August 03, 2025
• Rev. Dr. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
August 3, 2025
Faith in the Real World
Reclaiming the Church’s Prophetic Voice:
On Hate
Jonah
Normally we do a two-week series at this time called Faith in the Real World. We invite guest speakers, usually people of recognition, to share about what living their faith means to them. This year we are mixing it up a bit. We are going to spend the month thinking about what means for us to live our faith. Three of the weeks will be sermons and two of the Sundays, August 17 and 31, will feature guests who will help us think about how ways we can live out these sermons.
As a biblical source for considering these topics we’re going to use three of the minor prophets. Minor prophets were understood apart from the…Major Prophets. There are four major prophets in the Old Testament: Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Daniel, and then there are 12 minor prophets. Now they are not called minor because their messages are less important, but because of the difference in the lengths of writings. If the book of a prophet required more than one scroll, that book was called a Major Prophet. If the writing could all be included in one scroll it was a Minor Prophet.
Prophets served a critical role in the life of the nation. They weren’t so much predictors of the future as they were interpreters of the times slide: Prophets interpreted the times. They addressed the issues going on in the world and what God says about them. So we are going to let the prophets speak to issues in our world today.
I heard about a bumper sticker recently that said, “If you aren’t totally appalled you haven’t been paying attention.” There is a lot of appalling stuff happening in our world, and while the church is called to be pastoral in helping people get through challenges, the church is also called to be prophetic in addressing what should be done about these challenges. So we are going to talk about three of the major challenges to the health and welfare of our society right now: hate, fear and greed (words appear one at a time and then reverse back to greed only), and we begin today with hate.
Hate is on the rise. Three few years ago the FBI reported that hate crimes have been increasing annually by roughly 10 percent. We see this regularly in the news: racial hatred, nationalistic hatred, political hatred, but perhaps scariest of all, religious hatred.
Just this summer a church here in Indianapolis made news when a sermon went public not only condemning LGBTQ people but going so far as to say that they should harm themselves, even inferring others should harm them. And of course reckless speech like this is ost dangerous. Hate doesn’t stay in a bottle. And when religions promulgate hate, hope is at risk.
This was the message of the Book of Jonah. Jonah is a story about the unlimited mercy of God, but it’s also a story about religious hatred. Many of us are familiar with the story. Jonah was called by God to go to the city of Ninevah, the capital of Israel’s arch-enemy Assyria. Jonah was told to preach a message warning the Assyrians to repent. We are familiar with the humorous parts of the story, how Jonah disobeyed and tried to get out of the assignment. He got on a ship going the other direction, was thrown overbaord and swallowed by a great fish, and yet survived.
What we might not recognize about this story are its deeper implications. Jonah didn’t want to go the Ninevah because he didn’t understand why God would give them the chance to repent. He didn’t want to get close to them, to hear them speak their language, smell their foods cooking, see their parents playing with their children, or anything that said these are human beings just like himself. Jonah preferred that God just destroy them and leave him out of it.
The interesting thing that stands out about this story is how the other people around Jonah are presented. They are all people who do not share his faith, yet they come off as being more noble than Jonah. Think about it. When he was on the ship trying to get away from God, and it got caught in a violent storm, the sailors assumed someone on board did something to provoke God’s anger, so they began casting lots to find out. Jonah stops them, “I’m the problem. I am a Hebrew who worships the God who made the sea and land. Just throw me overboard and you’ll be alright.”
But they won’t do that. They say no, let’s try to row the boat to shore, even though Jonah, a stranger to them, has fessed up to putting them in danger. They display more compassion than Jonah does.
Then Jonah does go to Ninevah and preaches that unless they repent God is going to destroy them. Can’t you hear Jonah? “If you don’t change your ways God is going to strike you suckers down!” Isn’t that an appealing sermon?
But amazingly the people received it. They welcomed the preaching of this foreigner and repented. So Jonah who disobeyed God and ran from his assignment is confronted with people who obey God and change. The Ninevites are more faithful than Jonah.
And you’ve got to wonder when you think about this story on a deep level if the subliminal message is be careful about being religious. Be careful because being too religious can make you a worse person. It can make you less compassionate, less caring, less tolerant.
Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist leader of the Civil War era, said when one of his slaveholders, attended a Methodist Camp Meeting and became Christian, he held out hope that this would make him emancipate his slaves, or at least make him kinder and more humane. Instead, Douglass said, he became “more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before.” (Tisby, The Spirit of Justice, p50)
Now how could this be? No doubt because there were plenty of other slaveholding Christians, Methodists at that!, who confirmed for this man that he could hold onto his faith and disregard the full humanity of others at the same time.
That’s the scary thing religion can do. Nearly all hate movements in history have depended on some kind of religious support in order to sustain. Any kind of mistreatment or diminishment of others needs a moral high ground to support itself. When you can find justification in a religious belief that makes it okay to limit others rights or welfare, then hatred can breed.
But, this doesn’t mean hate is all bad. Hate is like cholesterol. There is good cholesterol and there is bad cholesterol. There is actually good hate as well as bad hate. Just consider the references in the Bible to God hating.
“You hate all who do wrong” Psalm 5:5
There are six things the Lord hates…haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies, and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.” Proverbs 6:16-19
Hate in this biblical context doesn’t mean extreme feelings of dislike or loathing. Hate means to separate from, to not accept, and resist the things opposed to God. The Bible makes it clear there are times we are called to hate. As it says in Ecclesiastes, there is “a time to love and a time to hate.” (3:8)
This should make us wonder, what does God hate about our world, and what does God call us to hate?
Let’s return to Jonah for some help with that. Jonah did what God asked. He didn’t like it but he did it. He spent three days preaching to the Ninevites telling them to repent. And the people did. And, “When God saw…how (the Ninevites) turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them.”
Tim Keller points out that nothing is mentioned here of the Ninevites converting. It doesn’t say they put away their idols or changed their religion. It just says they changed their ways, and that was enough for God. But not Jonah. “This was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry.”(3:10-4:1)
Why? Because Jonah has bad hate. Again, bad hate is not just the extreme emotion of anti-love. Its not just someone screaming “I hate you.” It goes beyond that. Bad hate becomes the incapacity to feel compassion for someone. It becomes the inability to advocate for what’s best for another. And this is what happened in Jonah.
What does this look in our world?
I think of our debate over DEI: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. In one sense, how could a Christian not support DEI? The very words represent the values of God. Yet, there are unchristian things that happen on both sides. On one side you have people who use DEI like a club to punish people who don’t abide by these values. And their only answer is to abolish. Fire the person. Cancel the program. Eliminate, much like Jonah wanted to do with the Ninevites. And there’s no room for repentance. There’s no room for change. And the story of Jonah is clearly about repentance, not just the Ninevites, but Jonah too!
At the same time, you have people on the other side who believe that the answer is to eliminate DEI altogether. Punish the institutions you use such policies. Make them pay. Cut their support. And, again, you have to wonder, if we do away with practices that help us understand the histories and experiences of non-white people, and if we become less informed about ways we unintentionally do harm to others, will we be allowing hate to breed?
So if our goal is to resist hate, what needs to happen?
The story of Jonah ends in a most unfinished way. Jonah climbs a hill to look out over the city waiting to see if God might destroy it yet. He’s in a huff. He’s angry and full of bad hate. But then God causes a plant to grow up and give him shade. He’s at least comfortable. Until God sends a worm to eat the plant and cause it die, so that the sun beats down on Jonah now making him really angry. Then God questions Jonah about what reason he has to be angry. He’s concerned for a plant he never tended, then God says, “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many animals?” (4:11)
And that’s how the story ends. God says “I value people. Even people I resist. I don’t give up on them.” And Jonah is left with a decision whether he will love like God.
And you wonder, who is the hero of the story? Its not exactly the sailors or the Ninevites. It’s certainly not Jonah. Perhaps, and hang with me here, the hero is the worm. The worm sent by God to eat the plant. The worm comes to save Jonah from himself. To save him of a false feeling of comfort or like he’s in the right. He can only be whole if he confronts the hatred inside of him and the ways he has sought a comfortable life for himself that doesn’t have to be concerned about the welfare of people who don’t concern him.
And maybe the usefulness of this story for us today, maybe the reason it ends unresolved, is so that we will ask what is our worm? What is the worm God sends to us to eat away things that need to be resisted and removed so that God’s love can more freely flow through us?
Is it a default for comfort…?
Is it a dislike of certain people we don’t believe deserve the same blessing we do?
Is it a resistance in us to speak up and out about the things we know are not congruent with the ways of God? What is your worm and how can it be an act of grace?