Yesterday's Guilt...Tomorrow’s Fear:
The time is now!
Jonah and 2021
Yom Kippur 2021
Thank you for joining us on Zoom again for another year in Covid lockdown and its commensurate curiosity, uncertainties, and frustrations. Amid this 2nd year of the global pandemic, we are fatigue fatigued, tired of being tired, you know?
I pray you have an easy fast. Sorry to mention fasting again… in case you are having a tough time. I often wonder if fasting is all that the Lord wants from us on this 25-hour period we call Yom Kippur. Let’s ponder the famous story of Jonah, not the whale bit, but the rest of the story, and see if it has anything to say to us as 21st century people in lockdown again. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be opened as we share in this section of the service. Thanks.
My friend John lives in Melbourne. He wrote me this week as he will not be able to be with us live but will watch this YouTube video later. He asked if he could share his “own special Yom Kippur memory.” He said, “I grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). We had a wonderful community of 750 (Jewish) families mostly of Litvak origin. The most prestigious honor of the year was to read Maftir Yonah on Yom Kippur, and this was done by a prominent member of our shul.
In Herman Wouk's beautiful book This is my God, this honor fell to his father who was an immigrant of modest means. Many years before, in a shul in the Bronx, his father had outbid the more affluent members by offering $200, a fortune in those days when they used to auction off the Aliyah.
In Wouk's own words "My father made this .... costly beau geste because his own father, a shamas in Minsk, had had the privilege of reading the Book of Jonah ....”
I share this memory from John of Melbourne to highlight the significance of the reading as we approach the end of the years’ worth of readings as well as one other consideration. You see, the story of Jonah is often merely the story of a whale and a reluctant prophet. But on Yom Kippur we keep reading the story to find the prophet no better off than when we meet him at the beginning of the short, four-chapter book, but also, we find a group of questionable people, who meet the Almighty and have their own ‘Yom Kippur’ of sorts. What is the Almighty to do with such a mob? That’s our story tonight.
I’ve heard some of you are making changes around your home, buying stuff to build from Bunnings or Miter 10, inspired by The Block. Who has time to do only one thing at a time, just now? Many here will attempt to multi-task, keeping their cell phones on, writing notes about this talk and about their shopping list at the same time. We are a time-strapped city in a time-poor country, with less time to do only one thing. Please, that said, please try to stay with me for the next while. I believe it will be worth your while. And let the cell phone vibrate all it wants. Let it be. By the way, if you haven’t turned your phone off or to silent, please do so now. Thanks.
Back in the 1960s Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel sang, “Time, time, time, see what’s become of me, while I looked around for my possibilities. I was so hard to please but look around, leaves are brown, and the sky is a hazy shade of winter.” Simon’s lyrics told me back then to make the most of my life, both when I was a travelling hippie and later when I lived in New York City, now 23 years here in Sydney, and throughout my days.
John Kennedy said, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future." And I appreciate Kennedy’s forward thinking. I’m a man of hope as well. And I’m grateful that 57 years after President Kennedy was shot, I’m still alive to carry on bringing hope to many.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
There are some things that stop us. If ‘the time is now’ then what gets in the way of our living, there?
I believe we can miss ‘now living’ by three things: 1) crippling guilt from the past, 2) tormenting fears about the future, and 3) wrong living for today in a self-consumptive way. Let’s see if we can unpack these and to assist us, I want to remind us of the story we just read, about Jonah the reluctant prophet.
Guilt that cripples us
First the past. Depending on your self-image you may think of your past as either a glorious memory or as one that is full of regrets. Some will not attend any of their high school reunions because they don’t esteem their status as significant; they say they have no life. Others can’t wait to sign up to the reunion to show off their university degrees, their trophy spouse and children, their loss of the high school overweight kilograms, whatever shows their significance. But most of us are not so trophied; most of us are not so epes as my grandfather would say. Our significance pales compared to the latest celebrity or the best sportsman in the State of Origin. We think we are something, but we are not so epes. And the thing that knocks us back so often is regret and failures from the past.
