Text:  Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:14-20                                                              W 3^rd Sunday after Epiphany

An Irrational Fear

            In the name of him who comes to us wherever we are and bids us to follow him, dear friends in Christ:  The other day I was looking over a list of the so-called phobias:  you know, those irrational fears that affect otherwise completely sane and normal people and that cause them to simply go to pieces when faced by whatever it is that pushes their panic button?  I’m sure you’re familiar with ones like claustrophobia, which is the fear of confined spaces; and acrophobia, the fear of heights.  Maybe you’ve heard of xenophobia, which is the fear of strangers.  And I don’t know, maybe some of you suffer from them.  I’ll bet too that most of you have heard of arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, because they made a film called that a number of years ago; but I’ll wager that you’re not too familiar with some other common phobias whose names are less well known.  Let’s take a little quiz:  Who knows what lygophobia is? (Fear of the dark.)  How about muriphobia?  (Fear of mice.)  Or ophidiophobia?  (Fear of snakes.)

Believe it or not, there is a thing called euphobia, which is the fear of hearing good news.  That would be a tough one. Imagine:  there’s a knock at the door, and you find yourself in a panic:  “Oh no!  It’s probably the Prize Patrol wanting to give me a check for ten million dollars!  Oh, what am I going to do?  No, wait! Whew!  Everything’s okay:  it’s just the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

            I suspect I’m not alone in this, but my wife accuses me of having agoraphobia, which (among other things) is the fear of going shopping.  I deny this, of course.  It’s more accurate to say that what I’ve got is peniaphobia which is the fear of going broke.  I suffer from it especially when she goes shopping.  My favorite item on the list was hippotomonstrosesquippedaliaphobia, which (and no, I’m not making this up) is the fear of long words.  Whoever thought that one up really had a sick sense of humor.  Imagine being the psychiatrist who has to tell his patient, “The good news is that I have diagnosed your problem; the bad news is that if I tell you what it is, it will very likely scare you to death.”

            Of course, not all phobias are entirely irrational.  In fact, as I looked over the list, I saw that there were a few that I wish were a bit more common, especially among members of the church.  For example, there is hamartophobia, which is the fear of sinning.  Closely related is hadephobia:  the fear of hell.  Would that we all had a greater sense of these fears (and yes, I know that the terms actually refer to unhealthy obsessions with such things, which would not be good … still, a bit more concern wouldn’t hurt).  Unfortunately, I’ve found that in the church we are more likely to be plagued with sophophobia, the fear of learning, and homilophobia, which is the fear of sermons.  I got to thinking that the latter one would be especially serious if you were a preacher who had it.  It could be very career limiting … but then again, on second thought, it might make you more popular, especially if most of the people in the congregation had it too. (And by the way, don’t even ask what the fear of long sermons is; that would probably be a whole sermon in itself.)

            Okay, that was a little bit of fun; but you’re probably wondering where I am going with all this.  As we’ve been seeing again in the past couple weeks, perhaps the greatest theme of the Epiphany season is that of the light of Christ shining into dark places.  It all starts at Christmas when he who is the Light of the World makes his first appearance in a dark Bethlehem stable.  Then shepherds in the night are directed to him by the sudden appearance of bright heavenly visitors.  Then come the eastern sages who are led to him by the light of a star.  By steps and degrees then, the Light spreads and encompasses ever more people in its radius.  And by that continuing expansion, each of us too has been brought into the Light of Christ.  It came to us shining brightly through his Word … his Word that for most of us was first spoken in Baptism by which the Holy Spirit illumined our hearts and minds with the Light of Christ and through it gave us the gift of faith in him.  But whether it came to us as infants or later in life, it’s important that we see that we were the people sitting in darkness upon whom God’s glorious Light in Christ came, and through it we have received the forgiveness of our sins, peace with God, and eternal life.

And now that we have this Light we are instructed not to hide it, but to let it shine forth in our actions, that is, our acts of love for others; and in what we say. To be more specific, in what we all know as the Great Commission, our Lord Jesus has tasked each of us who have his Light to make disciples of the people we encounter by sharing the saving truths of his Gospel with them.  We who have the Light are to use it to illumine others.

            And therein lies the problem.  It seems that for most Christians there is nothing more likely to send the heart to palpitating, the stomach to churning, the knees to knocking, and the hands to trembling as the prospect of telling someone else about God’s great plan of salvation by faith in the Lord Jesus.  Even the bravest and boldest among us can instantly be reduced to a quivering mound of Jell-O at the mere thought of it.  And so, I think that it’s accurate to say that with respect to the Gospel, God’s message of salvation through his Son who suffered and died for us, most of us have laliophobia:  the fear of speaking.  And to give a more precise diagnosis, since most of don’t mind talking about other things, what we have is evangelistic laliophobia:  an overwhelming fear of sharing the good news that brought us out of darkness and into the Light.

