Well, how quickly I changed my mind! Most people today complain about the violence and gore in cartoons or video games, but I would caution you greatly about the stories that were written with children in mind before anything was put on the video screen. Given the chance, I would put warning labels on most of the fables and fairy tales from generations past, not to mention some of these biblical stories we think are OK for kids because they came from the Bible we know and love so much. It is precisely in these enticing stories that our children discover the naked truth about the evils of the world. The heroes and villains may not be quite so clear-cut in real life, but the struggles they face are as real as the daily drama of life on the playground.

In the not so distant past, beginning with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, psychologists and psychiatrists have taken a clue from this genre of literature and have begun to study all sorts of cultural stories for hints at predictable human behavior, and they are often surprised by the truth found in what has been called just a "story." Turns out, the stories that we tell, tell a lot about us. The biblical story has a quirky way of becoming our story the more we invite it into our lives. When we adopt it as something that tells about a part of who we are, it’s pages become infectious. We begin to see ourselves in both the heroes and the villains, that is, when we’re being honest. Although we may prefer to identify with the disciples who eagerly jump in when Jesus calls them, we can also admit that we are like the reluctant prophet Jonah who does everything in his power to ignore God’s call.

It is the Jonah syndrome that I want to talk about today. Some might say that Jonah was depressed, even suicidal. He blatantly ignored God’s call. He would have preferred to be dead in the ocean than preaching to Nineveh. Even after he’s spit up by the fish and forced into preaching repentance to the Ninevites, sucessfully I might add, he mopes around and plants himself outside the walls of the city hoping for death by exposure. He did not rejoice in the fact that the sailors who met him as he was bound for Tarshish were able to worship God, and he refused to rejoice in God’s mercy on Nineveh. I imagine him as a thoroughly negative person.

However, he was the perfect caricature of all the great prophets who found time to gripe and moan at every turn of events. His brief prayer of thanksgiving from the belly of the fish seems to be his only instance of recognition of God’s almighty power, and I believe it was that recognition that saved him - be it only for a brief moment of satisfaction.

We all do the Jonah dance to one degree or another. Most of us are not suicidal in our depressions, but we may find ourselves the most stressed out or depressed at those times when our will is not in line with what God would have us do. Those times push and pull at us. We struggle with what’s right versus what’s comfortable for us. God was asking Jonah to do a difficult thing - a thing most of us would rather not do. Jonah was being asked to stand up to a bully, and not just any one bully, the biggest, baddest city of bullies in the known world. Nineveh was known far and wide for it’s cruelty to anyone who would question its motives. I remember form my eighth grade world history class having a teacher who delighted in grossing out the students with stories of Ninevite torture methods, and trust me, it’s tough to gross out eighth graders.

We who are the would-be, reluctant, prophets today run fast and furious from those times God wants us to stand up against recognized power. This story of Jonah is about an historical time like that for the Jews. The best guess to dating this story probably situates it during the period of Babylonian Exile or shortly thereafter, when many Jews were being asked to compromise their faith because of surrounding powers. They needed a crafty ally - someone they could imitate, someone who could stand up to the raw political machine and win. They needed a hero they could trust, and the only hero they could trust was one who would have the same jitters they had. They needed a Jonah. They needed a person, who like them, feared God, but also feared the consequences of challenging the status quo. They needed a flawed hero.

My guess is that we need many, many flawed heroes to help us today, for we are rocking the very same unsteady boat. The powers of evil and darkness have infected every corner of our world. The temptations to idolatry are everywhere, even in our most beloved places. The very church that built itself on Christ’s saving blood at times perpetuates hatred and other misguided values by spilling blood and venomous words in his name. Sadly enough, even though our country was founded on freedom, the word "American" has some similar connotations in parts of the world today as "Ninevite" had in the ancient world. That’s not good news! There are many places where people see America as power without a conscience. The institutions that have built walls around us for safety threaten to undo us, and my guess is that most of us would prefer to retreat as Jonah did - to go below deck and take a long nap rather than do something about it.

We are afraid to stand up to the bullies, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m scared to death. The first fear is that the bullies will chew us up and spit us out, but like Jonah, the next layer of fear is that the bullies might actually change and turn to God if all of God’s children actually follow into the dangerous places where God seems to be leading us. It’s a tough call. The voices aren’t always clear as to who are our friends and who are our enemies. Jonah’s fear is very real in us.

Part of that fear is that we don’t want to admit that we are as fragile as the bush at the end of the story. We grow up in a night, and perish in a night, and our lives seem insignificant in the big picture. We want to have mattered to ourselves, to our planet, to our God. We want God to worry about us, but we don’t want God to be all that concerned about our enemies. We can’t have it both ways. If we matter, all people matter, the bullies as much as the heroes. God loves the wicked ones enough to goad God’s prophets and indeed God’s only son into dangerous levels of conflict - into spiritual warfare - if you will - to borrow a phrase from the more evangelical traditions.

Evil, especially concentrated evil as was in Nineveh, is tricky business. And since this is sometimes understood as a child’s story, any child will tell you that bullies are always tricky business. Is God calling us to stand up to the bullies? If God is, how will God help us to prevail? Jonah was visibly shaken throughout his whole experience. Are our lives to be lived in peril for ultimate victory? Can we count on God’s mercy for our enemies, but not for ourselves? This story raises some very ugly questions, one’s we’d prefer not be asked.

The bullies are all around us. They’re in our playgrounds, our workplaces, our churches, and sometimes even in our homes. God gives us the chance to step out of our fear, not only to help ourselves, but to reach out to another person who needs to hear that they have not been overlooked by the eye of God. God is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, but God does not tolerate excessive evil, the kind of manipulation we know as bullying.

When we stand up to the bully, we can never be too sure of what will happen. The only actions we can control are our own. The bully may change or the bully may not change. God may accept the bully’s repentance even if we can’t stand it ourselves. Bill Easum, who writes about change in the church is often asked what to do about the church’s bullies who work very hard at preventing anything new from happening, and he says this, "Either convert them, neutralize them, kick them out, or kill them. The Body cannot live with cancer." Harsh words, usually described as "un-Christian," but throughout scripture, we hear not only about the prophets who reluctantly preach against power, but we hear about Moses who stood up to the Pharaoh, Jesus who ran the money changers out of the temple, and plenty of other instances where the gospel calls us to "tough love."

The Jonah syndrome is no different today than it was thousands of years ago. But the truth is this: God will go so far as to put us in the belly of a fish if it means showing us what needs to happen. My guess is the bullies aren’t near as scary as what God might do to keep us honest and make us stand up for what we believe.

Amen.