I know I’m going against the grain here in a Jewish setting. How can we think of a Jewish mother and not hear the episodes of guilt-sharing, which seem so endemic to her role? For instance, consider this case. The woman is very hungry and answers the phone from her distant son with a “So glad to hear from you.” “How are you?” he asks. “Fine, a little hungry,” his mother replies. “Nu, have you eaten today?” the son asks. “No, not in days,” his mother answers. “What! Why not? What’s wrong?” The mother’s guilt-filled answer rips to his heart, “I didn’t want to have my mouth full of food if you would ever call.”
Guilt can be a form of manipulation as the telephone story evidences or a real help to correct things, we do wrong. But either way, thinking and living in the past, with its commensurate regrets and pains, with wishes that didn’t work out and with a massive inability to repair anything, will only serve to prevent your living in the now, and not help it along at all.
Guilt cripples an otherwise-able walker. It’s near-to-impossible to walk forward if you are always looking backwards. The nearby building or the approaching pedestrian will be your landing pad, and no one will find peace. Living in the now is substantially weakened by backwards pondering. The regrets of not taking that position when the boss offered it, or of taking that little pill at university can be equally damaging to healthy living in the now. I feel so badly, you might be thinking, about some event, some excessive drinking party, an abortion, a divorce, typing an email on someone else’s email account… you get it. All probably bad. It’s probably that each of these memories brings you pain. We must find a way out of the unrelenting tyranny of the haunting past.
That said, this group of people here tonight on the Zoom call believes that guilt can be overcome. And we will see that in the story of Jonah, long after the whale gets him.
Terrorism and tomorrow: Tormenting fear
I want to take that idea and expand it to include you and to many watching us on the Internet. Not only do we have yesterday’s guilt crippling us, but also tomorrow’s fears. I’m not talking about plans, but about the inordinate worries and anxieties, which cause us to stop in those very plans. Fears, which torment us and prevent our living in the now. Add on personal trauma, and most comprehensively that which those 19 hijackers wanted to do on 9/11, to bring terror to many. Thus, terrorism has been a fact of life for 20 years in New York City and around the globe in measure.
Consider fear of the unknown, so marvelously underscored in Hollywood B-grade horror movies and in books that pre-dated them by hundreds of years. This continues to be the major preventative of growth and now-living in these days. HP Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” ― Supernatural Horror in Literature .
In fact, I found list after list of hundreds of fears, including Triskaidekaphobia. (Fear of the number 13)
Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. (Fear of the number 666) and what this entire visit to the Jews for Jesus Yom Kippur service might be for some of you, Neophobia, the fear of anything new.
“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.” (Michel de Montaigne)
The Bible uses the term “Fear” 295 times, with 52 of those in the writings of King David in the Psalms. It is akin to our word ‘apprehension’ but can thwart any kind of living in the now with its anxiety. I was speaking to a man a while back who wanted more information from us but couldn’t quite figure out how to get it since he neither gave out his email nor his home address. His fears whether warranted or not prevented his receiving what he might have really wanted.
Either living in the past and being tripped up by guilt or living in the future with its commensurate terror and worries… neither is where God wants us to live. Haz’man achshav. The time is now.
The prophet who brings a city to the now
We heard the story again of the prophet Jonah and his response to going to the Ninevites. You must understand that the Ninevites were the sworn enemies of the Jewish people in those days, Assyria was the evil empire, and they had declared war with regularity against us. They occupied territory which God had promised Abraham.
So that Jonah is called by God to go and talk to them about him… that’s just too much for a normal fellow like Jonah. He booked passage on the next ship, going the opposite direction. He thought they were not worthy of his information. He was above them. They were certainly God’s enemies and thus his enemies. They didn’t deserve to hear of God’s love and redemption.
He ended up being tossed overboard and immediately the sea calmed. That’s not a little creek. That’s the Mediterranean Sea!
In fact, he would have been a dead man, but for that sea monster, the whale which swallowed him whole.
Jonah is in the belly of the whale for 3 days and nights and then he prays. I’m not a very smart man, but I would have recommended that he pray a couple of days earlier.
He says he will get on with God’s business if he’s given another chance. In chapter two he says, probably of the mariners who rescued him, “Those who regard vain idols forsake their faithfulness, but I will sacrifice to you.” In other words, if you get me out of this mess, I’ll serve you forever.
