"I’ll just DIE if I don’t get Hannah Montana tickets." Perhaps it was another group, or "Princesses on Ice," or standing in line to see Harry Potter on opening night… but there comes a point in a child’s life when they learn the surprising power of this empty threat. Parents and step-parents and friends and aunts and uncles cave. They search online and pay too much for tickets. Foolish parents agree to go to an event that they would rather die than sit through for an agonizing 90 minutes. I know. I’ve done it. I’ve been suckered into buying toys that break, staying up past bedtime, and having an extra dessert knowing full well that if the child in question did not get the toy, or extra time, or extra calories, they were not, I repeat , were NOT going to die. I’ve never read an obituary that said, "Sadly, little Christy Jones died because her parents were too mean to take her to see Hannah Montana."

Inherently, we know these relationship traps. We’ve fallen in them too many times to count. There’s the "but Bobby has that video game" defense, the "all my friends are going" plea, the "I’ll be good for a year" promise, and my all time personal favorite, the "You are the best Mom in the whole wide world" test of will. Manipulation is learned early and can last a lifetime! I bet you could probably come up with the corporate counterparts to all these phrases in a very short amount of time.

The irony is that this technique is about as ancient as it gets, and we still fall for it. As they say: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Shame on me – I guess is what it comes down to. These patterns are so hard to unlearn because we don’t even know how or what we’d replace them with. The circular arguments of our childhood selves only seem to spiral into all areas of our adult relationships with others. Amazingly, even biblical characters from the prophet Jonah to the apostle Paul try these arguments out on the ultimate parent – God – and it’s quite curious to me how God decides to handle it.

In the Jonah story, God has given the prophet a task. God says, "Go to Ninevah and preach to my people there. Tell them that they’ve been misbehaving." Now, who, among us, would want to tell the bully that they’ve been wrong to steal lunch money? Jonah full well knew that he could get the snot kicked out of him. He fled. We might have done the same. God finds Jonah cowering under the proverbial kitchen sink, and you probably all know what happens next with the "getting swallowed and the spit up by the fish" part of the story. Apparently, getting out of that fish alive gave Jonah the courage he would need to go to Ninevah and preach repentance as God had asked him to do.

Jonah walks around, well maybe "sulks around" is more like it, the city of Ninevah. "Forty days more, and the city is going to be overthrown." That’s the message he gets to carry on the placard. Perhaps by the end of the walk, it felt pretty good to bully the bully. With the power of God to create havoc among the Ninevites, Jonah was probably feeling pretty powerful.

Little did he know what would happen next... Ninevah, the big city known for its evil deeds hears God’s message and repents. From the very highest command center of kings and nobles, the government calls for a time of fasting, remorse, and, oh my gosh, repentance. Jonah was stupefied. At least, if he had gotten attacked, or thrown in jail, or otherwise punished for doing what God had asked him to do he could have said, in all good grade school fashion, "I told you so." But the turn-around of this story only goes to show what kind of power we have to influence even the mightiest of tyrants with a little guts and a few well placed words.

So God changed his mind about Ninevah. OOOHHH did this make Jonah spitting mad! God decided on the fortieth day to leave them alone. This story really is not dependant on the fish part to make it interesting, it is here in the tale that we get Jonah and all his drama. It is here where he launches his tirade to God, "O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than live." God says, "Is it right for you to be angry?" And without even answering the question, Jonah storms off to find himself a shady spot and watch what’s going to happen in Ninevah – absolutely nothing!

Being that you can’t really hide from God even when you are stomping your feet – God finds Jonah, not to comfort him, not to coax him out of his death wish, but to teach him a lesson. God causes a bush to grow up beside Jonah and give him some shade. Jonah falls in love with this beautiful gift of the shade he so wanted. But the very next day, God causes a worm to eat the bush. Jonah gets a little hot without his shade tree so he asks God again that he might die. Oh, woe is Jonah the complainer, "It is better for me to die than live."

God doesn’t buy it – not in the least. God says, "Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?" Petulant Jonah answers, "Yes – angry enough to die." But the Lord replies, "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Ninevah, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left?"

God is the parent after all. God won’t let the childish prophet persist in his childish ways. He calls whiny Jonah to task. But that’s where the story ends. I wish we knew more. I wish we knew if Jonah got the point or if he locked himself in his bedroom for a year listening to angry songs on his Ipod. Perhaps Jonah was younger than we thought. Or perhaps we hear in this story a little too much of ourselves – unwilling to stray from declaring with certainty what’s fair or unfair – and failing to see an amazing glimpse of God’s gracious change of heart.

But Jonah is not the only scriptural character with a death wish. Paul writes to the Philippian church from the discomfort of a jail cell. He has reason to think that his captors will be less than merciful with him. He knows that the one godly man he follows died for the salvation of the world and that the death of Peter at the hands of their adversaries has already been foretold. He’s not opposed to dying for the cause. In fact, it may strengthen his message if he does. Continuing to contend with birthing the Christian church is a huge frustration. They don’t get his message. They have quarreled over inane things. So he writes in a letter to these same people, "For to me living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you."

How do you like those apples? Paul is telling his followers that he might rather be dead than go on serving them, but it would be better for them if maybe he stayed alive. I would certainly have to counsel any pastor to think about it seriously before making that kind of statement!

Paul can be a real jerk. He’s demanding, rude, and to the point if you can catch what he’s saying through his notorious run-on Greek vocabulary. But he actually helps the fledgling church take responsibility for themselves. He won’t let them get by with paltry excuses or get bogged down in details about dietary restrictions or worn out practices handed down from the Hebrew faith. He is a tell-it-like-it-is apostle. The new church won’t survive without followers willing to suffer all sorts of frustrations, persecutions, and even death to get this strange message of love and forgiveness across to the whole world. Paul may be better off dead, but the church was better off with Paul coaxing it to strong new beginnings.

It’s dangerous to allow the miscreant to be forgiven – whether that’s a city turned astray or the bickering followers of Philippi. What if they take advantage of us later? What if they are only fooling? But what if, what if they actually make the move to turn their hearts to God? That just might kill us.

Amen.