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By giving attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the book of Jonah, reading the first chapter beginning at the verse numbered 1. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.

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But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish, so he paid the fare and went on board to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. And the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the

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sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his God. And they threw the wares that were in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship, and had lain down, and was fast

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asleep. So the captain came and said to him, What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call upon your God. Perhaps the God will give a thought to us, that we do not perish.

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And they said to one another, Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah. Then they said to him, Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us.

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What is your occupation, and whence do you come? What is your country, and of what people are you? And he said to them, I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.

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Then the men were exceedingly afraid, and said to him, What is this that you have done? For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them. Then they said to him, What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?

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For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. He said to them, Take me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.

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Nevertheless, the men rode hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. Therefore they cried to the Lord, We beseech thee, O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for thou, O Lord, hast done as it pleased thee.

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So they took up Jonah and threw him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the

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fish three days and three nights. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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Amen. Some biblical scholars call Jonah the comic strip of the Old Testament, and there is a great deal of humorous hyperbole in it. But the intent of the book is very serious.

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In the proverbial nutshell, the story is this. God calls a man to service, and the man says no. That's not funny. That is cause for tears and for sad judgment.

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The entire story is told with a brilliant economy of words. The word Jonah means dove, and dove was the symbol for the nation of Israel. So the story is really about the nation of Israel being called to Nineveh to minister to the Ninevites and to bring them to repentance before God.

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Now Nineveh was a great city on the eastern banks of the Tigris River. It had been established by the Babylonians, but it was later taken over by the Assyrians. And using that as their base of operations, the Assyrians robbed and pillaged and burned and looted the cities and the villages of Israel.

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And now here was God calling to the Israelites and saying, "I want you to take my word to the Ninevites." And Israel, personified in Jonah, says, "No." And I see in this call and in this response a parable of our own time.

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For I believe that we are being called to Nineveh, and the Nineveh of this day is the inner city. The Nineveh of this time and of this place is the core of the great metropolises of America. And the Church as a whole is saying, "No."

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Jonah chose to go in a direction diametrically opposite to that in which the Lord called him. Instead of going to Nineveh East, he went to Tarshish, which was due west, in southern Spain.

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He was ready, you see, to become involved in this ministry, but not in the one to which he was called. Just so, the Church talks a great deal about missions, and it ought to, for the mission of the Church is one of its primary reasons for being.

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But we must remember that our mission is not only in Tarshish. Our mission is not only far away from where we are, in Afghanistan or Pakistan, in the Cameroon or in Ethiopia. Our mission is also right here in Nineveh, in the place where we live.

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Jesus called us to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth, but Jesus ministered as well in the very places where he lived and walked. He says that your ministry and your witness is to be in Jerusalem, that's at home, and in Judea and in Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth.

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The fact that we minister far away does not preclude our ministering at home. We are not to have our eyes exclusively on the horizon, but also on our own doorstep. Our tendency, however, has been to forget that counsel and to talk instead about Tarshish, about the mission that is far away and not the mission which is at hand.

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You see, it's very easy to discuss the problems that are being encountered and the spread of the gospel in Botswana land. It's a lot more difficult to go ten blocks up the street to where we have the highest infant mortality rate in all of America, higher than many other nations in the face of the

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earth, and to witness there in Nineveh. When we hear that kind of call, we have the tendency to answer, "Tell us, Lord, how are things in Tarshish?" And we offer excuses that oft times are very much like Jonah's.

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I suppose that one of the reasons that Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh was that he didn't understand the situation there. He'd never been there before. Now when you think about it, in terms of discipleship, that's irrelevant.

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When God gives us an assignment, it is not necessary that we understand every dimension upon it. We are called upon to be understanding in so much as we are called upon to be obedient. Ours is not to reason why.

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Ours is but to do and die. But the fact of the matter is that we do understand, to a certain degree at least, what's going on in our Nineveh. We've all had the experience of going to a restaurant and giving our name, having made

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a previous reservation, and being told there's no record of the reservation and therefore there's no place for us to sit. We've all had the experience of standing in the line in a hotel lobby and getting up to the desk and claiming our reservation only to discover that no reservation had been made.

