Candlemas Semester Blues
Preacher: Revd Dr Donald MacEwan, University Chaplain
Readings: Jonah 1:17 – 2:10; Mark 1:14-21
When I was ordained as a minister, I promised faithfully, diligently and cheerfully to discharge the duties of my ministry. Of course I don’t always succeed – not every email is answered, or answered quickly and without a hint of annoyance. But I do have a stab at being faithful, diligent and cheerful. However, I confess that the reasons to be cheerful as we begin the Candlemas Semester seem a bit thin on the ground.
We are live-streaming from a largely empty church. No congregation is allowed to gather. Students have not returned to St Andrews. And our lives are greatly circumscribed. This is all to suppress the virus, with its significant numbers of infections, hospitalizations and deaths – an unholy trinity of Covid. Students and staff have faced the pandemic with imagination, hard work and good humour, but also with a fair amount of anxiety and discouragement. It is no coincidence that as Chaplains we had many more appointments to support people in 2020 than in previous years. And in recent weeks my own work of listening to colleagues and students has had a higher than usual proportion of the bereaved, the broken-hearted and the bewildered.
How can I – how can we all – remain cheerful? Well, the Bible is often seen as a source of solace in hard times. So let’s turn to scripture. But that seems just as bad as real life. Today’s Old Testament lesson is the story of Jonah in the belly of a whale. It’s a terrific tale, full of trauma. Jonah was called by God to take his message to Nineveh, but Jonah didn’t want to so took a ship going the other way. But a fearful storm arose and threatened to destroy the ship until the other sailors threw Jonah overboard. Had he not been swallowed by the big fish (as the Bible describes it) he was surely doomed. So we have a city of cruelty and oppression, a failure of responsibility, an extreme weather event and human scapegoating to save their own skin. Not much cheer to be found there. And then, in dark and danger, Jonah prayed.
Reading over his prayer, I was struck by the number of words beginning with D in the English text. You cast me into the deep. I am driven away from your sight. I went down to the land. This brought to mind the minister of my church as I grew up in Glasgow, Dr Stewart, whose sermons would often come in three parts linked by the same initial letter. So, in honour of the late Angus Stewart, it’s time to descend to the depths of the Ds.
And we begin with distress.
- 2 I called to the Lord out of my distress.
- 3 You cast me into the deep…
all your waves and your billows passed over me.
Jonah experiences distress at his fate, which he ascribes to the God who called him, then found him wanting.
But whatever the cause, distress is surely a part of life. Our disquietude may be less dramatic than Jonah’s but feel just as real. Students have shared with me all sorts of reasons they feel dejected: from a disappointing grade after a lot of hard work, to being dumped by someone they loved; from the discomfort of social anxiety to the struggles of depression. Add to that the time of year – the short days of January, often cold and wet – and with a long haul ahead till spring, and it’s no surprise that many Universities have their own version of second term blues, or as we should perhaps call it here, Candlemas Semester Blues.
Yet that will pass, spring will come – I saw some snowdrops the other day, and who’s to say there won’t be a better mark, a new main squeeze, a return of perspective. But Jonah’s prayer doesn’t turn upward from distress, but descends deeper – into despair.
If despair is the absence of hope, that’s surely seen in v. 4:
Then I said, “I am driven away
from your sight;
how shall I look again
upon your holy temple?”
Jonah cannot envisage a return to Jerusalem, being again in the holy city, seeing the Temple. He is so despondent he cannot see a time beyond the darkness of the present, can’t believe an end will come, can’t imagine a different life, and so despair takes hold.
Our lives today have something of that feel. Even though the vaccines are being given, we don’t seem to know when the end of this strange time will be. It’s hard to see the way out, and some people may be feeling desperate. How shall I look again at a full church, a busy restaurant, a packed concert hall, a crowded airport, a heaving dancefloor?
But Covid only exacerbates the despair that staff and students can feel. Sometimes discharging my duties as a chaplain includes sitting in the belly of despair with others: when a marriage is somehow suddenly over; when a family rejects who we are; when a career seems nothing but a waste; when a child, inexplicably, takes their life. At times like these, there may be nothing else to do but sit there, in the belly, and wait. As the children’s song We’re going on a bear hunt puts it, whether it’s a deep cold river or a swirling whirling snowstorm:
We can’t go over it.
We can’t go under it.
We’ve got to go through it!
And Jonah goes through it: in his distress and even his despair. And he does it in dialogue with God. It’s a prayer from the belly of the whale. It came to mind this week in that extraordinary performance poem by Amanda Gorman, America’s Youth Poet Laureate, at Joe Biden’s inauguration. This is how she began:
When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We’ve braved the belly of the beast
Jonah braved the belly of the beast, and braved naming what it was like there.
Gorman went on:
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished.
And Jonah too, weathers his distress and despair, and witnesses to his hope in God’s deliverance.
- 2: Out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
- 6: I went down…
yet you brought up my life from the Pit.
- 9: Deliverance belongs to the Lord.
Jonah may not always be cheerful, and he is far from diligent, but he is faithful. He holds on to hope that God is listening, that God is there in the belly of the beast, that God is with him, and will guide him, and will be there beyond his distress.
This is the hope that I have when sitting with the distraught undergraduate, the dejected Masters student, and the dispirited colleague. And it could be the hope we all have when going through a pandemic which has caused distress, despair, and that final D which has lurked behind this address – death itself. That we will be delivered through it, not simply by our doggedness, but by God’s faithfulness to his beautiful, troubled planet. And then perhaps we can sing about life in Cole Porter’s song:
It’s delightful, it’s delicious,
It’s delectable, it’s delirious,
It’s dilemma, it’s delimit, it’s deluxe,
It’s de-lovely.
Jonah’s a funny story, and it can be easy to treat it as a joke. But it’s deadly serious: for when Jesus was asked for a sign, he said the only sign his generation would be given was Jonah, for three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster. This was the sign of the Son of Man in the belly of the earth for three days: of Jesus himself deposited in the tomb between dying on the cross and being raised to life on the third day. His followers were distressed at his arrest, and in despair at his death. But as Jonah was disgorged on the shore, so Jesus encountered his disciples on another shore – in disbelief, and then in delight.
Some people may discover a necessary hope for their lives in humanity. And I won’t dissuade them if it helps them through. But for me, it is Jesus’ descent which gives the only hope of a true deliverance.
And you know there may be the odd reason to be cheerful after all, witnessed on a cold, bright January day in the District of Columbia, or the hanging of a prayer on a Tree of Hope, or inching towards a more ordinary Candlemas Semester Blues of the poor grade, the broken heart and the difficult boss. For as President Joe Biden reminded us in his Inauguration Address, quoting Psalm 30, verse 5: Weeping may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning. There may be the odd reason to be cheerful after all.
END