Sunday’s Sermon: Forget The Former Things

I have my annual General Church Meeting at the church where I am preaching on Sunday morning after the service. I know it’s Freedom Day (the bicentenary of the Slave Trade Act becoming law) and that it’s Passion Sunday, but the Lectionary seemed to be relevant to an annual meeting.

Isaiah 43:14-21

Introduction
Today (Sunday 25^th March) is the two hundredth anniversary of the Act to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. I had originally planned to build the whole service around that theme, sermon included. We shall still include it in the intercessions, with a PowerPoint presentation from the campaigning organisation Stop The Traffik. But then I read the Lectionary lessons for today and found them profoundly relevant.

Isaiah 43 is written for Jewish exiles who have been away from home for decades. They are in Babylon, not Jerusalem. Year upon year hope has ebbed away like a tide that never comes in again. They have had children who have known nothing other than exile.

Do they sound like us? With a few exceptions most of us have known little other than numerical decline in church life. The peak for church membership numbers in the UK was around World War One. Ever since then the general trend has been down. Most of us have lived with that all our lives. We have seen churches combined or closed.

Here people reminisce about the glory days of Mr Barker and the Sunday School, or a larger attendance than when they first joined. We face critical issues about the increasing age profile of the congregation. If we are to make an impact we need to do so while we still have people who have sufficient strength and energy. (Not that I despise the importance of prayer, in which anyone of any condition can serve, and without which we are sunk anyway. But you know what I am saying.)

So what word from the Lord might there be for us in Isaiah 43? Come with me: let’s find out.

1. Remember
The first word is, ‘remember’: remember our God, who he is, and what his track record is.

I am the Lord, your Holy One,
   the Creator of Israel, your King.
Thus says the Lord,
   who makes a way in the sea,
   a path in the mighty waters,
who brings out chariot and horse,
   army and warrior;
they lie down, they cannot rise,
   they are extinguished, quenched like a wick
(verses 15-17).

Remember God, the Holy One, the Creator of Israel, the King, and the God of the Exodus who delivered Israel at the Red Sea from the Egyptians. This is the powerful and holy God in whom we trust.

It’s easy at times of discouragement and decline to forget the power and majesty of our God. But he has not changed. He is still the same. We may have declined but he has not. Society may mock our God, but God is not to be mocked.

It’s a cliché to say that just because there are clouds in the sky doesn’t mean the sun isn’t shining. But we are dealing with the hiddenness of God. Hidden in various ways, that is. There are times when God hides his obvious presence from us (not that he is truly absent) so that we might strive to seek him. God makes himself harder to find, because we can become complacent or lazy at putting in the effort. Although he takes the initiative in making himself known to us, when we take him for granted he may move back from us in order to make us serious in seeking after him and responding to him.

God also seems to be hidden when we have deliberately turned our backs on him. That was what had happened to the Jewish exiles in Babylon: they were there due to the disobedience of the holy nation. So it may be that the hiddenness of God calls us to examine our hearts and see whether there is anything to confess.

Another issue may be this: sometimes we think God is hidden when he isn’t. We may judge whether God is present on the wrong grounds. We think the presence of God is to be measured in terms of joy, celebration and triumph. But those are times when we forget that God is the God of the Cross as well as the God of the Resurrection. God is present in the suffering and brokenness to redeem it for his loving purposes. We can think he is hidden or absent but have overlooked his presence in the darkness.

Our situations of decline, struggle and aging, then, are not times to assume that God has taken leave of absence. They are not times to downsize our belief in him or our expectations of him. They are times to affirm that ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever’ (Hebrews 13:8). It is time to encourage one another still to believe in the God who delivered Israel from Egypt, who brought them back from Babylon, who raised his Son from the dead and who poured out his Spirit in power at the first Christian Pentecost. It’s why we mark the seasons of the Christian Year and rehearse the story of God in the thanksgiving story at Holy Communion – to remember that the God of the past is the God of today.  It is time to say, ‘Lord, we remember you. We believe in you. We trust you. Here we are, your servants at your disposal and your friends responding to your love.’

2. Forget
If God’s first word to us is ‘remember’, his second word is ‘forget’:

Do not remember the former things,
   or consider the things of old.
(verse 18)

‘The former things’? ‘The things of old’? What are they? God has just been reminding them of his mighty acts of deliverance in the Exodus: how can he tell Israel to forget the very event that constituted them as a nation? It’s like telling Christians to forget Easter! Shocking!

But shocking language is needed to encourage the spiritual discipline of forgetting. The problem for Israel was not their allegiance to the God of the Exodus, but the way they lived in the past. ‘It must have been wonderful back in those days.’

It’s one thing to learn from the past, says God, but it’s quite another to live in the past, he says. To live in the past is disabling. It means you can never be satisfied with today. It stops you seeing what God is doing or hearing what he is saying right now.

