River Road Church Baptist

January 22, 2006
Dr. Michael J. Clingenpeel

“The Color of Water ”

The Jewish writer and teacher, Eli Wiesel, once said that “Jonah is the perfect illustration of the antihero, having been a complete failure all of his life and in all his endeavors.”

The Hebrew Bible lesson for our lectionary today is from the Book of Jonah. It is about this man who is the perfect antihero. God called Jonah to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh. Jonah resisted. Flatly refused would be a better term.

The Ninevites were the natural adversaries of Israel then just as their descendants, the Iraqis, are now. Jonah was pleased, delighted that the Ninevites were to be the recipients of the judgment of God. So Jonah makes an attempt to evade the purposes of God. He books passage on a ship that is headed west on the Mediterranean rather than with a caravan heading east across the desert toward Nineveh. A storm, you recall, strikes the ship, the crew has a hasty meeting. In order to appease the gods of the sea and storm, they decide to throw Jonah overboard, whereupon Jonah is swallowed, according to Scripture, by a big fish.

This particular detail in this story has prompted an unsolvable debate within the biblical literalists and those who are not biblical literalists: does a fish have a mouth sufficiently large to swallow a human being whole? Could a human being survive in the belly of a fish for three days and three nights? The 19 th century Episcopal clergyman, Philips Brooks, said it posed no problem for him to believe in the accuracy of the story, after all Jonah was one of the minor prophets.

In any event in the story you recall that the fish coughs up this now stinking and contrite prophet, and Jonah heads for Nineveh, although somewhat halfheartedly. He strolls through the city streets shouting the threat of destruction in forty days. And much to his shock that very day the entire city of Nineveh repents - 39 days prior to the deadline of God.

Jonah’s success upsets him more than had he failed. He could not abide the thought of God showing compassion on one of the Hebrew’s bitterest enemies. Frustrated, Jonah goes outside of the city gates and pouts. How could he tolerate a world where both Jew and non-Jew were equally loved by God? A vine grows over his head and eventually it dies and when it dies Jonah mourns the death of the vine, more concerned about the dried up vine than over the potential loss of 120,000 of God’s children, the Ninevites.

Comparing Jonah with some of the prophets who initially said no to the call of God but eventually said yes, Wiesel says, “Jonah is the first and the only one to reject his mission not only in words but also in deed. He is the perfect illustration of the antihero in Scripture”.

What does this curious prophet and story say to us? Is it only a reminder that we cannot hide from God no matter how we try in our life? Is it simply a statement about the deliverance of God for all people? Or is it something more?

It seems to me that here we have a sharp contrast between human love on the one hand and divine love on the other, between human discrimination and divine inclusion.

Let’s begin by looking at human love which often is exclusive and narrow. Jonah declares to those upon the ship that he is a Hebrew - that his faith calls upon him to fear the Lord - that he is taught always to recognize that God is the creator. Unfortunately, though he sees it all as created by God, even people of faith may act selectively or with discrimination towards other people who are different. Jonah certainly did.

Two afternoons every week when I was in elementary school, I rode a city bus from the suburbs downtown to a doctor’s office where I received injections for allergies. It was always late afternoon by the time I boarded the bus. I would take the front seats - you know, the ones that are facing each other - so that I could position myself to see the driver shifting the gears, moving the pedals. And as I sat there I watched the people who boarded the bus. Most of the riders in those days were domestic workers who had completed their day’s employment out in the suburbs and were returning to the city where they lived. As each one climbed the stairs and dropped her token into the fare receptacle, the driver of the bus spoke a phrase I will never forget. “Back of the bus, please”, he said. That scene played itself over and over and over again in front of my 8- or 9-year old eyes. And what I do not forget is that the word he spoke, “please”, was never spoken as a request but always as a command. Not once did the driver look the women in the eye when he spoke to them.

Now, even to a white boy growing up in quiet acceptance of what was a segregated culture, I intuitively understood that it is only in the economy of human prejudice that their bus token did not buy for them the same seat that my bus token bought for me. We would like to believe that that kind of prejudice based on color of skin or gender or social class or economic capacity no longer exists in our society. But even if it did not, what endures is a deep flaw in the human heart that renders human beings as narrow and selective.

Jonah is the patron saint of the prejudiced. He is the antihero. He is the example in Scripture of how not to act toward other people. He could not excuse his calculating indifference toward the Ninevites on being a child or not being able to understand what God expected of him. Like Dr. Seuss’ proverbial Grinch, Jonah’s heart was several sizes too small, too small to include a group of people who are very different from himself. He reserved his compassion for people of his own kind. He doled out his love reluctantly and then, when the Ninevites repented, he was sorry.

Human love always seems to take into consideration things like color of skin, ethnic background, street address and dozens of other factors that God never considers very important.

But contrast that - the narrowness of Jonah’s attitude - with God’s limitless love for the people of Nineveh. Jonah was peevish and sulky. But when you think about it, his theology was not all that off base. When he spoke to God he said, “Lord, I know that you are a gracious God and merciful and slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”. With his mind Jonah thought the right things about God. The problem was with the way he acted towards others. Jonah’s living did not keep up with the nobility of his theology. He was incensed when the Ninevites repented. Yet God was thrilled because Nineveh was as much God’s people as the Hebrews. Let me use the contemporary geography here: Iraq is as much God’s people as Israel, as the United States is. God is the God of all people and all nations.

