Novelty is Nothing New

Isaiah 43:18-25
Do not remember what has gone before and don’t give undue attention to former things. Look, I am doing something new; it is sprouting up. Don’t you recognize it? In the wilderness I am making a way and I am bringing forth streams in the desert. The creature of the land will honor me, from the dragons to the daughters of the ostrich, because I give water in the wilderness and streams in the desert for my chosen people to drink, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.

But you did not call to me, O Jacob, for you have been weary of me, O Israel. You have not brought me a sheep for a burnt offering, nor have you honored me with sacrifices. I have not burdened you with tributes nor wearied you with frankincense. You have not bought me sweet calmus with silver, nor have you sated me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened me with your sins and wearied me with your iniquities.

I, I am the one who wipes out your transgressions for no purposes but my own and I will not remember your sins.

Here’s what I have been wondering this week: Why is it that people are so much more interesting on the Internet? When I was a campus minister I did a lot of ministry over the Internet. College students and high school students spend a lot of time communicating and playing in this new virtual world and it is creating a whole new category of relationships that just wasn’t possible before. Even some of us beyond college age who grew up with archaic machines like typewriters and rotary telephones have joined the digital world and are talking to people via e-mail and instant messager. But we still haven’t figured out what’s going on in this new world of networking and we haven’t had enough open discussions to know what sort of ethics should apply to the new relationships we are forming. But relationships ARE forming and we’re meeting people we never would have met before and they are interesting people. At least, that’s what we imagine them to be.

I’m old enough to still be slightly freaked out by all these new possibilities. E-mail seemed like a miraculous thing when it started. Suddenly you could send a note to someone on the other side of the world and they could receive it almost immediately and respond in the same day! My seminary friends in Texas and Scotland were suddenly available to me in a way they weren’t before and our relationships with each other continued. As we were planning for the baptism of Santi Bridges-Pereiera I was able to send a draft of the service to Portugal for them to review.

But e-mail was only the beginning. After that came chat rooms where you could go online and have a conversation with a group of people who would all be there on your screen in different colors interacting with each other in real time. Then there was IM - Instant Messaging, which is where you set up a list of friends who can contact you while you’re online. The first time I did this it was like I was in a room full of ghosts. Suddenly my empty office was filled with seven students and we were talking. It was a real test of my ability to multitask but you get used to this instant availability of people.

And now there are weblogs or blogs where people set up a personal web page and post their comments on politics, religion, and life in general and invite you to respond with comments of your own. I have one, though it has primarily turned into a sermon log, and two weeks ago I had a conversation about my sermon with a young pastor in Michigan who had stumbled across my latest entry. Blogs make everybody an author and a pundit and, at times, it is wonderful to hear the interior voice of some folks who have a lot to say, but find it hard to say in other settings.

But this computer world has its downside. It’s not just that this rapid writing capability makes us prone to error, although it does. I remember a colleague of mine in the early days of word processing who became fascinated with the “find & replace” option. He was going to have two funerals one day, both with a printed order of worship, one for a woman named Mary and the other for a woman named Edith. So when he finished the bulletin for the first service he just had the computer find all the references to Mary and replace them with the name Edith. Which was wonderful until the congregants at the second service got to the Apostle’s Creed and read out, “I believe in Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Edith…” We can be a little careless.

We can also be a little too trusting. Because of the anonymity of the web we can’t always trust that people are who they say they are. In fact, a person with the screen name of ‘suzyQ’ may turn out to be a 40-year-old guy by the name of Fred. Sexual predators love the Internet because they can lurk in the conversations of young people and pass themselves off a something they are not. We have all read stories of relationships that began on the web that ended tragically when a young girl or boy decided to meet the “friend” they found on the other end of a chat room talk or blog comment.

This week Northampton schools sent home a memo to parents and students asking them to be aware of the dangers of websites that allow free sharing of pictures and information. Sites like facebook.com and myspace.com allow students to put pictures and personal information on the web and then invite friends to see their postings. Those friends invite other friends and soon you have a whole group of people sharing thoughts on music, school life, relationships, parents and all the stuff students have always talked about. There is also the excitement of meeting people who may be on the other side of the country or the other side of the world who become part of the conversation through the friend’s invitations. It’s a little like how people in another generation felt about having a pen pal in Australia.

But because students and others feel so comfortable in these sites and in other online interactions that they also feel free to share information like their home addresses and real names. It only seems natural given that you are trying to establish a real relationship. But there are those who will exploit this information and there are dangers. The High School is having an information session on this on March 7 at 5 PM and we will be talking about it at youth group on March 12 at a session we’re calling “Being Virtuous in a Virtual World.” If you are a student or a parent I encourage you to be thinking about this. We are breaking new ground in thinking about this new online world and we all need to learn about it.

Now why am I talking about this in a sermon? What’s theological about the new world of computer relationships? I’m talking about it because I wonder why it is that people are so much more interesting on the Internet. What is it about the real world we live in it that has lost its magic and intrigue for us? Why is it that the relationships we develop with people through computer screens and keyboards have an edge and an excitement for us that we’re not finding in the relationships that develop through conversations over the breakfast table and in warm embraces as we return from a trip? I suspect that we have become disconnected from what God is doing in our everyday lives and we have bought into the illusion that what is novel is, in fact, new. In fact, I think that the search for novelty in relationships is just a sign of something very old - it is avoiding real relationship and blinding us to the reality that God is doing a new thing and we are missing it.

They didn’t have text messaging or blogs in their day, but the people of Israel had the same problem some three thousand years ago. Well, it wasn’t exactly the same, but they were having a hard time seeing something new in the place where they were. It was the time of the Exile. The people were living far from their homes in a foreign land - in Babylon, which is across the desert from Israel in the country we now call Iraq.

For hundreds of years Israel’s prophets had been warning the people that God was not pleased with them. They had forgotten their God - the God who had created them and given them life…the God who had called them into being as children of a promise to a couple of geriatric parents - Abraham and Sarah…the God who had delivered them from slavery in Egypt and brought them through the waters of the Red Sea and through the wilderness into a new land. You’d think it would be hard to forget a God like that, but the people had and it was the role of the prophets to remind them of who they were and how they had been chosen from all the nations of the earth to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. But the people didn’t listen to the prophets. Their rulers went astray and finally they were carried off into exile by the powerful nations around them.

Now Isaiah the prophet spoke to the people and unlike the prophets who went before he does not tell them to remember. He starts by saying, “Forget about all that you know about God. Forget about the old stories of God’s deliverance. Don’t remember how God saved your ancestors in the past. God is doing a new thing.”

A new thing? They must have laughed to hear Isaiah say that. A new thing? We’re in exile, Isaiah! Look around! There’s no Promised Land. There’s no Temple. There’s no protection for God’s people. There’s no hope and nothing to hold on to. There’s more than a huge desert separating us from home. There’s despair and dejection and degradation. If there is something new it must be found in Babylon. This is where the power is. This is where the cutting edge technologies are. This is the nation that must be blessed because look at all that they’ve got. God is doing a new thing, Isaiah? You’ve got to be kidding!

But it’s an interesting about the desert. What looks like a hostile, brutal place can surprise you with life. Have you ever been in the desert following a rain? It doesn’t happen very often but when it does all kinds of surprising things happen. Suzanne and I took a trip once to the Big Bend region of Texas in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert. Except for the tall cottonwood trees along the Rio Grande it is a place that looks dead. What plants and animals there are are spiky, hostile things that you don’t want to get near.

But when the rain falls the whole scene changes. Tall, thorny ocotillo bushes sprout blazing orange flowers immediately. Thousands of tiny, yellow flowers spring up in the rocky, sandy soil. Dry gulches becomes flowing rivers. It’s all there waiting to come to life, but you’d never know it until the rain comes.

That’s what Isaiah tells the people. “God is doing a new thing. Don’t you see it? Streams are breaking forth in the desert. God is preparing a new highway to take God’s people home right through the heart of the wilderness. The wild animals of the desert will find their true voice and offer praise to God and they will join the praise of the people as they go back home. Can’t you see what’s happening?”

But of course they can’t. The exile has sapped the people of their hope. The old stories that told them how things were supposed to work just didn’t seem to have the power to ground them anymore. They were in search of a new thing but they didn’t look to God. They neglected the old sacrificial system that helped them to deal with the struggles they were facing. They neglected the God who could free them from their sins. They just didn’t think God of Israel had the power to match the gods of Babylon.

So God tells them that God will be forgetful, too. Though God is burdened by their sin and by their forgetfulness, God will not remember their transgressions. This new thing is not just another version of the same old thing. When God comes to them again, it will be something so new that what is old will truly be passed away. Behold, the new has come.

It’s not too big a leap to say that we live in Babylon, too. Do you feel it? This land that we live in is a great land, a powerful land. All the world looks to this nation to define what is new and what is cutting edge. People come from all over the world to attend school here, to work here, to trade here, to make alliances. We export the latest fashions, the latest movies, the latest technology. Surely this is where the new things can be found.

But we are in exile. The God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ, is not the God who brings these new things. Many, many people have begun to wonder - what is the point of these old, old stories that we tell about God in church each week? What is the hope that I can find among Christians? What are they doing over there with their odd, little worship practices and their weekly activities? Why do they gather together so much and why do they read that old, old book? Surely there is nothing new in the Christian church.

But we know that the new things the world wants to give us or sell us are not the things that give us hope. We know that there is a deep emptiness at the heart of our society and we feel it in ourselves at times. I see our willingness to expose our lives online, to spread ourselves out for the world to see and possible abuse, as evidence that at our core we have a tremendous hunger for connection. The world is going so fast, the things that are happening to us so complex, the power to change things seems so beyond our capacity, that we just want someone to acknowledge us…to see us…to love us for who we are. This high-tech world is remarkably low-touch, and in such a world, even the comment of a stranger reading our blog from 20,000 miles away can seem like love.

God wants to give us more than that. The God of Jesus Christ did not come so that we could make ourselves disembodied people trying to become real in the ether of the Internet. The God of Israel came among us and lived among us and ate with sinners and touched the sick and healed the disturbed and suffered on a cross and died and rose again to show us what was real. And in taking on our humanity, God gave us the capacity to be truly human, too.

God is doing a new thing. This is not just an upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. This is not just version 2.0. It’s a whole new operating system that God is about. When we pass through the waters of baptism, we are welcomed into a community that dies with Christ so that we can be raised with Christ. We no longer look for the new in novelty. There’s more to life than that. We look for the new in the same place we’ve always discovered it -- in the God who makes paths in the wilderness and ways through the water. In this community, formed by Christ, we expect something new each day.

The Eastern Shore is a place of regular rhythms. Every six hours or so the tide comes in or the tide goes out supporting a network of tidal life. Offshore and in the bay schools of fish and dolphin pass through as they have done for centuries. But you all know that there are storms that change things forever. I already know the dates. 1933 and the great storm that moved folks off the barrier islands and meant the end of communities like Broadwater and a new life for places like Willis Wharf. 1964 and the northeaster that hit Chincoteague. These are times after which things could not be the same.

God is doing a new thing here in this place and can do a new thing in your life. If you open yourself to God’s grace and claim for yourself God’s love and recognize that God is not remembering your sin any more if you will only let it go - then nothing can ever be the same again.

Streams are erupting in the desert. A highway is being built across the wilderness to bring God’s people home from their exile. Will you walk with me on that path? Will you go through that water? Will you accept that you are accepted and loved and transformed? Thanks be to God.