Any text is capable of reinterpretation, and a rich text can admit of greater and greater interpretive perspectives.
To be religious, and by that I mean to have any sort of association with religion, however so slight – so yes that means you – who are sitting in this chapel on a March morning in the season of lent, to be religious is to enter into a kind of conversation, maybe a conversation which has been going on over millennia.
It falls to us in our generation to choose which conversation we are going to drop into, so that makes us almost unique in the history of religion, which up until fairly recently has assumed that religion, ‘our’ religion, is chosen for us by our parents (I mean our cultural parents; our parents, parents, parents, parents).
The hinge point of the Ten commandments, the point where the instruction switches from the purely spiritual (honouring God, Gods name, image, Gods holy day, etc) to the decidedly earthly (don’t kill, steal, lie, covet or adulter) is the instruction to honour our parents, and in some ways I think that refers to holding fast to our parents’ religious identity. There are reasons for this beyond narrow genetic identity. We may be able to get by in an unfamiliar language but we are more likely to be able to contribute fruitfully to a conversation in our mother tongue, if we are able to understand it’s nuance, to see beyond its surface into deeper levels of meaning.
Our generation is one of the first to have been puked-up by culture in an almost complete rejection of the religious inheritance from which that culture arose. Which unfortunately means that the conversation can seem utterly incomprehensible to us when we blunder into it; so we think that, we assume that, Biblical stories are simple historical myths, told by unsophisticated herders. A sort of proto Charlton Heston rocking a sheepskin, telling tall tales to comfort his people and explain the predicament of humanity before science showed up to save us all. That’s the idea, in brief. And when people mock religion by laughing about the Flying spaghetti monster, or your ‘imaginary friend’ that’s the idea they’re relying on. (Its a slightly problematic idea in its own way though in so far as it can be a bit barren of interpretational depth and, given it’s dependence on the idea of a linear passage from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilised’, it can turn genocidal quite quickly).
To participate in the conversation of religion, is to to speak forward the conversational nature of reality.
To bear witness to the presence of the sacred, is itself evidence of the sacred, is one way of expressing this. “The whole hearted searching for God in itself constitutes the finding of God” as Rabbi David Goldstein put it, is probably better.
And the ancient conversation of our religious tradition can bear some investigation…
All the Sundays in Lent we are talking about the connected ideas of the journey, the sacrifice and the body. Last week when I omitted the sermon, I left the interpretation of our reading open and this week I’m going to return to that. Our reading was the great hymn or psalm from the story of Jonah. From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the God. He said:
“In my distress I called to the Lord,
and he answered me.
From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help,
and you listened to my cry.”
The opening lines are formula which are repeated throughout scripture, appearing in Samuel, and in many of the psalms.
They are the words which Victor Frankl discovered ringing in his ears on that day in 1945 when he stepped over the barbed wire at Auswich and walked down the country lane in the sunlight and spring flowers…

The word Jonah means Dove. The dove is a metaphor for the human soul. Thats why it is the bird that Noah sends out to discover a perch after the flood, well, it’s the bird that returns to the arc. And just as that dove has a mission to complete so the story hints to us that we, like Jonah, also have a mission, we, like the dove, also need to find a perch and return to bear witness to the resting place that we have found. The story of Jonah is universal because we all recognise this intuitively. These are words we all hear ringing in our ears. However hard we try to tune them out.
Jonah is given a task and understanding its potential impact he attempts to escape. He ‘does one’.
But this way of life is familiar to many of us – if we try to escape, to turn away from what we have to face, instead of facing up to what we must do, things are likely to get very stormy, very quickly.
Jonah takes a ship to escape his task. There’s a way in which this attempt echoes the attempt of Adam and Eve to hide in the Garden.
Jonah the dove, is now aboard a ship (which is also a metaphor for the body), the soul is in a vessel.
It’s interesting what happens next in the story: Jonah goes to sleep. He goes down into the ship and falls asleep. There is a metaphoric reading here suggested in The Zohar ( see eg: Gershon Sholem “Zohar; The book of splendour”) which may suggest that the soul can be distracted by a kind of sleep in bodily escape. This is what my new age friends refer to as The Desire Body. Sacreligiously I want to remember Withnail and I here; that scene when Withnail insists on bullying the ladies in a Penrith teashop to produce cake and ‘the finest wines known to humanity’ .https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRgwbkdoIcY&list=RDVRgwbkdoIcY&start_radio=1&t=24

He isn’t allowed to sleep of course, the ship’s Captain (which some relate to the conscience) awakens him, and he is forced out of slumber and overboard into the storm where he is swallowed by a great fish.

Here ’s a thing which is quite instructive if we want to see the way that these stories are reduced by rationalist interpretation: translators have often assumed that the writers must have meant a whale, and we know the story as ‘Jonah and the whale’. But if we can be humble enough to assume that the writer might have had some idea what he or she was doing we might discover something else here: the name for a whale in the Hebrew scriptures is familiar enough ‘Leviathan’ and if the writer had intended to imply that Jonah was swallowed by a whale he might have simply said so, but he (or she) didn’t she said a fish. [We can assume that the poor simple primitive writer didn’t know as much as us clever sophisticated modern people all we like but it won’t get us very far…]
The Hebrew word for fish is Daga, well, approximately. Daga derives from the idea of ‘teeming’, abundance, lots of. Fish, like corn, was seen as a plurality, (and in English we still say fish instead of fishes). The related word Daag דאגה means anxiety, disquiet or fear. So within the very words of the story, we go from the reductionist idea that a man is swallowed by a fish, to the therapeutically valid understanding that a soul can be completely swallowed up by anxieties.
There is no idea more contemporary than this. I read yesterday that there has been a surge in the numbers of children being admitted to hospital for sleeping disorders, the number has doubled in the last seven years. Hospitalised for sleeping disorders, … the innocent sleep and yet our children are kept awake…

Well Jesus sleeps of course in his coracle on the lake and is woken by his panicking disciples. I suppose this is also a reference to Jonah, it must be – although I’m not sure I get what it means yet, why the parallel is being drawn. Jesus asks his disciples why they are so afraid – don’t they have any faith?

I mentioned Victor Frankl; in his book of the horror of Auswich ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ he describes the last days of the camp as the guards began to slip away fearing reprisals and the arrival of the allied liberating forces. They left the camp unguarded and it took a while for the staved and brutalised inmates to overcome their fear of the wire – for years simply approaching the perimeter would have brought machine gun fire, execution, torture, but Frankl nerves himself to do it. His wife has been killed although he doesn’t know it yet, his family are dead, but he finds immense joy in the sunlight and the springtime, and on thinking of the face of his beloved wife. Those words with which the prayer in Jonah begins comes to his mind: Out of my distress I called on the LORD; the LORD answered me and set me free.
This is how he remembered the event afterwards when he wrote his memoir of the time:
“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth-that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which a man can aspire. 
Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of human is through love and in love.”

Jonah – remembers his [co]mission, he picks it up and carries it forward. His pact is to bear witness to the presence of justice in the world, the presence of the sacred – the salvation of the human soul through love. Like Jonah Victor Frankl’s liberation began the day he was inspired by the religious idea of salvation, of keeping faith.

At the beginning of our service I said that spiritual activism is our most important work, this is our activism, our mission and our engagement: to bear witness to the sacred work of liberation by love.