Whenever anyone asks me where I call home I usually find myself at something of a loss.  From the fall of 1961 until the fall of 1972 I lived in the same house and went to sleep in the same bed every night in the same bedroom.  About the only things that changed over those eleven years were the clothes hanging in the closet and the fact that at one time I did move my bed from one wall to another across the room.  Other than that, going home meant going to the very same place every day.  However, one year after I graduated from high school, my parents moved to another city and I lost connections with all but a few of the people I had known since second grade.  And, because of the career path I have followed and the changing circumstances of life, I have lived in nine different communities under seventeen different roofs in the last twenty-seven years.

Many of you can point to the house in which you were raised as the same one to which you still go for Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Many of you who have lived under the same roof since you came home from your honeymoon half a century ago.  When Nancy and I go to the place she calls home, we walk through the very same door her mother did the day she brought Nancy home from the hospital a few days after she was born.  I sometimes envy that kind of fixed stability.  Quite frankly, one of the things I find so appealing about Cliff Temple is that it has been in the same place for so long.  People have been walking through those same doors to worship every Sunday since 1938.  Something about that I find comforting and reassuring.

But, for most of my life, home has been where I happened to be living that year.  No definable locale.  No particular house.  No place called home.  But, a way of life in which I have learned to define “home” not so much as a fixed point in time or space, as much as in terms of those significant relationships which have traveled with me on the journey and have helped stabilize what has turned out to be an otherwise nomadic experience.  Anchors, if you will, in a sea of constant motion and change.  All of which has prepared me well for the experience of being a Christian.

From the very beginning, the people of God have been transients.  Nomads.  People often without a place or, at least, people who often lived somewhere other than the place they would like to call home.  And, all throughout their history, God kept calling out prophets from among his people, those we know of as the Israelites, to remind them that going home was more about how they related to their God than where they relocated their tent because God could not be limited to a fixed point in time or space or place.  Prophets who were also charged with reminding God’s people, from time to time, that no matter where they lived, they could still be at home with God.  That home is always more of a relationship than a place.  Prophets who were charged, from time to time, with communicating that same message to people who were not, in the minds of the Israelites, God’s people.

Jonah was one of those prophets.  And, God had given him what he believed to be the worst of all assignments.  He was to go preach a message of hope to the people of Ninevah, the capital city of the Assyrian empire.  Not only were these people the worst of pagans, as far as the Israelites were concerned, they were some of the most despised of all of Israel’s enemies.  And, God told Jonah to go and preach to them a message of repentance that, if believed and followed, would result in the spiritual salvation of the enemies of God’s people.  It was a terrible assignment.

Yesterday I was in Midland for a brief visit with my ninety-three year old grand-mother.  Her mind is beginning to slip a little.  And, even though we had a wonderful visit and she seemed to know quite well who I was, my dad had to remind her that I was the pastor of a church in Dallas.  “Oh,” she said, “you pastor First Baptist, Dallas?”  I said, “no ma’am, not First Baptist, Cliff Temple.”  And, momer said, “well, that’s o.k.  That’s o.k.”  It was as if she were trying to comfort me or something.  She can’t know just how o.k. it is!  But, Ninevah was not o.k. with Jonah.  Being commanded to go preach a message that gave his worst enemies a chance at life was the moral equivalent of Jerry Jones telling Troy Aikman to hand the Cowboy’s game plan over to the other team in the first quarter of the Super Bowl.  (Something some people think he has done from time to time.)

Obeying this particular command, however, meant more to Jonah that just leaving the comforts of home.  It also meant leaving his comfortable ideas about God.  And, Jonah, like most of us, would rather lose nearly anything than his preconceived notions about God even if invited to do so by God Himself.  And, lose nearly everything is precisely what Jonah proceeded to do.  Can you imagine?  Someone who would rather die than change their mind!  Especially change their mind about God and what God is up to in this world and how He is accomplishing His purposes.  At one point in his stubborn depression, Jonah even went so far as to confess, “It is better for me to die than to live.”

Well, as Paul Harvey would likely say, now we know the rest of the story.  At least up to a point.  Jonah had a whale of a time running from God!  But, it is what happened when he stopped running that made being caught in a cyclone at sea and being swallowed alive by some kind of giant fish seem mild by comparison.  Because, it was when he stopped running that he had to come to terms with the fact that God wasn’t going to behave the way Jonah wanted him to.  And, there is no more miserable place to be than in that place you first discover that your God is different than you always thought.  Depression and anger often are not far behind that kind of discovery.  The sad thing, for me, is that that is where the story ends for us as far as Jonah is concerned.  Depression, anger and bitterness to the point of death.  I suppose God let the story end there with Jonah because the real question He wanted us to face is whether it would end there for us.

