What's new?
Commentary
Object:
Life can be quite onerous depending on the answer given to this question. Many of
us find ourselves perpetually overwhelmed by a steady stream of newness that is getting
the best of us. Just when many of us have mastered Windows XP, we find ourselves
lusting after the Microsoft Vista operating system. I often feel that I spend a lifetime of
unlearning the lessons I learned in seminary: It is now as legitimate to speak of thinking
locally to act globally as the other way around; expectations are now that the preacher
will insert personal illustrations lest they seem inauthentic, one will lead the sacraments
in a personal tone of voice. There are days when there are just too many new heavens and
earths to contend with. If this is what God is up to, then I must admit that I feel like my
C-drive is beginning to fill up as I am being thrust into overdrive by the promise of a
variety of new approaches to ministry. My prayer becomes, "O Lord, give it thou a rest
for mine eyes grow weary and my congregation grows faint at all the fads. Let thou thy
people depart in peace to process and reflect before thy preacher goes off to another
workshop."
Of course, on the other end of the scale there are days when the congregation pleads for the pastor to get off his or her hobbyhorse and get with what is happening in the world. I now see congregations flinch when a pastor uses sexist language, for it is no longer the lingua franca of the day. Church school children do a duck and cover drill at the thought of having to walk where Jesus walked using a sixty-year-old flannel board. In what I thought was a brilliant move, I used the film Good Will Hunting with my confirmation class believing the popularity of Robin Williams would win the day, only to be asked, "Who is Robin Williams?" My prayer is also, "O Lord, do not let me shame myself in front of the confirmation class, spare me those flat seasons when my parishioners can mouth my sermons as I preach them. If thou cannot grant me a new heaven or earth at least spare me the hell of people avoiding me because I have become a 'Johnny One Note.' Save me from having my head in a book, from being stuck trying to balance the books, or trying to book the youth group for another fun event, when your new heaven and earth breaks out."
The problem with change is that we can have either too much of it or too little of it. We can either be overwhelmed by too much new heaven or earth or be left under-whelmed in our impact on life by the hellishness that comes from being out to lunch missing the great feast of newness that God is serving up. The text from Isaiah serves up the menu of what God is up to and gives some suggestions as to how we may partake of what God is attempting to do in our lives and in the world.
Well, why bother with the passage from 2 Thessalonians at all? We know where it is headed right from the start. Of course, the problem in our musty reading of this text might be that we are not open to the fresh implications in and between its lines. Or, do we favor the seeming reinforcement that this text offers to the middle class lifestyles that many of us share and that not a few of us compulsively pursue as part of our redemption?
To paraphrase the old saying, "When all you have is a hammer then you are not likely to enjoy having your handiwork undone." The Luke texts suggest that many of us have been able to cobble together some pretty fancy work that would rival anything seen on PBS's This Old House. "When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said ..." (Luke 21:5). The text offers a path to follow that will lead beyond survival to thriving in the midst of what God is bringing about.
Each of these texts suggests how much is at stake in answers we give to the question, "What's new?"
Isaiah 65:17-25
God is going to do a new thing. Well, the Hebrews must have thought it is about time. They are immersed in the rebuilding work following their exile in Babylon. Things have not gone quite as expected: the work is hard, the friction great, and their bad theology abundant. Bring on the newness.
Like us, I am sure they expected the newness to either conform to reasonable, manageable proportions or that it would be so sweeping that it would elevate them beyond the normal constraints and difficulties of human existence. Couples preparing for marriage often seem to be ready for a newness that will sweep away all obstacles in their lives. However, even in the heavenly city there are streets to be swept and no doubt garbage to be taken out and left at the curb of the golden streets. Or the young couple expects that they, much like Prince Charles and Camilla, will carry on life without much significant change to major parts of their former life. However, note that the text does not say that God will do away with all things, only make all things new. Neither does the text say that all things will be restored to the way they once were nor that people will live happily ever after. While infants do survive in the new order of things, there are still infants who need care and nurturing. While those who don't make it to 100 feel robbed, there will still be senior citizens whose needs must be addressed. While the order of one building and another inhabiting is overturned there is still much building to be done.
