God Loves You

God Loves You
For the next few weeks we’ll be exploring together the blessing that has closed our service for the last couple years together…The blessing: God created you, God loves you, God is with you, God blesses you. Last week, we explored together the first part: God created you and saw the connection of Jesus’ baptism to God’s creation and making us a new creation to fulfill our mission as Christians—to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Now, within in creation, we saw the love that God had for creation…that God created the world out of love, God redeemed the world out of love, and God sustains the world out of love…
Now, I have to confess that this part of the blessing brings about a story…When I first started using this blessing with a group of seminary students, I had done the blessing first and as our time together progressed, we decided to bless one another. One of the women there was so concerned about getting the wording just right. I wrote it on the white board for her and she was practicing all day on how to say it. When it came to be her turn to use the blessing balm, she got visibly nervous and kept looking at the white board… “God…” she began and took a deep breath… I told her that it was okay if she didn’t get it in the same order; whatever came out of her mouth was the blessing. She nodded and looked like she started to feel comfortable. “Okay…Created, loves, with, bless…I got this.” She turned to the person next to her once again and took the blessing balm still repeating created, loves, with, bless…and then she started the blessing… “God loves you…NO!” Well…Yes, God indeed does love you.
Throughout Scripture we have stories of this love that God has…We saw it through creation, in the waters of baptism, and of course the story of Jesus is full of love. In our Gospel lesson this morning we have the story of Jesus calling his first disciples…The men that Jesus called were not men of high stature at all…they were fishermen—men who had to work hard in order to survive. These weren’t people who had the freedom to leave work for a few years to follow Jesus…They were men who took great risk to do this…And they weren’t men who were close to being kings or other royalty…Jesus’ first disciples were ordinary people—people who made mistakes…people who had families…people who questioned who Jesus was…Ordinary people…Out of love, Jesus called them to be his disciples and told them that he would make them fishers of people. That’s a pretty amazing love…the love that chooses ordinary people to do extraordinary things. That’s the love of God. God loves you.
Now, this is the same God throughout all of Scripture…God is the same yesterday, today, and forever…So, this is the same God of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Many times people will say that it seems like there is a different God in the Old Testament because God is always so angry…But there are many stories of the love of God throughout the Old Testament and just as many stories of human beings denying and rejecting that love. The parable of Jonah is one of those stories. The parable of Jonah is an incredibly beautiful love story…Many people may have heard of this story…Jonah was a prophet. Now, a prophet was someone who shared a message from God. These were people who were deeply connected to God and shared messages that were really controversial—they were messages of God’s displeasure in their rejection of God…they were challenging messages encouraging God’s people to follow God once again. They were messages that were not well received at all…Mostly because they were often telling people what they were doing wrong and how they weren’t following what God had intended. Many people didn’t want to hear that kind of a message and honestly, not much has changed because most people today don’t want to hear that message either! Prophets were often killed for sharing this message—John the Baptist was a prophet who literally lost his head…most other prophets often met a violent death because people were so opposed to hearing their messages of truth. So, Jonah was one of these prophets and he often went from town to town sharing these messages from God. Then, God tells Jonah that Jonah needs to go to Nineveh because Nineveh was a wicked city…Now if you’ve seen the Veggie tales version of the Jonah story, you would have seen Nineveh as the city that slaps people with fishes. Well, in reality Nineveh was much worse that a city that slapped people with fish…Nineveh was a city full of violent people, it was unwelcoming and not a place that anyone would willingly go…. At the entrance to the city you would find stakes with the heads of the unwelcomed people lining the entrance…So it may make a little bit more sense as to why Jonah was not interested in going to Nineveh to tell them that God was displeased with their behavior. If Nineveh took the heads of people who were just visiting, what would they do to someone who told them they were wicked?? So Jonah goes the opposite direction of Nineveh and goes out to sea where it is the furthest he can get and once out in the sea, it is made clear that God wants Jonah to go to Nineveh…The boat is rocky and the storm is fierce and as Jonah is tossed overboard, he finds his way to the belly of a great fish. When Jonah emerges, he finds himself on dry land ready to go to Nineveh. Sometimes it takes us to be alone and only able to rely on God to realize that we really do need to do what God has called us to do…Jonah is still not excited about this mission, but he figures that he’ll preach this message of repentance and share God’s message with the people and then they still won’t repent, so he’ll get to watch God destroy the city. And that fuels Jonah—so he goes to Nineveh and tells the people of Nineveh that in 40 days Nineveh will be overthrown. Well, something clicks with the people of Nineveh—through Jonah’s message…the grace of God…Something clicks and the people of Nineveh believed God, began to fast and repent. They turned around and went a new direction from what they were doing. And God was true to God’s word too…God saw what they had done and that they had turned around and so God decided not to destroy the city. See because God loved the city of Nineveh before this…God loved the city of Nineveh so much that God was so hurt by what they were doing—their evil and wicked ways…That God wasn’t going to leave them in their wickedness…So God sent Jonah to remind them of who God is. See that’s what God does…God loves us right where we are in the middle of all of our brokenness and giftedness…God loves us in spite of and because of our brokenness…But God loves us too much to leave us there. Just like the city of Nineveh—God wasn’t going to leave them in their wicked ways, but show them there was a better way through Jonah. And it happened! And God stayed true to God’s word…the city repented and God didn’t destroy it.