Not without cause do we talk of people looking at the past with rose-tinted spectacles, or making sepia-toned photos. Both images suggest an attitude that views the past in distorted colours. Living in the past is just that. It imagines things were great and ignores the problems. It imagines that today most things are bad and few things are good. In other words, it’s to live a lie.

Or to take another popular catchphrase on this subject, ‘Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.’ Whatever the blessings of the past, there is something wrong with Christians who only ever look back. I know it will be said that for many of us we have less of our life ahead of us than behind us, but that isn’t true for even the most elderly among us. We live with the hope of heaven! We all have much to look forward to. Only to look back and not to expect God to be at work today or anticipate being with him in glory is in some sense a loss of faith. It isn’t God’s best for us. The biblical warning for us is Lot’s wife: she looked back at Sodom and ended up as a pillar of salt. When in Isaiah God says, ‘Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old’, he desperately doesn’t want us to become pillars of salt (spiritually speaking).

What God calls for in Isaiah 43 is a New Testament theme also. Paul put it this way in our Epistle reading:

Beloved,<!– +fGk Brothers+e –> I do not consider that I have made it my own;<!– +fOther ancient authorities read my own yet+e –> but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly<!– +fGk upward+e –> call of God in Christ Jesus.
(Philippians 3:13-14)

Sometimes the refusal to forget is dressed up by talking about the importance of tradition in our faith, and there tradition is important. We don’t want to jettison the foundations given to us, the truths handed down. But we need to make a distinction. Someone once put it like this: ‘Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.’ The trouble with living in the past is that it isn’t a way of resourcing our lives from the great Christian tradition; it’s the dead faith of the living. It doesn’t provide energy for living faith, it fails to see that once worked well and was honourable will no longer be the tool in a new situation. Meanwhile devotion to the past leads only to complaining about the present. It’s one thing to remember the tradition that tells us of the mighty God we love, serve and trust; it’s quite the opposite to be bound to a traditionalism that sucks the life and hope out of us. The first we should remember, the second we should forget.

3. Look Forward
Remembering gives us back our foundations; forgetting clears away debris. But what is now to be built?

I 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.
The wild animals will honour me,
   the jackals and the ostriches;
for I give water in the wilderness,
   rivers in the desert,
to give drink to my chosen people,
   the people whom I formed for myself
so that they might declare my praise.
(verses 19-21)

As Israel of the Exodus had been given ‘a way through the [Red] Sea’ so Israel of the Exile will find ‘a way through the desert’ opening up for them. And as Israel of the Exodus had been sustained in the desert, so too would be Israel of the Exile: there would be ‘water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert’.[1] God was calling his people home and he would sustain them on the journey.

Good news, then! Exile does not last forever. Decline is not the final word, even if some people have predicted the end of religion in this country in the near future.[2] God has other plans. He will have the final word, not the pessimists, whether religious or secular. Individual churches may close and denominations that don’t adapt may suffer but Jesus said that he would build his church on the confession of faith in him and the gates of Hades would not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18).

But why does God want us to look forward to a future of hope? Why will he preserve and build his people? He says in verse 21 it is ‘so that they might declare my praise.’ Not just praise, you notice, but ‘declare [his] praise’. We are to be preserved not only for praise but for mission. We look forward to a calling to declare God’s praise, and that means witness. It means mission. It is the same as what happened at the first Christian Pentecost when the assembled crowd overheard the Spirit-filled disciples ‘speaking about God’s deeds of power’ (Acts 2:11).

God is leading us to new places of refreshing where we are to declare his praise. Because we are to remember him but forget living in the past, the way we do so will be anchored in the historic Gospel (who God is and what he does) but will take on new forms. It’s why the Methodist and Anglican churches have co-operated on the Fresh Expressions project. A ‘fresh expression of church’ is defined as

A fresh expression is a form of church for our changing culture, established primarily for the benefit of people who are not yet members of any church.

• It will come into being through principles of listening, service, incarnational mission and making disciples. 
• It will have the potential to become a mature expression of church shaped by the gospel and the enduring marks of the church and for its cultural context.

God is calling us, I believe, to hold onto the historic Gospel without tampering with it, but to release the old ways of doing things with thanks for what they achieved in the past but recognising they were temporary gifts. Then, he says, receive the new thing he is doing. Bring that historic Gospel into conversation with people today who need Christ and see what shape it might look like. The DVD produced by Fresh Expressions illustrates fourteen different projects around the UK: a sports project with deprived teenage boys in Hemel Hempstead, a café church in Staffordshire, a student congregation in Southampton, a rural group for the middle-aged to elderly in Devon, a skate park here in Essex at Benfleet, a ‘cell church’ in Gateshead – there are so many permutations.

To adapt Mr Spock in Star Trek, ‘It’s church, Jim, but not as we know it.’ But – it is church. And God is calling us ‘to boldly go.’

 

Technorati Tags: StopTheTraffik, Isaiah43, tradition, traditionalism, churchdecline, mission, FreshExpressions, JohnGoldingay, CallumBrown