I look a fool

After Jonah 3:10-4:11 

I did what you told

me; I risked my life

to speak to these evil,

godless, vicious people.

I did it; I told them

what you told me would

come. I predicted their

city to be destroyed,

judgment to be rained 

down. They repented;

you spared them. I’m

a fool, a laughingstock,

never to be heeded

again.

 

Have pity, man.

Have compassion.

Not on yourself

but for the people

of this great city.

They heard you speak.

They heard your words.

They turned their hearts.

 

Photograph by Sander Sammy via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

The Dead Sea Will Live Again – Clint Archer at The Cripplegate.

 

Orphaned Widow – Patsy Kuipers at Back 2 the Garden.

 

Rediscovering the Joy of Writing: Six Lessons for a Lifelong Habit – Scott Hubbard at Desiring God.

 

Scorched – Reflection and poem by Louise Gallagher at Dare Boldly. 

 

Bookstore Tour: Transom is a Tarrytown Delight – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

They listen and heed

After Jonah 3 

I got it. I understood

what you wanted me

to do. I prayed

forgiveness, I prayed

obedience, I prayed

acceptance. You heard,

and I learned what it

meant to be vomited

by a fish.

I listened (finally).

I heeded (finally).

I went to the city.

I spoke what you told

me to say.

They listened.

They heeded.

They repented.

You relented.

 

Photograph by Kevin Bosc via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Silence – poem by Kathleen at The Course of Our Seasons.

 

We Were a Peculiar People Once: Reflections of an Old-Time Baptist by David Lyle Jeffrey – reviewed by Casey Spinks at Front Porch Republic. 

 

Should You Head Back to School at a Seminary? – Joshua Nangle at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Religion.

 

Lessons from the Sky – poem by Nathaniel Todd McKee at Society of Classical Poets.

In the belly of the fish

After Jonah 1:17 – 2:10 

By my own will,

my own mistakes,

I found myself

in the belly of a fish.

 

The smell, the stench,

the acids staining my skin,

I brought upon myself

in the belly of the fish.

 

In the depths of despair,

in the clutch of fear,

I did only what I knew

in the belly of the fish.

 

I appealed to mercy,

I appealed to memory,

I appealed in worship,

in the belly of the fish.

 

My plea was heard,

my prayer was accepted,

and I was catapulted from

the belly of the fish.

 

Photograph by Todd Cravens via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

At Thirteen: A Poem Inspired Across Generations – Lucia Haase at Society of Classical Poets.

 

A Liturgy for When the House Feels Too Full of Children – Millie Sweeney at Story Warren.

The lot falls

After Jonah 1 

Lots are cast;

the lot falls

on him, guilt

designated and

justified.

The sea rages,

threatening all

because of his,

one man’s,

disobedience.

And he tells

them. He tells

them to quiet

the storm 

by tossing him

into the sea.

First refusing,

they ultimately

obey, throwing

him into the waves,

sacrifice as act

of obedience.

 

Photograph by Li Yang via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Invited into a Rich Community: An Interview with Matt Wheeler – Matt Connor at The Rabbit Room. 

 

“Ghost in This House” and “From a Sinner Who Didn’t Make It All the Way Through Baptist Summer Camp” – poems by C.B. Anderson at Society of Classical Poets. 

 

White – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher. 

Rejecting the call

After Jonah 1 

It is clear, the call,

that is. The call is

clear, nothing opaque

or ambiguous or

confusing about it.

And it is simple:

go.

The destination is

mentioned in such

an offhand manner

that obedience is

assumed.

 

He pales and shakes.

He flees, far away

from where he’s

told to go. But is it

fear of where he’s

told to go or that

he knows it’s

a command of grace

and salvation. And

those people deserved

none of it. 

 

It’s like being sent 

to Beijing or Nigeria

or Pyongyang or

Moscow or Caracas.

Not because the people

don’t need it but

because they don’t

deserve it.

 

Photograph by Jakayla Toney via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

St. Clare: A Sonnet – Malcolm Guite.

 

Believers in an Unbelieving World: How the Early Church Engaged Society – Stephen Presley at Desiring God.

 

There’s No Point in Keeping Receipts Unless We’re Balancing Them (and We’re probably Not Balancing Them) – Samuel D. James. 

No I won't go

Taken from Jonah

No I won’t go

I won’t I will flee

run away I will not

do this what you ask

because I know what

you will do when they

repent you will forgive

you will relent and not

destroy them let me turn

my face to the rock

and die. I cannot

face your compassion

for the undeserving

I cannot countenance

your forbearance and

you ask me if with

your great heart if you

should care let me die

in the heat let me die

in the sun

Photograph by Linnaea Mallette via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Pinocchio in Nineveh

This post first appeared at The Master’s Artist.

How much does culture – American culture – influence Christianity as practiced in the United States? It’s a fair question, and the answer is likely “a lot more than we realize.” The idea is that Christianity is supposed be salt and light in the culture, but we know from the New Testament and from the history of the church that it too often works the other way.

Benjamin Myers is an associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. His first book of poems, Elegy for Trains, was published in 2010, and received the 2011 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. His poems have been published in such journals as The Chiron Review and Christianity and Literature, and included in several anthologies.

Elegy for Trains is a fine collection, with poems ranging thematically from Shakespeare to seasons, from the writing process to Psalms and Revelations. But Myers also considers this “faith and culture question, and he does so in an interesting poem entitled “Jonah and Pinocchio:”

It was the two whales,

swimming each an inch

below the surface of my eight-year-old

mind that confused me,

left me standing before the Sunday School class

mute in my corduroy pants,

hair as stiff and slicked as the oil-spill

collected in the rushes along the beach,

trying to remember

what God sent a marionette

to Nineveh and whether the message

was “repent” or “always tell the truth.”