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We know how awkward it is to suddenly find yourself without a place, how it makes you feel inept and embarrassed before others, and sometimes very angry. We know about that. And that's what's going on in Nineveh in America today.

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People are being told they have a place and yet no place is being given to them. Do you know if everyone in the United States lived as close together as people in our ghettos live, the entire population of our land could live on Manhattan Island in New York City. The Better Business Bureau testifies again and again that the greatest incidents of retail

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crime occur in the inner city where rich landlords living outside of the inner city cheat those to whom they sell their goods. Did you know that 70% of the housing in America today is utterly beyond the capacity of black people to afford?

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Do you know that black employment is twice as high now as it was 10 years ago? Are you aware of the fact that 40% of those who live in the black inner cities of our country have inadequate medical care and that the average black man lives seven years shorter lifespan than the average white man?

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The number of black youngsters going to college is declining. It's not hard to understand why. The figures are out. A black youth being graduated from college can anticipate a monthly salary $110 less

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than a white youth who goes to work never having even graduated from high school. 80% of the housing in our inner cities is now substandard. One study says that it would take 44 years in which to simply survey the conditions that presently exist there.

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I suppose that statistics like these are not familiar to everyone. To that degree, we can say we don't know what's going on in Nineveh. But there are other dimensions to the problem too. I think in general, white people make very little effort to understand black people.

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Most white folks don't know that when the Battle of Bunker Hill was being fought, there were blacks fighting side by side with other American colonists at that time against the British. When Putnam said, "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes," there were black

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soldiers under his command, 5,000 black men fought in the Revolution. 180,000 black men fought in the Civil War on the side of the North. When Farragut said in the Battle of New Orleans, "Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead," one of the men who heard him was a black man, John Lawson, who went on to win the Medal

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of Honor, the highest medal that this country awards. Since that time, 40 other blacks have won that award. Do we know that black people hold over 8,000 patents in America? When you pick up your telephone, the transmitter in it was designed by Granville Woods, a black

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man. The shoes that you're wearing were made on a machine invented by John Matsalegas, a black man. If you're being treated for glaucoma, the basis of that treatment came from the studies

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of Dr. Percy Julian, a black man. If you've ever had blood plasma during the process of surgery, the development of plasma, so essential in the winning of the Second World War, among other things, was by a black doctor, Charles Drew.

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The first operation on the human heart that was ever performed was by Dr. David Hale Williams, a black man. The principal contributor to rocket and jet fuel development in this country is Dr. Edward Harris, a black man.

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The electronic control panel, which directs the X-15, our most sophisticated fighter plane, was designed by Dr. Luther Price, a black man. Doctors like Lawrence and Hughes and Angelou, musicians like Wright and Handy and Marsalis and Ellington, athletes like Leonard and Owens and Aaron.

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Our United States government recognized that black people invented ice cream, the golf tee, potato chips, the traffic light that hangs in the middle of the street, the player piano, the gas mask, and the list could go on and on. Now, we may not know the statistics of the inner city, and we may not know incidents

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of black history. It's a tragedy that we do not know these things, but we may not know them. But we do know this, don't we? From driving by it, or if we have enough courage, driving through it, the conditions in Nineveh,

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in the core of this city, and at every major metropolis across America, are deplorable. I think this is so obvious that I say with a heavy heart this morning that I think the main reason that we don't want to go there is because we don't care about black people. You know, it's an interesting thing when you study the history of the church.

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You discover in almost every era and time that the church has had a kind of blind spot about one thing or another. Take a period like the medieval period. Will Durant calls that the age of faith.

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Adultery was commonly practiced then. Marriages were made for political and economic purposes only, and so adultery could be entered into for romantic purposes. Now the scriptures clearly teach that adultery is a sin, and yet the church was absolutely

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blind to that, and it was practiced everywhere without any complaint. Or take last century. In the last century, we began the great attack upon the environment here in America, and some aspects, some plants, some animals that were basic and indigenous to this glorious

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continent that God has given us have since been utterly destroyed. Utterly destroyed. Take the passenger pigeon. The last one died in 1914.

