Help Me 211 Community Resources
Prayer Ministry
If you have a prayer request, please send it to pastordelawareheadwatersparish
SERMONS:
Pastor Peg posts her two most recent sermons on this page. If you are interested in reading more of her sermons you can go to pastorpeg.wordpress.com. For the next four weeks we are looking at the book of Jonah. Enjoy.
In The Belly of the Big Fish
October 19, 2025 18th Sunday in Pentecost
Jonah 1:16-2:10
The first act of Jonah was very exciting. God told him to go preach to the people of Ninevah; Jonah ran away and got on a ship to Spain; God caused a storm that almost destroyed the ship; the sailors found out that Jonah was running away, and Jonah offered to let them throw him overboard; the sailors threw him overboard and the storm stops.
Once the storm stops the sailors are very impressed and in awe of Jonah’s God. They worship God by giving thanks, offering a sacrifice, and making vows to God. Let’s unpacked that a bit.
While the storm was raging, the sailors were praying to their own gods to save them. We don’t know how many different gods they were praying to, but when you consider the number of gods that were floating around the middle east, it was probably a lot. Sailors tend to be an international lot. A sailor might sail with his fellow country man, or a sailor might sign up for a voyage and then decide to hang around the port he lands in, and then sign up with another crew going somewhere else. The Mediterranean is a big sea, and it’s quite possible that those sailors were from Egypt, Greece, Syria, Italy, or even Spain. Each of those sailors had their own gods that they prayed to. But it was Jonah’s God who caused and stopped the storm. And once the storm was over the sailors decided to worship the God of the Hebrews from then on.
So you see, although Jonah doesn’t consider himself to be a prophet, or any kind of evangelist, he’s already helped to convert a boatload of people to God before he even gets to Ninevah.
But now Jonah has been swallowed by a huge fish and he’s sitting for three days in the fish. Most of us who learn the story in Sunday School are told the fish is a whale, but the Bible doesn’t say whale it says a big fish. I did a deep dive into what the archeologist think the fish is and most of them put forth the idea that it’s a Sperm Whale. We know that adult, male sperm whales can grow up to 78 feet. (That’s the largest recorded one in the 20th century.) An adult whale does have a wide enough throat to swallow a man, and a big enough stomach to hold him. Plus, we know that after three days GOD spoke to the fish, and it vomited up Jonah on the seashore. Sperm whales do periodically vomit up auberges and annoying stuff in their stomachs. So, let’s assume that God instructed a sperm whale to swallow Jonah, and the whale obliged.
But now nothing much is happening because Jonah sits in the whale for three days and just prays.
Now you might wonder: Who would just sit in one place and pray for three days? Most of us wouldn’t do this on a regular basis, but we would do it if we were in extraordinary circumstances. Maybe if you were confined to a hospital bed or if you were a prisoner in a cell. You wouldn’t have anything else to do so you might decide that this was a good time to pray and get in touch with God.
This part reminded me of a friend who, when she was in her thirties, suddenly lost her job due to downsizing. She was sharing a house with three other people, so she had a place to live; and she had saved some money, so she wasn’t going to immediately starve. But the firing really came out of nowhere, and she had thought that this was a job that she could have for many years and build her career from. She really didn’t know what to do. She told me that she prayed and told God that she was just going to take time off, stay in her room, sort and organize her stuff, and wait to see what God wanted her to do next.
Well, at the end of the week her brother came to see her and told her that he would help her find a new job, that she could move in with him until she got back on her feet. And that’s what she did – she really felt that God had shown her, through her brother, what her next step should be.
Sometimes we need to sit still for a bit when things fall apart in our lives. I know that my tendency is to run around and try to fix everything right away. But that doesn’t help if I don’t know which direction I should go. Taking the time to stop, and breath, and center yourself with prayer and focusing on little things is a really good way to begin again.
I think that Jonah’s prayer in scripture is a condensed version of what he prayed himself through during the three days.
Jonah starts by acknowledging that he’s in really deep trouble and now instead of running away from God he’s praying to God and God is answering. So, Jonah is now in a dialogue with God.
Jonah admits that God threw him into the watery depths and that he ended up in the ocean and then in the belly of the whale. Jonah says: I’ve been thrown away, thrown out, out of your sight. I’ll never again lay eyes on your Holy Temple. The irony is that Jonah was running away from God and was trying to get to a place where God wouldn’t see or find him. But now it’s Jonah who wants to find God and be found again. He really feels that he’s no longer in God’s sight. Many of us feel that we can’t connect to God when we are going through a serious upheaval in our life or have to make a big decision. We do have times when we can’t seem to connect to God. We have times when we feel like our thoughts are all tangled up like seaweed, and we’ve dived far down into dark thoughts. And those thoughts are so dark that we fell like we are at the bottom of the sea and we’ll never be able to rise up into the light of day.
