Today I felt the urge to attend that church again. The way things work now, apparently, two Sundays a month they have a scripture-focused Sunday school (Old Testament this year), with two other Sundays devoted instead to discussing "conference talks" -- speeches given by church leaders at their twice-annual global conferences, what Dave Butler has derisively referred to as "quoting the thoughts of Elder J. Humpty Dumpty on every subject." I was a bit bummed to discover that I had chosen to attend on an Elder J. Humpty Dumpty day rather than an Old Testament day, but by a bizarre coincidence the conference talk they were discussing was "Forsake Not Your Own Mercy" by Matthew S. Holland (son of the late Jeffrey R.) -- which is a sermon on, you guessed it, the Book of Jonah. For most of the meeting, the thoughts of Elder J. Humpty Dumpty were set to one side, and we just talked about the Book of Jonah and what it has to say about the quality of mercy.
Just how common are sermons on the Book of Jonah in Mormondom? Not very. BYU's Scripture Citation Index, which catalogs scriptures quoted by CJCLDS leaders from 1830 to the present, currently has a total of 44,432 citations in their database during my lifetime (1979 to present). Of these, a whopping 15 come from the Book of Jonah. In rough terms, the Book of Jonah accounts for about one-1,000th of the text in the LDS canon but only about one-3,000th of recent citations by church leaders. It's both very short and very significantly underquoted relative to its length.
I looked up those 15 citations. Eight of them are from the Matthew S. Holland talk discussed today. Three are from a 2004 talk by James E. Faust which devotes one paragraph to the story of Jonah but couldn't be called a sermon about Jonah. (It's counted as three citations because a single footnote says "See Jonah 1, Jonah 2, Jonah 3.") The remainder are passing references.
So, yeah, of the approximately 3,300 conference talks that have so far been given in my lifetime, exactly one has been about the Book of Jonah.
A further sync with Jonah is that earlier this month I posted "Blubbery Hill," which revisits Dee and Kelley's 1584 whale vision and quotes the part where "the Prophet took them by the hands, and led them to the Whales mouth, saying, Go in."
This next part isn't about Jonah, but it's another random sync from church today, so I'll include it here. The opening hymn in sacrament meeting was "Come, Follow Me." Immediately after we'd finished singing that, they announced that we would now sing the sacrament hymn, "While of These Emblems We Partake." As the organist began playing the intro to the latter hymn, I thought, "Wait, is he playing 'Come, Follow Me' again?" but then soon realized that, no, it was actually a somewhat different tune. (The hymnal for some reason includes two different musical settings for "While of These Emblems We Partake." I was more familiar with the other one.)
Struck by the musical similarity of the two hymns, I checked who had composed them. The notes at the bottom of the page for "While of These Emblems We Partake" said:
Text: John Nicholson, 1839-1909Music: Samuel McBurney, b. 1847Tune name: SAUL
And for "Come, Follow Me":
Text: John Nicholson, 1839-1909Music: Samuel McBurney, 1847-1909
I checked the index. Nothing else in the hymnal is attributed to either of these two (except, in Nicholson's case, the other setting of "While of These Emblems We Partake").
I thought it was weird that only one of the two citations gave a death date for Samuel McBurney, so later I looked up the biographical details of the two men. McBurney did indeed die in 1909, on December 9. John Nicholson died that same year, on January 25. That's today. Whoever chose the hymns for today just happened to choose the two John Nicholson hymns on the anniversary of John Nicholson's death.
John Nicholson is also the real name of Hollywood's Jack Nicholson, who has appeared in syncs from time to time, mostly from Bill.
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