Jonah: Prayer of Despair

Jonah 2:1-9

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the 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 deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?’ The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God. As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord; and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty. But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”

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First of all, it’s meaningful to see Jonah’s prayer as one about thanksgiving as much as it is about despair. Oddly enough, Jonah sees his place in the belly of that fish as a sign of God’s deliverance. What most of us would imagine as a great source of despair – being swallowed by a large fish and living in its gut for three days – was ultimately seen as a sign of his rescue, for Jonah.

His real fear … the great despair … to which he refers in the prayer we just heard, actually took place on the ship and in the storm that landed him in the sea in the first place. I’ve talked before about what a source of fear and punishment the sea was for ancient people – and for those in Jesus’ day, too. The sea and its depths were as unknown as outer space is – or has been – for us. Without means to deep sea dive, snorkel, or see beyond the depths to which even the best swimmer might swim on a single breath’s worth of air, what lived and moved beneath the surface of the sea was left to the imagination – and that was terrifying. (I’d still much rather swim in a pool than a pond, to be honest.)

And not only that, Jonah was under the impression that it was his own disobedience that caused the storm and upset the crew of the ship on which he had stowed away, and that got him tossed overboard into the deadly waters that closed over him, that surrounded him with weeds and darkness, until his life ebbed away with the waves that engulfed and threatened him.

In those moments Jonah sounds as desperate as Jesus on the Cross. He talks about being removed from the home and presence of God – the Temple in Jerusalem – where God was believed to live and move and breathe. He laments the prospect of never getting back there. And Jonah wails about the Sea, he bemoans the Pit, and he cries over Sheol – all expressions of utter lostness, insurmountable distance from the Divine, despair upon despair upon despair.

It reminds me of Jesus, dying on the cross, when he cries, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” The separation, the distance and the lostness sound familiar. And I’m always struck by the way Walt Wangerin describes that moment, which we’ll hear again on Good Friday. He calls it “obliteration,” says, “not even God was there,” imagines that Jesus had been “blotted out of the book of life,” and that “the universe was silenced” by Christ’s cry of despair.

So, as we gather on this last of our Wednesday worship services inspired by the prayers of our ancestors … with Holy Week on the horizon … as we wonder about what it means to pray while in the throes of despair … we are in good company. Not just that of Jonah, but of Jesus, too.

And, I want our feelings of despair – and our invitation to pray our way with and through that desperation – to serve as an expression of hope and as some inkling of the faith that may seem missing in our most desperate moments... days… seasons… whatever.

When the diagnosis seems like you’ve been plunged into the depths of the sea…

When the grief feels like you’ve been swallowed up and carried far from anything safe, or sure, or like home…

When the pain and suffering literally hurts, burns, and stings like Sheol…

When the fear, frustration, and stubbornness of whatever it is that just won’t give feels as insurmountable as the highest mountain or as deep as the darkest pit...

When the unknown wraps itself around your heart of hearts like so many weeds and refuses to relent…

It may help to know – hard as it is may be to see or celebrate in the moment – what Jonah trusted: that the same sea that caused his despair in the first place was also home to the fish that delivered him to dry land, in the end.

I don’t mean for this to sound like a platitude. I’m not implying that God gives us our troubles as a test of faith. I’m certainly not saying our despair is unfounded or unfaithful, or pretending that we don’t have a right to our desperation when it comes.

In fact, and this may sound harsh – and hard to hear or believe, coming from your Pastor – and I could be wrong. But I kind of think that if you haven’t found reason to despair at certain times in your life – if you haven’t lost or left your faith or felt lost or left by your faith or by our God at some point – maybe you’re just better than the rest of us; maybe you’re not watching the news; or maybe you’re not living in the same reality as so many of the rest of us.

