New Beginnings 1: Isaiah 43:14-21

Isaiah 43:14-21

I was once talking with a Baptist minister friend about what our respective denominations do when one minister leaves and a new minister comes. I extolled the Methodist system where there is little or no gap between one minister going and the new one taking over. It saved congregations from enduring a vacancy or interregnum, I said. 

“But you’ve got that wrong,” he told me. “There is value in a church having a gap in between pastors. It gives them space to grieve the loss of a much-loved minister.”

And I think he had a point. I start with you today only a few days after David completed his time as your presbyter. Not only that, but he is also still in the circuit, and that’s a situation I know all about from the minister’s side. Five years into my last appointment, my responsibilities changed. I went from looking after Knaphill and Addlestone Methodist churches to having care of Knaphill and Byfleet. I missed Addlestone. And they were still close by in the circuit, which made it harder. 

So if today you are feeling the loss of David, and are wondering what things will be like with me, when I am largely an unknown quantity to you, I want to say I get it. 

You may not be wild that the first thing I want to highlight from Isaiah 43 is God telling his people to put the past behind them.

            Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past. (Verse 18)

This needs handling carefully. There are good ways to relate to the past, and bad ways.

But make no mistake, God is serious about us putting the past behind us. In the passage, the ‘former things’ he tells Israel to forget are when he parted the Red Sea for them and then closed it over the pursuing Egyptian army. It’s like he’s telling them to forget the Exodus – the central event in Israel’s history and the focus of the Passover. It would be like telling Christians to forget Good Friday, Easter, and Holy Communion – and did you notice how Jesus in the Luke reading referred to his forthcoming death and resurrection as his ‘departure’, or his ‘exodus’?

Of course, the Lord doesn’t mean it completely literally that Israel should forget the Exodus. Later in the chapter, he talks about Israel’s need to remember. This is shock language to get over a point, just as Jesus’ teaching, including his parables, often included shock language to make a point. 

We need to distinguish between living in the past (which is unhealthy) and learning from the past (which is life-giving). We live in the past when we make past events romantic and perhaps perfect when they probably weren’t. They become a mental prison for us. They crush our imagination and hope. 

For example, in one previous circuit there where I served there was one vociferous elderly lady who would not stop going on about the time when the Sunday School at the church had a hundred children in it. She expected us to get back to those days, and she loaded guilt on those who were serving in the Junior Church. She expected our two children, themselves only just on the cusp of starting school, to be among the pioneers!

Whatever you have enjoyed and appreciated in the past at this church, please do not allow those memories to blind you to what God wants to do today. 

Our reasons for living in the past are often not good ones. It may be that we don’t like the way things are going in our world today and that we fear the future. Well, there are bad trends in our society, but no Christian has reason to fear the future. We believe the future is in God’s hands. 

Indeed, one of my favourite quotes for sermons (and I’m nervous about playing this card right at the beginning of my ministry here!) is from the American preacher and sociologist Tony Campolo. When asked how he could be so positive and hopeful in a dark and depressing world he replied, “I’ve read the book and I’ve peeked at the final chapter: Jesus wins!”

So don’t live in the past out of fear. 

And don’t live in the past out of a sense of comfort. Yes, there are uncertainties ahead of us, but we are people of faith. We are called to put our trust in Jesus. Don’t go back in your mind to a comfortable time in the past in preference to trusting him. That isn’t our calling. 

The best thing to do with the past is to learn from it. We can learn about strengths and weaknesses in our lives, and in our families and institutions that influence us. 

Most important of all, learning from the past means we look back at what God has done in Jesus Christ, and we learn more about the character of the God that we love, trust, and serve. Isn’t that what we do in reading Scripture, for example?

So that’s my first point – let’s put the past behind us. Learn from it, yes, but live there, no. 

The second of the two things I want to emphasise to day is look for what God is doing now.

            See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland. (Verse 19)

In the case of Israel, they were in exile in Babylon at this time and had been so for a few decades. Older generations were dying off. New generations were being born there who had never seen the Promised Land. But now God promises to take them home: that’s what the way in the wilderness is. Our best guess is this prophecy came about ten years or so before they began to return. 

Maybe you are disillusioned about the state of the church today. I certainly get that way at times! There is a sense in which we are in exile, too. We are now a minority in our nation and our culture. Most people are not religious. We are strange to them. Sometimes they regard us as a threat. There may be Christian elements embedded into our unwritten constitution, as we saw in some ways at the coronation of King Charles earlier this year. But in practice, we are anything but a Christian nation (whatever that is, anyway). Spiritually, we live in exile. 

And when you live in exile for any length of time, either hope starts to fade, or we chase the latest fad, or we try to ape the culture we are living in. None of these is a good Christian response. 

We do need to live in the alien culture and to bless it, as Jeremiah told the first batch of Jewish exiles in Babylon, when we wrote them a letter. (You can read it in Jeremiah 29.) We can even get involved in its structures and power, as Daniel and his three friends did. What we can’t do is absorb the values. 

What will that look like for us? The COVID pandemic taught us the importance of the digital world as a way people live and communicate today. It doesn’t replace meeting together physically but is added to it. We are called to live in a hybrid of the two. 

We also look at how we can bless people outside the church today. We may or may not agree with their lifestyles, but we can still bless them. For instance, in my last circuit in one village the churches took boxes of chocolates to all the local shops and businesses at Christmas. We told them how much we appreciated them and that we were praying for them to prosper. We also gave them an email address if they wanted to send us any prayer requests. 

We get on with doing things like this while we wait for a word from the Lord about the new things he wants to do with us and among us. They won’t be any old crackpot thing that someone suggests, but they may surprise us, and they will certainly be consistent with what we know about his will and character from Holy Scripture. 

Indeed, we shall need to be people who are soaked in the Scriptures in order to test various claims when they come along, saying, ‘This is what God is calling us to do today.’ We shall need to echo the cry of John Wesley when he prayed, ‘O Lord, make me a man of one book.’

It may even be that, just like the Jewish exiles in Babylon, the older generations like many of us die out and God does his new thing predominantly with younger generations who will be the vanguard of his renewal. Older forms of church like ours might go and the newer churches replace us. But if that is what takes the Gospel into a new day and age, we should rejoice. God did that when he raised up Methodism. He may do that again. 

Of this I am sure: God’s new thing will involve us going outward with his redeeming love and not merely inward to a religious club.

So in conclusion, are we ready to leave the past behind, learning from it but not living in it? Are we willing to hear God speak of his new thing and test all claims to it by Holy Scripture? And in the meantime, will we hear the call to bless this alien culture we live in?

So now you know why the hymn before the sermon was ‘Lord, for the years.’ Let us echo the final two lines in our lives and in our life together: 

            Past put behind us, for the future take us,

                        Lord of our lives, to live for Christ alone. (Timothy Dudley-Smith)