Our passage from Isaiah 43 has been a favorite of mine for over 22 years, since my friend and colleague Gretchen Bretz preached on it at my installation service in Colorado, and I look forward to diving into it with you this morning; but before we do that, I want to make sure we all have the context clearly in view. This is part of a sixteen-chapter section of this book, chapters 40-55, which is commonly referred to as “Second Isaiah.” I could go into a lot of background, but I’ll just say this: there is an arc to these chapters into which our passage fits.
For one thing, the imagery here is part of a crescendo which has been building since chapter 40. The language of preparing a way and leading the people of God in a new way begins in 40:3-5, where the cry goes out among the host of heaven to prepare a way for the Lord. We see it again in 42:16—to use Phil Keaggy’s paraphrase from the song “Things I Will Do” on his 1976 album Love Broke Thru,
I will lead the blind
By the way they do not know;
In paths they do not know I will guide them.
I will make darkness into light before them
And rugged places into plains.These are the things I will do . . .
And I will not leave them undone.
—and yet again in 43:2. Related to this is the language of bringing water, and thus life, in the wasteland; this first appears in 41:18-20, while 42:15 gives us the ironic inversion: “I will lay waste to the hills and dry out all that grows on them; I will turn the rivers to desert and dry up the lakes.” In 44:3, the Lord promises, “I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground.”
This imagery is woven through and supports an extended polemic against idolatry: in 40:18-20, 41:1-7 and 21-29, 42:16-20, and continuing to a long prose indictment of idols and idol-worshipers in 44:9-20. All of this builds to the announcement of Cyrus as God’s chosen deliverer—his anointed one, his meshiach—in 44:28-45:1. Now, as I say this, it might not be obvious to you; what do blind and deaf people have to do with idols? There’s a scriptural principle underlying Isaiah’s language which isn’t explicitly articulated here but is set forth in Psalms 115 and 135. Here’s 115:4-8:
Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
eyes, but do not see.
They have ears, but do not hear;
noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel;
feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat.
Recognize that language in Isaiah 43? And in verse 8, the psalmist drives the point home:
Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.
Worshiping idols makes you as blind and deaf as they are.
This is building through these chapters of Isaiah. God hauls the gods of the nations into court again and again, pointing to all he has done and challenging them to match his record; he also declares he will do a new thing and dares them to equal him. And then in verse 18, we get an extraordinary command. The ESV reads, “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.” The NIV puts it this way: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.” Going back for chapters, the Lord and his prophet have been challenging the people to go back and remember all God has done, and compare that to the track record of the idols they keep worshiping instead. And now the prophet says, “Nah—forget that”? Are we supposed to remember all God has done for us, or not?
The first thing to say here is that if we’re speaking precisely, “do not remember” is not the same thing as “forget.” For example, Sara’s birthday is June 11; our anniversary is June 21. (This year will be our 28th.) I have never forgotten those dates, but I only remember them on occasion. If you ask me if I remember her birthday, the answer will be yes—but I probably wasn’t actively remembering it before you asked, unless it’s getting close. To re-member is to put the members back together—it’s to re-assemble the past, in a way. It’s the active work of putting awareness of something back together in our conscious minds. To forget something is to bury the pieces of memory too deep to dig back up, or even to jettison them completely, making it impossible to re-assemble, to re-member, them.
Look a little further down in Isaiah 43, at verse 25, where God declares, “I am he who blots out your wrongdoing for my own sake, and I will remember your sin no more.” God isn’t saying he will forget our sins—that would leave great swaths of human history missing from his memory. Rather, he promises he will no longer call them to mind. They will no longer be what he thinks about when he thinks about us. Forgive and forget? No; but how about “forgive and don’t live”? Once you forgive what has happened in the past, you don’t have to live there anymore. You can live in the present instead.
It’s something of the same point in verse 18, which calls us to both remember and not remember; or, as Gretchen summarized it in her sermon title in 2003, “Remember, Don’t Dwell.” We are certainly to remember what God has done for what it tells us of his character and faithfulness. Who he is does not change, and his covenant love for his people does not change. We hold on to this by remembering and telling the story of his righteous acts—his acts of deliverance. He was in the deliverance business then, and he’s in the deliverance business now—he’s the same God he has always been, and his purpose has never changed. This means his mighty acts aren’t safely confined to history, and we can never be sure what he might do.
