Second Chances: Dangerous Opportunities

"Second Chances:  Dangerous Opportunities"
Jonah 3:1-4

In his sensitive novel, The Fall, the French writer Albert Camus described a man who faced a crisis.  The man had wandered into a bar in Amsterdam, making his confession to a bartender, hoping for some alcohol laced absolution from his crisis.  The bartender listened attentively to the painful confession:

That particular night in November, I was returning to the West Bank.  It was past midnight, a rainy mist was falling and there were a few people on the street.  On the bridge, I passed behind a figure leaning over the railing and seeming to stare at the river.  On closer view I made out a slim, young woman dressed in black...I went on after a moments hesitation.  I had gone some 50 yards when I hear the sound—which despite the distance seemed dreadfully loud in the midnight silence—a body striking the water.  I stopped without turning around.  Almost at once I heard a cry for help, which was repeated several times; then it ceased.  The silence seemed interminable.  I wanted to run, and yet did not stir.  I told myself I had to be quick and then an irresistible weakness settled over me.  “Too late; too far,” I told myself.  Then, slowly, under the rain, I went away.  I informed no one.

On the last page of the novel, the man returned to the scene of the event that had been the greatest crisis in his life, and cried out into the night and to the river below:

O young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us!

That’s the trouble with the crises’ we face in life:  we never seem to get a second chance.  Words we speak can’t be stuffed back into our mouths to be spoken again, differently.  Actions can’t be done over.  Inaction can’t be turned into action in order to rectify certain consequences.  Deeds done are done deeds.

As I recently heard one speaker say, “I only have seen the world spin in the opposite direction, thus reversing time, once.  That was in the movie Superman II when Superman flew around the world the wrong way real fast.  And that was just a movie.”

None of us ever get to go backwards in order to re-do an action, re-make a decision, or re-speak certain words.  We may wish to do that with all our hearts, but all the wishing will not make it so.  What we did is what we did.  Period.

Even though we can’t go back and re-do what we did, we can go forward and try again.  We can go forward and make a new decision, a new choice, take a new action.

There are times when those opportunities come along.  We get belched up out of the stinking mess we had gotten ourselves into and we face the possibility of a new chance.  That is the opportunity side of any crisis.  It may also be the danger side, if we continue to make harmful decisions and take hurtful actions, or just do nothing at all.

Jonah was fortunate in his crisis in that he was dealing with God.  God was going to give Jonah a second chance.  My beliefs about God tell me that most second, third, and fourth chances are made available to us by God.  Whether we realize it or not.

God was not going to take the crisis away from Jonah, seeing as how Jonah didn’t want to have any part of it in the first place.  God was gracious.  But Jonah’s second chance still was the challenge to preach against the wickedness of that “great city Ninevah.”  Jonah still had to face it.

What God was asking Jonah to do was not easy.  God was giving Jonah a second chance, yes, but God didn’t jerk Jonah out of the whale, pick him up out of the whale barf, wipe him off, and say, “Poor, poor boy; I won’t ask you to do that horrible thing I asked you to do again.  I’m so sorry I upset you so much.”

Instead, God did pick Jonah up, set him on his feet, and said, “Go get yourself hosed off, and I’ll meet you back at square one.  Then we’ll start this all over again and see what happens this time.”

Jonah did as God said.  Got himself back to “go,” got the same instructions for how the game was supposed to be played.  This time, Jonah decided to play by the rules.  Those are the kinds of second chances God provides us, testing, as it were, our levels of courage and willingness to accept an opportunity from God, even if it might be dangerous or risky.

In that way, Jonah found himself in a long line of people God had dealt with in a similar way.

You will remember Moses, asked by God to go back to Egypt, after Moses had killed an Egyptian soldier.  God asked Moses to go back, face the most powerful leader in the known world, and demand from Pharaoh the release of all the Hebrew slaves.

You will remember Abraham, who faced a double barreled summons from God.  One barrel was to leave his family and homeland to go to a place that would be shown him, wherever that was.  He was to leave his family and everything that defined stability for him and move out toward a very destabilizing and unknown future.

The second barrel for Abraham, as you will remember, was the utterly astonishing request from God that Abraham take his son Issac to a nearby mountain top and burn him alive as a sacrifice to God.  Which Abraham almost did before God blew out the match, so-to-speak.

You will remember Saul, who became Israel’s first king.  He was wandering around the countryside looking for his father’s lost donkeys.  Up comes this weird old man, the prophet Samuel (whom we met in last week’s sermon as a seven year old boy in the Temple) who began pouring olive oil on Saul’s head.  Then Samuel said, “You are king over all Israel.”  What was Saul supposed to do?  Go home and tell his daddy, “I’m the king!”?  And where is Saul supposed to go?  There’s no capital.  No government.  No precedent for what kind of leadership he’s supposed to enact.  Saul was the first.  God, through Samuel, made Saul king and said, essentially, “Go to it!”  But go to what?

Are you beginning to see a pattern of how God does things?  Both in first and second chances?  There are so many who could be mentioned:  Joseph, Jeremiah, Job, Elijah, David, Paul, you and I.  What is God looking for in all of these stories that can’t be summed up in some kind of second chance courage?

Courage is the drive that makes second chances full of opportunity.  Courage is what makes a person get up after they’ve fallen on their face and, given the opportunity by God, try again.  It doesn’t take courage to make the same bad decision, to live old dysfunctional patters over and over again.  It doesn’t take courage to do something that has no risk in it.  No danger.  No opportunity.

There is an African tribal story about how one young warrior bragged, “I’m not afraid of anything.  Once I even cut off a lion’s tail with my short-bladed knife.”
One of the tribes elders asked, “Why did not you cut off the lion’s head?”
The warrior looked around at the other elders, and with a sheepish tone said, “Because someone else had already cut it off.”

Courage means facing the dangerous opportunities—the second, third, or fourth chances that God provides for us and running with them.  Usually it means facing lions that still have their heads on, and are very much alive.

“Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.  ‘Go to that great city of Ninevah and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.’”

The request of God to Jonah was clear.
Go to Ninevah, that capital of the Assyrian Empire, the greatest city in the world.
Go to Ninevah, that city of unsurpassed magnificence and beauty.
Go to Ninevah, that city full of temples, and royal palaces, and political power, and engineering wonders.
Go to Ninevah, that city with some of the most learned people, who study at one of the world’s greatest libraries.
Go to Ninevah, Jonah, and tell those people, as great as they think they are, they’re messed up.  As much as they live with everything else there is to have in the world, they aren’t living with me.
Go to Ninevah and tell them as religious as they think they are, there is only one God, and I am that God.  Tell them this, one God has expectations for their lifestyle choices, that those expectations are being frustrated by their faithless selfishness.
Go, Jonah; go to Ninevah and speak loud and clear.  You have a second chance.  Let’s see what you can do this time.

Now, tell me that wouldn’t take some courage.  I know that courage, in our country, in our culture, seems to be in short supply these days.  But the lions we face are put there by God.  God does that because God wants us to get a sense of what we are capable of doing.

But more importantly, God wants us to see what God can do through us as we face the lion-sized crises together.  Aren’t we tired of just cutting the tails off of lions that have already been beheaded?  Don’t we desire, deep down, for another chance to stand up to the lions we face, the challenges of second chances that God brings our way, and say, “Come on.  Come on!  Let’s see what the Lord and I can do!”