The new order of things will demand more than just sitting idly by. It will require actively participating in the new order by following a new set of blueprints, a new diet plan, and a new economic order of things. Of course, immediately we are presented with a bit of a chicken and the egg kind of issue. Is it the new blue print, diet, and economic order that makes for the newness or is it the newness that makes it possible for this trinity? Of course, the really new thing is recognizing that it is both. Whichever end of the stick you pick up, it will lead you to the fulfillment of where God wants you to be.
Certainly, from whichever place we begin, there is going to be a lot of serious challenging change if these scenarios are enacted. Imagine if people did live to a hundred on a routine basis. They would have to live with the consequences of much that they had planned for and worked for in ways they never had before. Visualize what it might mean to a family system's theory for people to regularly interact with their great, great, great, great, grandchildren. Certainly, our political life would take on quite a different coloration if politicians knew that they would be answerable to future generations in more than a metaphorical sense. Can you imagine a nation where the food supply is not controlled by huge corporate interests? "They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat" (Isaiah 65:22). This vision would turn around the current energy crises if food was produced locally instead of needing to be shipped long distances. "They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit" (Isaiah 65:21). Here is a stunning vision of an alternative world that takes one's breath away.
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
There are few texts in scripture that are more likely to send chills up and down my spine than this one. It is not so much because I find its rebuke of idleness addressed to me. Rather, it is the way that it has been interpreted and used over the years to reinforce a fairly prosaic moralistic stance toward life. "No work, no eat," do we really need this text to bring out this particular truth? If anything, this text tends to reinforce a pride in pulling one's own weight that belies the true interdependent human reality. The text becomes a little bit more comfortable if what is meant here is that I do my part that others may do their part just as their work makes it possible for me to do mine.
It is one thing to address this text to the well-educated, able-bodied, upwardly mobile with interesting jobs. It is quite another to address this text to those who haven't been able to find work in six months or who grind away at mind-numbing, soul-searing jobs.
If one examines the text closely, it is addressed to those who have been using their beliefs about the world to come to, in essence, drop out of the world that is. Many Christians have advocated less than a spirited care of the environment because the issue of this life will soon be addressed by the second coming. Bill Moyers has commented on Glenn Scherer's The Road to Environmental Apocalypse. Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming apocalypse.
Paul is saying here that whatever one's beliefs about the world to come, disengagement from the world that is likely to lead to an aridness of soul and dullness of mind is to be avoided. It is one thing to address this passage to a single working mom whose world weariness has come from the day in and day out struggle to keep human and to keep food on the table. It is quite another to address it to those whose disengagement from the world comes from their ability to live off their investments that free them from participating in the daily struggles that most of us must face. Something more is suggested here than the simple failure to work for a living. The King James Version, as it renders verse 6, highlights what Paul is after, "Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us." Often in scripture the phrase disorderly connotes those who have fallen out of military discipline: those who have gotten out of step or those who have fallen from the ranks. I am reminded of the price that George H. W. Bush paid for the political misstep of not knowing what the electronic price code bars were for on the items that he purchased. In the minds of many it demonstrated that he was not to be ranked among the people he sought to lead. Fairly or unfairly, the impression was given that somehow he was not one of us. Certainly this is to be avoided by Christians if they proclaim a gospel of redemption of the world as it is so that it can be what God intended it to be.
For Aristotle, the first task of persuasive rhetoric was to establish a fundamental rapport with the audience in which they recognized the speaker as basically one of them. It was for Aristotle the most important of the fundamental persuasive elements of speech: ethnos, pathos, and logos. How can we proclaim the redemption of the world if we are not seen as, like most others, taking the world that is very seriously? Certainly if we live in idleness we will not be understood to be taking the world very seriously. Work is to be redeemed not eliminated. Paul is adamant about this for there will be some serious missteps ahead if the church is seen as the people who are out of step with the way that most people must live their lives. The church will be seen as not only having nothing new to say to the world but nothing to say at all.
Luke 21:5-19
Having stood looking across the Kidron Valley toward the temple, I know the truth of Jesus' words. "When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, 'As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down' " (Luke 21:5-6). All that one can see of the ruins of the temple is the retaining wall that Herod installed and that has become known world wide as the Wailing Wall. Occasionally, one can see the Israeli Arab conflict acted out in the clash of those who have come to the Wailing Wall and those who have come to visit the Dome of The Rock, the third holiest site in Islam that is only a few hundred yards away.
