{"id":25465,"date":"2025-07-07T06:48:48","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T10:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=25465"},"modified":"2025-07-07T07:19:26","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T11:19:26","slug":"25465","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=25465","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Come As You Are - Crowder - Lyric Video\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Md9VSwTxmn8?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">An Imperfect Messenger<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>The story [of Jonah] is glorious because it <strong>reveals unerringly a universal God of mercy<\/strong> and justice and because it pokes holes in the self-righteousness of those who think themselves religious while blaming others for the evil in the world and taking pleasure in their suffering.\u202f&nbsp;<br>\u2014Megan McKenna,&nbsp;<em>Prophets: Words of Fire<\/em>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard Rohr has always felt a deep connection to the story of the prophet Jonah, while recognizing how imperfectly Jonah follows his call:&nbsp;<\/em>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Even though I love Jonah, he is <strong>what I call an unfinished prophet<\/strong>. He rejects his divine commission at first, refusing to preach God\u2019s mercy to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria and Israel\u2019s ancient enemy. After he flees and boards a ship going the wrong way, he\u2019s cast overboard in a storm, swallowed by a great fish, and rescued in a marvelous manner. Only then does he obey God\u2019s call and go to Nineveh. The people repent upon hearing his message and thus are saved from God\u2019s wrath. But Jonah complains, angry because the Lord spared them. <strong>He is so detached from his own real message that he\u2019s disappointed when it succeeds<\/strong>!&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>From that point on, poor Jonah is simultaneously angry, lamenting, and praising YHWH for four full chapters. <strong>His problem is that he cannot move beyond a dualistic reward-punishment worldview.<\/strong> Jonah thinks only Israel deserves mercy, whereas God extends total mercy to Jonah, to the pagan Ninevites who persecuted Jonah\u2019s people, and to those \u201cwho cannot tell their right hand from their left.\u201d To make the story complete, this mercy is even given to \u201call the animals\u201d (Jonah 4:11)! The world of predictable good guys and always-awful bad guys collapses into God\u2019s unfathomable grace.\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I love this story so much that I have collected images of a man in the belly of the whale for much of my adult life. I think I live in that whale\u2019s belly permanently, with loads of unresolved questions and painful paradoxes in my life. Yet God is always \u201cvomiting\u201d me up in the right place\u2014in the complete opposite direction that I\u2019ve been trying to run, like Jonah himself (Jonah 2:10).&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jonah\u2019s story breaks all the expectations of who is right and then remakes those expectations in favor of grace. It is a brilliant morality play, not a piece of dogmatic theology, as some try to make it. Yet it does have political implications, in the sense that it provokes us to change our notions of who deserves power and who doesn\u2019t.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jonah thought he had the exclusive cachet of truth and thus could despise those to whom he was preaching. <strong>He wanted them to be wrong so that he could be right, yet in his anger at Nineveh and the Assyrian Empire, he failed to appreciate God\u2019s desire to offer forgiveness and grace even to Jonah\u2019s enemies<\/strong>. In fact, he even resented their joining his \u201cbelief club.\u201d He struggled mightily to accept the new \u201cpolitical\u201d arrangement.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Have We Listened to God\u2019s Call?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>At the CAC\u2019s&nbsp;<\/em>CONSPIRE 2018&nbsp;<em>conference, Dr. Barbara Holmes (1943\u20132024) shared her own personal \u201cJonah story\u201d:<\/em>\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a crisis of disobedience when we choose to disobey God\u2019s will for our lives. In this instance, I think of Jonah\u2026. He thinks he\u2019s right. He hates the Assyrians, and understandably so. After all, they were a marauding, land-grabbing nation, a real threat to Israel. He had national pride. He wanted to see them destroyed. When he gets the call from God, he travels 2,500\u202fmiles to the southern area of Spain. He couldn\u2019t get much further away. Why does he flee? He flees, he says at the end of chapter four, because he knows God is merciful. There is no worse situation than a merciful God when you want to see your enemies get what\u2019s coming to them. Jonah wants to do things his way and ends up in the belly of a sea monster.\u202f\u202f\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Do you have a Jonah story? I do.