Sermon: "Praying in the Past Tense" (Jonah part 3), January 24, 2021
Drawing by Jago, from “Oh No, Jonah”
Preacher: Rev. Ryan Slifka
Scripture: Jonah 2
This is the third sermon in our 6 week series on the Book of Jonah.
Here we are in the third week of our series on the book of Jonah. First God came to Jonah, sent him to the wicked city of Nineveh to get them to turn from their evil ways, to which Jonah replied, “nope.” He hopped a boat and headed in the other direction, only to have God hot on his heels with a tsunami. The ship was about to break up when the sailors decided to toss Jonah overboard, stilling the storm. And just when you thought Jonah had outrun God for good, God sent a great fish to swallow him up. He goes from eye of the storm to belly of the beast.
Now, at the end of last week’s passage, it said that God appointed the fish and the fish swallowed Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. But in today’s text Jonah doesn’t know this. My sense is that hope isn’t the first emotion you feel when you’re in the digestive tract of a large aquatic creature. He’s in a kind of limbo. He’s alive—he doesn’t face immediate death or a crisis. But there’s also no indication that’s he’s going anywhere. He’s in what is now popularly called a “liminal space.”[1] The uncertain place between what was and what will be. He’s in the dark, no idea what’ll happen next. Other than his gradual digestion into nothingness. No future means no hope. It’s a scary place, a demoralizing place to be. Whether you’re inside a marine animal or otherwise.
So Jonah does what countless human beings have done in these circumstances, ever since our ancestors learned to carry a tune: he sings. We don’t know how long it takes for it to come out of him, but Jonah’s response to his closed-in circumstances is to sing. To belt something out.
Jonah sings. And the song he sings is both unsurprising and completely unexpected.
It’s unsurprising in that he just kinda sings pieces of a bunch of songs he knows. It's a mishmash of different sections of the Psalter, the song book of the Bible. Each line can be found in another Psalm, either literally or the idea.[2] It reminds me of an ongoing complaint in my household. My singing is brutal, but I’ll just sing throughout the day and torture everyone in the house. And both my wife Cheyenne and the kids have said “I wish he’d learn more than the first verse in every song.” It’s like Jonah’s got all this music in the back of his mind and so sings snippets of stuff suitable for the occasion. We sing the stuff we know that resonates based on our mood. It’s no surprise.
What’s surprising, though is the content—what he’s chosen to sing. Considering the circumstances, he’s singing all the wrong stuff. He’s inside an animal, no exit sign. He should have the ol’ blues harp out, graveling about being deep down and low. Or in lament mode, wishing he wasn’t resting his head on a stomach lining. He should be shouting to God for deliverance, because only a miracle could save him. The song has some of this stuff in it. He sings about being in Sheol, the underworld, the land of the dead where there’s nothing but a shadowy existence. He sings about the waters closing around his head and seaweed choking off his air supply, feeling alienated permanently from God’s presence, as if he were locked up and thrown away the key.
But that’s not the song he ultimately sings. Jonah’s in the belly of the whale and the song he sings is a song of thanksgiving. Gratitude to God for his rescue. A rescue that—by the way—hasn’t happened yet. It begins with “I called out to the Lord in my distress, and he answered me.” And it ends with lyrics like “You O Lord, brought me up out of the Pit.” “And as my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord , and my prayer came to you in your holy temple.” “I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you… deliverance belongs to the Lord.”
Not only does the theme of thanksgiving not fit the circumstances, it’s also just not true. Remember there’s no indication that there would be one. Jonah’s thanking God, and it’s all in the past tense. As if it’s already happened. But it hasn’t. It’s like when we deny my eldest son something he wants and he acts like we’re giving to him anyway. “OK, thanks for McDonalds tonight. Yippee!” It’s clearly not a reflection of reality. Because God hasn’t done any such thing. There’s been no rescue.
Now, a lot of modern scholars have suggested that the prayer doesn’t fit because it’s a later addition. That the story, the narrative of came first and then somebody just plunked the song in there. Kind of like inserting a love song during a funeral in a movie soundtrack. It just didn’t fit the story. So it’s a kind of mistake.[3]
Could be. I mean the Bible went through an evolution, a lot of change and editing before it was finalized. Could be an awkward later addition.
Could be. But maybe it’s intentional. Whether it was written in along with the story, or whether it was added later. Maybe in having Jonah pray, thanking God for deliverance in the past tense, they’re making a point.[4]
And the point I think is this: God is consistently faithful. God is faithful in her consistency. Let me explain.
