Sunday, January 21, 2024… Sanctity of Life Sunday
“Nineveh”
Psalm 62; Jonah 3:1-10; 1 Corinthians 7:29-35; Mark 1:14-20
Divine Service IV with Holy Communion
Hymns: #605 “Father Welcomes All His Children”; #362 “O Sing of Christ”; #411 “I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light”
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
The Lord sent prophet Jonah to the very great and wicked city of Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, a nation of mighty armies, fierce warriors, and arrogant kings, a city of wealth and power, out to conquer and dominate the world. Jonah didn’t understand why God didn’t just put an end to the place and be done with it. When Jonah looked at Nineveh, all he saw was the sin; he’d already written the people of Nineveh off in his heart. (Prophet of God he may have been, but Jonah had an attitude problem). But when God looked at Nineveh, He saw the people – men, women, children, and babies, precious souls – on whom He wanted to have mercy. God saw people worthy of His love, and people worth saving.
God told Jonah, “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before Me.” Preach against it, God said, because people need to hear the bad news about their sin, before they’ll repent and open their hearts to the Good News about Jesus. Law first and then the Gospel, is how it works. Jonah ran from God’s calling; he booked passage on a ship headed south and sailed away. God had a great thing in mind to do, and Jonah turned from it. His anger, hate, and prejudices had him painting all the Ninevites with the same broad and condemning brush. Much easier to write them off, than to say, “Here I am, Lord! Send me!”
Much of what Jonah thought about Nineveh was true. They were pagans and idol worshipers. Their gods they worshipped were Marduk, the god of storms; Nergal, the god of war and destruction and death; and Molech, who demanded that infants be brought to him to be sacrificed by fire. There were certainly wicked people doing wicked things in that place; why not wish the Lord would burn that wicked city down? But there were also good people, families with little children, people just trying to get by, who didn’t know the true God – not yet – but their hearts were open if someone could reach them. Jonah saw Nineveh as a place to avoid and run away from. God saw it as a place He needed to send His prophets to. (So Jonah, off you go!)
God sent a storm upon that ship Jonah had booked passage on (who’s the real storm God in this story?), and he ended up being thrown overboard in the middle of the storm, then begging for mercy in the belly of an enormous fish that God had sent to swallow him. (The fish was mercy, by the way; without it he would have died). And then, after three days and three nights, the fish spit him out on the beach. And there on the beach, gasping for air, stinking of fish, seaweed in his hair, the Word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: "Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you,” God said. Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord this time and went to Nineveh, and walked the streets shouting out the message God had given him: "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.” An urgent message, that was, because time was short.
And the thing Jonah wanted least to happen, did: “The Ninevites believed God.” They began to fast and repent and pray for mercy. Even the king of Nineveh, proud and arrogant as that man must have been, “rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust.” (We have a few leaders in our own country I wish would do that). And he urged his people to repent, and call upon God, and turn from their violence and evil ways, in hope that the Lord would have mercy. And what Jonah was afraid would happen, did – thanks be to God! “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, He had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction He had threatened.” The Ninevites repented, and God relented.
Prophet Jonah got in a sulk about it. He went and found a place to sit down outside the city and built himself a little shelter, and sat there in the heat of the day waiting to see what God would do, hoping God would change His mind and decide to burn them anyway. Then, says the book of Jonah, the Lord caused a vine to grow up over the prophet’s head, to shelter him from the sun, and Jonah was happy about that. But then the Lord caused the vine to wither again, and that made Jonah angry enough to tell the Lord he just wanted to die. But the LORD said, "You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?” And that’s how the book of Jonah ends. We’re never told if Jonah got over his anger, or changed his heart, or repented of his sins, or what happened to him after that. We’re left hoping and praying his story had a happy ending.
Men and women of God, you and I are living in Nineveh. The whole world is Nineveh; this country is the American Nineveh. Look at what’s going on all around us. Look how the churches are struggling and half empty, and how the local bars are doing better business than we are. Watch the news, read the police reports. Read all the obituaries that make no mention of church or faith. “There will be no service” or “A memorial gathering will be held at the Happy Tap” makes me so sad. How many children are being neglected or abused? How many are murdered before they have a chance to be born? If the statistics I’ve been reading are right, fifty to sixty percent of our neighbors have no connection with God or His Church, no connection to Jesus Christ, no saving faith. (And I’m afraid those numbers might be a bit low).