I wasn’t here that often,

and they were waiting

for me to retell the story of the prophet,

but I kept adding donkey ears,

a growing nose,

a blue fairy where there ought to be a storm.

Then the little room itself

rolled around me

like a stomach. The window

on the far wall became a blowhole

through which I was given a vision:

trees in an upward avalanche of green,

each spring leaf like a bird in sudden flight

after the long skin and bones of winter.

And who’s to say I wasn’t right,

that the point of the story might not be

that after this life’s long childhood of wood,

I could awake some clear, cold morning

where the waves wash over the sand

to find I have become a real boy.

Pinocchio – the story of the puppet boy who, through a series of adventures and misadventures, eventually becomes a real boy, first appeared in story form in 1883. But it was Walt Disney who transformed the story into an American cultural icon, with the famous admonition to always tell the truth or your nose will grow.

There is a whale in the story – Monstro, who devours Pinocchio’s father Geppetto. The whale plays a critical role in the climax of the story, when Pinocchio becomes a real boy.

Benjamin Myers rather playfully takes one whale story – Monstro in Pinocchio – and confuses it as a child would confuse it. Asked to tell the story of Jonah and the whale, the child in Myers’ poem conflates the whale of Jonah with the whale of Pinocchio. God sends a marionette to Nineveh, with a message to repent or to tell the truth; the child isn’t sure.

But he plunges onward, “…adding donkey ears/ a growing nose / a blue fairy.” The room becomes the interior of the whale (Pinocchio’s whale), and the child has a vision of “trees in an upward avalanche of green, / each spring leaf like a bird in sudden flight / after the long skin and bones of winter.”

He digs his hole deeper and deeper (you can almost feel the child squirming). And then, right at the end, he realizes that, if they’re not the same story, they actually may have the same outcome. The child speaker of the poem realizes that, like Pinocchio, he may one day become a real boy.

One way to consider the poem, and the boy’s dilemma, is to see his required recitation in the context of both whales – both stories – competing for the telling. He means to tell the faith story, the Jonah story, but it’s the cultural story, the Pinocchio story, that (mostly) comes out. And yet nothing is actually lost, because in this long childhood of wood, the real boy may well emerge.

Culture can be used redemptively, too.

Illustration by Enrico Mazzanti, the first illustrator of Le avventure  di Pinocchio (1883). 

Jonah: It’s Not About the Fish

For those of us who didn’t first learn about Jonah in Sunday School, the story seems scientifically impossible and a proof point that the Bible contains preposterous accounts, if not downright inaccuracies.

For those of us who did first learn the story of Jonah in Sunday School, we leave the scientific debate to others. (I don’t embrace creationism versus evolution arguments, either.) Hearing the story as a young child, all I can say is that it made sense, a truth easily grasped by children  and often far better than learned adults.

It’s not about the fish.

The story of Jonah is about many things, and to focus on the fish is to miss all of them. It’s about faith, obedience, understanding the culture and world one lives within, understanding how God works in that world, repentance, and having expectations confounded or confirmed.

Jonah is an individual whose life gets played out in a much larger context. And it’s a geopolitical story, the story of the capital city of a brutal empire being brought to its knees.

And, as Andy Stanley points out in The Grace of God, it is a perplexing story of God’s grace. Perplexing, in that the Assyrians deserved anything but grace. What they did deserve was destruction for their brutality and the evil they committed upon the surrounding nations and peoples (they were the ones who conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, whose people disappeared into history).

And yet, the fish notwithstanding, Jonah makes his way to Nineveh, and preaches repentance for three days (the same number of days he was inside the fish; and likely the same number of days in his “anger at God” period at the end of the story). The city listens to his preaching, repents, and is spared God’s wrath, much to Jonah’s chagrin. He knew this would happen, because he knew God as a God of grace.

And it made him angry.

I identify with the Assyrians. I did nothing to deserve God’s grace. Nothing. Just the opposite, in fact. And I was grateful for it.

And I identify with Jonah. Don’t all those people today who deny and ridicule the very notion of God, the people think his church is filled with stupid yahoos, the people who murder and destroy and tear at the very fabric of our society, the people who are trying to force an anti-Christian underpinning on everything in the culture, well, surely they deserve to get theirs, right?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps they will hear the call to repentance; perhaps Christians will articulate a call to repentance. Perhaps God will spare them too. The story of Jonah is also the story opf how anyone, no matter how evil, can repent and be forgiven.

Yes, the story of Jonah is a story of God’s Grace.

Led by Jason Stayszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing The Grace of God by Andy Stanley. To see more posts on this chapter, “Puzzled by Grace,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Sally Pesavento via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Pinicchio in Nineveh

Poet Benjamin Myers has taken the story of Pinocchio and the account of Jonah -- remember the whales in the both? -- and written a poem that is both funny and raises larger questions about culture and Christianity. He rather playfully takes one whale story – Monstro in Pinocchio – and confuses it as a child would confuse it. Asked to tell the story of Jonah and the whale, the child in Myers’ poem conflates the whale of Jonah with the whale of Pinocchio. God sends a marionette to Nineveh, with a message to repent or to tell the truth; the child isn’t sure.

To read more about the poem, please see my new post at The Master's Artist. The poem is from Myers' new collection, Elegy for Trains: Poems.