(All our songs this morning are from Singing the Faith (StF) Mission Praise (MP) or Hymns & Psalms (H&P) numbers will be given where available)
Welcome to our Sunday Service, today shared on paper across our circuit and with the congregation at Saltaire Methodist Church and led by Rev Phil Drake our Circuit Superintendent Minister.
Click on the blue links to follow them for bible readings and associated links
Theme: Repentance
Call to worship:
Some things God wants us to do are easy;
some are hard;
some are very hard.
Are we ready to put ourselves out
in order to respond to God’s call?
As we worship today, let us seek God’s guidance.
Song – StF 416 or MP 683 – There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
Song – StF 429 – Lord we turn to you for mercy
Prayer of approach:
Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought and word and deed.
We have not loved you with our whole heart.
We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves.
[Silence]
In your mercy,
forgive what we have been,
help us to amend what we are,
and direct what we shall be;
that we may delight in your will
and walk in your ways;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Bible reading:
Jonah 3:1-10: Conversion of Nineveh
Food for thought: Repentance in the book of Jonah.
1. Jonah repents. The things that happen to Jonah personally are a good illustration of the basic meaning of repentance – a total change of direction, a 180 degree turn about.
Jonah was a reluctant prophet, if ever there was one. Called by God to deliver a message to the city of Nineveh, Jonah decides differently. Completely the opposite, in fact. He takes a boat, not east to Nineveh, but west towards Tarshish. To get as far away as possible from the place where God wanted him to be. Like many of us in this modern age, Jonah decided that he knew what was best for himself; he wanted to be in control, to make his own decisions; to be independent of the work of God, to leave God behind.
But God was determined to show Jonah otherwise. There’s a storm at sea, Jonah is thrown overboard, and gets swallowed by a big fish. Inside the fish, Jonah is given a time of grace, space to reconsider, an opportunity to change his mind. Jonah does just that, and offers to make whatever sacrifice is necessary to make amends. He repents and turns back to God. On the third day, the fish spews Jonah out onto dry land. God speaks to Jonah a second time. A second chance, a new start.
And so the man of the world becomes the man of God. The man of the world, who wanted to avoid God, becomes the man of God, a prophet, who speaks God’s word to the people of Nineveh. The sense of the story is that the events of Jonah’s personal life equip him for the work of mission. Jonah is able to preach a gospel of repentance to others because he has experienced that call to repentance for himself. The message of the gospel must be backed up by the experience of faith. If the words we speak are empty words, those who are listening will see through us. Engaging in Christian mission begins with personal reflection on our Christian faith.
In the sixth century a member of a well-to-do Irish family left his native land for ministry and mission based on the isle of Iona off the west coast of Scotland. His name was Columba, a Latin translation of the name Jonah. Columba turned his back on the comfort and security of aristocratic life in Ireland for a much harder challenge of building a monastic community in a strange place. He was motivated to do so by the desire for penitence. In part this act of penitence was forced upon him as punishment for some sort of political wrangling within the Irish church that had gone against him. In part also it was a voluntary exile, a giving up of the things that he valued so that he might serve Christ more fully. On reaching Iona, he climbed to the top of the hill in the middle of the island, and only when he had assured himself that he could no longer see his homeland did he literally burn his boat. There could be no going back on his new life. Columba didn’t set out to be a missionary. But out of this personal journey of faith grew a mission to the mainland of Britain and Columba became one of the most outstanding missionaries of his age. We, too, should take time to reflect on our personal journey of faith.
2. Nineveh repents. The response of the people of Nineveh to the preaching of Jonah show us the power of God’s word to bring results. The message is heeded and acted upon.
Nineveh was a city wonders, a centre of the civilised world – its high walls and buldings, its palaces and gardens made a sight to behold. A city so large that it took three days to walk across it. It was a day’s walk for Jonah before he got to the heart of it. We get the picture – Nineveh was big in every way. But there was also another side to living in Nineveh. For the city was also a place deep wrongdoing.
Jonah preaches his message, and the most amazing things start to happen. They turned away from their wickedness. The people of Nineveh believed God and the word he had spoken through Jonah. The whole city fasted and put on sackcloth as signs of repentance. Even the king sat in ashes. The people were of one heart and mind in the response that they made. And so a city of this world becomes a city of God. A violent people become a God-fearing people. and the city of the wicked becomes the city of the redeemed.
St. Augustine wrote about the city of this world and contrasted it with what he called ‘Civitas dei’, the city of God. Augustine lived at the time of the fall of the Roman empire. How could it be, he asked himself, that Rome, the eternal city, everything that a city should be, and the centre of the known world, could be conquered and sacked by invading barbarians. He knew that it wasn’t a straightforward question. Augustine himself witnessed to his own amazement how even the barbarians treated the citizens of Rome and its churches with respect. He concluded that not even Rome was perfect, and that only the heavenly city, the city of God, was perfect. The bible gives us a vision of this city of God, a new Jerusalem, given by God.
In the meantime, God has given us the church. The church is called to be like a city on a hill, shining as a light for others to live by. Yet all too often the reality is a very different picture of a church showing all the conflicts, divisions and even violence of this world. The making of the new circuit plan last week involved appointments for a pulpit exchange as part of the Week of Prayer for Christian unity. The Week of Prayer a reminder that the church needs to be a penitent church, recognising and acknowledging the divisions which we have set between us, and longing for a deeper unity under Christ. Yet, in the midst of the cities of this world, a truly penitent church can show all the hope and promise of that heavenly city.
3. God repents.
There is one other act of repentance in the book of Jonah. And that is the most surprising of all. For it is God who repents. God who changes his mind. Because if we are to read to the end of the story of Jonah, after getting Jonah to do all that work of preaching repentance, God decides that he would not punish Nineveh after all, much to Jonah’s annoyance. But this would have come as no surprise to the Jewish people who first heard this story. For they knew God to be gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, always ready to relent from punishment (see for example, Exodus 34.6, and compare this with Jonah 4.2). But what would have been surprising to them was that God was ready to relent from punishing foreigners. And so, they learned to discover a God who reserved his love not just for his chosen people but for other nations as well.
The book of Jonah is a story to inform our own view of mission. As Frederick Faber wrote:
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in his justice
Which is more than liberty.
For the love of God is broader
Than the measures of man’s mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
Sometimes working for God, can be hard, very hard even, but the reward is in the knowledge which comes through a commitment to serve God in all his ways. In this story of repentance, we are given a vision of God’s plan for the redemption of the whole world. May we be caught up in that vision, and as partners of God’s mission, that we may fulfil God’s purposes for each one of us. Amen.
Question for reflection:
Reading: Psalm 103, noting the mantra in verses 8-10 that is repeated at other points of the Old Testament as a kind of ‘mini-creed’:
The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
9 He will not always accuse,
nor will he keep his anger for ever.
10 He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
How is this declaration of the God who is ‘slow to anger’ an expression of the God who cares rather than the God of vengeance often associated with the Old Testament?
Prayers of intercession
[Offer prayers for those whom you know to be in need at the present time]
Then use this prayer:
Merciful God, you have prepared for those who love you
such good things as pass our understanding;
pour into our hearts such love towards you
that we, loving you above all things,
may obtain your promises,
which exceed all that we can desire;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Lord’s Prayer may be said.
Song – StF 410 or H&P 774 – Lord, your church on earth is seeking
Song – StF 477 or MP 936 – Teach me to dance to the beat of your heart
Acknowledgments: Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
