Spring Cleaning

The introduction to the St. Andrew’s Lenten Reader states that Lent is a journey from old visions of our lives that may have outlived their usefulness toward being surprised by new possibilities. Each person who contributed witnessed to their own personal story of faith formation.  Earlier in chapter 43, verse 10, Isaiah writes, “You are my witnesses, says the Lord.”  In the Spiritual Formation Bible I often use, witnessing is defined as “simply reporting one’s encounter with the holy. More personal than giving doctrinal principles, witnessing is telling what you have seen and heard.”   How do you remember your faith history?

In this section of Isaiah, chapters 40 and following, the prophet is coming alongside the Hebrew people to comfort them and open them to the Spirit’s new insight. Chapter 43, that we read today, overflows with promises of divine comfort and restoration. The exiled Hebrew people remembered how they were enslaved in Babylon and how their lives had been taken from them.   Israelites are called to be a servant people who will cooperate with God’s purposes that are greater than any they could imagine.  

The prophet Isaiah offers comfort and encouragement when he explains that the Lord makes a way in the sea.  The lives of their ancestors had been spared as they ran from Pharaoh’s army.  Their Hebrew offspring were reminded to remember the story when God had parted the waters making a way for them to cross safely.  

Imagine their surprise to hear this instruction: “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?”

Why would they be asked to forget what surely, they should have been encouraged to remember? 

The Hebrew people who were now in captivity in Babylon had forgotten the formative part of their history. God was focusing the Hebrews’ eyes, minds and hearts on what God was about to do with and for them. God called the Hebrews from a memory of a history that had enslaved them and encouraged them to not allow those same barriers to hold them back.  They were called to march toward a new future.

Isaiah writes to people so in love with those wonderful past times that they have misunderstood the present tense.  They were nostalgic and thought they could recover better days they remembered as comfortable and familiar.  Isaiah blurts out the heavy truth to the Hebrew exiles and to us:  Do not remember the old things, behold i am doing a new thing. Can’t you see it? 

There is much of our history that needs to be preserved. In our call to worship, the Psalmist, like our Lenten reflections, remembers what it was that still grounded them: I trust in the Lord with all my heart…I have hidden God’s word in my heart…With my lips i talk about all the decisions you have made…I spend time thinking about your rules…I consider how you want me to live.

We are reminded how our history formed us as God’s people. It is in the teasing apart of our history, individually and as a church, that is more than historical fact. We must distinguish between what is a comfortable and familiar memory and that which continues to form our faith in the present time. Isaiah would say to the exiles that their history is not what would define them.

It was the part of their history that grounded them and gave them the foundation to march forward toward their new future. There is much about our history that must be preserved but if it is the only lens that keeps us from recognizing, welcoming, and embracing the new that is emerging around and within us then we will miss what it means to be informed as God’s people. When the history book becomes our newspaper, we view the present only through the lens of the past saying this is what happened and so, this is what will continue to happen. We are blinded to what is new because we are expecting a repeat of the past. 

In our New Testament reading, Paul tells the Philippian church the same message. Don’t rest on your accomplishments or credentials or even your past failures.

 Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but this one thing I do; forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.  

Our history can become only a book that keeps us bound to a predictable past or we can become our newspaper through which we see the new that God wants us to move toward. Moving there and seeing what God is doing is up to us.  

These are someone else’s words that seem to fit our message today. We are called to.

Go out from old, tired stuff, go out from fears that divide you, go out from quarrels unresolved.  Go out from old sins unforgiven. Go out from old decisions that have scarred and wounded.  Go out from old memories that have become graven images.  Go out into God’s demanding mission.