He Went to Paris
Jonah 4
But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city. The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And 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?”
__________
In the writing of "He Went to Paris," Jimmy Buffett explains how the song was inspired after an encounter with a man we met at a Chicago nightclub. They swapped stories, where the man shared with Buffett accounts of his time during the Spanish Civil War. Having lost an arm reminisced about the time he spent recovering in a Paris hospital. The song is a tribute to his story and the experiences of writers such as Hemmingway, whom Jimmy Buffett enjoyed reading. Life-changing events often push us unwillingly in a manner that kick-starts a journey of searching for answers to questions that bother us. Questions that bother us because life does not seem to deal everyone an equal hand, questions that bother us because some give their all and still lose everything. While we may not find answers to all the questions our hearts yearn for, they are powerful enough to mold us and shape us in our journey of life and faith.
Jonah is another such person who had several questions that bothered him. God called Jonah to go and preach a message of repentance to the people of Nineveh. Do you know what happens next? Trying to run away from what God asked, Jonah hops on a boat to Tarshish, maybe hoping to find some answers, only to wind up in a great storm that would force him to the city of Nineveh. Jonah does what God wants him to do. He still doesn't understand the why, but he hopes that after he speaks the messages of God, he'll find his answer. And that catches us up to our reading for today, where Jonah finds a place overlooking Nineveh, hoping that God would destroy the city. Jonah waits and waits, yet God doesn't destroy Nineveh. The questions plaguing Jonah's mind weren't answered the way he would have wanted them answered. And it tore Jonah up from the inside. His bias, prejudice, and self-righteousness tainted his perception of the world around him.
There's power in the questions we ask ourselves. There's power in these questions because they are not only the catalysts for our quest for answers but lenses through which we view the world. For example, we can certainly ask questions that feed our egos. Jonah's questions only centered around his self-righteousness and not on the fact that God cared for the people of Nineveh. We can ask questions in an attempt to make sense of the unexplainable. Or we can ask questions that set us on a journey of wellness and healing, such as the one undertaken by the man who "went to Paris." Of course, we don't have to go to Paris to look for answers to the questions that trouble us so. We do have to attempt to find answers, though, and for some of us, we may even need to pause and evaluate the questions we are asking. This morning we heard of two different tales, two different endings that we might not have expected.
There's a part of us that might have thought the man who went to Paris would end up in a bitter pit, while Jonah, a prophet of God, would end up doing okay. Yet in a reversal of roles, we find the man who went to Paris telling Jimmy Buffet, "some of it's magic, some of it's tragic, but I had a good life all the way," while Jonah sits bitterly under a shriveled plant wishing that Nineveh had been destroyed. It's a stark reminder for people of faith, people who profess to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, that if we aren't mindful of the questions that we ask ourselves, then we could end up in a worse spot than where we started. The reading for us today and our song remind us that our healing journey and wholeness can take many forms and result in innumerable outcomes. For those of us who say we follow God, it means we have an extra set of questions, lenses we can use, but they only help if we use them. Let us follow the questions that lead us on the lifegiving path of God. Amen.