When we think about the prophet Jonah, what do we remember? We remember the whale (or the big fish.) We reduce the story into what we think is a simple children’s story. Why we think that a story about someone being swallowed by a fish is comforting to children is another issue. What we often forget is why the whale swallows Jonah in the first place. He was going the wrong way.

         The story of Jonah is the story of a racist, who does God’s will despite himself. When God first commanded Jonah to prophecy to the Ninevites, he got on a ship going the opposite direction. He didn’t want to proclaim God’s word to the Ninevites. Jonah knew that if he warned the Ninevites that God would destroy them, there was a chance that they would repent and God would forgive them. Jonah was holding out for destruction. So Jonah is swallowed by a whale and spit up on the shore, and he travels into the city and proclaims a message five words long in Hebrew. “Forty days Nineveh is destroyed!” I’m sure he proclaimed that hopeful message with great zeal. Then Jonah waited on a hillside under the shade of a tree, for the destruction of the people he hated.

         God has bigger plans than we imagine. The people of Nineveh took the message to heart. King and peasant all fasted and wore sackcloth and ashes. God saw that they had a change of heart and spared them all. Jonah was upset and the tree that gave him shade had withered in the night. He was so upset about the tree that he asked God to kill him. Life was not worth living. God points out to Jonah in the closing words of the book, “You care for a tree that grew up in a night and died overnight. Should not I be concerned about this great city full of people who do not know their right hand from their left?”

         There is a great message here about how God has a larger heart than we imagine. Many of the barriers and limits that constrain us are of our own making. There is also a reminder that it is God who has the power to transform hearts. We often think in absolutes and deny the possibility of new life. We think nothing will ever change. We despair that we can be any different. We blame others for the problems of our lives – politicians, bankers, foreigners, Ninevites! – and fail to see that God can overcome anything – even us.

         We think of miracles as stories that are preserved in old books. They are things that happened long ago, in a different age and time. We remember little snippets and give them to children like old broken things that we can’t use anymore – but they might amuse the children. The thing about miracles is that they are rarely what people think that they want. Whenever we are reminded of a miracle, the miracle is always about how God has created something new that is unexpected.

         God is always drawing people into new life and deep love. We are so stressed out and worried that we are tempted to reduce the world around us into simple practical rules of thumb. “You get what you pay for.” “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” We have begun to believe certain truths about the church. We think we have to be a mega church in order to gather members. We think we have to have fabulous programs in order to be a good church. We fear that we can’t afford to be the church. Yet the church is not about money or market forces. We are gathered here to enter into the work of God of drawing the whole world to God.

         We hear the story of the call of the disciples and we may think that it has little to do with us. It is very impressive that these fishermen left everything to follow Jesus. But they are apostles after all. Jesus himself invited them. How could they say no?

         The call of the disciples is not a story of extraordinary people with heroic willpower. The call of the disciples is a story about ordinary people who accept an invitation into something new. The fishermen left their familiar world and entered into God’s work or restoring the world. Along the way, they had to face their old preconceptions about how the world was supposed to work. They questioned Jesus’ teaching. They were troubled by some of the people who wanted to follow Jesus too. They were confused and afraid and fled when things got tough. After the resurrection, it took some time for them to appreciate what God had done and how they would live new life. The rest of the New Testament is the continuing story about how the people of God continued to enter into the work of God.

         Today we are invited to participate in the work of reconciling the world. It doesn’t matter what we have or who we are. God has called us and God loves us. God wants us to share this love with everyone. The question we have to ask is how will we do this today? I think all our attempts to repair or restore the church we knew can be empty distractions. We are worried about preserving something that had once been life giving to us. Today we must discover what is life giving today. We have to be ready to drop our familiar fishing gear and pick up the new tools God is giving us. We need to look beyond our familiar boundaries and look to the horizon of God’s love.

         We are worried that we cannot hold together the church of the past. This is a good place to be. Now we have nothing to lose as we enter into God’s work.