The key verse is where Jonah says that “As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord/and my prayer came to you in your holy temple.” I remembered the Lord. Jonah remembers God. And it’s not just the existence of God he remembers. To remember God all throughout the Bible is to remember God’s faithfulness—that God has acted. And because God has acted in the past, God will act again in the future.
When God sends Moses to confront the Egyptian Pharaoh to free his people from slavery.[5] Moses asks God, “who shall I say sent me” and God replies “The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.” God, who brought Abraham and Sarah children when they couldn't conceive. God who rescued Isaac from human sacrifice, God who made Jacob into a great nation. God reminds Moses of how he’d brought newness, a life, a future in the past, to reassure him that the same’s gonna happen when he goes to see Pharaoh. Moses is to act as if this liberation has already occurred. God has been faithful in the past, so God will be faithful again in the future.
So Jonah prays in the past tense because he remembers that God is the God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob. God is the God who busted Israel out of Egyptian slavery. He’s heard over and over and over again the promises made in the sacred scriptures that—as they say in the black church—God makes a way outta no way. It’s the memory of God that gives Jonah hope in the present, and leads him to pray. And he prays as if his liberation has already occurred. Because if he’s dealing with this same God it’s already signed, sealed and delivered. Because God holds the future, freedom’s already on its way. Even when all other avenues have been exhausted. Even in the belly of a fish. Even in Sheol, the land of the dead.
God is consistently faithful. God is faithful in her consistency. Jonah prays in the past tense because he knows the future’s already in God’s hands.
Now, it probably doesn’t take much of a stretch for us to imagine what kind of impact Jonah’s past-tense praying could have on us here and now. I mean, we’re not exactly in a belly-of-a-fish type situation. But there are echoes, as individuals, as a society, as church. Like Jonah, we’re in the dark. We’re alive, but not sure what tomorrow, let alone down the road’ll bring. Our language, quite understandably, is past or future oriented. We long to return to normal, and we pray for better days. Nothing wrong with this. But in this grand, ancient tradition, we're given something fuller. Something far more hopeful.
Like Jonah, we’re studied in the stories of God’s faithfulness, generation to generation. The God of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Moses and Miriam. The God who brought Israel out of slavery through the waters of the Red Sea. The God who brought exiles home from Babylon. The God who chose an unwed teenager named Mary to bear himself into the world. The God, who, in the resurrection of Jesus Christ overthrew the powers of sin and death, and was reconciling the world to himself through the blood of his cross.
Like Jonah reciting his thanksgiving mash-up of the Psalms, we’ve been given this great narrative of salvation to recite. Week after week, day after day, in trust that it’ll get it’ll eventually settle into our souls. So that whether we find ourselves at a funeral, or laying in a hospital bed after a diagnosis. Whether we’re meandering through meadows of meaninglessness or fretting about the church budget. Whether we’re stressing in a great time of social uncertainty, or in the belly of a great fish the hope is that this same song'll rise from within us. And with it the expectation that the God who has been faithful to us in the past, will be faithful to us here and now. And forevermore. So much so, that—like Jonah—we may pray in the past tense as though our salvation were already in the bag. Because it already is.
So, my fellow fish-dwellers. May we, like Jonah, remember the Lord, even as the waters creep up around our necks. May we remember the faithfulness of God to whom the scriptures bear continual witness. May we remember and give God thanks. Thanks for hearing our prayers. Thanks for lifting us out from the Pit, for raising us up from the ash-heap of despair, for delivering the church from this present age and nullifying all death and sin with his New Creation. Let’s raise a glass to the One who made heaven and earth for pulling us from the cold dark deep and spitting us out on the shore of a brand new day.
And let’s make sure to pray it in the past tense, as if it’s already been done. Because if God is the God we meet in Jesus Christ… it already has.
AMEN.
[1] Susan Beaumont, personal website https://susanbeaumont.com/embracing-liminal-space/
[2] “The prayer of Jonah is a pastiche of different [verses] taken from Psalms” such as Ps. 18:7; 30:3; 118:5; 120:1; 130:1,2; and references many more. Ehud ben Zvi, “Jonah,” in the Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed. (Oxford: University press, 2014), 1189-1190.
[3] See Phyllis Trible, "Jonah," in the New Interpreter's Bible Commentary, vol. VII, gen. ed. Leander Keck (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 505.
[4] The following on “past-tense prayer” is based on insights from Jacques Ellul’s treatment of this chapter. See Jacques Ellul, The Judgment of Jonah, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971).
[5] Exodus 3:15.