Epic exhortations from Whaleman’s Chapel:
Excerpts of a sermon preached in the novel, Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick is the famous novel published in 1851 by Herman Melville. The main character and narrator, Ishmael, enlists with a whaling ship, the Pequot, under captain Ahab in pursuit of a huge and vicious sperm whale known as Moby Dick.
Before the infamous voyage (which resulted in the loss of the ship and all crew except the narrator), Ishmael attended a service at Whaling Chapel. The novel describes Father Mapple, the minister there, who knows what the mariners face because he had been a harpooner himself.
Chapter 7 describes the chapel and the pulpit which was designed in the form of the prow of a ship “the first part of a ship to encounter the sea, reinforcing the Bible’s strength and its fight against darkness. Though Ishmael spends only a short time at the chapel preparing for his voyage, what he hears prepares him for his journey with Captain Ahab.”[1]
Chapter 8 features the full text of the sermon preached by Father Mapple, based on the book of Jonah. [2] The following excerpt is from the latter part of the message where he exhorts ministers—like himself—who herald God’s message.
Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. “Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard—larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships”!
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.
[Next they sing a hymn; the lyrics are included.] Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah—“And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.”
“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How billow- like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two- stranded lesson;
A lesson to us all as sinful men, and
A lesson to me as a pilot of the living God.
As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah.
… [After his exposition of Jonah as a message and warning for all, Father Mapple shifts to part two.] “Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me.
I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which … Jonah teaches to me as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along “into the midst of the seas,“ where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and” the weeds were wrapped about his head,“ and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet—“out of the belly of hell”—when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried.
Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and “vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;” when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
“This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and
- woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it.
- Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty!
- Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale!
- Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal!
- Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!
- Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor!
- Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation [deliverance from death]!
- Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway”![3]
He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly enthusiasm,—“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low?
- Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight —who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.
- Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him.
- Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges.
- Delight,—top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven.
- Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages.
- And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath—O Father!—chiefly known to me by Thy rod—mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s, or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God”?
He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.
[1] Leyland Ryken, Philip Ryken and Todd Wilson, Pastors in The Classics: Timeless Lessons on Life and Ministry from World Literature (Baker Books), 159.
[2] The full text of this famous American novel is at https://www.gutenberg.org
[3] 1 Corinthians 9:27
This article is edited by John Woodward, GraceNotebook.com