FAMILY DEVOTIONS: Taking Faith Home

NEW! This week we in church we introduced a new option for our family devotions. This TAKING FAITH HOME material from The Youth and Family Institute follows the Lectionary Readings that we use as our Scripture each week. It’s another way for the whole family to reflect together on the theme from the previous Sunday’s worship. For a copy, please e-mail the church office.

TAKING FAITH HOME FROM CHURCH SCHOOL. This month the church school rotation is focusing on the story of Jonah. Take a moment to recall together (and write down everything you know about the story of Jonah) The story of Jonah is a short book in the Hebrew Scripture. Read it. Then compare what you have read with what you have written.

During the coming weeks we will look at aspects of the Jonah story. Below is some background material on Jonah from a version of the Bible translated and written by Eugene Peterson. See if you can identify some themes in Jonah that you could talk together about or draw pictures about.

Introduction to JONAH from THE MESSAGE by Eugene Peterson
Everybody knows about Jonah. People who have never read the Bible know enough about Jonah to laugh at a joke about him and the “whale.” Jonah has entered our folklore. There is a playful aspect to his story, a kind of slapstick clumsiness about Jonah as he bumbles his way along, trying, but always unsuccessfully, to avoid God.

But the playfulness is not frivolous. This is deadly serious. While we are smiling or laughing at Jonah, we drop the guard with which we are trying to keep God at a comfortable distance, and suddenly we find ourselves caught in the purposes and commands of God. Stories are the most prominent biblical way of helping us see ourselves in “the God story,” which always gets around to the story of God making and saving us. Stories, in contrast to abstract statements of truth, tease us into becoming participants in what is being said. We find ourselves involved in the action. We may start out as spectators or critics, but if the story is good (and the biblical stories are very good!), we find ourselves no longer just listening to but inhabiting the story.

One reason that the Jonah story is so enduringly important for nurturing the life of faith in us is that Jonah is not a hero too high and mighty for us to identify with—he doesn’t do anything great. Instead of being held up as an ideal to admire, we find Jonah as a companion in our ineptness. Here is someone on our level. Even when Jonah does it right (like preaching, finally, in Nineveh) he does it wrong (by getting angry at God). But the whole time, God is working within and around Jonah’s very ineptness and accomplishing his purposes in him. Most of us need a biblical friend or two like Jonah.