Forget the former things

This Sunday Xander and I were installed as the new officers at Buckingham Salvation Army, and it was wonderful. We are so excited about what God is going to do with this. We hold on to Banbury Prayer Beacon (so pleased about that, we are definitely not done here yet!) and press in to seeing what the new thing is that God is going to in Buckingham.

Over and over again in the last few months God has been showing me this passage from Isaiah 43:

This is what the Lord says—

    he who made a way through the sea,

    a path through the mighty waters,

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who drew out the chariots and horses,

    the army and reinforcements together,

and they lay there, never to rise again,

    extinguished, snuffed out like a wick:

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“Forget the former things;

    do not dwell on the past.

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See, I am doing a new thing!

    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

I am making a way in the wilderness

    and streams in the wasteland.

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The wild animals honor me,

    the jackals and the owls,

because I provide water in the wilderness

    and streams in the wasteland,

to give drink to my people, my chosen,

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    the people I formed for myself

    that they may proclaim my praise.

The stories Isaiah is recounting in this passage are the seminal moments of the Israelites history. The truly amazing and miraculous stories of how God liberated them from slavery in Egypt, parted the Red Sea, drowned the Egyptian armies, guided them through the wilderness and led them to the Promised Land.

We have a similar story ourselves from our Sabbath year in Banbury. God used the imagery with us of being called out of slavery in Egypt, learning to live free in the Promised Land. Learning to Sabbath, learning to not be enslaved to the busyness of programme and activity, but to make space for God to show up, and see what he wants to do, to be bold in faith and responsive to his call to healing, hospitality, prayerfulness. God has really done some amazing things with us over the past few years.

Xander was made a captain a few weeks ago and we’ve been reflecting on how we feel like we’re not brand new anymore. We’re definitely not in our early 20s anymore, we can tell we’ve got a couple of kids, a few more grey hairs, some stories under our belts. But we’re very aware that we don’t come with all the answers, or magic tricks that will transform all of Buckingham overnight. There’s a reminder to forget the former things and watch out as God does a new thing here, and in us too.

1 Cor 2:1-5 – When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. 2 For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. 4 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.

We want to follow Jesus together, and see where he takes us. We have great faith that the Spirit wants to show up and move in power, not because we’ve got something special or we’ve been somewhere great before, but because Jesus has this on his heart and we want to go with him.

Things as they are might be familiar, safe. Buckingham has a history, there are beautiful things God has been doing there over the generations. Xander and I have been reading through the history books, looking back over what God has been doing, trying to get a feel for the promises he has made to our ancestors there. Over and over again we hear God saying to ‘go in and take possession of the land that the Lord swore he would give to your ancestors.’ God has unfinished business in Buckingham for The Salvation Army. I’m not even sure what those promises are, but I know he wants to make good on them.

And yet.

We are called to forget all of that. Not to forget the goodness or the power of God. He tells them to build an altar to help them remember those things, a pile of stones that will tell them the story again every time they go back there. 

What he is telling them to do is to reimagine their future, to remember that their best is not behind them, the past is not all they have. Someone once told me that the Second World War years were the best years of their life. All that bombing and rationing and death. And they were convinced that nothing better had happened in their life since then. God is calling us to literally get a life. To see broader than we have before. To have a vision of God that goes beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. To not limit our future to the things that have gone before.

I’m a particular fan of the Narnia books. I love the image of God they portray. One moment that stands out to me is in Prince Caspian, where the children want Aslan to come in roaring, defeating death and the enemy like he did before, and yet he says, ‘Things never happen the same way twice.’

When we go into Buckingham, we can’t do a Sabbath year and expect the same things to work in the same way – we haven’t been this way before.

Did you know in the gospels Jesus never heals someone the same way twice? When we are followers of Jesus we’ve got to embrace change. Change is the standard of the new way. Jesus calls us to follow. Followers of Jesus were originally called ‘followers of The Way’. It’s not formulaic, there’s no magic tricks. That’s on purpose. We have to stay close to Jesus. The Israelites learned where to go in the wilderness by following the presence of God. We keep asking, how does Jesus want us to do it this time?

Our temptation is to revert back to what’s comfortable and familiar. The problem is we forget our own smallness, and how big God is.

I spent 7 years as part of Southwark Salvation Army in Elephant and Castle. I loved it there, those were extremely formational years for me. It's such a transient community, and the corps reflects that. You could go away for a month and not recognise things when you came back. It's been 4 years since I was part of that community, and I know without shadow of a doubt that things are very different now than they were then. The community is not static, it's dynamic, alive, constantly shifting and changing, sometimes rejoicing, sometimes in pain, always seeking after the heart of Jesus.

My biggest dreams for Buckingham look much more like learning together to keep adapting to the heartbeat of the Jesus who never changes but calls us to constantly adapt, than looking to build a solid institution or framework that crumbles whenever I move on.

Alan Hirsch does a much better job than I could of talking about how as followers of Jesus we should be building movements instead of monuments, here.

Did the Israelites ever obey and truly forget the former things and go on to see the new thing that God was doing? The next few hundred years they cycled around these sin/exile/repent exercises in futility, wasting time, not living out the freedom and the space God had bought for them.

Space, potential, opportunity feels overwhelming, doesn’t it? Starting something new in Buckingham, almost from scratch, I’ll admit it, feels overwhelming for me. Where do we even begin?

God has better for us than staying as we are. He has given us something powerful, not just for us, but something to share that the people of Buckingham are hungry for. We’re not struggling for survival, barely managing to keep afloat and hold our head above water. God has given us freedom, new life, healing, hope, peace, joy, transformation, passion, purpose. Let’s share those!

And as we do, my ears ring with these words repeating:

“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?

I am making a way in the wilderness

    and streams in the wasteland.

Let it be.