“Time is short,” St. Paul says (and he wrote that 2000 years ago, so time today is shorter today than it’s ever been). “The kingdom of God is near,” Jesus says. “The hour is nearer now than when we first believed.” You and I are the modern-day Jonah’s God has sent into this Nineveh of a world, the ones Jesus calls to be “fishers of men,” to “search for the lost and bring back the strays, to bind up the injured and strengthen the weak.” God has put us here to bring sinners to repentance, and to bring them the good and healing medicine of the Sacrament (We call that Word and Sacrament ministry).
Do you understand how important it is for a person to feed on Jesus, to be fed by the body and blood of Christ? The Lord’s Supper isn’t optional; it’s essential for life. St. Paul even wrote to the Corinthian Church, after giving them instructions about Communion, that neglecting the Sacrament was the reason “many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep.” Jesus said about Himself, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." Jesus told Peter, “If you love Me, feed My sheep.”
God has put us here to plant the seeds of faith, and to baptize all the babies and raise them up to know God. That means to teach them the Commandments, the Creeds, and the Lord’s Prayer, and afterward to bring them to make the Confirmation promise: “I will suffer all, even death, rather than fall away from it;” and them bring them to the Lord’s Table. Jesus called that “making disciples.”
As we join God’s Church in recognizing this day as Sanctity of Life Sunday, please be aware that the devil’s whole program is to murder the child while it’s still aborning. Satan hates Christian faith, because faith in Christ is the end of him and his kingdom. He especially hates the “faith that will not shrink” kind of faith, faith that’s withstood all the trials and temptations that go along with living here in this Nineveh of a world and is all the stronger for it. Strong, unshakeable faith is something the devil can’t do anything about; it’s his greatest fear, in fact. Even if the devil kills me, I’m still going to heaven. Whether I live or die, I belong to the Lord. That’s the “this I know” kind of faith we’re out to create and nurture and grow in this place. And that’s why the devil is out to kill faith while it’s small, or even to destroy it before it can ever begin.
Satan tried to destroy the infant Jesus before He could grow into a man. The book of Revelation tells about how the devil, as a great red dragon, hovered over the mother of God, waiting to devour her child the moment He was born. That happened in the Christmas story when King Herod ordered the murder of all the baby boys in Jerusalem, hoping to kill the newborn King; and God brought the holy family to safety in Egypt, until old Herod was dead.
Satan thought he could murder Jesus on a cross before the Church He came to establish could grow and spread outward into the world; yet Easter morning came, and Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, and the devil’s plan for death became instead the hope of our world and our source of life. “Jesus lives, and “because He lives, we shall live also” has become the heart of the Good news we have to shout about in our Nineveh world.
The devil thought if he could martyr the first disciples, have them put to death one by one, he could the Good News from spreading in the world. But instead of killing their faith, persecution became a badge of honor. Peter and John, after being flogged and ordered not to preach anymore in Jesus’ name, left the synagogue praising God, because they’d been found worthy to suffer for His sake. The apostle’s faithful witness, even as they were dying, only served to bring more and more people to faith. Person to person, heart to heart, from the lips to the ears, faith has come down through the years until it’s reached us here; and the Good News goes on.
Our enemy the devil is still very much at work in the world today, still working to kill baby faith before it has a chance to grow. The greatest tragedy of the sin of abortion is that the little ones are having their lives taken from them before they have a chance to be brought to the font and baptized. It’s the devil who’s taken the Word of God out of our schools, to keep the Word of Life out of the ears of our children.
When the devil manages to cause turmoil and trouble in God’s Church, it’s the baby Christians, those new to faith, most likely to be hurt by it and fall away. Whenever we in God’s Church decide to try to do something to reach out to our neighbors (like our ReVitality program, or “Everyone His Witness,” or any kind of outreach), you can bet the devil will be right there to try and throw a wrench in the works before we get started. If the devil can have us fighting about bells or budgets or windows or the color of the paint, and have us fighting each other instead of him, he’s accomplished his goal.
When we look out on modern-day Nineveh, and on our Nineveh neighborhoods, Church, may we see what God sees – lost and dying people in need of Christ, souls that need to be saved, and sheep that need to be fed. May those God has sent us to reach be the heart and center and focus of everything we do together as God’s Church, and the reason for every action we take and every penny we decide to spend. After all, we have the Word of Life!
Father in Heaven, help us to see every human life, from the greatest to the smallest, as sacred and holy and worthy of our love, our attention, and our time. Lord Jesus, You alone have the words of eternal life; now move our hearts to share Your life-giving Word. Good Holy Spirit, lead us to those You would have us reach, or lead them here to us. Use these lives of ours, O Lord, to save the lives of others. In Jesus’ name; Amen.