Three little stories to begin with this morning, in no particular order. The first comes from a Law Reform Committee for whom I was the researcher/secretary in the 1970’s. It was a pretty high-powered committee made up of distinguished lawyers, expert in their chosen field of property and trustee law. One of the members had decided that he preferred life in the provinces, rather than a major city, and he was occasionally subject to some light-hearted banter from his city colleagues.
One day he mentioned that in his office they only had a set of Gazette Law Reports, rather than the more common, official New Zealand Law Reports. Now that won’t mean much to you, but the thing to know is that the Gazette Law Reports had ceased publication at the end of 1954, about 20 years earlier. Well, our chairman, a senior Queen’s Counsel from Auckland, saw his chance for a really good leg-pull. He arranged for a beautiful certificate to be printed for his provincial colleague to hang on his office wall. It read: “Advice in this office is based on the law as it was on 31.12.54.”
The second story comes from All Saints, Palmerston North, where I was ordained as a deacon. It was a huge church in a wealthy parish, and they had a highly accomplished, professional organist, of whom we were all a bit scared. There were three of us to be ordained, and so the Vicar, Brian Carrel,l kindly invited each of us to nominate a hymn for the ordination service. Two of them chose traditional hymns, including Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, which was and is my favourite hymn and I was going to have it as my choice. Seizing the chance to have two favourites, I hastily decided that I would go a bit more modern, and I chose “Here I am, Lord”
This did not please the organist; she flatly refused to play it as it would sound awful on the organ. But Brian was used to her. He warmly agreed with her view, and suggested that music of this sort would have to be played on the piano, as it really wasn’t good enough for the organ. His strategy worked perfectly. When we came to that part of the service, the organist moved quietly and unobtrusively from the organ to the piano, played it beautifully, and quietly returned to the organ. That was that, we thought, but it wasn’t. At the end of the service one of the regulars baled Brian up, jabbed her finger at his breastbone, and said in a voice that could be heard throughout Palmerston North and much of the Manawatu, “Vicar, if the pipe organ was good enough for our Lord, it should be good enough for All Saints, Palmerston North!”
The third story you have probably heard me tell before, but it fits our theme today so well that I’m going to tell it again. It comes from Anthony de Mellow, and is about a priest somewhere who finally got fed up with his cat, which kept wandering in to the temple during a service and distracting the worshippers. So he had someone build a cage, and just before the service was about to start, he would grab the cat, stick it in the cage and not let it out until the service had finished.
When the priest died, his followers continued the practice, caging the cat until the service had finished. And when the cat died they got another one, because it was a very important part of their tradition to have a caged cat present during their services.
That last one’s a great story, isn’t it? And each of them tells us something about the relationship between the past and the future. Of course, we don’t want a lawyer whose knowledge of the law is 20 years out of date. But nor do we want one who is so-up-to-date that he knows nothing about any law that was passed before he started. And the remedy for our friend in the provinces was not to throw away his reports when they ceased publication, but to subscribe to the other series and keep up to date.
The second story warns of the dangers of not knowing the past. We can easily fall into the trap of thinking that the way things are now, they always have been and must therefore continue to be because there is no alternative and never has been. The woman in Palmerston North might have been an extreme example, but she certainly is not alone in believing that everything in the church today is traceable back to the very beginning. Those who insist on celibacy for priests need to be reminded that this practice was not mandatory for the first 1,000 years of the church’s history; and those who believe that the Church has always taken a keen interest in marriage do not know their church history very well either.
And the third story instructs us to question our practices from time to time. We laugh at the story of the cat-in-the-cage; but try removing the communion rail, as one of my former colleagues did, and you will soon discover the rich variety of reasons that people think explain why we have them. And here’s a question for the congregation in Holy Trinity; why do we ring the bell just before we sing the Lord’s Prayer?
It’s more than time to look at today’s Scriptures. As much as I love the Book of Isaiah – and this particular passage is one of my favourites – it should come with a bit of a warning. Verse 18 in particular can sound like a complete rejection of the past: Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it. To get the full flavour of that we need to remember the context surrounding it. The people were in exile. Everything had gone wrong. Their world had collapsed around them. Many had given up hope. They were sunk in depression. Those who still retained some hope in God looked back to the past, drew on the Exodus experience, and assumed that God would rescue them one day through another great prophet like Moses.
Both views of the past were wrong. To assume that the past would have the final say, that nothing could or would be done, was completely wrong. It left God out of the thinking – it assumed that even God was powerless to overcome the past disaster. But the second view – that God would act in the same way as he had acted in the exodus – was also wrong. in part. Yes, God would act yet again to rescue them; but, no, God would not use the same method to achieve the rescue this time. This time God had in mind to use a foreign, military conqueror to free the Israelites from exile in Babylon. In that sense God was doing a new thing – but to effect an old purpose, to rescue, to save his people.
Knowledge of the past should have given the people hope for the future. They should have been able to draw on the past to reinforce their trust in the character of God. That cannot change. But how God will manifest that character in any particular circumstances is a very different issue. We must always expect God to do something new – be alert to the possibility that God comes to us in a new and surprising way. That, I think, is what Isaiah is telling us today.
And that is at the very heart of our Christian faith, for the supreme example of God doing a new thing in order to effect the same old purpose of saving his people is found in the death and resurrection of Christ. No one foresaw it, no one predicted it, even his closest followers were caught by surprise when Jesus was raised from the dead. In that sense, it was a new thing, and everyone was amazed. But when they started to try to make sense of it, how did they go about that? By digging into the past, into their traditions, into their Scriptures, into their past experiences of God.
And we are reminded of all this in our gospel reading today. Just shut your eyes for a moment, and let me describe for you the action that takes place in this little story. Some men come along and dig a hole. Then they pick up a stretcher with a body on it, and they lower it into the hole until it reaches the bottom. Full stop. What does that remind you of? Isn’t that a description of a burial?
And at the bottom of the hole the body encounters Jesus. And Jesus raises him up. Isn’t that a description of resurrection? And the people are amazed: and they praised God saying, ‘We have never seen anything like this!’ Which is their way of saying that God is doing a new thing. Of course, the religious leaders were not so pleased. Jesus was claiming to heal by forgiving sin. No one could forgive sin but God himself. And they were right. But God was forgiving sin in a new way, through Jesus rather than through temple sacrifice.
We know whose side we’re on here, don’t we? But would we be quite so sure if someone came along to our place of worship and tried to introduce radical change? Would we recognise that God is doing a new thing among us? Or would we take the same line as the teachers of the law and turn on the innovator?
After all, some of us like musty old books and pipe organs – even if we’re not too keen on cats in cages.
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