in the sacred manner the shape of all things of the spirit. And the shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that make one circle, wide as daylight and starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree."

So my blessing at the tenth anniversary of my formal ordination, to all of us who’ve undertaken the path of ministry, of service: may Jonah’s curse, that tumbles us into the belly of the beast, become your true blessing. To each of you here: May your path to the depths, allow you to open your hearts fully, and from there transport you to the heights, to those moments of wisdom out of which your words and actions can indeed serve the great mystery that is our beginning and end. May you know the hoops and that tree at the center of it all. May your song from the belly of the beast become a blessing for the many beings.

Amen.