I know some people like Jonah.  People who have, for one reason or another, gotten it in their mind that life and God and all that go with it have to be one way, their way, or no way at all.  And, as it turns out, there never is a way to get it their way and they are angry and depressed and bitter almost to the point of death no matter where they live.  No matter what place they try to call home.

In particular, I’m thinking of a fellow pastor and friend who lives in another city.  I’ve known him now for some fifteen years and I’ve never known him to be happy.  He’s always talking about where he once lived (even though he wasn’t happy there) or where he wants to live as the place he’s sure he’d be happy.  But, at fifty, he’s certain the possibilities are so limited that his best bet is just to find the most comfortable way of being miserable.  It seems as though he’s never awakened to the fact that unhappy is who he is not where he is and so he keeps moving and, in the process, just transferring his misery from one city to another.

We all get like that from time to time.  In our teenage years we think that fun happens everywhere else but where we live.  In our marriages we are sometimes tempted to think that we’d be happy with nearly anyone else other than the one to whom we’re married.  In our churches.  In nearly everything.  The only time the story of our lives gets written in terms of permanent tragedy is when we never awaken to answer the question God put to Jonah, “is it right for you to be angry . . .?”

One reason religious fundamentalism is on the rise is because, in an increasingly mobile and fastchanging culture, people are simply finding faster and more efficient ways of discovering how miserable they are and that all they are doing in changing jobs and spouses and hobbies and houses is moving their misery from one place to another.  And, because everyone is so busy moving from one place to another, they are looking for some place to call home.  If it can’t be in the address where they get their mail, they at least want a place where they can park their ideas.  At least one place that offers them a fixed idea about something, especially about God.  So, they often turn to the church house where, in more cases than not, they find a fundamentalism that offers them fixed ideas about how God is and always will be no matter what happens.

That’s where things get tricky.  It is true that God is the “same yesterday, today and forever.”  (Hebrews 13:8)  But, if our ways of thinking about God and who He is become more important to us than God Himself we may find that we miss God altogether.  Jesus was crucified, in part, because He didn’t look like what the Jews thought the Messiah should look like and didn’t behave the way they thought the Messiah should behave.  If our ideas about God are so fixed that we make them the condition of our relationship with God, as did the Jews with Jesus, we will likely find ourselves in the same dilemma as did Jonah.

Jonah was angry, in part, because he knew that if he preached a message of repentance the people of Nineveh were likely to do just that.  It actually made Jonah angry that “God was merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love . . ..”  God wasn’t behaving toward others the way Jonah needed God to behave in order to be on good terms with God.  He actually could not deal with a God who said to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compasssion.”  (Romans 9:15)  Jonah needed God to be vindictive and punitive.  The only way the world could finally look like what Jonah wanted it to in order for him to be happy was if God kept His promise to destroy Ninevah if the people didn’t repent even though they did repent.  Jonah felt as though he had been unjustly treated when God didn’t behave the way He wanted Him to in order for Jonah to find happiness according to his definition of it.

That’s a very dangerous place to live.  If God is nothing more than your fixed idea of Him and He has to behave according to your ways of thinking about Him, if that is what your faith is based on, then you have set yourself up for anger and depression and bitterness to the point of death.  More often than not there is a substantial distance between what we think God should be and do and what we actually end up experiencing of God and with God in this life.

If your ideas about God are too fixed it won’t take anything more than a madman gunning down innocent youths in their prayers to totally destroy your god.  If however, faith for you is an ever-changing and ever-growing relationship, then you will find you are at home with God even if the place you are living in is utter hell itself.

Honestly, if God had been the God Jonah wanted Him to be to Ninevah, then even Jonah wouldn’t have lived to tell the story.  If God only dealt with rebellious people by destroying them then Jonah would have been nothing more than whale bait.  Instead, the fish yakked Jonah up on the beach to let him live another day.  The fact that Jonah lived to learn something new about God was, or should have been, proof that God is always bigger and better than our ideas about Him.

One of my birthday cards contained a little packet of toothpicks with an imitation leather holder.  I guess you’d call it “porta-pick” or something such as that.  It thrills me to know that I am being heard even when I preach about the pickiest minutia.  Nonetheless, the packet of toothpicks had a set of instructions with them (if you can believe that!) that included this warning, “never leave home without them.”

I guess there are some essentials without which we should never leave home.  Jonah’s story has given one more.  The wonderful hope that faith is a relationship with God more than just a set of ideas about Him.  That people who choose to follow God through faith in Christ often find that they have no place to call home.  But, they also discover that God wants to make His home with them wherever they are so that, no matter what may or may not come their way to make them happy or miserable, the one thing that will never change in their lives is the presence of God in it.

Amen.