The hope buried in the heartbreaking story of Jonah is that it asks us whom it would hurt us to see forgiven. And it asks us to see the mercy of God extending to them, not only for their sake, but for ours. For opening yourself to the One who so fervently adores precisely these, is to apprehend just how near that fervent love has also always been to you.
There could be no Samuel without an Eli. And there could be no Eli without a Samuel. Samuel went on to live out the lessons Eli taught him. He stood up to kings, He told truth to power. And he never stopped listening to the voice of God.
On Tuesday morning, I decided to preach about hate today. Which, some would say, is not a typical topic for the Sunday of Jesus’s baptism. But, in my morning devotions, I’d been reading from Jesus and the Disinherited, a slender but remarkable book by Howard Thurman, published in 1949. And the chapter I read from Tuesday morning was titled “Hate.” You see, Howard Thurman says we can’t comprehend Jesus’s costly way of redeeming love until we’ve dealt truthfully about what needs redeeming in this world and in our lives. Specifically, we must deal truthfully with fear, deception, and hate. And Christians have been pretty sentimental in our considerations of hatred in human life. We’ve hoped to get rid of it “by preachments, by moralizing, by platitudinous judgments,” as Thurman puts it, but we have not been willing to examine where it comes from and how it affects us when we’re possessed by it.
What we need to be are more like magi if we’re to be Jesus’s Church. Spending our energy only on the act of giving our gifts away to one another, to our neighborhoods, to our cities, to the next stranger who stumbles in upon us. We’re to be a community that’s continually laying things at other people’s feet and letting them go. Tending, most essentially, not to the things or the influence or the relevance or the membership rolls or the buildings that we possess.
Maybe the message of the tenth day of Christmas, the New Year’s fallout, is that this pursuit of the divine contains all this, too. Jesus goes dark for twenty years after this event, growing and listening and questioning. As much as we wanted God to show up and make all things immediately right, apparently faith isn’t an on/off switch. Your salvation isn’t a formula.