And I’m fairly certain that – no matter how great your faith, how deep your trust – if it hasn’t happened to you yet, despair will find you. And you’ll feel left with nothing but the desire and need to try to pray your way out of it. And sometimes that kind of despair is exactly how, where, and when God shows up for us. In the emptiness. In the void. In the doubt and fear and uncertainty we’re running from or feel so self-righteously indignant about in those moments when we’ve given up, chucked it all, thrown in the towel, felt like our life, our purpose, our hope is ebbing away into oblivion.

And that kind of desperation is sad and scary, for sure. Not sinful, mind you. But sad and scary and lonely, as can be.

So tonight, let’s acknowledge the despair that has found us – or that will one day. Let’s not be afraid to give it a voice, like Jonah did and like Jesus does, too. And let’s be as patient as we are able, as faithful as God allows, and let’s let love hold us, until hope – however great or small – returns by the grace of God.

Because it’s also worth knowing that when Jesus cried “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” He was quoting Psalm 22. He knew his scripture, remember. So, in the depths of his despair, he was praying the prayers of his ancestors, much like we’ve been trying to do. And it’s believed Jesus latched onto that particular Psalm because he knew it ended with the kind of hope he was so desperately clinging to – or trying to find.

That Psalm starts with “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”; it begins with words of groaning, mockery, and sneering … it starts with feeling despised and scorned and in need of rescue (just like Jonah) … it points to Jesus feeling poured out like water, bones out of joint, a heart melting in his chest, and being layed out like the dust of death, surrounded by dogs and bulls and evildoers, and more …

But that Psalm – that prayer - ends, in spite of all that, with a request for – with hope that – with belief in – God’s capacity and desire for rescue. Hope for a God who will deliver and be worthy of praise. Trust in a God who does not despise… neglect… ignore… or hide.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Though I know you won’t forever!

May our prayers be as desperate and despairing; as honest and hopeless; as angry and afraid and as overwhelmed and underwater as we feel more often than we wish was true. And because of that – may they also be tinged with – and leave plenty of room – for God’s rescue to find us, for God’s love to win the day, for God’s grace to lead us to the dry land of our deliverance.

Amen

Bagged Salad, Lazarus, and the Glory of God

John 11:17-44

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home.

Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village but was still at the place where Martha had met him.

The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.

He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.”

When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

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I hate bagged salad. To this day, I can still remember the: like fermented lettuce soaked in apple cider vinegar and cat pee. It was putrid. Pallets of it were taken to the farm every week. You’ve probably heard me talk about the farminary before: farm plus seminary equals farminary. It was agriculture and theological education wrapped into one. Before my first class started, I had grand ideas about what the farminary would be like: romanticized thoughts about growing a huge, flourishing garden that would compete with Eden.

On the first day of class, Nate Stucky, our professor and director of the farminary, led us to our first hands-on agricultural assignment. It wasn’t tilling rows, planting seeds, and certainly not picking any harvest. Instead, he led us to the compost pile and a pallet of bagged salad swarming with flies. Even now, I am convinced you could see green streaks of stench floating above it like in a cartoon.

Nate told us, “Today you continue to help bring this farm back to life.”

Before the farminary began, the land had been a sod farm and a Christmas tree farm. Both of those stripped the land of the good, rich soil, leaving behind infertile dirt that no one wanted. Nate knew when he began the farminary that the first thing he had to do was bring the soil back to life.

Which meant students like me spent much of our time at the compost pile, ripping open thousands of bagged salad kits, dumping the contents onto the pile, and turning it over and over. And it wasn’t just rotten lettuce. Food waste from the dining hall. Coffee grounds from a local shop. Leaves from last fall. All of it together—a giant pile of smelly, dying compost—was what brought life to this barren land.

When we stirred it all up and revealed the black soil at the bottom, Nate would say, “That’s resurrection.”

The obvious, yet difficult thing about resurrection is that it requires death first. Most of us approach death like either Martha or Mary.

Martha approaches it with hope. She is certainly grieved by her brother’s death—“Lord, if you had been here…” but at the same time she remembers the promises she’s heard her whole life about resurrection and life everlasting. So she responds with hope for the future: “God will do what you ask, and I know there will be resurrection someday.”