What does God do? He causes the whale to vomit and out comes Jonah onto dry ground. That’s quite a hurl! God again reminds Jonah of the mission to the Gentiles, and off he goes. It’s a three-day journey across town, like the distance across 12 LGAs, and on the first day he declares, “In 40 days Nineveh will be overthrown, or in our terms, you are going down!” He’s almost jubilant.
But the mayor of Nineveh heard the message and sent out an edict that everyone, including the cattle should fast and cry out to God and perhaps God, meaning the God of the Hebrews, yes, our God, would relent and save them.
That’s not a dream or a fanciful power message. He’s living in the now and looking to the God of all time to save him and all his people. He’s not boastful and confident in his own righteousness or divine power; he’s humble and asks the people to join him in that humility.
What will God do? His nature is to forgive and to be merciful. That’s who he is. That’s what he does. And Jonah knew that, too. He said later in chapter four, “Please LORD, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore, 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.”
God doesn’t want us to live in shame and guilt from our past. He doesn’t want us to live in the fanciful future where there is much to fear, where nothing is sure, and COVID will kill us, or the pandemic is a lie and Bill Gates created 5G to put chips in us running magnets and changing our DNA and… see, this is a horror movie of fear.
God wants us, and he wanted the Ninevites to live in now. Not the now of self-consumption and lavish ‘devil may care’ attitude. Those hooligans who drive at 125 kph on the streets of Canterbury and crash into each other or innocent bystanders…they are living in now, for themselves.
Rather, I’m calling us to live in the now of forgiveness and confidence in who he is. God also wanted that for Jonah and ends the story with an appeal to the prophet, but we don’t see Jonah’s final response. It feels almost Jeffrey Archer-esque. But there is no denouement. The knot never unknots.
Except for the Assyrians. They find forgiveness. Jonah finds turmoil, living in resentment and fear, living in hostility and racism.
Yesterday’s guilt: tomorrow’s fear, all crashed into those Iraqis of their day, and they chose the God who is present.
They must cry Abba, and they must ask for mercy, and they must acknowledge that without him, they would have no future, they would have no hope from their guilt and shame. They like King David in the Psalms would declare, “If Thou, LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou may be feared. (Psalm 130.3-4)
Guilt. Yesterday. Check.
Fear. Tomorrow. Check.
What happens to the Gentiles in Nineveh?
Back to our lives today, we could be full of self-consumption and pompous assurance that things will be fine all day, or as we say, ‘she’ll be right, mate.’ But that may be ill-informed. 2008 a global financial crisis crashed onto our lives, our wallets, our superannuation, and many have still not recovered. My friend Tim was 67 and was living just fine, thank you very much. But four months ago, was diagnosed with COVID and only 13 died days later. We think we are untouchable. We think we are in the now, but honestly, without the presence of Rabbi Yeshua, whom some call Jesus, without Him, the Messiah of Israel, and the Savior of those Assyrians, without him, our lives would be empty and worrisome.
With him, we can live in the now.
With him, we can be forgiven of our guilt and our sin.
With him we can be assured of a bright tomorrow without fear, because perfect love casts out all fear and those who know Him, who walk with him, who have received Yeshua as the Truth and the Way to the Father, know the truth, and the truth has set us free from worry and fears.
Dear friend, if you are cowering from possible terror tomorrow or crippled by the guilt of our ever-present sins in the past, then may I ask you to consider Yeshua, the Messiah of Israel, and hope of the world?
He was the one who told a group of Jewish leaders in his day who had been monitoring his activities throughout Israel and demanded a ‘sign.’
He told them that no sign would be given them, even though he had already performed many such miraculous deeds, cleansing a leper, raising a paralytic, walking on the Sea of Galilee in the middle of the night, raising from the dead a woman, and giving sight to a blind man. But hey, how about another sign, they demanded.
He told them no sign would be given them except the sign of Jonah who was basically as good as gone, three days and nights, gone. And yet, he came back and was with us and the Gentiles in Assyria.
That’s the Yeshua who himself was put into a new grave in Jerusalem, as good as gone, and yet, he also came back from the dead. That’s the sign of Jonah.
His dying on the cross looked like hopelessness for the waiting world, but in his rising from the dead on the 3rd day, Yeshua brought us eternal life. It can begin today. It can begin for you today. I invite you to confess him Lord and Savior not only of the world, but also of your world. You will never be the same again.
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