Epiphany Third B

The Reverend Denise Giardina

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62:5-12; I Cor. 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

In the name of God who creates the earth, Christ who redeems and renews the earth, and the Holy Ghost which dances and blows and swirls and grows in wind and rain and sea and forest. AMEN

In the little Methodist church in the southern part of the state where I grew up, we didn’t use a lectionary. What that meant was that the preacher, though he was wonderful pastor, would always preach basically the same sermon on the same handful of his favorite lessons.

So when I became an Episcopalian, one of the first things I noticed and was fascinated by, in addition to the liturgy, was the lectionary. I continue to find it fascinating, especially when I am called to preach, for then I am forced to examine it especially carefully. And I keep wondering how did the shapers of the lectionary decide which lessons to choose?

It is obvious, of course, that depending upon the season and the year, the various gospels are incorporated, often in a sequential order that follows the gospel narrative. But how then were the Old Testament lessons and Epistles chosen to match the Gospels? On top of that, we now have a new lectionary, which has replaced some lessons, especially OT lesson and epistles, with others. My limited experience is that the new choices are an improvement, but I still am left to ponder what led to those choices? How were they matched to the gospels?

The choice of today’s lessons is clear in some respects and not so clear in others. The OT lesson and epistle are new. When I realized I would be preaching from the book of Jonah, part of the new lectionary, I thought, O boy! Jonah isn’t preached on very often. And when I was child, the book of Jonah contained two of my favorite stories. The first and most famous is the story of Jonah and the whale (or more accurately, the Big Fish). Jonah tries to avoid God’s command to go to the city of Nineveh to preach repentance, and because of his avoidance, a large fish swallows him.

When I considered today’s gospel as well, I found some humorous irony. In the gospel, we are told about Jesus calling to follow him men who fish for – well, for fish. Why? In order to eat them of course. And in Jonah, we are told about a fish that eats a man. Animal rights activists will want to cheer at the reversal. And I remembered my childhood questions about this story. Like, if you got swallowed by a fish, how would you breathe? And, wouldn’t the fish start to digest you? And then wouldn’t you turn into – well, you get the picture! I decided Jonah must not have spent very much time in that fish’s belly.

But let me bring this speculation to a crashing halt. Because the story of Jonah and the fish is not in today’s reading. What a missed opportunity, lectionary people! (And I hope the Lectionary Police aren’t waiting in the hall to cart me away for expanding on the lesson.)

Today’s lesson then tells us that God commands Jonah a second time to go to Nineveh, where he is again asked to preach repentance. Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, was the greatest city of the Middle East in those days. It was located, by the way, across the Euphrates River from the contemporary city of Mosul in modern Iraq.

In the eyes of God Nineveh was a sinful city. It was the avoidance of preaching repentance to Nineveh that got Jonah into trouble with the Big Fish in the first place. So he has learned his lesson and agrees to preach gloom and doom to Nineveh. But then the most extraordinary thing happens. The people of Nineveh actually listen. They changed their ways, even without being invaded. They believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth.

And then another extraordinary thing. God changes his mind.

Does God change his mind? If God is all knowing and foreseeing, why would God change his mind? Could it be God is in this crazy thing called life with the rest of us, and living and experiencing and growing with us?

God had planned to destroy the city; but God repents. Think about that. God changed his mind about the calamity he planned to bring upon the people of Nineveh, and, our lesson tells us, he did not do it. I can recall the sexist cliché from my younger years, that it was woman’s prerogative to change her mind, assuming that only women prevaricate in this manner. Well, apparently God does too. An argument perhaps for arguing that God changed her mind.

That brings me to the last part of the book of Jonah which is also not included in our lesson today. Jonah, after preaching impending calamity and doom to the people of Nineveh, was upset because God didn’t carry through with God’s threat. Jonah was looking forward to the destruction, as do so many moralizers. Let us picture Jonah, a fiery preacher crying to Nineveh “God is going to blow you off the face of the earth,” and then retiring with a smile on his face to watch, like a child anticipating fireworks on a video game. And nothing happens. What a disappointment! How much fun it would have been to watch those awful Ninevites burn in torment!

But it didn’t happen. And we have learned since, through lessons such as our gospel, that it didn’t happen because people, unbelievably, incredibly, can change. Consider some of the lessons of the gospel and of history. A group of simple fishermen leave their nets and so found a religion, our religion, which has changed our lives and changed the world. An Englishman ferries hundreds of slaves across the Atlantic from Africa in terrible conditions, watches them suffer and die. Then he experiences a conversion, works to help end the British slave trade, and writes the hymn Amazing Grace. In Berlin, Mr. Gorbachev tears down that wall. And a nation that enslaves Africans, and visits their descendents with terrible discrimination and segregation and lynching, turns around, repents, and elects an African-American president.

It should not surprise us when God can change God’s mind, and then rejecting the power of godhood take on the form of a baby, squalling and covered in the fluid of the birth canal and then of a defenseless child, and finally a gentle, compassionate man nailed to a cross to suffer death by torture. Our faith tells us that God triumphs over this horrible death, and has destroyed death itself. As the poet John Donne said, “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more, Death, thou shalt die.”

Those lines of John Donne are call a paradox. To return to the subject of lectionary choices, our lessons today also confront us with paradox. A paradox exists when two opposing ideas are both thought to be true. Jonah and today’s gospel call us out, to repent and then get on the road to change. The epistle in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians calls us to stay in place. The 7th chapter as a whole tells men to remain uncircumcised if they are so, but not to worry if they are circumcised. Slaves are called to accept their situation and wait. People who are not married are encouraged to remain single. What happened to changing – to going out to Nineveh to preach repentance, to leaving the fishing nets to follow Christ?

That is the seeming contradiction, to remain or to go out, to stay in place or answer the call. We could consider that Paul’s advice to the Corinthians is set within the context of the expectation of the early church, in Paul’s day, that the end times were upon them. Why worry about changing one’s life when the end is near?

But why then did our lectionary supervisors choose to place this lesson in the midst of others that call for change? I believe paradox, the pairing of opposites, is vital for our understanding of God. Because how can our frail human brains comprehend the majesty of God without engaging contradictions? We learn lessons from these paradoxes. The epistle helps us to accept our situations and our limitations. I write novels, but I will never win the Nobel Prize. You raise children but you will never cure cancer. You provide your family with a comfortable living but you will never be Bill Gates. You suffer from a physical or mental disability and yet you can live your life in faithfulness to God as fully as you are able.

And there is the warning paradox we will receive in today’s offertory anthem. “The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod. Yet brothers pray for just one thing: the marvelous peace of God.” What we are called to is not easy; it is a journey fraught with suffering and peril.

And yet we are all called out. We are called to leave our fishing nets behind and follow Christ. We are called to go to Nineveh. We should expect that some fish along the way will swallow us. A very big fish! But God goes with us. And the God who changes her mind will never change about one thing. God will not leave us behind.