\u202fFrom the age of ten through my twenties, I knew I had a call of God on my life. Through dreams, waking visions, and moments of surprising attunement with the Divine, I knew God was calling me. But there I was, a ten-year-old girl, with a call to something I didn\u2019t understand. I\u2019d never seen a woman in ministry. For that matter, I\u2019d never seen a woman leading in any spiritual capacity. So, what was I to do?\u202f\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, I went on with my life. I got married, had two children, and after a decade heard the call again even more strongly. This time I turned my head to where I thought God lived (up there) and I said, \u201cExcuse me, sir, or ma\u2019am\u201d\u2014I wanted to cover my bases\u2014\u201cI don\u2019t know if you know about the divorce, but I have two children, I\u2019ve got to feed them and ministers don\u2019t make any money. So, if you don\u2019t mind, I\u2019m going to law school.\u201d [1]\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>It took time, but Holmes eventually said \u201cyes\u201d to God\u2019s call. At&nbsp;<\/em>CONSPIRE 2021,&nbsp;<em>she encouraged listeners to remain open and faithful to God\u2019s invitations to serve:\u202f<\/em>\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As I was standing at my law school graduation ceremony, I heard a voice say to me, \u201cThis isn\u2019t it.\u201d I was startled, and I said to my girlfriend who was standing in line with me to get our degrees, \u201cI just heard a voice say, \u2018This is not it.\u2019\u201d She started laughing and said, \u201cWell, you sure have wasted a lot of time.\u201d\u2026 There was nothing to do but hear the whispering and continue my practices. <strong>I now allow life to lead me to the precipice of the newness <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">that was already seeded in my life\u2026<\/span>.\u202f&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Trust God, trust Holy Spirit to lead you into all truth. Make your intention clear that you will follow as called, without exception. Make your intention known to God and wait for the Holy Spirit to lead you into the fulfillment of your vocation<\/strong>. [2]\u202f&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">God Never Wanted Kings<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>The establishment of monarchy in ancient Israel was a theological disaster that God explicitly opposed\u2014which should fundamentally challenge how we conceptualize divine authority today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The establishment of monarchy in ancient Israel was a theological disaster that God explicitly opposed\u2014which should fundamentally challenge how we conceptualize divine authority today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>First, let me start with something that&#8217;s always bothered me about 1 Samuel.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.parrott.ink\/when-god-gets-angry\/\">As we talked about earlier<\/a>, Eli&#8217;s sons are corrupt priests who steal from sacrifices and abuse their religious authority. God&#8217;s response? The entire lineage gets cut off. Divine judgment, full stop.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But fast forward a few chapters, and Samuel&#8217;s sons are taking bribes and perverting justice as judges. The consequence for Samuel? Absolutely nothing. The text never addresses this glaring double standard, never explains why one father faces devastating judgment while the other walks away unscathed.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sometimes scripture&#8217;s inconsistencies are worth sitting with rather than explaining away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But this smaller inconsistency points us toward a much larger theological tension. When Israel demands a king after Samuel&#8217;s sons fail, God&#8217;s response should shake any simplistic theology that claims everything happens according to divine plan. God explicitly tells Samuel: &#8220;They have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them&#8221; (1 Samuel 8:7). The people are literally rejecting God&#8217;s kingship in favor of human monarchy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What follows in 1 Samuel 8 reads like dystopian political theory. God, through Samuel, lays out exactly what monarchy will mean. There&#8217;s a 4x repetition of the Hebrew verb \u05d9\u05b4\u05e7\u05b8\u05bc\u05d7\/yiqq\u0101\u1e25, &#8220;he will take&#8221; (which correlates with what Samuel&#8217;s own sons are doing, &#8220;taking bribes&#8221;). Samuel says, &#8220;Your sons conscripted for war and forced to run before royal chariots, your daughters taken as perfumers and cooks and bakers, your best fields and vineyards and olive orchards confiscated and given to royal officials. A tenth of your grain, your vineyards, your flocks\u2014<strong>all flowing upward to sustain the machinery of monarchy.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>God essentially says, &#8220;You want hierarchical human power structures? Here&#8217;s your future.