March 17, 2013
Old Testament Reading: Isaiah 43:16-21
16Thus
says the LORD,
who
makes a way in the sea,
a path
in the mighty waters,
17who brings out chariot and
horse,
army and warrior;
they lie down, they cannot rise,
they are extinguished, quenched like a wick:
18Do not remember the former
things,
or consider the things of old.
19I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in
the desert.
20The wild animals will honor
me,
the jackals and the ostriches;
for I give water in the wilderness,
rivers in the desert,
to give drink to my chosen people,
21the people whom I formed for
myself
so that they might declare my praise.
Sermon: “Nurturing Newness”
There is a universal truth
about us human beings: we are never wrong.
Right? Unfortunately, history
has proved such a statement to be embarrassing on several occasions. Let’s look at some, shall we?
When smallpox had ravaged
many villages and towns in the 17th century, you might think that
the efforts of Dr. Edward Jenner to create a vaccine would be welcomed. They were not. The British medical community declared that “inoculation of the kind employed by Jenner would produce a cow-like
face; those who had been vaccinated (the word 'vaccinate' is derived from the
Latin vacca, a cow) would grow hairy and cough like cows...one doctor stated:
'Smallpox is a visitation from God; but the cowpox is produced by presumptuous
man.” Clearly, you’d rather die from
smallpox than look (or cough?) like a cow.
Next up, we have a statement from Madeline
Dahlgren in 1871: “We hold that the new status will
prove to be the worst kind of communism. The relations between the sexes, so
carefully guarded by religion and by parents, by law and by society, will
become common and therefore corrupt. The family, the foundation of the State,
will disappear. The mothers, sisters and daughters of our glorious past will
exist no more and the female gender will vanish.” Can you guess what “communism” she was addressing? Women’s right to vote.
We move
into the 20th century and, unfortunately it just becomes more
embarrassing. Harpers Weekly included an
article in a 1902 edition that claimed that "the actual building of roads devoted to motor cars is not for
the near future, in spite of many rumors to that effect."
In 1903, just one week
before two North Carolinian brothers successfully flew at Kitty
Hawk, the New York Times grumbled about a scientist working on aviation
technology, saying, "...We hope that
Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in
further peril by continuing to waste his time and the money involved, in
further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to
humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to
fly...”
Let’s fast forward into our time. Clifford Stoll wrote an article against the internet in
Newsweek in 1995, saying, “Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive
libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and
virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to
networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government
more democratic. Baloney.” He went on to say that online reading would
never outnumber newspaper subscriptions, and that no one would ever book
flights or shop over the internet. He concludes, “What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is that the Internet is one
big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness.”
As you know, vaccinations
are part of the fabric of our healthcare for children (without turning them
into cows), we women have been voting for a while now and are miraculously our
society has survived, roads are so ordinary to life that we don’t even think
about them (unless of course there is construction), airplanes are used for
business, travel, military and medical needs every single day and yes, the
internet has become indispensible to commerce and society.
Whether we embrace it with
open arms or are dragged kicking and screaming into it, newness comes. It is folly to think that things will always
be this way, because that’s the way they have always been. But it is also folly to think that change
comes without any connection to history and the past.
I think this is something
of the message the prophet Isaiah had for the people of Israel, freed from
slavery in Egypt, but then finding themselves captive again in Babylon. The prophet’s bold statement is this:
Do not remember the former
things, or consider the things of old. I
am about to do newness; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I changed his wording a
bit from our reading, to make it closer to what he originally said in the Hebrew. Isaiah did not say God was about to “do a new
thing.”
We do always like to think of
newness in the form of “things,” don’t we?
A new ipad, a new job, a new baby, a new book. Newness seems to always come in one package
or another. But Isaiah did not say
“thing”, we added that. He just said
that God was about “to do newness.”
God’s newness cannot be
encompassed in any one “thing.” This is
why I think the argument about “contemporary” or “traditional” worship falls
flat: it assumes God’s newness is only found in one of those categories. This is why our language of “historical” or
“modern”, of “old” or “young” when it comes to church can be damaging. The newness God brings does not fit in our
labels, but transcends—and transforms—them all.
Isaiah did tell the people
of Israel, “do not remember the former things of old.” But it’s important to realize that he housed
all of that talk of God’s newness springing forth inside the memories of their
shared history. Because God made a path in mighty waters, because God defeated all
who enslaved them, because God choose
them as a covenant people, God can be trusted.
And if God can be trusted, so can the newness God brings.
This is a hard leap to
make. All of the mistaken predictions I
shared earlier show that we humans are a distrustful people, especially when it
comes to change. We can trust the God of
the past: whom we saw in Sunday School as a child, whom we saw in days of hard
work and nights of constant care for family, whom we saw in life-changing
journeys and challenging trials. We only
need look back on our past to see that God was with us. Trusting the God of the past is easy. Trusting the God of the present is
harder. Trusting the God of the future
is extraordinarily difficult.
But, as we journey in the
wilderness towards a future heavy with a looming cross and bright with the
promise of an empty tomb, that is our call.
It is not enough to cling to the past, hoping the crumbs of our old faith
will sustain us. We might find enough to
survive there, but we will never find enough to thrive, to “spring forth” with
God’s newness.
We must, like the people
of Israel confident that God was once with them but facing present uncertainty,
actively look for God’s newness here, now, today. Just as highways in the wilderness and
waterfalls in the desert do not make sense, just as costly perfume poured out
at an ordinary dinner party seems strangely extravagant, God’s newness might
bewilder us. But we do not have to
understand it. We just have to nurture
it, like fragile shoots stretching up towards a spring sun, until it flourishes
in our midst. I am not going to give you
descriptions for what God’s newness looks like.
That would be putting it back in the language of “things.”
Instead, I leave you (and
me) with a challenge: lets open our eyes and hearts to the possibility that the
God of the past is also the God of the present and the future. Let’s embrace the fragile uncertainty of
change, not as something to be feared, but as rich soil in which the Spirit can
grow new life among us. Let’s remember
our past, but not be stifled by it.
Let’s look toward an unknown future, but not be threatened by it.
Do we have the courage to
not only trust God, but to trust the newness God brings? Amen.
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