They asked Jesus, "Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?" In many ways, in the age that we live in, we have grown skeptical, not about the end time but that there could be anything ahead that will look like sustained good times. Energy crises, global warming, war, have all left us quite suspicious about anyone claiming that there could be an age of abundance ahead for us in any meaningful sense. Newness does not come easily for human beings in the first place. Fly by wire aircraft, which operated like an electronic organ console by making electronic connections instead of like a tracker organ where there is physical connection with the control surfaces, posed a serious problem for pilots who had been trained on older planes. Flying without an actual wheel in front of them that gave a physical sense of the plane was well outside of the comfort zone of most pilots. The pilots were only pacified when a fake wheel was installed that they could hold onto during the flight. Newness does not come easily. Well into WWII, the British still trained their artillery crews to hold the horses as the guns fired even though they no longer used the animals to move the guns. Newness does not come easily. We come to terms and find ourselves not expecting anything more than nations rising up against nation and the general run of plagues and famines that make up the nightly news.
Many will come claiming that they know when these events will have taken a turn from which there is no return as the heavens either close up on our future or when will they open up a new future for us.
What is new here is that it seems that the option to just retreat into our shell will be foreclosed. "But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify" (Luke 21:12-13). Along with the opportunity to testify, there will be family divisions and public opposition. Yet Jesus says that the community will get through these things even though we cannot imagine beforehand how. As a matter of fact, we will not only survive but will find ourselves thriving as we gain our souls.
There is much to be gained as we handle family divisions, face public opposition, and find ourselves giving public account of our faith. We gain soul power and a depth of soul that will not perish. It is certainly new to see a time of internal division, external opposition, and a general accounting as the place where we need to be. I don't see this presented in much of the church renewal literature as the way we ought to go. However, our attempts to either paper over differences, or cut ourselves off from each other, along with our unwillingness to endure real hatred for the sake of deeper relationships may be preventing us from going anywhere.
Application
Let us be clear about what the Hebrew text says here. It is God who will be making a new heaven and a new earth. If God is doing this in our age, it is certainly rearranging our understanding of what heaven and earth is about. At this point, many of us find ourselves saying, "Check, please!" We are hard-pressed to see how a new heaven or a new earth can be carved out of the mess that we are in. Yet, look around and there are signs that this just may be what is happening. Certainly, something new is brewing when a group of evangelical leaders unite to take global warming seriously.
My home conference of the United Church of Christ devoted its latest annual meeting to the themes of evangelism and prayer. Michael Ignatieff, deputy leader of the Liberal party of Canada, recently wrote an apology in the New York Times for having backed the Iraq War. What struck me was not so much his new position as the model he chose to emulate in his thinking. Daring leaders can be trusted as long as they give some inkling of knowing what it is to fail. They must be men of sorrow acquainted with grief, as the prophet Isaiah says, "Something is going on here that reflects a new heaven and earth."
Of course, this is going to cause some problems for some people as they discover that this new heaven and new earth may burst the bounds of old churches, theologies, and understandings. This newness sounds familiar, "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins" (Mark 2:22). Indeed, it may be that "the old, old story" is what makes all things new. Perhaps in the church we get all bollixed up over change because we fall short of offering a new heaven and a new earth. To many people it seems that the church is about the same pettiness and narrowness of vision and self-serving pursuit that they see in the rest of the world.
Yet, what always haunts and can often help is that it has always been such people that surrounded Jesus.
Alternative Application
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13. Part of the Hippocratic Oath is the pledge, "to do no harm." It might not be a bad thing for a similar pledge to be part of ordination and confirmation vows, as well as membership commitments. For all our high-minded theology, visionary statements, and impassioned mission we find ourselves all too often falling into hurtful patterns in the life of the church. I know of no pastor who does not find themselves engaged from time to time in a ministry to those who are seeking transformed lives but are church-phobic. They fear that they will find the same abusive patterns in church that they see in the outside world.
Our fear to offend or embarrass ourselves often overtakes us when we are given an opportunity to testify and are afraid to enter into the openness to what God can do with those opportunities that, according to Jesus, will be given us to testify.