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That was the most common bird in America. Now they're gone. There's a terrible finality about that, friends. The Lord God Almighty fashioned in whatever purpose is his and whatever method is his

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this creature, and humankind destroyed it so that it will never exist again. And the blind spot in all of this is that most of these birds, and I'm using this as but a single example, were slain at religious revival meetings that were being held in the Midwest during the days of the development of the West.

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Now at that time, when the church was blind to the sin of adultery, it saw blacks as equal with whites. At that time, the very churchmen who were destroying the environment and not thinking about how God had put it into the care of humankind to be loved and nourished and utilized

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as well, those same people were fighting on the abolition side for the elimination of slavery in America. They understood the dreadful thing that it was. Now today, we stand square against adultery.

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Today, we are taking as a church a more and more aggressive posture with regard to environmental questions. But when it comes to the blacks, problems that were recognized then, well, many of us just don't seem to care.

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How can we read what the Bible says about love? And biblical love means loving those who are not always lovable in everything that they do. How can we read that and say we don't care?

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How can we read in the scriptures about salvation and understand that the word for salvation has two orbs? One has to do with spiritual wholeness and the other has to do with material wholeness so that salvation has not only to do with filling a man's mind and his heart but also

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with filling his belly as well. How can we take a Bible that has in it books like Amos and Isaiah and passages like the Sermon on the Mount? How can we worship a Jesus who will not turn away from a Samaritan woman, who will not

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turn away from a Roman oppressor who comes to him with his prayer, who will give attention to a Syrophoenician woman, who will listen with loving attention to the needs of a prostitute, and who will minister to a dying thief? How can we honor that kind of Jesus who teaches us in scripture that we are all members one

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of another and that if one suffers then all of God's children are suffering? How can we know that and not care about what's happening in our nemesis? Oh, I know what some people say and so do you. Some people say we are to be concerned with personal evangelism.

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After all, the poor you will always have with you. Well, Jesus certainly was personally evangelical and yet he aggressively ministered to the poor. And if you're not going to minister to the poor because they're always going to be around,

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then we better close every hospital because there are always going to be some people who are sick. And some people say that the ministry of the church is for each individual to carry on on his own or on her own.

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The church is not to act as a social force in the community. Where is our concept of communio sanctorum? I had a person say to me following worship a few weeks ago, "Why is it that you have a flag hanging in your gallery which has a swastika on it, a Nazi swastika?"

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I said, "Look at that swastika. It's X'd out and the flames of the love of God are burning it into nothingness." That represents the theological declaration of Barman. That represents the testimony of men like Albert Schweitzer who said that the only agency

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or institution that stood against Hitler and what Hitler stood for in Nazi Germany was the church. Are we to say that the church was wrong in so doing? I find it very strange that the same people who say that the church should not speak to

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social issues here are not opposed at all to what the church is standing for in Poland and how it is helping the breath of freedom to blow more in that place. To say we won't go because we don't care is to be disobedient by being loveless. The Bible says there is either Jew nor Greek.

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That eliminates all national and birth distinctions. The Bible says there is neither circumcised nor uncircumcised. That eliminates all religious distinctions within our Hebrew Christian tradition. The Bible says there are neither barbarians nor Scythians.

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That eliminates cultural differences. The Bible says there is neither slave nor free. That eliminates social and economic stratifications. The Bible says that Jesus Christ is all in all and one who is all in all is to be obeyed.

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If he says Nineveh, then we are to say, "Yea, Lord, Nineveh." The problem ultimately is, of course, that we lack the courage. The inner city is a very dangerous place. It is exploding with crime and disease and despair and death.

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Do you know that the principal cause of death to black young men in America between the ages of 20 and 35 is homicide? It shouldn't surprise us that there is such violence in the inner city. Our schools fail them, do not meet them at their point of need.

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Our welfare entitlement programs, fewer than 15% of the dollars given in our welfare programs go to people who are below the poverty level. We teach in this country that a person's worth is measured by their work. You work your way up.

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And then we will not employ the black woman or the black man. Should it surprise us then that violence escalates? Every fourth grader in America knows that we won our independence in a war, that we won the West with a six gun, that we won two of our states by defeating Mexico, that we

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preserved the Union by killing hundreds of thousands of one another, that we became a world power by the strength of our arms, that we alone of all the nations on the face of the earth have dropped an atomic weapon on people not once but twice. You only have to look at the movies we go to and the television shows that we are so

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anxious to see, to understand how violence is part of our tradition. I shall never forget being in Los Angeles at the time of the Watts riots. I was watching on television the face of a young black teenager. He said something which, when you first hear it, sounds so absurd as to be almost laughable.

