February 19, 2006

Isaiah 43:18-25

We Remember!

The prophet offers words of profound hope to a hopeless nation:

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Throughout this section of scripture, the theme of forgetting the past and receiving God’s new word is persistent. In Isaiah 48, we read:

You have heard; now see all this; and will you not declare it? From this time forward I make you hear new things, hidden things that you have not known. They are created now, not long ago; before today you have never heard of them…
 

Can I allow my heart to truly believe these unbelievable words of God? Knowing all that has taken place before, and seeing all that is around and within me now, I dare not hope that God has something new and different in store for me, for us, for all of us. Does the prophet play with my despair and toy with my longings, like a cat amusing itself with a trapped mouse? I pray not!

What is it that the prophet proclaims that gives such hope?

I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me…

I will make a way. God will make a way where there is no way. In the vast and desolate wildernesses of our lives, God will create a means for us to proceed and will give our parched lips water abundant.

Now, I don’t mean to question the prophet, and certainly not God, but some of this newness does sound quite familiar. A way in the wilderness… water in the desert… Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old… before today you have never heard of them… And yet, something is exceptionally recognizable about this story, this exodus from slavery and heartache to a new and prosperous place… Ah, yes:

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea. The Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night, and turned the sea into dry land… The Israelites went into the sea on dry ground… thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the Egyptians. And later: and the people complained against Moses saying, “What shall we drink?...” Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees, and they camped there by the water.

Of course, it is the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt, heading out towards the promised land. That’s why these words sound familiar! Tell me, why would the Prophet command us to let go of the past, promise a new word from God, and then dangle before us imagery and language about THE most powerful event of our history? What kind of double-talk is this?

The key to this paradox perhaps lies in what follows in both Isaiah 43 and 48.

Yet you did not call upon me, O Jacob; but you have been weary of me, O Israel… you have not honored me with your sacrifices,… but you have burdened me with your sins…

The former things I declared long ago, they went out from my mouth and I made them known; then suddenly I did them and they came to pass. Because I know that you are obstinate, and your neck is an iron sinew, and your forehead brass, I declared them to you from long ago… so that you would not say, “My idol did them!”
 

God has done great things for us, and if we were to remember them always, we would have no trouble being hopeful for God’s future. But the problem is us, we have such limited memories, such self-centered worlds. Our necks are “iron sinew” and our foreheads are “brass.” It is not that God has not said these words of deliverance and hope before – they’ve been repeated time and time again, acted upon ad infinitum. Rather, it is that we haven’t been willing to hear them! “You have never heard, you have never known, from of old your ear has not been opened!”

I feel like I am in exile, both in my personal life and in our national life. I feel like all the Good News that was proclaimed before, both from other prophets, sages, and teachers and from my own mouth has landed with a dull thud on the floor of life. I fear hopelessness and despair like never before. In large part, this is because of what I see around us: the same old same old…

Nationally, I wonder where all the good will and hope for peace went following the collapse of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War. With terrible atrocities in Kosovo, Rwanda, and now Darfur, wars in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq, and new walls being built to separate Israeli from Palestinian, can we, in good conscience, as Yoko Ono read the words of her husband, John Lennon, from the stage of the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, “imagine peace?”

I despair that our nation’s democratic foundations and all of our moral responsibility to neighbors who are “the least of these” has been trampled by questionable ethics and exorbitant salaries of those at the top of our corporate ladders; has been imprisoned by railroaded policies of fewer and fewer taxes on the richest among us and fewer and fewer resources to help the weakest and most vulnerable among us; has been mocked by a culture of arrogance, secrecy and deception by our top political leaders; and has been torn apart by the allowance of torture and inhumane treatment in the name of national security.

How can I believe that God will “do a new thing” when it seems that every commercial I see on television, pop-up ad on the internet, spot I hear on the radio reinforces the age-old stereotypes about male and female gender identities, reinstills the damnable notions that things are more important than people and consuming is more blessed than giving, and racking up debt is as American as apple pie.