Unlike Paul, all too often we have been a burden for we have not done the work of making our congregations free of sexual abuse. We have done harm because we have not done the work of examining our life to see to what degree it partakes of a sexual understanding that have left the weakest and most vulnerable among us exposed to hurt. Like Paul, who knew he needed to work to earn his keep and keep his credibility, we have to do our homework in order to maintain our credibility as a source of vitality in our society.
I wonder to what degree our slavishness to expediency, a survival mentality, and the desire to draw lines between each other rather than draw circles that include each other prevents us from being a joy and our people a delight.
Perhaps the new thing that God is doing among us is the call to do no harm. If we begin there, we will end up where "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent -- its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord" (Isaiah 65:25).
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 98
Rolling the radio around the stations one morning during summer vacation, it became evident that there is not much of a taste for "new songs." From static to station and back again, the radio dial was alive with oldies stations. Hits from the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and now even the '90s! Oldies. Each decade claims a niche of style, a series of songs that generations sing through adolescence and hopefully, into adulthood. These songs are reveled in, each one serving as a benchmark for a memory that improves in quality with the passage of time.
Oldies are, of course, fine. It's great fun to pull out those old thirty-three-and-a-third vinyl records and place them on the turntable. Even more fun is to watch the amazement on the faces of the young, who are all plugged in with MP3 files and other high tech means of listening. They can scarcely believe that such antiquity still exists, let alone actually works!
But it is these young ones who are listening to a "new song." One wonders if they, too, will be cemented to their "oldies" as time marches on for them. Is it only the young who can sing a "new song"? Is each successive generation condemned to being handcuffed to the past? And if so, why is that?
This psalm calls us to sing a "new song" to the Lord. But how many congregations and parishes are stuck singing the oldies? How often have people intoned this phrase in one form or another? "We've always done it this way." Or, "We tried that once and it didn't work...." Yes, it's true. People tend to find memory's niche and build a nest therein. They decorate the walls of this nest with distortions and blurred vision of how things really were in those good old days.
Through it all, however, the call still comes to sing a "new song" to the Lord. One can't help but wonder what that might look like in today's cultural milieu. Is it bringing a "praise band" into worship? Perhaps. Is it celebrating ethnic diversity and trying to worship in different languages? Possibly. It could be these or a host of other new tunes taking the shape of worship, fellowship, mission, and witness. However the song goes, this new song, sung to the Lord, must also be sung to the community in which the church exists.
If the people in the community hear the song and turn off the radio, it doesn't do much good, does it? Yes. This new song must be sung to the Lord, but the Lord isn't the only one in the audience. The church today needs to reach out with this new song to welcome, to witness, and yes to evangelize a whole new generation who have yet to discover the wonder of this God who deserves our songs.
Of course, on the other end of the scale there are days when the congregation pleads for the pastor to get off his or her hobbyhorse and get with what is happening in the world. I now see congregations flinch when a pastor uses sexist language, for it is no longer the lingua franca of the day. Church school children do a duck and cover drill at the thought of having to walk where Jesus walked using a sixty-year-old flannel board. In what I thought was a brilliant move, I used the film Good Will Hunting with my confirmation class believing the popularity of Robin Williams would win the day, only to be asked, "Who is Robin Williams?" My prayer is also, "O Lord, do not let me shame myself in front of the confirmation class, spare me those flat seasons when my parishioners can mouth my sermons as I preach them. If thou cannot grant me a new heaven or earth at least spare me the hell of people avoiding me because I have become a 'Johnny One Note.' Save me from having my head in a book, from being stuck trying to balance the books, or trying to book the youth group for another fun event, when your new heaven and earth breaks out."
The problem with change is that we can have either too much of it or too little of it. We can either be overwhelmed by too much new heaven or earth or be left under-whelmed in our impact on life by the hellishness that comes from being out to lunch missing the great feast of newness that God is serving up. The text from Isaiah serves up the menu of what God is up to and gives some suggestions as to how we may partake of what God is attempting to do in our lives and in the world.
Well, why bother with the passage from 2 Thessalonians at all? We know where it is headed right from the start. Of course, the problem in our musty reading of this text might be that we are not open to the fresh implications in and between its lines. Or, do we favor the seeming reinforcement that this text offers to the middle class lifestyles that many of us share and that not a few of us compulsively pursue as part of our redemption?