But Jesus wants Martha to have hope in this life, not just the next.

So he says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Do you believe this?” Jesus takes those promises we know in our heads and puts a face to them. In moments of loss and crisis and death, what matters most is not just what you know, but who you know—who you trust. You know about resurrection, Jesus says, but do you believe I am the one who brings life now, not just someday?

Mary, on the other hand, comes with no speeches, no theology, no future hope. She says the same words as her sister, but without the reassurance: “Lord, if you had been here…” I imagine her angry and sad, crying on her knees, repeating that line over and over. Jesus doesn’t correct her or explain anything.

He just meets her tears with his own.

I find it comforting that Jesus seems to meet each sister where she is—strengthening Martha’s hope while sitting in Mary’s despair. Because whether we come with hope or with anger, with faith or with tears, Jesus still walks us to the tomb.

Because it’s there at the tomb, in deep grief and pain, that Jesus reveals his glory. With the stench of death in the air, Jesus says to Martha, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” What Jesus is telling Martha, and us, is that the glory of God is revealed in resurrection:

not just when hearts start beating again, but whenever something we thought was dead begins to live again.

Yes, Lazarus is raised, but God’s glory is seen in anything that has been treated like it’s dead but brought back to life. In the things we have grieved, mourned, and wept over, but that somehow lives again. In the stuff that is rotting and stinking, yet somehow comes back to life. We can see this glory all around us.

If you’ve ever been out west to Yellowstone National Park, one of the most common trees you’ll see is the lodgepole pine. When fires come through the park, they burn the trees and scorch the earth below. But in the heat, the pines release their resin-sealed seeds onto the ground. The flames melt the resin, the underbrush is cleared away, and out of the ashes rise new trees. What looks like destruction is actually preparation for new life.

Death and resurrection. The glory of God.

Or consider the Martindale–Brightwood neighborhood right here on the near northeast side of Indianapolis. Once a thriving neighborhood for middle-class Black families, it was systematically devastated by redlining and pollution, left to decay. But for decades now, churches, neighbors, and the Martindale–Brightwood Community Development Corporation have been working together to bring affordable housing, access to food, jobs, and mentoring for youth to the area—all signs of new life. It’s not a story of a thriving area, yet. But I bet Lazarus wasn’t running a marathon the next day. It’s slow, but it’s still death and resurrection. The glory of God.

Think of your own life: a relationship once shattered is revived; a career thoroughly burned is brought back from the ashes; a love of God rekindled after years of church hurt and deconstruction.

Each one an example of resurrection.

The glory of God is seen in the dead, rotten, smelly, sealed-up places because that’s where new life is called forth. If we want resurrection, then we can’t be offended by a little stench. We can’t be too scared of death, because the two go together.

And resurrection isn’t something we just witness. We are invited to get involved. Jesus says to those gathered there, “Unbind him and let him go.” Jesus does the raising, but he tells the community to do the unbinding.Resurrection is God’s work. But unbinding… that’s the church’s work. That’s our work

And we are already trying to do this in our own way. Through our Outreach Grants, through our support of Project Rouj, through investing in people and places that are overlooked, we are helping unbind what God is bringing back to life. We are saying this is not over yet. There is still life here.

Sometimes unbinding looks like helping a neighborhood come back to life.

Sometimes it looks like walking with someone through grief or addiction or failure until they can stand again, like our Stephen Ministers do.

Sometimes it’s forgiveness, cutting the grave clothes off a relationship that was assumed over.

Unbinding is helping people live again. And that is the work Jesus gives to the church: to go to the places of death and look for signs of new life.

So let’s rip open the bag.
Pour out the rot.
Stir the pile.

Take in the smell,
looking for signs of life,
for the glory of God.

And once we see it,
unbind it,
let it go,
and spread it around.

God has brought back to life
that which was dead.

And we have seen God’s glory,
alive and well,
here and now.

Amen.