But the political always turns to the personal, and my hopelessness and despair focuses closer to home. We are coming up on five years of all the fanfare of my arrival as “Redevelopment Pastor,” and I wonder if you made the right choice. Is this nice guy pastor you’ve got really the right one to usher in God’s transformation and renewal? Does painting walls and shining up woodwork distract us from radical changes needed in order to make this ship of faith seaworthy for the next 164 years? Can the recrafting of our programming through a Mission Council really help nurture the gifts of all in the congregation and free us up to do what God is calling us to do?

And let’s not even get into my own fears and frustrations about my personal life!

It would seem to be exactly the right time for God to call us to look at, study, delve into the ancient stories of slavery, exile, exodus, response, renewal, and blessedness. Why does God therefore say, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.” Why do a “new thing” we we’ve not ever really figured out, lived into the old new thing?

Well, as I intimated in the beginning, God tells us one thing and then, with a sly grin, does another. God tells us to not remember former things, because we so quickly forget them, but then pours out images, language, stories, and examples that flood our memories with all that God has done for us in the past. For the people hearing Isaiah’s words, they are in exile in Babylon longing for return to their trampled desecrated homeland. Being reminded of the exodus out of Egypt, even if in an underhanded and oh-so-clever manner, gives the people in their new day hope from the past.

Our key, again, is in the middle part of our text:

Yet you did not call upon me, O Jacob; but you have been weary of me, O Israel! You have not brought me your sheep for burnt offerings, or honored me with your sacrifices. I have not burdened you with offerings, or wearied you with frankincense… but you have burdened me with your sins; you have wearied me with your iniquities.

In words only a poet of divine inspiration could articulate, God wants us to forget(remember) the past salvation God has brought because God is willing to remember(forget) the past transgressions we have wrought. The fulcrum of this forgetting/remembering/forgetting is nothing less than the Mercy of the Almighty God!

Poet and professor Walter Brueggemann sings,

“What a difference mercy makes! It is given and present in the memory of the church. It is present and given in our lives today. It is present and given in the world today. Wondrous acts that happen among us to make all things new.”

Mercy! Mercy is God’s willingness to remember and forget all that we have done, as a world, as a nation, as a church, as individuals, that distort our God-given image and break the relationships we have with God and one another. This is exactly what we are called to do at the table of our Lord: remember the ancient stories of all that God has done to bring us out of slavery, exile, wilderness, crucifixion and then forget them in order to receive the new gift of mercy that comes afresh each and every moment. This is our gift at the table of the Lord: mercy given and mercy received.

!!God has every right to remember our sins, our broken promises, our terrible memories… BUT GOD DOESN’T! All is forgotten!
“Yahweh is endlessly committed to this people,” Brueggeman writes, “and will yet again disrupt the serious indictment with an act of forgiving and forgetting.”

We, similarly, have every intention of forgetting all God has done for us, or at least we act like we’ve forgotten all God has done. But scratch the surface just a little bit, and WE REMEMBER! But break the bread, just a little bit, and WE REMEMBER! But drink from the cup, just a little bit, and WE REMEMBER!

Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: I am the Lord your God, who teaches you for your own good, who leads you in the way you should go. O that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your prosperity would have been like a river, and your success like the waves of the sea; your offspring would have been like the sand, and your descendants like its grains; their name would never be cut off or destroyed from before me.

Go out from Babylon, flee from Chaldea, declare this with a shout of joy, proclaim it, send it forth to the end of the earth; say, ‘The Lord has redeemed his servant Jacob!’ They did not thirst when he led them through the deserts; he made water flow for them from the rock; he split open the rock and the water gushed out.

God’s Mercy – Our Hope. Forever Old, Forever New.
Amen.

 

Rev. Allen V. Harris
Franklin Circle Christian Church
www.FranklinCircleChurch.org


 

Copyright 2006 -- The Rev. Allen V. Harris

Franklin Circle Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

1688 Fulton Rd., Cleveland, OH 44113-3096