But then Jonah remembers that God did pull him out of the sea and got him into the whale, which is better than drowning. Have you ever looked back on your life and remembered when you were in a bad place and then realized that that bad place was only a transition to something better? My friend actually discovered later that the job she thought was so great was actually falling apart for everyone. Her firing was a good thing and led to something better. That week of being quiet and sad was only a transition to something else.
Also, Jonah realized that he wasn’t dead yet. This is the miracle part of the story. At some point if you’re in a whale you are supposed to die. No one could last for three days, but Jonah did – and at that point I think he realized that he was participating in a miracle. That God still saw him, and heard his prayers. When Jonah realizes this, he goes from despair to connection, to thanksgiving to God for saving him.
When you’re in despair it’s tough to get to that turning point. But what helps gets us to a turning point is recognizing the miracles and blessings in our lives and giving thanks for them. I don’t want to present giving thanks to you as a magic bullet for anxiety or depression. But it helps. One New Year, I was very disappointed with myself because I really felt that I hadn’t achieved my goals. But then I heard a voice speaking to me (looking back I feel it was the holy spirit) that told me to write down what I had achieved during the year. I found out that I had achieved a lot. Not what I thought I should have achieved, but a lot that I could be proud of. Recognizing and giving thanks for all those small miracles during the year turned me around.
Finally, after giving thanks Jonah says: Okay God, I’ll do what you want me to do. I’ll go preach to those people in Ninevah. And the whale spits Jonah out where he can begin to make his way to Ninevah.
So, although Jonah is just sitting in the whale a lot is actually happening. Jonah is sitting still instead of running. He’s taking time to re-establish his connection and communication with God, re-evaluate his life, and then he makes the decision to quit running and do what God wants him to do. He’s now willing to trust God and the direction that God give him. We’re going to find out that Jonah still has a lot of work to do when he gets to Ninevah, but he’s on his way, and from now on he and God are going to be communicating with each other.
All of us go through times in our lives when we need to take a new direction but don’t know what to do. The lesson from this part of Jonah is to stop and give ourselves some time to be still and pray. To get reconnected with God, which will help us to re-evaluate our lives and help us to see the direction that God wants us to do next. If we give ourselves the gift of that time, then we will be more certain of the path forward out into the world with God.
Running From God
October 12, 2025 18th Sunday of Pentecost
Jonah 1:1-15
Jonah is one of the humorous books of the Bible. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have some themes in it that you shouldn’t take seriously. Jonah belongs to a genre of scripture storytelling that uses humor to get theological points across. It’s like how Jesus uses parables that have their Whaaaat? That doesn’t make sense moments, which make you think about things. Jonah is an allegory, or an extended parable, (that might have been based on real events) told in an amusing way to help people think about how they relate to God in their lives and how God relates to us. In fact, Jonah is probably the surviving story that we have from antiquity of this genre.
Did you know that until the Reformation, this was one of the most popular and most preached books of the Old Testament? People loved it, and a lot of plays and songs were made about it, because it’s a fun story! Today we mostly learn this story in Sunday school, or there might be a section of the book that pops up in our lectionaries. So, it’s nice that we’re doing this sermon series on Jonah: The Reluctant Prophet, and we’ll get to look at the whole book!
The story starts off right away with God telling Jonah: Up on your feet and on your way to the big city of Nineveh! Preach to them. They’re in a bad way and I can’t ignore it any longer.
Now unlike other books of prophets, which usually start out by introducing the prophet by saying, so-and-so was a prophet of Israel, or even giving us some background about when they were called by God, this book just starts out with God telling Jonah to go preach in the city of Nineveh. This tells us that Jonah isn’t a prophet already; he’s just an ordinary person. He could be a farmer, or shepherd, or a carpenter; it doesn’t matter. The point of the introduction is to clue us in that Jonah could be anyone, and that God can call anyone, at any time, into His service.
Now Jonah doesn’t say: Yes, Lord, right away I’ll go preach to all those people. He makes tracks in the opposite direction.
But before we judge Jonah too harshly, the readers or hearers of this story would know that Jonah has a right to be scared. Ninevah was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, and the greatest power in the Middle East when it was in existence. The city started in 6,000 BCE as a settlement on the Tigris River, in what is now Iraq. And because it was located on a strategic area of the river, it became a central meeting point for people. Over many millennia, from the bronze into the iron age, it grew to be a center of agricultural, commerce, pottery and metal working development.
