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Minister's Inter-faith Blog Page 11

Looking for a New Thing

Thanks for your reply to Blogpage10, Syd. I understand what you are speaking about. I too have experienced that type of "thanks" for illustrating other ways of understanding.

This week we had that wonderful piece of scripture from Isaiah 43, where we are told to forget the things of old and attend to the "new thing." The text identifies the "new thing" by telling the old story in a new context. The story of the exodus, the crossing of the sea of reeds, the classic story of Israel's identity is retold in an encapsulated form, and then the text goes on to say "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?"

I talked on Sunday of the stories we live in, using as an example my own story that feeds into a genetic bio-chemical imbalance in my own brain chemistry, which leads to a proclivity to depression. I was taught a story in my home life of a fearful darkness that could grasp our lives and bring great suffering that we are powerless against. The story is a great description of depression. It was passed on from one generation to the next in our family. Now I ask, how may I hear a new story, live out of a new story, or break open the old story in a new way? I think we live in story like fish in the sea. The point of Isaiah is that the old story can be retold in a way that allows for a new thing, helps us see the new thing. The thing that really interests me is how the old story can be told in ways that help us see the new thing. Stories are our way of being in the world. The point of a story is not historical fact, but meaning. Stories give meaning, and place us in a world of meaning. Stories are true not because they are history, but because they point to the meaning in our lives. David Tracy, a great Catholic Theologian, speaks of those Classic stories that have a surplus of meaning and operate in the shaping of cultures and political orders. How do we tell the old story in ways that help us see the New thing?

Daniel

A retelling of the Exodus and other classical stories may be calling many of us individually to a "New Thing." However, I think the loudest call at present is to us as a group. Interestingly, the Greek scripture got into a discussion of wasting resources, and you mentioned in your sermon the "new thing" of the 1925 Union, which put an end to many years of sinful waste from competing congregations which had continued in small Prarie towns for fifty or more years. But that was 82 years ago. Do we not see equally sinful waste today when, for instance, Squamish United and St. John's Anglican church are each one third full on a Sunday morning, and largely unused for the rest of the week? Leaving on one side the poor environmental example that we are setting, as the disciples discussed in our gospel story, are we not wasting money that should be given to the poor? We lack the excuse of the woman with the burial ointment!

I am not old enough to know how many decades of debate it took to bring about the partial union of 1925, but is not time for us to at least to begin thinking about a new thing?

Roy.

The Anglican and the United Churches almost became one church in 1970. It was the Anglican Bishops who terminated the possible Union. Both the General Council and the Anglican houses of laity and clergy voted in favour, but the Bishops voted against it. We were very close to a Union that would have brought the churches together. The Facilities Committee has as one of its options the development of joint facilities with St. John the Divine Anglican. As I closed my sermon I asked the question what new thing is God calling us toward in Squamish? The word new and us were not accidental. The word "New" I hope doesn't simply mean "novel". The new thing of Isaiah is a radically altered identity, and also a radically different way of understanding God. The idea of a God that is no longer merely tribal in nature, but is the God of all people and all creation is a New Thing that is radical in nature. That is the theological contribution largely of Second Isaiah and the community of Second Isaiah.

As to the us, in our own context I think the recovery of a different sense of self is at the centre of what we need to change. What do I mean by this? When I spoke of living out of a story and made reference to one of the stories that I have lived out of, I indicated how this story was in fact not merely my own, but belonged to a whole family through time and history. The fact that we live in stories as our way of being in the world indicates that we can never be "individuals" in the sense that modernity has given. The individualism of modernity is base upon the false notion that we are separable from each other, creation and our society. In fact we are as persons "societies of occasions," made up of the conversations, memories, communities, families, schools, books and churches we have known.

Charles Taylor, certainly the greatest of Canadian philosophers, has made the point that the fallacy of the modern self consists in its belief in its own absolute nature. As we observe the political forces at work in our own country we see the working of the false self of individualism. The popular political understandings of governments in the last 20-30 years has largely been built upon the ideology of Fredrick Hayek and a reading of Adam Smith offered by such think-tanks as the Fraser Institute that abstract the idea of community out of his writing-- incidentally, the morality of the market place that Smith argues for is dependent upon the operations of community where we know and are known as members. The New in this regard is about a decay in our sense of being citizens, and the substitution for the individualism of being "Tax payers". Curiously the New in our context might be a recovery of the "old" by a deeper sense of citizenship and its responsibilites.

In respect to ecological sensibility, that too is not so much New as it is in a recovery of an older sense of the sacredness of Creation and a clear sense of our place in creation. We have exceeded limits and grown economies that are out of all proportion to the Creation we live within. In respect to everything from farming practices to consumption and use of technical gadgetry, what we most need is a return to simpler lives, less use of things and, dare I say, less consumption. Wendell Berry notes how our history was marked by the rebellion from rule by Kings and emperors, only to end up bowing to the new powers of wealth, corporations, possessions and commodities. To recall the story of exodus, we left Egypt only to submit to new forms of slavery. Freedom and the New thing in Hebrew and in Greek Scripture have to do with recovering our identity in a new community, and living well in that community. The old word propriety had this understanding of living in a way that makes for a healthy community. As Paul put it: "No one Lives to themselves and no one dies to themselves."