To paraphrase the old saying, "When all you have is a hammer then you are not likely to enjoy having your handiwork undone." The Luke texts suggest that many of us have been able to cobble together some pretty fancy work that would rival anything seen on PBS's This Old House. "When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said ..." (Luke 21:5). The text offers a path to follow that will lead beyond survival to thriving in the midst of what God is bringing about.
Each of these texts suggests how much is at stake in answers we give to the question, "What's new?"
Isaiah 65:17-25
God is going to do a new thing. Well, the Hebrews must have thought it is about time. They are immersed in the rebuilding work following their exile in Babylon. Things have not gone quite as expected: the work is hard, the friction great, and their bad theology abundant. Bring on the newness.
Like us, I am sure they expected the newness to either conform to reasonable, manageable proportions or that it would be so sweeping that it would elevate them beyond the normal constraints and difficulties of human existence. Couples preparing for marriage often seem to be ready for a newness that will sweep away all obstacles in their lives. However, even in the heavenly city there are streets to be swept and no doubt garbage to be taken out and left at the curb of the golden streets. Or the young couple expects that they, much like Prince Charles and Camilla, will carry on life without much significant change to major parts of their former life. However, note that the text does not say that God will do away with all things, only make all things new. Neither does the text say that all things will be restored to the way they once were nor that people will live happily ever after. While infants do survive in the new order of things, there are still infants who need care and nurturing. While those who don't make it to 100 feel robbed, there will still be senior citizens whose needs must be addressed. While the order of one building and another inhabiting is overturned there is still much building to be done.
The new order of things will demand more than just sitting idly by. It will require actively participating in the new order by following a new set of blueprints, a new diet plan, and a new economic order of things. Of course, immediately we are presented with a bit of a chicken and the egg kind of issue. Is it the new blue print, diet, and economic order that makes for the newness or is it the newness that makes it possible for this trinity? Of course, the really new thing is recognizing that it is both. Whichever end of the stick you pick up, it will lead you to the fulfillment of where God wants you to be.
Certainly, from whichever place we begin, there is going to be a lot of serious challenging change if these scenarios are enacted. Imagine if people did live to a hundred on a routine basis. They would have to live with the consequences of much that they had planned for and worked for in ways they never had before. Visualize what it might mean to a family system's theory for people to regularly interact with their great, great, great, great, grandchildren. Certainly, our political life would take on quite a different coloration if politicians knew that they would be answerable to future generations in more than a metaphorical sense. Can you imagine a nation where the food supply is not controlled by huge corporate interests? "They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat" (Isaiah 65:22). This vision would turn around the current energy crises if food was produced locally instead of needing to be shipped long distances. "They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit" (Isaiah 65:21). Here is a stunning vision of an alternative world that takes one's breath away.
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
There are few texts in scripture that are more likely to send chills up and down my spine than this one. It is not so much because I find its rebuke of idleness addressed to me. Rather, it is the way that it has been interpreted and used over the years to reinforce a fairly prosaic moralistic stance toward life. "No work, no eat," do we really need this text to bring out this particular truth? If anything, this text tends to reinforce a pride in pulling one's own weight that belies the true interdependent human reality. The text becomes a little bit more comfortable if what is meant here is that I do my part that others may do their part just as their work makes it possible for me to do mine.
It is one thing to address this text to the well-educated, able-bodied, upwardly mobile with interesting jobs. It is quite another to address this text to those who haven't been able to find work in six months or who grind away at mind-numbing, soul-searing jobs.
If one examines the text closely, it is addressed to those who have been using their beliefs about the world to come to, in essence, drop out of the world that is. Many Christians have advocated less than a spirited care of the environment because the issue of this life will soon be addressed by the second coming. Bill Moyers has commented on Glenn Scherer's The Road to Environmental Apocalypse. Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming apocalypse.