For 760 years, between 1365 until 605 BCE, it was the capital of the Assyrian Empire. At its height its footprint was about 1,900 acres and the inside of the city was surrounded by a 7.5-mile wall. Supposedly it took you three days to walk from one side of it to another. The population averaged at about 350,000 people – that’s three times the size of Albany. Ninevah was one of the Megapolises of the Ancient World.
But it was also known as a place of cruelty. You have probably heard of the Code of Hammurabi, from early Babylon, where we get the famous phrase an eye for an eye. This code influenced all of the cultures of the surrounding regions. There wasn’t a lot of mercy in the Assyrian Code of Law, so the culture wasn’t a kind one. They were considered to be a proud and ruthless people.
So of course, Jonah, an everyday man from the little country of Israel, is terrified to go and confront the mightiest city in the world. I can relate. Have you ever been given a job that was so immense or difficult that you just didn’t think you could do it? One that, if you failed at it, might ruin you and your life? We don’t want to do those kinds of jobs; we don’t want to accept those kinds of challenges.
How do we run away when we’re faced with challenges like that? Well, some people turn to drink or drugs. Some people hide in house or craft projects, or read, or start to binge watch TV. Some people travel or even move to another country. You might think that’s extreme, but I knew a number of ex-pats in Japan who were living there because things were too difficult at home. They’re modern day Jonahs.
But Jonah is not running away from personal projects or jobs that he doesn’t want to do in daily life. He’s running away from something that God wants him to do.
Now, Jonah is in a covenant relationship with God, by default. Every Jewish person knew that God made a covenant with Abraham and all his descendants, that he would be there for them if they would worship Him and obey Him. And that covenant was renewed when Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from the Mountain and then gave them the promise-land to live it. It is a two-way street. As long as Jonah obeys God, and does what He wants, Jonah is going to be protected and guided on the way. But Jonah doesn’t see that as a possibility. He runs down to the Mediterranean Sea and boards a boat headed to Tarshish, or ancient Spain. That is about as far away as you could get from Israel in the ancient world.
Now we are all here today in this church as followers of Jesus. We are all a part of the renewal of that ancient and sacred covenant with God through Jesus Christ. Through Jesus, God’s covenant was opened up and made available to everyone in the world, not just the Jewish people. If God calls on us to do something, no matter how hard it is, He is going to be there with us during the project. We are going to have His help, we are going to have Jesus’ help, and we’re going to have the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Jonah apparently is so scared that he has forgotten about this covenant. He gets into that boat and snuggles down in the hold and takes a nap. Yep, I’m hiding in this boat, going the opposite way, and God can’t see me.
But God knows where Jonah is, and he causes a storm to push the boat about so badly that they ship is in danger of breaking up. The sailors are terrified and praying hard to their gods. The only person who isn’t praying is Jonah – because he’s asleep. So, the sailors wake him up and tell him to pray to his God, maybe that will tip the balance.
But Jonah recognizes that he’s the problem. And after they draw straws to find out who’s responsible he confesses that he’s in disobedience and running away from what God wants him to do. But Jonah also realizes that it’s not just about him anymore. All these sailors are now in peril because he hasn’t been doing what he’s supposed to be doing. So, he tells the sailors to throw him overboard in order to save themselves.
We can see that Jonah might be scared of doing what God wants him to do, but he’s not a bad person. He doesn’t want to see other people hurt because of his actions, or inaction. Sometimes that happens to us when were confronted with stuff that we don’t want to do. It might not be fun but if we don’t do it other people are affected. No person is an island, we are all in some way connected to each other, positively and negatively.
You know addicts often say: The only person I’m hurting with my drinking (or fill in the blank on that) is myself. But actually at least six people are going to be negatively affected by someone’s addiction. On the reverse, if you hunker down and do something good, even though it’s difficult, at least seven people are going to be affected for good. So, the next time you’re resisting doing that hard job remember that in the end you are going to be benefiting more than yourself.
The sailors are also good people. They row very hard and try not to throw Jonah overboard. Finally, they do with a prayer: O GOD! Don’t let us drown because of this man’s life, and don’t blame us for his death. You are GOD. Do what you think is best. Can you imagine how hard that must have been for them? That’s another warning for us – we need to consider what actions the people around us are going to have to do if we don’t do our difficult jobs, and the emotional toll that it might cost them.
Immediately the sea calms down, demonstrating to them that they made the right decision. That’s where we’re going to leave the story. Next week we’re going to talk about what happens when he gets swallowed by the whale.
In the meantime, think about those difficult jobs that you have to do. God doesn’t want you to run from them – He wants to help you get through them. You are all in covenant with God and you can ask for help. If you do, it will help to keep you out of life’s storms and put you on a right and positive path with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.