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But when you think of the one who said it, that from which he came, that in which he lived, that which he endured, it's not so incredible at all. This young black man said, "We're fighting because you whites killed two-thirds of America's Indians and now you're out to get us."

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That's the root of the hostility that exists in the inner city. And the Protestant Church, as it has again and again, is running away. We ran when the Irish came. We ran when the Italians came.

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We ran when the Polish came. We ran when the Central Europeans came. And we're running now. More and more churches moving away from Nineveh.

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This church, thanks be to God, vowed 80 years ago that it would stay in the inner city. And we are doing some good things here. We are engaged in the rebuilding of housing in the ghetto, giving some pride and ownership. We are engaged in the friendship education program, remedial education for black students

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that are having difficulties in school. We support presbytery causes that are being carried out in the black inner city areas of our town. We have our Boys Club.

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We have our Girls Club that are almost entirely utilized by young black girls and boys. But we must do a lot more. Because you see, very few of us are personally involved. We exercise our power through a check or a voted presbytery or some words from a pulpit

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on a Sunday morning. But not many of us are there working with the Christian blacks and with other Christian whites who are laboring to serve Christ in our Nineveh. You know, I can remember as a very small boy, only nine years old, reading about Japanese

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kamikaze pilots. You remember, they were the best pilots they had. They went through all kinds of religious dedication services. They were honored.

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And then they climbed into their airplanes and flew suicidal missions, crashing themselves and their planes into the sides of American naval ships. And I remember recalling that in the early days of the Vietnam War. Because if you will recall, there were Buddhist monks then who were incinerating themselves.

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They would cover themselves with gasoline and light themselves aflame. And as I read that, I noticed that only the most spiritually sophisticated monks were permitted to do this. And they entered into special religious preparation.

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And their friends surrounded them so that once they were ignited, nobody could get in to put out the flames. And they administered to them, even as they were dying, medicines that would to a certain degree alleviate the pain.

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And after the deceased had come, they would carry the remains of these people in honored procession. And I thought of those kamikaze, those Shintoists. And I thought of those Buddhists in those little lands in Southeast Asia.

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Very recently, when in Iran, we have young Muslim men driving trucks full of explosives into American embassies or into American military installations. Birds laying down their lives for-- [AUDIO OUT]

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--faith teaches them. I don't subscribe to that kind of thing. The scriptures of our faith hold up life before death, nonviolence always before violence. But when I see the dedication of these people, I have to say to myself, we are called to

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a cross. Jesus said, "Whosoever would be my disciple must take up his cross daily and follow me." And I think the way of the cross for us today leads right through the heart of our inner cities.

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The gospel is the only thing-- not the government. The gospel is the only thing-- not social agencies. The gospel is the only thing that is strong enough to go and to endure and to win in that kind of place.

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In God's providence, it has fallen to the church in our day to take up this ministry. It is a crisis ministry and a ministry of great cost. But my sisters and brothers in Christ, we're either going to march together under this flag or we're going to watch the stars fall out of that one.

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We must go and we must do. Or if we do not, Nineveh will rise up to judge us. Our Lord Jesus Christ only mentioned Nineveh once. At least only one reference to it is noted in Scripture.

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He was speaking to the Pharisees and he was speaking about his own person and his own power and of what he would do in the world through those that were his. And when the Pharisees scorned his counsel, he said, "The men of Nineveh will arise with this generation and they will condemn it."

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I pray that that will not be true of us, that we will not miss God's call to mission around the world and also on our own doorstep. The question is, have we nerve enough for Nineveh? Let us pray.

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Oh God, these are hard words. Hard to say. Hard to hear. Hard to heed.

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Grant that we might love each other enough to be strong in our ministry to the world's unloved. May we be so filled and persuaded by the power of Jesus Christ living in us that we will be afraid no more of Nineveh, but we will go there and with a knife to our throats still

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sing the precious name for whose sake we pray. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]