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And they choose it anyway. Not everything happens according to divine plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"redactors\">Redactors<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>From a textual perspective, this is super interesting. The biblical editors who had to make decisions about what was included in the Bible\u2014we call them&nbsp;<em>redactors<\/em>\u2014had to make choices about what to include and what to leave out. These ancient editors were working during or after the monarchic period, when kings were simply a fact of life in Israel and Judah. Many of them, particularly those we call the Deuteronomistic historians, <strong>clearly favored David and worked to legitimize dynastic succession.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Yet they kept this blistering anti-monarchy critique right at the foundation of the monarchy narrative.<\/strong>&nbsp;They could have smoothed over this tension, could have edited the story to make monarchy look like God&#8217;s idea all along. Instead, they preserved this text that essentially says kings were never part of the plan. The Hebrew Bible&#8217;s ambivalence toward monarchy isn&#8217;t an accident or an oversight\u2014<strong>it&#8217;s theological resistance preserved in canonical form.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This preservation of competing perspectives matters enormously for how we read scripture today. The Bible isn&#8217;t a monolithic document with a single perspective on power. It&#8217;s a <strong>collection of texts that argue with each other, that preserve minority reports and dissenting opinions<\/strong>. The same tradition that gives us royal psalms and Davidic covenant theology also maintains this fundamental critique that God never wanted human kings in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"jesus-islord\">Jesus is&#8230;Lord?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Which brings us to contemporary theology and the language we use for the divine. Hebrew scholar Dr. Wil Gafney points out that even the word &#8220;Lord&#8221; in our prayer language emerges from slaveholding contexts. The Greek&nbsp;<em>kyrios<\/em>, the Latin&nbsp;<em>dominus<\/em>, the English &#8220;master&#8221;\u2014these are terms from imperial and slaveholding societies. When we <strong>exclusively use imperial metaphors for the divine, we&#8217;re theologically legitimizing the very power structures that significant portions of scripture critique<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Think about how often our God-language relies on metaphors of domination: King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Sovereign, Ruler. We&#8217;ve so internalized these power metaphors that we rarely stop to ask whether they actually align with the God revealed in scripture\u2014the God who warns against human kings, who sides with the oppressed, who shows up as a refugee baby rather than a conquering emperor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The biblical editors understood something we sometimes forget: divine authority and human power structures are not synonymous. In fact, scripture often presents them as opposed to each other. The prophets consistently critique royal power. Jesus explicitly rejects the devil&#8217;s offer of all the kingdoms of the world. <strong>The early church proclaimed &#8220;Jesus is Lord&#8221; as a direct challenge to &#8220;Caesar is Lord,&#8221; not as an endorsement of lordship as a concept.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If scripture itself preserves skepticism toward concentrated power, then reimagining our God-language isn&#8217;t liberal revisionism or theological innovation. It&#8217;s fidelity to what the Bible itself does\u2014preserving tension, maintaining critique, refusing to let power structures go unchallenged.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The God who warned against kings might not be thrilled with our imperial Christologies either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Real theological imagination means <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">finding language that sounds like liberation rather than domination<\/span><\/strong>. It means taking seriously scripture&#8217;s own skepticism about power rather than selectively reading only the texts that reinforce hierarchical authority. It means being honest about the ways our traditional God-language might actually work against the liberation that God desires for creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The ancient redactors left us a gift: a sacred text that argues with itself about power, that refuses to resolve the tension between divine sovereignty and human authority. Maybe it&#8217;s time we stopped trying to resolve that tension and started learning from it instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.parrott.ink\/when-leaders-refuse-to-serve\/\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An Imperfect Messenger The story [of Jonah] is glorious because it reveals unerringly a universal God of mercy and justice and because it pokes holes in the self-righteousness of those who think themselves religious while blaming others for the evil in the world and taking pleasure in their suffering.\u202f&nbsp;\u2014Megan McKenna,&nbsp;Prophets: Words of Fire&nbsp; Father Richard [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25465"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25465"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25470,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25465\/revisions\/25470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}