            Why is that?  Well, we have lots of reasons, don’t we?  Let’s see:  we don’t want to be confrontational, we don’t want to be made fun of, we don’t want to be embarrassed, we don’t want to alienate our friends or relatives, and we don’t want to be thought of as religious fanatics.  Beyond that, since we know matters of faith are intensely personal, we don’t want to impose our views where they are not welcome.  We also fear messing it up and saying something wrong – though in most cases not enough to bother to learn how to say it right. But above all we fear rejection.  We’re afraid that despite our best intentions and deepest sincerity our words of God’s grace when spoken will just sort of hang in an uncomfortable silence and be refused.

Now, there may be more reasons and excuses for our fears, but I think I’ve hit most of them.  My goal this morning is to show that not only are such fears sinful because they stand in the way of us actually doing a vitally important task our Lord has assigned to us all; but that they really are irrational and unreasonable fears.  And to show it, we’ll do well to spend some time learning from the Old Testament prophet Jonah, a man who, when commanded by God, also displayed an irrational fear of speaking.

            At first glance, however, we might conclude that Jonah had good reason to be afraid. The Lord sent him to preach to the people in the city of Nineveh, which was the capital of the Assyrian Empire.  You might think of the Assyrians as the Nazis of their day. They were a people who worked hard to earn a reputation as the most violent, cruel, and unforgiving conquerors imaginable.  They believed in keeping the nations they captured in subjection by sheer terror, and they delighted in finding ways to enhance their renown for brutality.  They figured that if the nations they enslaved were too afraid of them to even think about rebellion, it would make their jobs as conquerors that much easier.  Without going into the gruesome details, let’s just say that very successful.  They also believed that their many gods were powerful and that they had given them victory over all the other nations.  They thought the gods of the people they conquered must be a weak and pathetic lot to allow their people to fall subject to so cruel an adversary as themselves.  So:  prideful, mean, vicious, feeling superior to everyone, and all the evidence seeming to support their points of view—these were the people Jonah was supposed to go talk to.

And it’s kind of hard to come up with a contemporary illustration for us that fits since we enjoy living in the one nation with superpower status, which is what Assyria was back then; but I’ll try.  We know that Iran is ruled today by Islamic extremists who believe that our country is the source of all the world’s evils. Hardly a day goes by when there isn’t a state sponsored protest that involves burning the American flag and/or effigies of our President while huge crowds of people shake their fists and yell “Death to the great Satan!” (meaning us, of course).  So, imagine how you’d feel if tomorrow the Lord said to you, “I’d like you to go to Teheran and walk up and down the streets of the city telling those people to shape up.  Tell them that I, the God of the Christians, am angry with them and their worthless devotion to their false god Allah.  Tell them that I’m about to turn them all into toast unless they repent of their wicked ways and turn to me with repentant hearts”.  Quick show of hands:  who’d like to sign up for that mission trip?  But that’s pretty much what the Lord told Jonah to do.

So, like I said, it would appear that he had good reason to be fearful.  But it may surprise you to know that Jonah was not at all afraid of the dangers he would face or what might happen to him.  He wasn’t afraid of the Assyrians.  Nor was he afraid of rejection or ridicule.  No, Jonah was afraid of success.  He was afraid of being heard and believed.  You see, Jonah understood something that for the most part we don’t grasp very well. Jonah understood that God works through his Word to accomplish his will.  Jonah knew that God’s Word is powerful in and of itself.  He knew that when spoken, God’s Word changes things; and he believed in the power of the Word (not his own eloquence or ability to speak) to change the hard and loveless hearts of the people of Nineveh. As we sang in the first hymn, Jonah knew that if he spoke as the Lord had instructed him, that God’s Word would “cleave the darkness” in their hearts and bring the divine Light of his truth to them.  And Jonah didn’t want that to happen.  Like a lot of people in his day, he hated the Assyrians in general and the Ninevites in particular.  He wanted the Lord to destroy them.  He knew that if he went and did as God asked, that they’d believe and repent and turn to the Lord, and that as a result, the Lord would turn from his anger and spare them. Yes, a man with a real heart of an evangelist, that Jonah … but at least he understood the power of God’s Word.