Paul is saying here that whatever one's beliefs about the world to come, disengagement from the world that is likely to lead to an aridness of soul and dullness of mind is to be avoided. It is one thing to address this passage to a single working mom whose world weariness has come from the day in and day out struggle to keep human and to keep food on the table. It is quite another to address it to those whose disengagement from the world comes from their ability to live off their investments that free them from participating in the daily struggles that most of us must face. Something more is suggested here than the simple failure to work for a living. The King James Version, as it renders verse 6, highlights what Paul is after, "Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us." Often in scripture the phrase disorderly connotes those who have fallen out of military discipline: those who have gotten out of step or those who have fallen from the ranks. I am reminded of the price that George H. W. Bush paid for the political misstep of not knowing what the electronic price code bars were for on the items that he purchased. In the minds of many it demonstrated that he was not to be ranked among the people he sought to lead. Fairly or unfairly, the impression was given that somehow he was not one of us. Certainly this is to be avoided by Christians if they proclaim a gospel of redemption of the world as it is so that it can be what God intended it to be.
For Aristotle, the first task of persuasive rhetoric was to establish a fundamental rapport with the audience in which they recognized the speaker as basically one of them. It was for Aristotle the most important of the fundamental persuasive elements of speech: ethnos, pathos, and logos. How can we proclaim the redemption of the world if we are not seen as, like most others, taking the world that is very seriously? Certainly if we live in idleness we will not be understood to be taking the world very seriously. Work is to be redeemed not eliminated. Paul is adamant about this for there will be some serious missteps ahead if the church is seen as the people who are out of step with the way that most people must live their lives. The church will be seen as not only having nothing new to say to the world but nothing to say at all.
Luke 21:5-19
Having stood looking across the Kidron Valley toward the temple, I know the truth of Jesus' words. "When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, 'As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down' " (Luke 21:5-6). All that one can see of the ruins of the temple is the retaining wall that Herod installed and that has become known world wide as the Wailing Wall. Occasionally, one can see the Israeli Arab conflict acted out in the clash of those who have come to the Wailing Wall and those who have come to visit the Dome of The Rock, the third holiest site in Islam that is only a few hundred yards away.
They asked Jesus, "Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?" In many ways, in the age that we live in, we have grown skeptical, not about the end time but that there could be anything ahead that will look like sustained good times. Energy crises, global warming, war, have all left us quite suspicious about anyone claiming that there could be an age of abundance ahead for us in any meaningful sense. Newness does not come easily for human beings in the first place. Fly by wire aircraft, which operated like an electronic organ console by making electronic connections instead of like a tracker organ where there is physical connection with the control surfaces, posed a serious problem for pilots who had been trained on older planes. Flying without an actual wheel in front of them that gave a physical sense of the plane was well outside of the comfort zone of most pilots. The pilots were only pacified when a fake wheel was installed that they could hold onto during the flight. Newness does not come easily. Well into WWII, the British still trained their artillery crews to hold the horses as the guns fired even though they no longer used the animals to move the guns. Newness does not come easily. We come to terms and find ourselves not expecting anything more than nations rising up against nation and the general run of plagues and famines that make up the nightly news.
Many will come claiming that they know when these events will have taken a turn from which there is no return as the heavens either close up on our future or when will they open up a new future for us.
What is new here is that it seems that the option to just retreat into our shell will be foreclosed. "But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. This will give you an opportunity to testify" (Luke 21:12-13). Along with the opportunity to testify, there will be family divisions and public opposition. Yet Jesus says that the community will get through these things even though we cannot imagine beforehand how. As a matter of fact, we will not only survive but will find ourselves thriving as we gain our souls.
There is much to be gained as we handle family divisions, face public opposition, and find ourselves giving public account of our faith. We gain soul power and a depth of soul that will not perish. It is certainly new to see a time of internal division, external opposition, and a general accounting as the place where we need to be. I don't see this presented in much of the church renewal literature as the way we ought to go. However, our attempts to either paper over differences, or cut ourselves off from each other, along with our unwillingness to endure real hatred for the sake of deeper relationships may be preventing us from going anywhere.
Application
Let us be clear about what the Hebrew text says here. It is God who will be making a new heaven and a new earth. If God is doing this in our age, it is certainly rearranging our understanding of what heaven and earth is about. At this point, many of us find ourselves saying, "Check, please!" We are hard-pressed to see how a new heaven or a new earth can be carved out of the mess that we are in. Yet, look around and there are signs that this just may be what is happening. Certainly, something new is brewing when a group of evangelical leaders unite to take global warming seriously.
