Sermon Notes
Title: Why Do We Run?
Text: Jonah 1:1-3&5b, Luke 16:19-31

God’s plan was to shift our church from being just a weekend “butts in the seats” church into being a loving community of restoration.

Faithfulness to our calling usually takes a back seat to success. Once we start to experience success, we want to maintain it, so we begin to operate in fear of losing what we’ve gained. We get tempted to lose the courage it takes to remain faithful to God’s calling on our lives.

The Lord’s word came to Jonah, Amittai’s son: 2 “Get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their evil has come to my attention.” 3 So Jonah got up—to flee to Tarshish from the Lord! He went down to Joppa and found a ship headed for Tarshish. He paid the fare and went aboard to go with them to Tarshish, away from the Lord....Now Jonah had gone down into the hold of the vessel to lie down and was deep in sleep. Jonah 1:1-3,5b (Common English Bible)

We run away out of fear. When we peel away the layers of fear which keep us from obediently following God’s call on our lives, our most basic fear comes down to a lack of trust in God’s absolute love and grace.

What was good about creation is that God designed it to be in a harmonious, interdependent relationship. Humans were declared Supremely Good because they were created in the image of God and could see that their purpose was to understand this loving harmony and to protect and nurture it. Humans were given the ability to love what God loves. Our callings always have to do with loving creation, and everything and everyone in it, just as God loves.

“In Genesis 3, you have the breaking down of all the relationships in creation: relationships that God declared, “Very good.” - Sharon Lisa Harper

And that’s what we do. Shame and fear causes us to hide. We love to hide behind blame. But we hide in other ways too. We hide in our addictions and numbing, patterns of thought and behavior, validation seeking, and selfish pursuits. These hiding behaviors tend to individualistic and isolating by nature. They pull us away from communion with God and community with others.

We were all created supremely good in the image of God to live in loving community. We all have a calling to give of our supremely good selves to the betterment of creation and the human community. But in our lack of trust in God’s goodness we selfishly grab for what looks good to us, we end up breaking relationship, running away from community, hiding out in shame behind our favorite soothing behaviors, and ultimately falling asleep to ourselves and why we are here. This pattern is what many call, “sin.”

All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory…. Romans 3:23 (Common English Bible)

The rich man seemed to be oblivious to destitute Lazurus just outside his gate. How could he miss someone he basically had to stumble over every time he left his house? Perhaps it was because the rich man was hiding behind his wealth and asleep to his purpose in life. Everytime the rich man went out of his gate, God was trying to wake him up to who he really was and to his calling to use his wealth to care for his neighbor, but he chose to keep running away, choosing to trust in his own riches more than in the rich love of God.

God respects our free will so much that we are allowed to continue to run and hide. But when we continue to choose to run and hide from who we are and what we are meant to be, we end up completely isolated, beyond any hope of human connection or the reach of love. We get there by our own choosing. Some people refer to this state of loveless isolation as hell.

Wealth, power, achievement, and notoriety can look like tasty fruit to grab. We think it will bring us fulfillment, but the only thing that really satisfies is loving relationship with God, others, and creation. We were created to be in loving relationship and our deepest calling is always related in some way to the restoration of this loving relationship.

Adam and Eve give us the template for grabbing what looks good to us and ending up with shame, fear, and isolated hiding. Jonah and Prodigal Son are stories of runners who ended up isolated and off track. And if we are honest, each of us has our own story of running away, shame, fear, and isolation. It is the universal human story. Fortunately, that is not the whole story. We also have a God who is gracious and seeks us out when we are lost in our fearful isolation. The grace of God is always trying to find us in order to restore us.