At the same time, I think we’ve all known people who wanted to re-member the past completely enough to move back in. Maybe we’ve known rather more who wanted to re-member the past to use it as a blueprint for the future so they could live there. When it comes to God, Isaiah says, don’t do that. A little over a year ago I titled a sermon “The Problem with ‘Therefore,’” and I think God through the prophet is on about the same thing. Remember how God did things last time, but when you hit the natural tendency to say, “Therefore, God must be doing x now,” or, “Therefore, this is what God’s going to do next”—well, set that aside. Hold it with open hands and let the Lord blow it away. We want to know what God is going to do next; he doesn’t want that. There are exceptions, but not many.
In fact, and to that end, God never does things the same way twice. The Jews in exile in Babylon were looking for a prophet like Moses to arise and lead them on a new Exodus back to the Promised Land; God says, “I’m raising up Cyrus, a pagan king, to be the instrument of my deliverance.” Centuries later, in their own land but with no descendant of David on the throne in Jerusalem, looking around and realizing the second Exodus hadn’t really happened yet, the Jews were looking for a political figure, one who would wield power, like David and Cyrus. They got the exact backwards of that. God is always on about the same things; his character is unchanging and his purpose never alters or shifts; but his methods, like his mercies, are new every morning.
There are at least a couple reasons for this. First, this draws a contrast between God and idols. The false gods of the nations can only do the same thing over and over again. They are predictable; they cannot surprise, and they cannot outreach our imagination. This is necessary for pagan religion to “work,” because paganism depends on predictability: you do the thing the deity demands, and you get the reward you’re expecting in return. Until, of course, the human-created divine fails, as all human-created things eventually do; whether we call our deity Marduk or politics, Ba’al or wealth, Ishtar or career, Zeus or sexual pleasure, it will eventually fail us, leaving us disappointed and bereft. God is greater than the idols because he can do a new thing, and because he will never fail us. The new thing he announces, he will do.
Second, this draws a contrast between God and our expectations of him. The temptation to idolatry is subtle and slippery; if the Enemy can’t draw us into worshiping something other than God, he can still warp us to worship God as something other than he is. We’re driven to make sense of the world, and so understandably we try to make sense of God—but to do that, we have to make him smaller. We have to make him small enough to comprehend, small enough to explain. On the large scale, that’s where heresies come from—and it’s why my Reformed Church colleague Daniel Meeter contends that all of us are heretics in one way or another: it’s hard to avoid collapsing our understanding of God to something we can actually, y’know, understand. On the daily scale of life, we want God to make sense in the context of what we think is best for us and for those around us, and we want to have a handle on what’s going on and what will happen next so we can plan effectively. We want to feel comfortable, and a comfortable faith requires a predictable God.
Thing is, even when God satisfies our expectations, he regularly does so in such a way as to confound them. He’s always working on multiple levels; as he delivers us and provides for us, he does so in ways that remind us he’s bigger. He wants us to realize we don’t have him figured out, because if we know what God is going to say or do next, and if we why, we can stop listening. Working at the BMV, I’ve had to learn I can’t trust customers to know what they actually need and accurately communicate that need to me. People tell me they need tags, or a handicapped sticker, or inform me they need to file for a lost title, and none of those are actually things—though I know what they mean by them. I hear “I need a new license” multiple times a shift, and that phrase can introduce any driver’s license transaction or any vehicle-registration transaction, and occasionally even a title transaction. If I assume I know what my customer is saying, I stop listening, and we’re both in trouble. I have to stay open to my customers and listen attentively to learn what they actually mean and what they truly need. In the Message, Eugene Peterson rendered the first part of verse 18 “Be alert, be present.” This is the core of discernment; expectations take us out of this mindstate. Is it any wonder God confounds them?
It’s important to note, this applies not just in perceiving God but also in responding to him. In and through each of us, he is doing a new thing—and probably not what we think he’s doing, much less what we would prioritize. The thing about God promising to make a way through the desert is, I think most of us would be really happy if he’d just take some of that water and make us a nice little oasis in the middle of the desert, partway along, where we can settle down and do our own thing. That’s not what God’s on about. He’s taking us all the way through.
Growing in discernment, then, means learning to set aside our “therefore”s and our expectations—of what God might say to us; of what God might do; of what God might ask us to do. He will not confine or conform himself to what seems reasonable to us. There’s a practical aspect in play here: to whatever extent we leave our expectations unquestioned, they will skew our perception and understanding. After all, you tend to see what you’re looking for and hear what you’re listening for. If we want our perception of God to be true and our response to God to be faithful, we need to be alert to our expectations and our preconceived notions, and diligent to clear them out of the way.