My home conference of the United Church of Christ devoted its latest annual meeting to the themes of evangelism and prayer. Michael Ignatieff, deputy leader of the Liberal party of Canada, recently wrote an apology in the New York Times for having backed the Iraq War. What struck me was not so much his new position as the model he chose to emulate in his thinking. Daring leaders can be trusted as long as they give some inkling of knowing what it is to fail. They must be men of sorrow acquainted with grief, as the prophet Isaiah says, "Something is going on here that reflects a new heaven and earth."
Of course, this is going to cause some problems for some people as they discover that this new heaven and new earth may burst the bounds of old churches, theologies, and understandings. This newness sounds familiar, "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins" (Mark 2:22). Indeed, it may be that "the old, old story" is what makes all things new. Perhaps in the church we get all bollixed up over change because we fall short of offering a new heaven and a new earth. To many people it seems that the church is about the same pettiness and narrowness of vision and self-serving pursuit that they see in the rest of the world.
Yet, what always haunts and can often help is that it has always been such people that surrounded Jesus.
Alternative Application
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13. Part of the Hippocratic Oath is the pledge, "to do no harm." It might not be a bad thing for a similar pledge to be part of ordination and confirmation vows, as well as membership commitments. For all our high-minded theology, visionary statements, and impassioned mission we find ourselves all too often falling into hurtful patterns in the life of the church. I know of no pastor who does not find themselves engaged from time to time in a ministry to those who are seeking transformed lives but are church-phobic. They fear that they will find the same abusive patterns in church that they see in the outside world.
Our fear to offend or embarrass ourselves often overtakes us when we are given an opportunity to testify and are afraid to enter into the openness to what God can do with those opportunities that, according to Jesus, will be given us to testify.
Unlike Paul, all too often we have been a burden for we have not done the work of making our congregations free of sexual abuse. We have done harm because we have not done the work of examining our life to see to what degree it partakes of a sexual understanding that have left the weakest and most vulnerable among us exposed to hurt. Like Paul, who knew he needed to work to earn his keep and keep his credibility, we have to do our homework in order to maintain our credibility as a source of vitality in our society.
I wonder to what degree our slavishness to expediency, a survival mentality, and the desire to draw lines between each other rather than draw circles that include each other prevents us from being a joy and our people a delight.
Perhaps the new thing that God is doing among us is the call to do no harm. If we begin there, we will end up where "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent -- its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord" (Isaiah 65:25).
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 98
Rolling the radio around the stations one morning during summer vacation, it became evident that there is not much of a taste for "new songs." From static to station and back again, the radio dial was alive with oldies stations. Hits from the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and now even the '90s! Oldies. Each decade claims a niche of style, a series of songs that generations sing through adolescence and hopefully, into adulthood. These songs are reveled in, each one serving as a benchmark for a memory that improves in quality with the passage of time.
Oldies are, of course, fine. It's great fun to pull out those old thirty-three-and-a-third vinyl records and place them on the turntable. Even more fun is to watch the amazement on the faces of the young, who are all plugged in with MP3 files and other high tech means of listening. They can scarcely believe that such antiquity still exists, let alone actually works!
But it is these young ones who are listening to a "new song." One wonders if they, too, will be cemented to their "oldies" as time marches on for them. Is it only the young who can sing a "new song"? Is each successive generation condemned to being handcuffed to the past? And if so, why is that?
This psalm calls us to sing a "new song" to the Lord. But how many congregations and parishes are stuck singing the oldies? How often have people intoned this phrase in one form or another? "We've always done it this way." Or, "We tried that once and it didn't work...." Yes, it's true. People tend to find memory's niche and build a nest therein. They decorate the walls of this nest with distortions and blurred vision of how things really were in those good old days.
Through it all, however, the call still comes to sing a "new song" to the Lord. One can't help but wonder what that might look like in today's cultural milieu. Is it bringing a "praise band" into worship? Perhaps. Is it celebrating ethnic diversity and trying to worship in different languages? Possibly. It could be these or a host of other new tunes taking the shape of worship, fellowship, mission, and witness. However the song goes, this new song, sung to the Lord, must also be sung to the community in which the church exists.
If the people in the community hear the song and turn off the radio, it doesn't do much good, does it? Yes. This new song must be sung to the Lord, but the Lord isn't the only one in the audience. The church today needs to reach out with this new song to welcome, to witness, and yes to evangelize a whole new generation who have yet to discover the wonder of this God who deserves our songs.
