Jonah 3:1-10
I was raised with two religions, the Southern Baptist form of Protestantism, and the Lost Cause form of mass delusion, though we did not call the latter a religion. I was taught that the “war of Northern aggression” was fought over state’s rights, and that men like Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson were great heroes reluctantly cast into an unnecessary conflict. There was no overt white supremacy, though there was certainly plenty of other racism in my wider social context.
Recent years have brought a long overdue correction. Though my matrilineal heritage includes enslavers, even members of the Lee family, I am delighted to see the statues come down. Far too many remain, of course, including that infamous mountainside carving in Georgia, but progress continues to be made.
In all of the stories of melted Confederates, you have heard no mention of Lieutenant General James Longstreet. He was one of the most important military leaders in the Confederacy, yet there have only ever been two memorials to him, a bridge named after him in his Georgia hometown, and a ground-level equestrian statue at the Gettysburg Battlefield dedicated in 1998, long after the Daughters of the Confederacy and related “Lost Cause” groups had faded into the grave.
If you only read military history, you might think that this erasure in the Lost Cause mythology was the result of Longstreet’s role in that infamous battle at Gettysburg. He is often blamed for the Confederacy’s defeat, with particular attention paid to his performance on July 3rd, 1863, and the disaster that was Pickett’s Charge. Longstreet would later claim that he found Lee’s strategy at Gettysburg misguided.
But this is not a lecture on military tactics, and in the end, the disappearance of James Longstreet from the mythology of the Enslaver’s Rebellion, for it was not a civil war, had nothing to do with the war itself, and everything to do with what happened when the war was over.
In short, Longstreet accepted the defeat of the Confederacy, embraced Reconstruction, and defended emancipated former slaves, newly granted citizenship and voting rights. He joined the Republican Party, still then very much the party of Lincoln and abolition, and received government appointments, including an overseas posting as the United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
There is an irony here. President Andrew Johnson had denied Longstreet’s application for amnesty after the war, stating that he, Longstreet, along with Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, had caused the Union too much trouble. He was important enough to be in Johnson’s top three of unforgivable Confederates, yet other defeated Confederates considered him a traitor.
Do we melt down the sole statue? Rename the bridge?
What do we do with the truly repentant, hated by both sinners and the self-righteous alike?
Though cancel culture is used as a pejorative by the evil defenders of misogyny and white supremacy, it is fair to say that some people have been rightly cancelled, with people and institutions choosing to neither support nor platform misinformation and hate. But cancellation works both ways, with good folks, companies, and programs taken down by bigotry and hate, like the lynch mob that drove Claudine Gay from the presidency of Harvard, two forms of racism mixed in with an American oligarch’s unearned billions and power.
Even when deserved, cancelation can seem totally out of proportion. And though many engage in an empty performative repentance, there are those who genuinely repent, who learn and grow. Should their gifts, their livelihoods, be forever erased?
God decided to cancel Nineveh. We know this is a myth that may or may not have some kernel of historicity, but that isn’t the point. When we enter into biblical narrative, we suspend disbelief and operate within the world of that story, asking ourselves what we are meant to learn.
At least we do in our progressive and reconstructionist Christianity. Some other forms of Christianity have no disbelief at all, certain that Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, not even paying attention to the text’s own words, that it was a great fish.
And the story of Jonah is that remarkable story where the people actually repent. God cancels the cancelation.
The classic formula for reconciliation begins with true repentance, followed by forgiveness. And the whole forgiving thing is not optional for us. We forgive that we might be forgiven. Says so right there in the Christian Testament.
And before you go running down the rabbit hole of abuse, it says forgive, not forget, and demands true repentance, so this faith requirement that we offer grace to one another does not mean trapping someone in an abusive relationship. All too often, false repentance and forced forgiveness have been weaponized against women and other vulnerable people, and that is not at all what we are discussing here this morning.
The not-really-an-apology aside, people make mistakes, sometimes because they are young and dumb, though there is more than enough old and dumb out there too.
There is a huge difference between someone defaming their victim, being found liable for defaming their victim, and then responding to the defamation trial by doubling down on defaming their victim, and folks who get it, accept responsibility for their behavior, accept the cost, and try to move on, though society often refuses to allow them to move on.
What happened at Nineveh forces us to wrestle with a lot more than the simple formula of verdict, repentance, and reconciliation or, alternatively, verdict and vengeance.
We have to consider divine wrath itself, again within the context of the story, have to tease out a real world understanding of sin as having natural consequences in social systems versus the idea that God has a fragile human ego that is offended by disobedience of some arbitrary rules. We have to ask very real questions about whether punishment itself is an effective deterrent, and when it is simply vengeance, for many worship a false god who is a domestic abuser in the sky, and most of us don’t.
These are not just abstract theological questions, not just questions about sinners in the hands of an angry God, for Israel continues to slaughter Palestinian civilians, we know that fact even through the fog of war and the plague of misinformation, and it is hard to tell when the strategic response to Hamas terrorism became collective punishment, when self-defense tipped into genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Closer to home, just this week we learned that the U.S. Justice Department would seek the death penalty against Payton Gendron, the white supremacist who murdered ten and wounded three others at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo. There is no evidence that capital punishment is a deterrent, and so many mass slaughters in America are functionally mass murder-suicides, the idiotic intersection of our refusal to fund mental health care and the toxic legacy of enslaver’s gun rights, landing us back where we began, every day dealing with the Second Amendment that was put in place to protect those who enslaved others.
There are stories that have a happy ending. Or at least a happy middle. During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, a Nascar driver dropped the N-word over a hot mic as the sport tried to entertain fans with virtual racing. He was using it as street lingo rather than as a racial insult. He lost his job, and was required to complete sensitivity training before the sport would even consider lifting his suspension. He did so, and so much more. He even traveled to Minnesota in the wake of George Floyd’s murder so he could listen to the African-American community in the Twin Cities, learn about their experiences.
Kyle Larson’s mother is a Japanese American. His grandparents were placed in an internment camp during World War II. Racism was part of his own family story.
In 2021, he returned to the sport, and won the championship.
Nascar has plenty of problems, but it has been making some efforts toward diversity despite its fan-base, and while we can question the motivation, just as we can question James Longstreet’s version of the events at Gettysburg, Nascar has clamped down on overt displays of racism. They chose rehabilitation for a promising young driver. So far, they have not been disappointed.
And I guess in the end, all I can offer is questions, and maybe a little bit of a challenge, for Nineveh would end up being destroyed, both in the normal course of the rise and fall of nations, but more recently, when the United States pursued misdirected vengeance after 9/11, destabilized Iraq, and created space for the formation of the Islamic State, the terrorist network that occupied Mosul, the modern ruins built on the ruins of ancient Nineveh, leading to the battle that once again destroyed the city.
Paul’s letter to the Romans may declare that “vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” and maybe it is, though I sure hope not, hope that we can be like ancient Nineveh, repentant and covered by grace.
One thing seems certain to me: vengeance always, always, hurt the one seeking it as much as it does the offender.
Amen.
Mind-blowing. This needs to be read by many more people and many more times. Thank you!