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.
a poem for my sons when they yell at God by Jacob Stratman, July 3, 2018
Jonah Leaving the Whale, by Jan Brueghel the Elder, oil on panel (38 x 56 cm), ca. 1600
“It is a childish work—the whale has the head of a dog and Jonah looks suspiciously fresh.
In candied red, the white-bearded
prophet emerges hands still clasped in prayer,
clean, really clean, maybe too clean, first-day-
of-school clean, baptism clean. It is a childish
painting, perhaps, the punished coming up
for air after a three-day, divine timeout,
his begging and pleading inside this flesh
box, sincere or not, but he’s out, old and fresh
in a world around him, Brueghel is sure
to make clear, swirling blue-black and solid
brown, the earth’s bruising, perhaps a wish
of healing yellow in the distance, a light
faded behind the eye’s focus. The dogfish
eyes big and rolling back mouth open
like the cave like the tomb like the brown creek
carp we refuse to touch hate to catch squishy
and formless but counted nonetheless. But
he will dirty himself again after Nineveh
under the vine cussing at God telling
God His own business, and he will forget
the welcoming red the fresh fruit color
of that cloak—the thin (or thinning) clearing
in the background beyond sea and storm,
even the mouth as exit as release.
He will soon forget to consider how
suspicious it is for a man like him
sitting in death’s darkness for three days
to come out so clean so bright so forgiven.
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/poetry/poem-my-sons-when-they-yell-god
Pray: God of Graciousness, thank you for providing to us a savior who offers us perfect cleansing, even as we dirty ourselves again and again. Amen.