I’ve had some time to think about your sermon, Smithy. I think it was bold of you to try to thread some tricky needles. It’s unfortunate you have to spend so much time on such issues, when the real point of the story has little to do with them. Real or poetic, the point is the same point. And it’s nothing to do with fish. So I applaud you for trying to deal with it. I know it can be very tiring dealing with these sorts of contentious issues, and I hope you will be able to maintain your energy and enthusiasm for the extra work that entails. So, be encouraged and soldier on! 

   I also agree that trying to own or privatize God is a big part of the problem people run into in religion. That’s what I like to think of as the relativizing of absolutism (and we also often run into its counterpart, the absolutizing of relativism). The particular slant you chose to address today probably reflects your own personal experience, or possibly your judgments about your audience and what their most likely tendency is (which mistakes they need to be warned against and what actions they most need to be encouraged). God isn’t the God of nationalism. But he’s also not the God of internationalism or anti-nationalism. And people have certainly tried to own those as ideologies and place God behind them, just as much as provincialism. It’s hard to know what side of the horse people are most likely to fall off of. And I know you had to make a guess.

    In their defense, some people today who praise nationalism and the provincialism of town and family do so only because they feel those things to be under threat and are defensively advancing them in the face of fear of extinction, when people are telling them that the love of your own country or even love of and preference for your own people and family are the root of evil. That God demands that they give their love, time, energy, maybe even lives instead to some distant good or people or cause or abstraction that erases the boundaries of or claims precedence over local love and fealty.

   But in the Bible, as much as the brotherhood of all believers is elevated, so is the independence of individual churches, and the direction to look first to and to love your own house and family. Grace and forgiveness are taught, but also sin and righteousness. Generosity and circumspection, bravery and caution, faith and works, forgiveness and justice. And I would argue that to teach either without the other is to court disaster. 

    The problem is that these things end up being set in opposition, instead of complimentation and interrelationship and mature development in the full flowering of the faith. People learn that God isn’t the God of this and conclude, thus, that he must then be the God of that. And in our efforts to push back on one we often accidentally set up the other as a new idol and forget what the value was behind the first.

    God is the God of nations. He is also the God of hearth and home, of fealty and filial affection and the need to look first to your own life and own home and set those in proper order. And if you don’t, then you won’t even really know what good it is that you have to give when you go out into the world to try to spread it (and I think Afghanistan might be an example of that, an attempt to right someone else’s house without a real understanding of either what was wrong with theirs or what was right with ours, and having an insufficient understanding of or development of the good within our own home to be able to give it to anyone else; hospitality begins with love of home before love of others, because you must first have something set in order that has been loved and cultivated to give to them to also love and cultivate, and that in particular is what we failed to do).   

    The mistake is in thinking that it stops there, that God is the God of nationalism. “Ism” meaning a reductive ideology, that our interests go no further and are for nothing further. That God gives us a home to love, and it is only for itself, that we develop and focus on it and love it first to do nothing but enjoy it second. And that, I think, is the mistake, and Jonah’s mistake. He was a faithful man who had his house in order, but who had no wish to share it or see it extended.    

    Jonah represents, perhaps, a kind of extreme. Someone who loves God and his faith, and who understandably resents those who are opposed to it. And he has that moment when he perceives, not that God could forgive his enemies (which he seems to have already been aware of) but that they might actually admit they were doing wrong and seek forgiveness if they were offered proper warning and the opportunity for it.

    I know that in my own life some of my greatest disappointments have been when I saw how people treated someone who had realized they were in the wrong and tried to repent. Instead of welcoming them and integrating them, they want to kick them, with the added strength of that person’s awakened conscience. Which shows that they don’t really care about the truth that much, or the person, because they would rather see the truth proved in punishment than in acceptance. They would rather see someone be crushed by the truth than see them bend to it.

    Jonah is a pious man who hates evil so much that he would rather see it be destroyed than redeemed, and for whom the outward vessels and icons of evil matter more than the eternal realities (which would be far more soundly defeated by being defeated within his enemies’ hearts than they would by being defeated as his enemies’ hearts). 

   So often the problem in life is that we want things simple. And we want God to be simple. Following God means caring about people in other countries and setting them in order. Following God means caring about your home and setting it in order. I think our mistake is that we think it’s either one or the other, or we get the appropriate order to tackle them in wrong. I think you preach from the assumption that people know that family and country are valuable and primary gifts and responsibilities, and you want to make sure that they don’t get stuck there. And that’s wonderful and very necessary. 

    But, as I said, I think some people take that tack because those assumptions are, in fact, crumbling around them and are under assault. They’re aren’t unassailable assumptions any more. They’re being told that it’s ungodly to have such concerns and loyalties. And I think more and more people these days take quite a reversed view of the world, of moral action being lodged in some wider abstract community, a faith that exists in pursuing causes at a distance from our own individual moral and family and community lives, that that’s what it means to follow God. And some people have seen the consequences of abandoning those more personal concerns, failing to “keep house”, and are sounding the alarm that the very strength and wealth we seek to give to others may be being squandered and lost at home and in misguided attempts at moral aggrandizement and intervention in the lives of others (which is often easier and showier than settling the problems in our own backyard).

    The issue, of course, isn’t that one is right and one is wrong. It’s that one is incomplete without the other, or one is baseless and weak without the other, and one can become extreme and misguided without the other. And I think the trend runs equally through both. Both are equally subject to perversion and subversion, because both are a kind of distortion of the heart of God.

   Is God the God of the world and all men, the God of the international, borderless brotherhood of humanity? Or is he the God of the individual, the family, the people, the nation, the independent church? And on what level does he prefer to greet us an deal with us? As abstractions, as collectives, as groups or societies, or as individual men and women and cities and families, people caught in a specific place and time? I think the answer must be, both. And if you argue either to the exclusion of (reduction to exclude) the other, you’re going to miss out. I also think if you try to subvert God’s order, the process of maturation, starting from the center as the basis (you, your life, your soul, your heart, your awareness, your relationship to God as an individual) and gradually working outward in circle after circle, each building on the strength of the one before it, you will also build an edifice that overreaches its own capabilities and forgoes its most essential responsibilities, that’s destined to fall and possibly bring you down with it.

   Afghanistan is perhaps another good example of this. America is left even weaker and more vulnerable, in many ways. The enemy we chased out is back, and more confident than ever in their victory, and armed with the strength and resources we left behind because we couldn’t sustain and protect them. I happen to have supported the war there myself. But I also believe we radically overestimated our ability to give or reproduce what we thought we had, or what it would take to truly make a change in such a place. We believed that we were on the side of the angels, and we thought that was enough. 

   Anyway, sorry for the long, wandering message. Brevity’s name is not mine, obviously. Thank you for tackling the minor prophets. I have always felt that much of the old testament misses the attention it deserves. Good luck with the rest of the series! And I hope that people will find it very helpful and instructive.