Isaiah 43: 16-25 (links validated 3/9/25a)

I remember a theological consultation I once had with an astute elementary schooler who asked me, “How come God doesn’t have to follow the rules of the world. If God made the world, shouldn’t God have to follow the rules (I.e. not perform miracles, exist outside of time, etc.). I asked him if he had a favorite cartoon TV show and he readily supplied the answer to my question. Then I asked him whether the creator of the TV show are, themselves, cartoons. Whether they have to abide by the conventions of the world established by the television show. I think that clicked for him. But for the lover of visual art or opera in your congregation, you can offer the same apologetic argument. To the best of our knowledge, Salvador Dali never melted, Seurat is not made up of tiny dots and Puccini and Verdi did not sing their every thought in real life. God is God in like fashion. God made — but is not constrained — by the world. Thus we declare that God can do new things.

In one of his many memorable clinical vignettes, neurologist Oliver Sacks tells us about Jimmie, a man whose memory somehow became a sieve. Jimmie remains forever stuck thinking it’s 1945. Harry Truman is president, the war just ended, and this ex-sailor believes he has his whole future to look forward to. Sacks reports that Jimmie is a very nice, affable fellow with whom you can have a good conversation about this or that. But if you leave the room after visiting with him for two hours and then return a short while later, he will greet you as if for the first time. Now, of course, that is simply tragic all by itself, but even more interesting is Dr. Sacks’ observation as to the overall effect that this temporal vacuum has on Jimmie: he has no joy. Jimmie is joyless in that he is confined to an ever-changing, yet finally meaningless, present moment. With nothing new ever to look back on and so with nothing ever to look forward to, joy is simply impossible. Curiously, there is one time when Jimmie displays something akin to joy after all; one moment when the vacant look on his face is replaced with something that Sacks can describe only as a look of completeness and of hushed calmness. This happens whenever Jimmie takes communion in chapel...

I just finished reading Purple Hibiscus, a novel set in Nigeria during a time of political unrest. It centers on the family of a wealthy, sternly Catholic businessman who can’t do enough good for his church and community, or enough evil to his family. As he spreads the wealth around in the name of his Catholic faith, he also tyrannizes his children. He beats his wife for minor infractions of church law, causing her to have two miscarriages. Things get so bad that he beats his beloved daughter nearly to death because she treasured a painting of her pagan grandfather. The family lives in a hell they cannot escape because their father does so much good in the community that no one would believe their story of family abuse. Their situation is hopeless, until suddenly this Christian version of Hannibal Lector is found dead in his office. It turns out that the downtrodden mother, after the beating of her daughter, had begun to incrementally poison the father. By her own hand, she set her family free. God set us free with his own hand, through the death of his Son.

Sometimes God's "new thing" is as obvious as the Armory Show of 1913. The Armory Show, officially the International Exhibition of Modern Art, shocked the country when it opened in New York at the 69th Regiment Armory. Designed to introduce American audiences - who were used to Rembrandts and Raphaels - to the most contemporary art, the Armory show indeed attracted many visitors. More than 200,000 ticket-holders were willing to stand in long lines to see the work. What those exhibition-goers saw was so unlike what had come before that everyone had an opinion.

(Recommended!!)