January 22, 2012 Sermon

Who Knows  (Jonah 3:1-5, 10 Mark 1:14-20)

Rev. Beth Hayward

Annie Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Shipping News tells the story of 36 year old Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper reporter from upstate New York whose father emigrated from Newfoundland. Shortly after his parents' suicide, Quoyle's unfaithful and abusive wife Petal leaves town and attempts to sell their daughters in a shady deal. Soon after, Petal is killed in a car accident; the young girls are located by police and returned to Quoyle. Despite his daughters' safe return, Quoyle's life is collapsing, and his paternal aunt, Agnis Hamm, convinces him to return to Newfoundland for a new beginning. They return to their ancestral home on Quoyle's Point and a story of rebirth and transformation slowly emerges.

Early in the novel Quoye is portrayed at one of his lowest moments, in the small fictional town of Mockingburg. This is how Proulx describes him:

“He wrote his pieces, lived in his rented trailer watching television. Sometimes he dreamed of love. Why not? A free country. When Ed Punch fired him he went on binges of ice cream, canned ravioli.
He abstracted his life from the times. He believed he was a newspaper reporter, yet read no paper except the Mockingburg Record, and so managed to ignore terrorism, climatological change, collapsing governments, chemical spills, plagues, recession and failing banks… that was the stuff of others’ lives. He was waiting for his to begin.
He got in the habit of walking around the trailer and asking aloud, “Who knows?” He said, “Who knows?” for no one knew. He meant, anything could happen.
A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction". (The Shipping News, A Proulx pp. 25-26)

Standing in your living room asking aloud “Who knows?” Is it a sign that you are standing on the precarious line between sanity and the abyss. Is it an indication that you have an obvious choice to make between status quo or getting on with your life? Calling out Who knows to an empty room, a sign that if there is a God, that God is too distant to be of any use? It has been said that the question Who knows is at the heart of the story of Jonah.

We have a little excerpt of Jonah before us this morning but given that the book of Jonah takes up two and a half pages in this entire canon: there’s no excuse to just read a bit of it. I invite you to go home and read the entire larger than life story for yourself. It begins with the word of the Lord coming to Jonah saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ Well Jonah is a Jew and the Ninevites are Gentiles, and besides he’s afraid and besides that it is really far away. So Jonah hops on a boat to Tarshish, which is in the complete opposite direction of Ninevah.

While on the boat God hurls a great wind at the sea. In a panic all of the sailors cry out to their god, but the storm persists. Meanwhile: Jonah is asleep in the hold. The other sailors cast lots to find out whose God brought on this storm. Jonah’s of course: so those sailors repent and reluctantly take Jonah up on his offer to be thrown overboard. The wind dies down and Jonah winds up in the belly of a large fish. After three days he finally prays to the same God he just about died running away from. Jonah is finally spared from certain death as he is unceremoniously thrown back up on dry land.

God comes to Jonah a second time, that’s where we pick up the story today. Jonah goes to Ninevah, preaches the most un-heartfelt, one line sermon of the entire scriptures, and the people, their king and even their animals repent and change their ways. As the king finishes telling all to repent he ends with these words: "Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”

Like Quoyle in his trailer in that moment when things could go either way. These ancient words echo back to us a question that has lingered through the generations. Who knows? “Who knows the true character of this strange God who rules over the waves and the creatures over and under these waves, who inspires sacred songs even on the lips of those running from his presence; who worries over desert bushes and over great cities and over those who want to be stewards and witnesses to both?” (Feasting on the Word)

Who knows, it’s the question we come to when we are out of questions, when our hope is so thin that we have run out of places to turn. It is the question we come to at the crossroads: when seeing the beauty of God in the snow on the mountains and the in the sound of birds singing is not enough to sustain our hope. The question we come to when being a faithful Christian: coming to worship, saying our prayers, participating in acts that seek justice for the marginalized, is not enough to assure us that all will be okay or that God is indeed with us. It is the question we ask when we truly don’t know that there is any hope, or that God will be with us, or that our consuming fear can really be held in such a way that we can find our way through. Who knows: a most profound question of faith that arises from a place of bold uncertainty.

A life of faith is not a life of certitude. This book never promised it would be.

The King of Ninevah no sooner has the question out of his mouth then we read: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.”

This story is too hyperbolic to be interpreted as a warning that God might send a fish to swallow up bad people or rain down destruction on a city of sinners. The story is larger than life like a great fable, so that we might get the real life point which is in part: We are not alone, God is with us.

We see here an image of God: seeking out the faithful Jew, giving second chances to God’s own. We see God changing God’s mind about the destruction of Ninevah. We see the reign of God being broad enough to embrace the gentile Ninevites, and deep enough to stick with God’s own reluctant people. Isn’t it interesting that in contrast to Jonah, the insider, who repeatedly hears God’s word and runs the other way, that the Ninevites hear a one sentence sermon without a mention of God and repent? The answer to that lingering questions: who knows, doesn’t lie in always doing the right thing, or having a list of doctrinal beliefs to hold on to, or knowing the destination of your faith journey.

All through scripture the key to faithfulness is responsiveness. Abram and Sarai hear a call and go, some fishermen receive an invitation and follow. God persists, sticks with us until we stop running, until from sheer exhaustion or faint hope we find our way to responding. God engaged in an intimate relationship with us, willing to change because we change. Or in the case of Jonah, accompanying us even when we “go dark,” even when we do our very best to hide from being seen by God.

God doesn’t give up on us. And more than that God responds to us. In the dance of relationship, when we change, God also changes. God is not bound by God’s past eternal or temporal decisions. God is free to act creatively in relationship to our creativity. God finds us: Even and especially in our Who Knows moments, relentlessly seeks us out, actively comes after us, persistently seeking out a response from us.

The journey to redemption and renewed hope for Quoyle does not occur in an instant as for the Ninevites. It does not happen like the story of the calling of those fishermen turned disciples, where they leave their nets, and their families and all that defines who they are to follow a travelling preacher, in the blink of an eye. For Quoyle the journey out of the bleak hopelessness meanders and comes with many risks, great and small and more fumbles along the way. Quoyle resolves his Who Knows moment not in a linear trajectory toward a well-marked destination: but more as the sea rises and falls toward the elusive shore.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her book, An Altar in the World “Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish— separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.”

So whether you find yourself in a boat on rocky seas, or in a city that scarcely knows it is lost, or whether you feel swallowed by a big fish, whether you are running from God or dropping your nets to follow, one thing is sure, you are not alone. God is with you and there are abundant possibilities for new life and new direction and new hope on the precarious line of who knows, who knows, who knows. Amen.

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