This week Pastor Margo will offer devotions on the week’s lectionary texts, which are concerned with the powerful call on all of us to preach the good news of Jesus Christ. The devotion resource is the Christian Century website.
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
Jonah’s fish by Laura Wang from March 28, 2019
I was hungry, and he thrashed
like a hurt turtle, paddling nowhere
on his sprawling, knobby joints.
Between the endless ropes of kelp
and the breath-bubbles spiraling
about his head, I didn’t see
his eyes rolling to whiteness,
the matted fur of head, chest, limbs
that would have signaled: man,
earth-born scourge of the seas,
now overthrown and scallop-pale
with cold. I swallowed him whole.
First he bellowed; later, voice ragged,
his whimpers bounced off my bones,
rattled them like bars. Then, slowly,
a vibration as his breath circled
my womb’s vault, warming my throat.
He chanted; I admit I listened
(he called me Hades—I decided
to let that go). And then he said a thing
that sent me careening through the depths
for terror: that it was he who’d cast him off,
wrapped his hard heart in a blanket
of waves. What fearful creature
was I carrying? Would I be stricken
for harboring him, stripped of my fins
and forced to trawl the sand?
Into the lightless waters where I fled
he spoke, and spoke to me.
It was enough
to turn my gut: I sped to shore,
spit him up there. Since then, fullness
hasn’t felt quite the same.
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/poetry/jonah-s-fish
Pray: God of goodness, sober us with the grave responsibility to speak the good news of Jesus Christ when You direct our mouths to open. Thrill us with the hopeful possibilities that You might “change Your mind” based on our obedient words. Amen.