           My son was so proud to get his first job, and he was proud to get his first paycheck. When he looked at the final amount he was upset. “What’s with all these taxes?” Welcome to the life of responsible adulthood! It’s great to be a grown up. We have power to do things and we have responsibilities. As Christians we are called into this community to do be God’s people. We find blessing and joy. We also have a lot of work to do. Some of it we’d rather not do but we must anyway.

         We quickly hear the apostle Paul remind the Corinthians of this very thing. They were wise and blessed with resources. They knew they had found true freedom in their faith. Paul reminds them that their freedom was not permission to do anything at all. They had made a choice to leave one sort of life but they had also bound themselves to one another and to God in a new way. Although they were free, they were also responsible for each other. They were also committed to living a new life, even if they were free to return to old ways.

         Samuel was bound to the service of God by his mother Hannah, as an act of thanksgiving when she was finally blessed with a child. He lived in dark times. The temple was still a tent. The people lacked deep faith. The leaders were weak and ineffective. No one had heard the voice of God for some time. In the literal darkness, God calls to Samuel. At first, he thinks the old blind priest Eli is calling him. Eli has the wisdom to have Samuel respond and to listen to what God is saying. Samuel did not ask for the voice of God or even understand it. All he did was to allow himself to be open to what God might offer.

         Philip follows Jesus and begins to be inspired by what he hears. He tells Nathanael about a teacher who might be the fulfillment of all their hope. Nathanael wonders, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip brings him to Jesus and Jesus tells him he saw him under a fig tree. Nathanael is amazed at this miracle of foresight and heaps praise on Jesus. Jesus tells Nathanael he will see greater things than these. There’s a little play on names here. Nathanael is an Israelite in whom there is no guile. The person Israel, who was Jacob, got through life always trying to trick the people around him. It is because of his deceit that Jacob had to flee his brother. In the wilderness, he slept with his head on a stone and had a vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder into heaven. Nathanael, the deceit-less son of Jacob will have greater visions than his ancestor. He will see the new life offered by Jesus.

         We have the same blessing. We have seen new life. We have tasted the love of God. It has made a great difference to each of us here today. If it is such good news, then why are we broke? Why is our sanctuary empty?

         We are not the first people to live through dark times. We are surrounded by a culture that has lost faith, or pays far less attention to using faith to determine behavior. We may wonder at our future. What will be our place in the New Milford of tomorrow? What do we have to offer? Our message does not seem to be very popular. We are not very entertaining. If we have anything to offer, it is only the difference our faith makes in our life.

         We are being called to give up some of our illusions about what mature faith is like. When my son got his first paycheck, he realized that the power of maturity (of earning pay and having money) is balanced by the responsibilities of maturity. The church does not exist to please us or to make us feel good. We have been given good news in order to be transformed into new people and to go out into the world and offer God’s love to everyone who needs it. Our calling is a wonderful blessing. We rediscover our place with God. We are bound to other people of faith in God’s work of restoring the world.

         It is not easy work. The freedom and blessing we get also compels us to responsibility. We are called to receive God’s blessing by faith and we are called to follow Jesus by faith. We have to have courage to look beyond our present circumstances and not let our troubles define us. We are not the church that used to have an endowment. We are heirs of the kingdom of God. We are not the church that used to have many members. We are people called to proclaim good news, no matter how many people listen. We are not old and tired. We are born again. We have new life.

         We are called by God for God’s purpose. If we really believe that God has called us here, then we must be ready to let go of our own demands of God. You may think that you came here this morning to hear wonderful music, or to listen to a well-crafted sermon, or to bring your children to Sunday school. The real reason you are here is because God reaches out in love to you, to draw you closer and to send you out with a job to reconcile the world.

         The worship we do together, the singing and praying, the teaching and the encouragement all work together to make us a community of reconcilers. Much of our most difficult work is to simply learn how to be reconciled with each other. We have to learn what it means to love the people who are closest to us. We have to learn how to love people with whom we disagree. We are stretched to love people who are strangers to us and who are sick or in need. The work of reconciliation takes us out of ourselves and our own worries and our own needs. Maybe this is what will save us. If we can stop worrying about the budget or our kids or our fears – and if we can invest our lives in the transformation of the world then we will see the vision that Jesus promises us.