That’s where our passage ends for this morning, but that’s not the end of the story for Jonah…Because you see, Jonah believed in the love of God and the grace and forgiveness of God. He was constantly preaching it to different places…And he certainly believed in God’s mighty power and forgiveness and grace and love…But he thought that Nineveh was much past that. So, after proclaiming this message, Jonah saw what happened to Nineveh—that they repented and God didn’t destroy the city, so what did he do? Did he celebrate with the people and join in their repentance or share in the good news that they had been redeemed? Actually no…Jonah gets mad at God…Jonah gets angry with God for being faithful. So Jonah tells God, “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” Jonah is mad because God stayed faithful! Jonah is mad because God did exactly what God promised and Jonah is mad! So Jonah goes east of the city and says it would be better for him to die than to do something like this again…Did you hear that? Jonah would rather die than to see God’s love in action—to see people repent and believe and live their lives differently because of God’s love! So, he goes and starts to do just that. And God provides a bush to Jonah to give him shade and ease his discomfort and Jonah is so happy about that—he’s thrilled about the bush and the shade and is resigning himself that maybe this way of life he’s choosing won’t be so bad. Well, the bush withers because of a worm and the wind blows hot and the sun beats hard…And Jonah has more compassion for the bush that withered than for all of Nineveh. And God says, to Jonah—“You are concerned for this bush, that you had nothing to do with—you didn’t create it or sustain it…It was there a day for you and in a night it was gone…Don’t you then see why I am so concerned about Nineveh? That in this great city there are more than 120 thousand people who didn’t understand what they were doing and needed to be shown my love.” God is telling Jonah that even in their wickedness & brokenness God loved Nineveh and wanted them so much to understand that and turn around and believe that. And they did! And Jonah doesn’t want to accept that…Jonah doesn’t want to accept that God loves Nineveh as much as God loves Jonah.
I think that we can behave like Jonah sometimes…Oh we believe that God loves us—I mean we don’t do anything really wrong for the most part right? So of course God loves us more than God loves those wicked and evil people? Well, actually…God loves everyone—that doesn’t mean that God loves what people are doing and their actions, but God loves everyone and loves us all in the middle of our weakness and our brokenness and our hurting and God loves us enough not to leave us there…All of the world. All of creation…No matter how many times we break God’s heart by what we do, God still loves us. And there are times when we want others to love God the exact same way that we do using the exact same experiences and the exact same words…and sometimes that just isn’t possible. People experience God differently and that’s okay. It’s okay that you had an amazingly powerful experience of God’s love and you want to share it with others, but they will experience that same love on their own in their own time and in their own ways. When we try and force someone to have the exact same experiences that we do, it’s sometimes more harmful. In this clip from the movie Dan in Real Life. Dan & his family are on vacation at a cabin and & his daughter Cara’s boyfriend has taken a bus and snuck up to the cabin in order to spend time together. When Dan finds them together, he sends the boy right back where he came from leaving his daughter with a broken heart…(Clip)…God’s ability to love far surpasses our own…God loves you with as much passion as Cara running after the car…With as much protection as Dan doing what he thought was best for his daughter…With as much wisdom as Will sharing philosophies on love…with as much gentleness as Marie softly correcting Dan’s way of thinking…God’s love encompasses all of that and more!
And guess what—there’s nothing that you can do to repay that love. You can love back and you can worship and you can turn your life around and do what God has called you to do. That’s very important and that’s what we do in response to God’s love and grace for us. Because we have been offered the gift of salvation, we respond to all of God’s people to meet their needs…But we don’t do it to pay God back for what God has done or to earn salvation or earn more love from God. There’s nothing that we can do that Jesus hasn’t already done for us. So, we don’t do good works to earn God’s favor and God’s grace…We do good works because God has already loved us. God loves what we can be and what we are. God loves who we were and who we will become…God loves you.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement spent some time in America and his mission was to come to America and share the message of the Gospel and see how God’s grace moved and worked. He was different from Jonah in that he really wanted to see this change happen. Well, John Wesley was a brilliant and faithful, but complicated man and through a series of circumstances John Wesley made some mistakes and was issued a warrant for his arrest…So, John Wesley fled America returned to England where he felt defeated—he didn’t do what he had set out to do at all and in fact may have done more harm than good…John continued to remain faithful to his vows as an Anglican priest, but he was really just going through the motions…He believed in God’s love and forgiveness, but he was struggling to believe in it for himself. Until one day he went to a worship service where he heard God’s message of love proclaimed in a way that he finally heard it for himself. And at Aldersgate, John Wesley said that his heart was strangely warmed as he realized that Jesus died for me…Yes, even for me. That’s the love of God…To realize that God loved the whole world so much that God sent Jesus Christ…And that you as an individual of sacred worth are who God had in mind in doing that…God loves you.
It is overwhelming to think of God’s love because quite honestly it is way too big for us to even imagine…God loves you. Don’t worry about figuring out all of the intricacies of God’s love—don’t worry about figuring out how you repay God for God’s love…Don’t worry about doing everything perfect so you can keep God’s love…Just stay in love with God. And let God love you…and that love will change you because that’s who God is…God loves us right where we are and God loves us enough not to leave us there. God loves you.