There’s a theological aspect here too, though. Or maybe a theopraxial aspect? I don’t think that’s a word, but maybe it should be, because this is about the practice of God, if that makes any sense—about living in our knowledge of him. In any case, the point is this: learning to set aside our expectations isn’t just about getting “better at discernment” (which I think is a somewhat problematic phrase), it’s about being where God wants us. Consider this detachment writ large—learning to detach from our expectations. It’s about looking at our own ideas of the story God is telling in our lives and in the world and releasing our grip. It’s about actually living by faith—which is a perilous thing to say. I recognized some years ago, in myself and in others, that when we talk about living by faith, what we all too often mean is putting our faith in God to give us the thing we want—relationship, job, whatever—so we can then put our faith in that. What God means is more like Roadrunner, standing in midair sticking out our tongue at Wile E. Coyote.
The call here is to hold past, present, and future lightly. Remember what God has done, how he has proven his character and faithfulness; especially remember what he has done in Jesus, for all time is present there at the cross and the empty tomb; but don’t live there. Leave the future in his hands, trusting that he truly is writing a good story, even if some of the chapters are brutally hard and far, far longer than we might wish; above all, trust him for the ending; and let the process, the details, and the route go. Most of all, be with him in the present and let it be his, trusting him for whatever he might do; for whatever he might tell us, including that he will tell us what we need to know when we need to know it; and for whatever he might call us to do.
Now, maybe you’re hearing that and thinking, “It’s not that easy.” Yeah, tell me about it. When I was young, I imagined my life going in a relatively straight, logical line, but it’s turned out more like a five-dimensional hyperspace corkscrew. My script didn’t include a Session meeting—a meeting of the board of elders, of which I was the moderator—on Ash Wednesday at which I agreed to step down as the pastor of that church. It really didn’t include the long Lent that has followed—ten years and counting, now—or the fact that over much of this extended Lenten season, God hasn’t seemed to be doing anything with it. I don’t see him changing me. I look at myself, as far as I can tell, I’m the same wretched sinner I’ve always seen in the mirror. Yet I was comforted, last month, to realize that when Moses came down from Sinai, he didn’t know his face was glowing. He couldn’t see the effect on him of his time with God, but those around him could. And sometimes I catch glimpses, and I realize God has been changing me in areas where I wasn’t looking, and maybe even where I didn’t know there were areas.
We began the service with Brooke Ligertwood’s song “Bless God”; can I really sing, “Every chance I get, I’ll bless your name”? Not as a promise, no, but I don’t think God is expecting a promise. Can I sing it as an aspiration, as a prayer that it be true, as a longing for it to be true? Increasingly, yes. And more, to sing “Bless God when my hands are empty;/Bless God with a praise that costs me”—that, I can do. That, I know. That, I can sing with full voice and whole heart. And you don’t get there with a life that goes according to plan, one where God meets your expectations and gives you your “best life now.” To be able to bless God with a praise that costs you—and to come alongside others with the assurance that you really can bless God when your hands are empty—well, for that, maybe a five-dimensional hyperspace corkscrew is the kind of life you need. I do not know what God are doing, or why he’s doing it the way they has, and I don’t know where it’s going. I can only go forward in trust that he’s the same God they’ve always been, and pray that by his mercy I will see the harvest.
As I do that, I take comfort from the Lord’s table—and not just in the obvious ways. I encouraged you last month to think of this as enacted prayer; this morning, I encourage you to see it as a work of discernment. After all, the apostle Paul did. This is from 1 Corinthians; here is, first, 10:16-17:
Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf.
Now listen to the next chapter, verses 17-29:
In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good. In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it. No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God’s approval. So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk. Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God by humiliating those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you? Certainly not in this matter!
For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup. For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves.
I grew up in a tradition which took those last sentences very seriously; there was a liturgy of preparation for the Sunday before communion which I think was longer than the communion liturgy itself. That was one reason we only had communion quarterly, which seems to me now a privation of the spirit. We thought we had to be sure we really truly fully understand what it means that this is the body of Christ, and had to examine ourselves intensely to make sure we would be fit to take communion the next week.
That interpretation comprehensively misses the point. Paul is talking, from 10:16 on, about the church as the body of Christ. The wealthy among the Corinthians were sinning by exploiting the Supper, taking everything and leaving nothing for the poor in the church; they ate and drank without discerning the poor as part of the body of Christ. One of the reasons I love celebrating the sacrament in this way, with people coming forward to the table, is watching the body of Christ moving in the dance. I encourage you, as we take communion together, don’t just think about it as you and Jesus: discern the body of Christ in the people moving around you. Maybe you will feel, as I do, the Lord’s delight in us as we his body answer his invitation: come to the table, for all things are now ready.
“pumpkin in the snow” © 2008 Andrea Zanda; image has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic