Doing a New Thing

Let’s just note a few of those points in the Bible where the challenge to do something new is explicitly present. In Isaiah 43:18 and 19, for example, the prophet utters the challenge: Stop dwelling on past events and brooding over days gone by. I am about to do something new; this moment it will unfold. Can you not perceive it? Even through the wilderness I shall make a way, and paths in the barren desert. Often we look back to a golden age that, if we’re honest, is probably not as golden as we remember it. There’s nothing wrong with looking back. There’s nothing wrong with recognising the value of what’s happened. But there is everything wrong with getting stuck there. We need to look for God’s doing “something new”. But, of course, there is another perspective to recognise. We should not ignore and forget the words of the preacher, Ecclesiastes 1:9/10 – What has happened will happen again, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which there can be said, ‘Look, this is new’? No, it was already in existence, long before our time. Now, even though it goes against my basic thesis, I think this is a very important and valuable insight. Sometimes we think that we have got a monopoly on difficulty and struggling. Not so! For example, we struggle and agonise about how to deploy clergy and look back to that golden age – there it is again – when such things were not a problem. But this really isn’t a new problem. If you look back to accounts of Congregationalism in the 1930s, for instance, you’ll find there were some very similar debates. Things don’t actually change that much, and I am not sure whether that worries me, or reassures me – but I do believe it is so; and yet, within that context, I am still looking for God’s new thing. And I want to reinforce the need to do that by moving into the New Testament and, first of all, quoting something Paul said. It’s in 2 Corinthians 5:17 – For anyone united to Christ, there is a new creation: the old order has gone, a new order has already begun. As one commentator says, “all who have died with Christ are now in him and have been made new.” Putting it another way, God is about transformation. That’s what God offers us – and that’s what, in his name, we should offer to others. The slate can be wiped clean. We can have a new start. Of course, the preacher is right to say that, in a sense, there is nothing new. But, because of what God does for and with us, we are constantly full of new potential. As in so many things, the point is to have the right thing in the right place. And we might well reinforce that with, for the moment, one final Biblical comment on newness and it needs to be, surely, words of Jesus – and I look to that double parable in Matthew 9:16 and 17 – No one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for then the patch tears away from the garment and leaves a bigger hole. Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; if they do, the skins burst, and the wine runs out and the skins are ruined. No, they put new wine into fresh skins; then both are preserved. Jesus’ main message is about God’s Kingdom – and in proclaiming the Kingdom Jesus is proclaiming a different way of life. Jesus is talking about new possibility, about things being transformed. What Jesus places on offer does not leave people unchanged. New relationships happen. New resources become available. New structures need to be brought into play to make things work. And I guess that the challenge for each of us is to work out what that means for us in our situation. It is relatively easy to identify the good things of the past, though it is, of course, important to do that – but what is the new thing to which God is pointing us at this time? That raises more challenging questions and, most likely, a range of interesting possibilities.