            We see the same thing evident in this morning’s Gospel reading.  At first glance it seems to be a lesson about the amazing faithfulness of the disciples who leave behind all their worldly possessions, their families and their businesses, their future hopes and dreams, to follow after the Lord Jesus, who, at this point, they know very little about. The lesson usually serves as a departure point for a sermon about how we too need to be ready and willing to leave it all behind to follow Jesus.  Unfortunately, such a message misses the whole point of the story.  I mean, who does that?  Who leaves it all behind to follow Jesus?  Do you?  Have you? But did you notice how no one tells Jesus, “No.  We’ve got too much work to do.  Come back tomorrow, maybe”?  Or that no one says to him, “Look, we’re two brothers running the family business and their lives depend on us.  Tell you what, I’ll go with you; but let my brother stay behind and keep things going”? Rather odd isn’t it, that he asks four busy people to drop what they’re doing and follow and all four of them just get up and walk away with him?  You see, the story isn’t about their great faithfulness; but rather it’s about the power of God’s Word that changes their hearts, reorders their priorities, and instills trust and confidence in God’s gracious care in a future not yet seen so that they can step out boldly in faith and without fear.  The story is about the power of God’s Word.

And Jonah believed in that power; the trouble was that he didn’t apply what he believed about it to himself. He knew that it would change the Ninevites; but it didn’t occur to him that the same Word had to power to change him. Consequently, he had to learn the hard way.  So, when he fled in a ship, the Lord spoke and a storm came and threatened the life of everyone aboard.  When the sailors cast lots to decide who was the cause of their troubles, the Lord spoke and the lot fell on Jonah.  When the sailors cast him into the sea, the Lord spoke again and the tempest subsided. Then the Lord spoke again and commanded a great fish he had prepared to swallow Jonah up.  And that’s where Jonah stayed for three days, inside the stinking belly of that fish, learning the lesson that when God speaks to whatever, be it to wind and waves, to dice, to fish, or to his people, the things he wants to accomplish happen.  And, though it took some time, Jonah learned the lesson.  We know it because as our text begins, the second time the Word of the Lord came to Jonah, he obeyed.

Okay, there’re two quick applications in all this that I’d like to make.  First, as I’ve already indicated, we too have the command of the Lord to speak his saving Word to people who need to hear it.  And as we’ve seen, the Lord is serious about this. Let it not be that through our fear and reluctance to obey that, like Jonah, we find ourselves in the middle of one of the Lord’s very convincing (and may I say creative) lessons about how he means business.  I mean, if we should be afraid of anything, it should be not be of speaking; but of not doing what he commands.

Secondly, and perhaps more to the point, is that we redirect our focus to the power of God’s Word and to the way in which he uses it.  When God looked from heaven and saw what the evil the Ninevites were up to, he didn’t send a disaster to destroy them; he sent a prophet to call them to repentance. When God’s prophet failed to obey him, he didn’t strike him down dead.  He used his Word to produce the force necessary to win him back.  The point is that God uses his powerful Word to rescue people from sin and induct them into his grace and favor.  He uses it to turn them from their rebellion and to communicate to them his forgiveness and his love.  He uses his Word to bring people from darkness into Light.

The story of Jonah shows us that the Lord is far more loving and forgiving to sinners than the prophet he sends to them to speak his Word.  Jonah’s heart was filled with hatred, not love – that’s why he didn’t want to go. And while it’s easy for us to condemn him, the fact is that the reason we don’t like to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with others is because there is no love to be found for others in our hearts.  Such love as we have is directed only to ourselves.  That’s why we fear speaking.  The question is, “What will happen to me if I do?”  That’s where our priorities lie.  And such self-love is the very essence of sin.  A better question, the loving question to ask, is “What will happen to them if I don’t speak?  What will happen to them if they never hear of God’s love for them in the Savior?”

            The story of Jonah also shows us how the Lord worked through his Word to instill love for others in the heart of his wayward prophet.  The story continues today in the lives of each of us.  Even now, the Lord is using Jonah’s story to show us where we have failed to love others by not speaking God’s powerful Word to them when we were given opportunity.  He’s showing us that we let self-love and fear obstruct his plan for our lives.  But recalling that the Lord dealt with Jonah with grace and forgiveness reminds us that he deals with us the same way for Christ’s sake.  And through his forgiveness in his Son who loved us and gave himself for us, we too are filled with the Light of his love – perfect love that casts out all fear (especially the irrational kind), and that gives us the boldness to follow him and to declare the wonders of his love to those who so desperately need to hear.  He’s given us Light and Life in Christ Jesus the Son.  May he make us fearless to shine forth with and share them, in his holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!