Wednesday • 10/12/2022
Proper 23

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:1-24; Jonah 1:17-2:10; Acts 27:9-26; Luke 9:1-17

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1-3,11a,14c,18-19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92)

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In today’s readings both the runaway prophet Jonah and the future apostle Paul experience rescue for the sake of mission.

Jonah: from “the belly of Sheol.” “Where can I flee from your presence?” asks the psalmist. “If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there,” he says, answering his own question (Psalm 139:7b,8b). Death itself is no barrier to the God who is determined to know, to claim, to fellowship with … to love. For his part, Jonah has done everything he can to get away from God. Three times, yesterday’s reading notes that Jonah flees “from the presence of God” (Jonah 1:3 [twice], 10). Jonah’s flight carries him down, down, down: “down” to Joppa to find a boat to take him to Tarshish, “down” into the hold of the ship to escape into slumber, and finally down “into” the sea (Jonah 1:3,5,15).

Right there, as low as he can go, as far away from God as he can seem to get, Jonah comes face to face with the God he can’t escape—right there in the belly of a great fish. Right there in what he calls “the belly of Sheol,” the belly of death. There he learns to bless the God from whom there is no escape. There Jonah learns that God hears from his “holy temple” (Jonah 2:4,7).

Having hit bottom, Jonah learns to cry out: “I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice” (Jonah 2:2). The hinge of the entire book of Jonah lies at 2:6: “… I went down… yet you brought me up.” As a result, the fish whose belly should have been the end of Jonah becomes instead the end of an old Jonah and the beginning of a new Jonah. A means of death becomes the means of life. Small wonder Jesus likens Jonah’s three days and three nights to his own: “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). Small wonder also that generations of Christians have seen a picture of Jonah’s and their baptisms in Jonah’s symbolic death in the belly of the fish and his symbolic resurrection when he is “spewed out upon the dry land” (Jonah 2:10). Saved by a fish. Praise be.

Acts: hope in the storm. “… we finally gave up all hope of being saved” — Acts 27:20. Emerging from his “baptism,” Jonah still has a lot to learn about the God who has loved him and saved him. God loves and has saving designs on people who are “other” to Jonah (who nevertheless is still not ready to see God’s mercy extended to the Ninevites). Not so with Paul. Paul rises from his own baptism, scales removed from his eyes, ready to take the good news of Christ as Messiah, Savior, and Lord, to Jew and Greek alike, and see lives changed. As he describes it, Jesus’s call to Paul includes his being sent “to open [Gentiles’] eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:18).

As a result, when everybody else on the storm-tossed ship headed for Rome has lost hope (including Paul’s friend and companion in ministry, Luke, who numbers himself among the despairing with his “we finally gave up”) Paul is able to speak hope to the hopeless. He speaks calm in the storm: “I urge you now to keep up your courage, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship.” He narrates the appearance of an angel who promises that Paul’s mission will be carried out and that there will be safety for all on the ship. Paul continues, “So keep up your courage, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told. But we will have to run aground on some island” (Acts 27:22,25-26). And so it shall be in tomorrow’s reading.

For today, I pray for you and me a Jonah prayer and a Paul prayer. I pray for us the assurance that in the lowest of our lows—even when it’s a low we have fully brought upon ourselves—the grace of God is already there, ready to hear, ready to lift up. And I pray for you and for me calm amid any storm: fixed purpose, indominable courage, and an irresistible love for the things and the people the Lord loves.

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Pieter Lastman , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons