Letting go
Most everyone has a favorite Bible verse. For many people that verse is John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son,” or from Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” For some their favorite verse is the lens through which they read the world or one that they use as a guide for living and discerning, such as “By their fruits you shall know them,” from Matthew. My favorite verse comes from Isaiah, and we read it today. “Thus says the Lord, I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”
The prophet Isaiah was speaking this word to God’s people who had been displaced, having been carried off into captivity to Babylon fifty years before when Judah fell to Nebuchadnezzar’s overwhelming armies. Now Babylon also had fallen to a new empire, the Persians, who were set to allow the Jewish people to return home. But guess what? Many of them decided that they didn’t want to go. They’d settled in Babylon. They’d gotten used to life there. So when God said, come! Follow me! I’m making the way through the wilderness! Just like I made a way through the waters when you were captives in Egypt! When God said all that, they said, “No, that’s ok, thanks, but we’re good!”
So here comes Isaiah to make this point: we have a wonderful past, a wonderful history, a wonderful God who has saved us in times before. But now it is time for a new thing, and we have to let go of that past if we are going to move into the future. We must go forward, new life is up ahead, and staying where we are means staying in captivity.
But change is hard, and new things can be viewed with suspicion. Change makes us feel that life has gotten out of control. A push for change makes us feel that somebody is saying the things we used to do were wrong, that what we were taught is wrong, that our parents and our schools and our churches were wrong, and that challenges our allegiances as well as our sense of being grounded. And change is often accompanied by grief. Nobody wants to feel those feelings. We just don’t like disruption and change.
So we resist change, we cling to our ways, we cling to our memories, even if those memories no longer bring us hope but make us feel sad and defeated. And when Isaiah asks, “God is about to do a new thing, do you not perceive it?” We say, with our hands over our eyes and ears, “No! We don’t see hope in the new. We don’t want to see the new thing, we like the old thing.” Even if the old thing is captivity.
So, for example, we continue to lament that we do not have children in our parish, ignoring the 85 families who come to our campus every weekday to entrust their children to our preschool program, and the yard full of toddlers and moms and dads on the patio for 6 morning classes a week in the community music program, and all of our preschool children who are already enrolled for Vacation Bible School in July - ignoring all that because they’re not in a Sunday school classroom this morning. We keep saying we want to invest in children and families, ignoring that we are investing in children and families, because the new thing, what we’re doing now, putting our resources into expanding our building capacity to include even more children, doesn’t look like the old thing.
Because we are in captivity to the past, as glorious as it may have been, and because change is hard, and it makes us feel out of control, and it asks something of us.
Change asks something of us. God asks something of us - to look for new life, to look for new things, to see God at work using new channels, new methods, new people, new ideas. And yes, that means God is also asking us to allow ourselves to be transformed by the new people and new ideas and new channels. We will be changed by allowing change, by gaining new perspective, by participating in God’s holy work in new ways. Yet many before us and many after us too will say, no thanks, we’re good, we don’t want to let go, we don’t want the pain and the grief that will come with change.
When his good friend Mary anointed Jesus that night in Bethany, she was anointing him for his death. He was about to undergo a great change, a great suffering, a gruesome death after which he would be transformed - raised by God into new life. But before the new life could come forth, a ritual of grief needed to be observed. That grief filled the room with its fragrance, just as Mary’s brother Lazarus’s previously dead body filled his tomb with a stench. New life was coming, but first preparation had to be made. The old had to be grieved and let go so that the new could spring forth - something Peter was not able to do as we see in other stories when Jesus told him what was to happen and he said no.
We have some letting go to do here in our parish. We have some pain that we need to grieve. You’ll be hearing more about this in coming days, the same days as when we prepare for Jesus’ death and resurrection, hearing more about how we can come together to walk through letting go so that we can see and embrace new life.
For when the women approached Jesus’s tomb after his burial, the angels said to them, why do you seek the living among the dead? I am about to do a new thing, says the Lord. Do you not perceive it? Let go of the former things and live.
Comments