“Always be ready to give an account of the hope that is within you.” In my first year of Seminary on the first day of my first preaching class, the professor gave us an assignment to prepare a 5-minute speech, memorized, on the hope that is within you. And for that assignment, I told the story of Jonah.
You know the story: Jonah, the prophet, who was told by God to go to Nineveh, and Jonah went to Tarshish, the opposite direction. Through a great wind and a great fish, God redirected Jonah, and tried again to get Jonah to go to Nineveh and call out over them, for their great evil had risen up to God. So Jonah goes and cries out over them, and the people of Nineveh do the darndest thing: they say they are sorry. They repent, and so God decides not to destroy them. This makes Jonah really upset, so he goes to the edge of the city, crosses his arms, and waits for God to smite them. God asks Jonah, what are you doing? Jonah responds that God should have destroyed them, but he knew God was too loving to do that, which is the reason Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh in the first place.
God sends a plant, which Jonah loves, but then God sends a worm that destroys the plant, which makes Jonah even more upset. God says, Jonah, this is not making any sense. Why do you care so much for this plant? You didn’t create the plant, you didn’t sew the seed, you didn’t give it growth, you didn’t do anything for this plant. Yet you are upset that it is gone. Why, then, shouldn’t I care about the people of Nineveh who I did create, and who have a lot of animals? And this is the end of the story. It ends with a question. We don’t know how Jonah is going to respond. Will he finally come around and understand what God has been saying? Is he finally going to grasp the depth and height of God’s expansive love that will include the people of Nineveh? I don’t know, but we are left with this impression that even if he doesn’t come to grasp it now, that God is going to keep working with Jonah. God will keep working with him in spite of all of Jonah’s recalcitrant disobedience. In spite of his lack of understanding and his ignorance, probably willful ignorance, God will keep working with him.
In my speech for that class, I said this is the hope that is within me. That God’s love is so expansive that it includes the people of Nineveh and the great evil that they did; that God’s love is so expansive that it includes Jonah and all his recalcitrant disobedience; and I, who certainly have my own limitations and failures, all the things I do wrong, all the lack of understanding I have, sometimes willfully so, I think there is room for me within the expansiveness of God’s love.
I think there is room for you, too. In fact, I think there is room for everyone. God’s love is so expansive that it includes everyone. That is the story we hear in Scripture from beginning to end, from Creation to New Creation. A story of a God who loves more than we can ask for or begin to imagine. It is in the story of Creation when after each day, God looks over it and says, it is good. Sometimes God says, it is very good.
I think Desmond Tutu puts it in my most favorite way in his children’s Bible. He says God’s love bubbled and overflowed. It bubbled up and spilled over into Creation. We, this created order, these created beings which include you and me, are the result of God’s love bubbling over.
God’s love is so expansive it includes Sarah and Abraham, who initially had some faith, but eventually had all sorts of doubts and questions and push-back and laughter about what God had promised. It includes their trickster grandson, Jacob, and Jacob’s kids: the borderline narcissistic Joseph and his resentful siblings. God’s love includes Miriam and Moses and all the suffering they undergo. It includes the foreigner Ruth and her grandson, David, who is considered the greatest of all the kings. But in some of his stories, he is not all that great at times.
God’s love includes all those people the prophets cry out over. And God’s love includes all those Disciples and all of their misunderstandings that at times look like bumbling idiocy. God’s love includes them being restored, even after they abandoned and denied Him. God’s love includes Saul who becomes Paul, who had taken part in murdering people, legally, if that makes it any better. God’s love included him, it includes you, and God’s love includes me.
The thing about God’s love is that it is so expansive that every time we think we have reached the border of it, we discover that we are nowhere close. There are a lifetime of adventures to explore in the unknown territory that is God’s love. God loves you, more than you can ask for or begin to imagine.
Sometimes people say that love is just a bunch of fluffy stuff. It is a soft Gospel that we preach. Why don’t we talk about the hard stuff? Whoever says that has not yet really explored the depths of God’s love. They have not gone on the adventure of unknown territories. When we go there, we discover love is anything but soft and easy. The expanses of God’s love, as the Jonah story tells us, includes the people we might call enemies. It includes the people that are truly doing wrong things in this world. It includes the person who makes our blood boil. That person is also loved by God. They are included in the expansiveness, the breadth and the depth of God’s love. God’s love is that expansive, and more so.
That is the hope that is within me, my friends in Christ. That God’s love is so enormous, so vast that there are no words to describe it, and I will never find those words. I will spend all my days exploring it until the day I am reunited fully with God and I experience it in its purity. That is my hope, the hope that is within me.
I also have a prayer, my friends, that you may know that love in your life, as well. That you may know deep down inside of you, that God loves you. That you know in your mind and in your heart and in your marrow that you are beloved. God made you in love, God loves you, and nothing is going to take that away. I pray that you know that God loves you more than you can ask for or begin to imagine.
AMEN