Everything we do affects everyone else. We cannot know how we affect things, which should cause us to act with care and within limits. The small community is one that understands its place in that community of all communities that is the "way" "kingdom" "reign" or "commonwealth" of God. The New is in some sense a recovery of the "old" for a new time. The "Old" is that which is perennial true; that we are all kin, as the previous week's lessons pointed out, and that kinship is our identity and gives us our place in creation. Ignoring that kinship means not only to murder the other, but to damage our own being as members one to the other. There is no escaping the connectedness. The New Thing is coming to a deep awareness and a living pattern where we are Kin to all others and a part of Creation.

It was Emmanuel Levinas, certainly one of the most important of European philosophers of the latter part of the last century who wrote: "I receive my own identity as a gift from the autrui (the other). I only know myself from the caress of your face." As a Talmudic Jew, he is referencing the teachings of the Rabbinic tradition. For us in the United Church, it is the almost forgotten implication of those simple words of the New Creed, "We (not I) are not alone, we live in God's world." The New is the coming back home to our place as members one of the other.

Daniel.

I don't quite see it the way you do, Dan. Isaiah is quoting God, but only as he senses what God's message might be. While the past wonders of what God has done are spoken, (and the Jews will recite it all again at the coming Passover feast), what he says is,- "Yes I did all that, now forget it! I am doing something new. Can't you see it?" He isn't saying "Play it again Sam, but in a different key." So I don't see why you are concerned about telling the old story in a new way. Going on further in the chapter, He tells them about the good things He will do for His people. Who are they? They aren't the ones he said didn't do a very good job under the rules of Judaism, with the sacrifices and all that, bewailing their sins and so on. Forget that, God will look after that.

<>What did Isaiah see happening in his time that was a sign that God was doing something new? It is my own belief, (though I could certainly be wrong), and thinking about the evidence revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls, I think that he saw the pseudo-Christian Essene communities being established, communities which would eventually produce the 'The Great Teacher" who lived about 100 years before Jesus, and who said the same things that we attribute to Jesus.

John The Baptist, I am sure, was an Essene, and I personally believe that Jesus was one also. What did Isaiah think needed to be corrected with something new? I think it was the lack of sincerity and love in the Judaism of the Sanhedrin and Doctors of the Law. So it is appropriate as we move into this next week that we should concentrate on Maundy Thursday, and the new commandment that "We are to love one another," even more than the events of Good Friday.

Syd.

"The Bishop did it in the Chapter House with a heavy volume of canon law..." It sounds a bit like a game of Clue. What exactly did the bishops refuse to accept in 1970? In an earlier failed amalgamation, it was of course the continuing Presbyterians who did it, and in a more recent attempt at amalgamation it was the fault of the Disciples. There may be some truth in these judgments, but is it not almost always true that failure to resolve an impasse has responsibility on both sides of the dispute?

In any event, the New Thing we are called to look at is not the malgamation of an entire church hierarchy, but a rationalization of facilities (and I believe ultimately of staff, which is the major expense in both local budgets) between two small local churches. We have local examples of possible models, both in Whistler and in Lillooet, and it would be useful to make a careful examination of the pluses and minuses associated with each of these models.

Roy S.

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What I am suggesting, Syd, is that Second Isaiah is precisely about telling the old story of Exodus as a recalling of the vision of Exodus in order to be able to see the meaning of the new thing. The Essenes understood the Old Story to be about purity and exclusion, and they read Isaiah in that way. I am arguing that Second Isaiah saw it as about the freedom found in a new community that now could include the whole of humanity, because God was no longer understood as only the God of Israel. The whole Biblical journey is marked by carrying the old story into a new situation, and allowing it to show what the new situation holds, what is its truth. The classic stories of culture and civilization are "old stories" precisely because they expose a truth about reality, and their capacity to do this is precisely because they are part of a tradition that pre-dates us and will post-date us.

Sadly, modernity as a construct of the Enlightenment tried to uproot human experience from tradition and place, suggesting that nothing of the past was of value and only the novel was important. This is a profoundly wrong headed approach to human life. One example is the wisdom of good farming practices of the past: leaving fallow and manuring with straw etc; in many places, this produced both great yields and more nutritious crops than so called modern factory farming. Exceeding certain limits proves disastrous for land, and for communities, human and non-human. The truth of living in a certain harmony within creation is forgotten with the novelty of chemical farming and genetic manipulation. The incarnate art of conversation and face contact, equally, can be lost in the limitless expansion of technical gadgetry. I would suggest that the Christ is an experience of the New, emerging, resurrecting, as an affirmation of the truth in the old as a way of seeing the truth in the new. We live from a past, are here because of the past, and we live best when we take tradition seriously; that I take to be the fullest expression of being human.