Ruth McBride Jordan was the daughter of a Jewish rabbi. She and her family moved to Suffolk, Virginia, when she was only two years old. She described her father as an abusive man and because of that she left her home in her teens and moved to New York City where she married a black, Baptist preacher in Brooklyn. She converted to become a Baptist. Together they founded the New Brown Memorial Baptist Church. She bore 12 children, outlived two husbands, raised a dozen black children as a single white mother in Brooklyn and every one of them obtained a college education.

One of the children, James McBride, wrote a tribute to his mother that was published several years ago. In it he describes a day on which he and his mother were walking home from church. James asked his mother whether God was black or white. “Oh boy”, she said, “God’s not black and God’s not white. God is a spirit”. He persisted. “Well then which does he like better? Does he like black people better or white people better?” “Well, son, he loves all people. He’s a spirit.” “Mom, what’s a spirit?” “Son, a spirit, well, a spirit’s a spirit.” Obviously James McBride had learned his journalistic lessons well. “Well, Mom, what color is God’s spirit?” asked James. “God’s spirit doesn’t have a color, son”, she said. “God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.”

God is the color of water. God loves all people generously. God is neither black nor white, American or Iraqi or Israeli. God is the color of water. God loves Israelites. God loves Ninevites. God is a spirit.

But God gave us a glimpse into God’s character by the sending of a son whom we know as Jesus. So what is God like? God is like Jesus. God is everything Jesus is. Jesus told a parable about a Samaritan who came to the aid of a Jew. Jesus drew water for a woman who was a Samaritan. Jesus came and forgave a thief who was on the cross. Jesus is love. We see that in the life and ministry of Jesus.

Therefore we know that God is love. God had high expectations for Jonah understanding this and living this. Jonah understood the kind of God that he feared and God has pretty high expectations for you and me in the same area, because you and I understand precisely the kind of savior that Jesus is – a loving savior.

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book Gospel Medicine writes, “In case you haven’t noticed, Christianity is a religion in which the sinners have all of the advantages. They can step on your feet fifty times and you’re supposed to keep smiling. They can talk bad about you every time you leave the room and it’s your job to excuse them without any thought of getting even. The burden is on you. Because you have been forgiven yourself, God expects you to do unto others as God has done unto you.”

While I was working on my doctorate in Louisville, Kentucky, I spent one summer as a teaching assistant for Dr. Thomas Kilgore, then pastor of a church in Los Angeles, California. He was a visiting professor to the seminary teaching in the area of the black church. Dr. Kilgore had been president of the American Baptist Convention, but long before that he was a leader in the civil rights movement. When he was student at Morehouse College in Atlanta he used to eat lunch every Sunday with Martin Luther King and bounce on his knee Martin Luther King, Jr.

I spent many hours with Dr. Kilgore, and one afternoon he told me a remarkable story from his childhood. When he was 15 years old, he worked as a waiter and a dishwasher in a boarding house in a small North Carolina town where he was raised. One afternoon he borrowed a friend’s car, and he and a couple of girls went for a ride. They stopped outside of town, got out of the car and a moment later the sheriff of the town along with a couple of deputies drove up and accused Kilgore of shouting profanities at a white woman whom they had passed a few moments before. He denied the charge. Nevertheless, he was arrested. Handcuffs were placed on his hands, he was tossed into the police car, driven into town, and booked for assault with abusive language. The sheriff, a man named Woods, tried to extract a confession out of Kilgore but he was unsuccessful. Kilgore was tried. He was convicted on the testimony of the sheriff alone and sentenced to six months on a chain gang. Kilgore’s lawyer appealed the verdict, saying that his client, fifteen years old, should not serve an adult sentence. The judge listened and said, “If you will leave this county for the next year, then I will not make you serve the sentence on the chain gang.” So together, Kilgore and his family moved out of the county into Asheville, North Carolina.


Kilgore told me that in the years following he felt bitterness toward Sheriff Woods, but he decided the only way he could work his way through that bitterness was to pray for Sheriff Woods. And so he began to pray for him on a daily basis. Years later Kilgore told me he returned to his hometown. As he was driving down the street he looked over and sitting on a crate in front of a store was the sheriff, now old and dying. Kilgore got out of his car, walked over, introduced himself to the sheriff, reminded him of the incident and then said, “I want you to know that I love you and I forgive you”.

How could he do that? How could he do that after all of those years? John has the answer: “We love because God first loved us”. Our society cannot change the human heart, only God can. And the God who can do that for Thomas Kilgore and for you and for me is the color of water. But God is more than the color of water. He is the fountain of living waters, and only when you drink from that inexhaustible supply of God’s living grace will you be able to see with God’s eyes and love with God’s heart.

May we pray: Thank you, O God, for Jonah, not because he was always good or because he always did what you asked him to, but because from him we learn bitterly the importance of your love, a love which we mirror in the way we treat other people. We pray, O God, that our love would be broad and deep and filled with the kind of compassion demonstrated by the love of our Lord in whose name we pray. Amen.


MC; lmk, mt