The Old story and tradition are precisely those things that enable us to see the truth of the new thing. This is precisely what Second Isaiah is doing with the Exodus story. It is a kind of talisman, enabling a perception of the new exodus. He is saying not that the Old Story was worthless and should now be abandoned, but rather that this story--and Second Isaiah retells the old Exodus story not as an "old story" but as a story that reveals the new--is in fact the key to the New Thing. There is nothing remarkable about saying, forget that old story, I've got a new one. We hear that every day in the claims of advertising firms; that is just Novelty. But real newness is the capacity to bring something new out of the past story, it is that which uses and integrates our past in a new form and way that redeems the past and the present, providing hope for the future. We cannot escape our past, we can only live its truths and be open to their transformation. I take the biblical journey to be a journey not of forgetting the past, as if it had nothing to offer, but "forgetting" it as the only determinant of the future. Second Isaiah is not saying forget the Exodus story, but forget the Babylonian exile as the defining story, and see the new exodus. If Second Isaiah had in fact wanted to say, "Forget that Old Story. Listen to the new one of Cyrus the Pesrsian," he would has said "Believe the stories of Persia and forget the stories of Israel." Instead, and this is what is so remarkable in the passage in Isaiah 43, he retells the Exodus story in the present tense. The new Exodus is led not by Moses--an Egyptian Israelite--but by a Persian. He uses the past story by telling it in the present tense as the interpretive key to seeing the meaning of the new thing. The remarkable thing, again, is not that a novel thing is coming to be, but that this new thing is an exodus--the old story--that can make one forget the exile.

To read more, see the Hebrew Scripture scholars Paul D, Hanson, Dynamic Transcendence and James Sanders, Torah and Canon or his God has a Story Too. Finally, the Exodus story is never told in the Jewish community as concerning a past event for people in the past. Rather in the Seder Pasach it is told as a story for and with the community Now. "We" and the present tense are used in the retelling of the Old Story. It is the interpretative event and ongoing "happening" in the retelling that helps the community understand the meaning of every new moment, and gives them a renewed sense of identity. The Old Story is ever New.

Daniel

I agree with what you are saying, Daniel, but I am still a bit confused by that particular selection from Isaiah 43. Isaiah is quoting what he believes God is saying, and my New English version reads - Thus says the Lord, ( immediately after saying how he rescued them from Egypt in the Exodus) "Cease to dwell on days gone by and to brood over past history. Here and now I will do a new thing; this moment it will break from the bud. Can you not perceive it?"

How is this requiring us to tell the old story on a new way?

In regard to Roy's point, as a one time Anglican, I know that the Anglican clergy has this "thing" about continuity of the laying on of hands in Ordination. The claim is made that since at the time of the break from the Church of Rome by Henry VIII, the newly established Church of England clergy had been ordained by RC's, they too could claim to be in the direct line of the apostles. This was one objection the bishops had to union with the United Church. In the 1970 effort, we even went so far as to have a common hymn book, which we in the choir at the time called "Big Red". Syd.

I agree that a dispute over episcopal ordination was one important obstacle to organic union of the two hierarchies. Presumably, some of the Anglicans thought they had a greater authority because of this, and others valued it as a link with historical tradition. But why could the United Church clergy not have augmented their link with historical tradition by accepting some form of episcopal benediction?

Incidentally, a similar intransigence was one factor in the breakdown of talks with the Disciples. Here, the United Church was taking the opposite position- a communion service officiated by a United Church clergyperson had greater validity than one officiated by a Disciple elder from a church that believed in "the priesthood of all believers." A focus upon "authority" and "validity" rather than Christian action is surely one of the things that keeps many thinking people away from the church.

The "Big Red" hymn book was certainly a welcome attempt to meld the worship traditions of the two churches, although a few of the reharmonizations of hackneyed Victorian hymns were less than successful. Now, we again seem to have drifted apart. The new Anglican hymn book often reflects a rather out-dated theology. Voices United has a few good new tunes, but seems mostly a mix of jolly ditties (which congregations seem to like singing, but lack any substantial harmonies) and a return to some of the poorest of the hymns from the Victorian era of evangelism.

Roy.

Eureka! Sorry for being so obtuse, Dan. I woke up in the middle of the night and it sort of fell into place, at least for me. God is saying through Isaiah that,- "We had a great relationship, in the old tradition, the old covenant. You stepped out of line and got smacked. Get over it! I am bringing about something new, a spiritual revival. A spiritual Easter!" Then he goes on to say how great things can be again, even better than before.

I hope I am getting closer to what you are saying Daniel. This sort of thing can be the story of an individual's life. The wandering away, the spiritual and even physical pain, and the reconciliation can recur any number of times in a lifespan. I have over-simplified it, no doubt.

Syd.

Sermon Notes 18

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