CENTRAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Samford Turner, Pastor
December 31, 2006
SERMON TITLE: “God Makes All Things New”
Isaiah 65:17-25
Revelation 21:1-5

Oh God we live not by bread alone, but by every word which comes from your mouth. So we invite you to speak to us this day in ways that we can hear as the scripture is read; as the sermon proclaims your word. Allow us to hear you and only you speaking to us. In hearing your word, we ask that we might also respond with all of our heart in worshipping and serving you in the world. These things we ask in Christ’s name, Amen

Read the above named scripture.

“The grass withers and the flower fades but the Word of the Lord endureth forever”

Thanks be unto God!

“And the word became flesh and dwelt among us filled with grace and truth and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father”. This is how the Apostle John speaks to us about what God has done in the birth of Christ and to the world. Who would have thought God would have done such a thing? Who would have imagined that God would have chosen to enter into creation to make all things new by being born of a woman in a manger? Who could have conceived of such a thing? No one, quite frankly. Absolutely, no one could have conceived such a wild scheme, no one but God! God was doing something new, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. God was doing something extraordinarily new, unheard of, unprecedented, and unexpected. God was at work creating all things new; new opportunities for all of creation; new possibilities for all of humankind. In reality no one should have been surprised but everyone was!! If we really understand what has happened, we’re still surprised. No one should have been surprised because this is the God who created the heavens and the earth out of absolutely nothing. God is able to do extraordinary things, unexpected things, and unprecedented things. It is in the very nature of God to create. Many of us may imagine that God, once upon a time, created the heavens and the earth and then went out of the creating business. Nothing could be further from the truth. God is always about creating. It’s who God is. It’s what God does. The truth is that God has never stopped creating. When humankind rejected God in the garden, God created a new way for them - not the way that God had intended, but a new way for them. When humankind seemed unable to respond to God’s grace, God set about creating new possibilities. God called Abraham and Sarah to leave everything that they had and to go to a place God only knew where. Through their faith and obedience, God began creating new possibilities for God’s people. God called a barren couple to become a blessing to all the families of the earth. They had to tell them that they offspring would be more numerous than the stars in the sky. Who could have figured God to do something like that?

When God’s children were slaves in Egypt they cried out in the midst of their oppression and God heard their cry and God created new possibilities for them. God led them out of Egypt and into ultimately a promised land filled with new possibilities and new opportunities. They were to be a holy people for the sake of the world God so loved. It has been pondered for ages then that pithy little remark ‘how strange that God should choose the Jews!’ How strange indeed! That’s exactly who God chose, surprisingly, unexpectedly, God being God! Once in the Promised Land the people soon began to be attracted to all kinds of other things other than God and God sent prophet after prophet after prophet to call them back and they rejected the prophets.

Finally, Babylon came calling and the Babylonians crushed the people of God, destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the temple and carried God’s people off into captivity and into exile.

The words we read this morning from Isaiah were words spoken to those exiles, spoken to people whose hope was nonexistent, who thought there was nothing new under the sun and what was going to happen tomorrow was like what had happened yesterday and the day before and the year before that and the decade before that and the century before that. These words were spoken by God through the prophet in the midst of hopelessness announcing that God was creating something new, nothing modest mind you, but new heavens and a new earth. That’s big time creation! And the people had to be baffled! Who could have thought that God would do such a thing! Who could have imagined it? Certainly not those children of Israel in exile. Later in the story an angel appears to a poor Palestinian peasant girl and dares to tell her that she is pregnant by the Holy Spirit and the Son that she would birth would be the Messiah, the long sought one who would save God’s people. What an improbable plan! I don’t know about you but if I was in charge, I would have chosen somebody else named in that Christmas story. Let’s give a child to Caesar Augustus! All the powers there in Rome, all the structures there; you’ve got not only military might but economic might, let’s give him a child who will become the Savior of the world. That makes sense but to a poor Palestinian peasant girl in some back water of the empire. Who is God kidding?! We could never have dreamed up such a thing, not you and I independently or together. Only God is capable of dreaming these kinds of dreams; only the strange God who creates extraordinary possibilities out of practically nothing.

We would, as we typically do, if we’re in the creation business, we would try to create something out of some stuff that we have and our theory is - the more good stuff you’ve got the better the creation is going to be, right? Whatever it is we are creating. If you’ve got some good stuff; you’re going to wind up with a good creation. God doesn’t work that way. God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing, scripture tells us, absolutely nothing!

God doesn’t work the way we work. God doesn’t think the way we think. Remember Gideon in those first few years when the children of Israel were in the Promised Land but still had all kinds of native groups that were giving them difficulties. So Gideon is going to take the army of Israel against the Midionites. He’s got 32,000 people that he’s going to put in the field against the Mideonites, against a force the Bible says ‘is more numerous than the grains of sand at the seashore’. And God says, ‘Hold on Gideon, you’ve got entirely too many soldiers’. So Gideon sends 22,000 home. He keeps 10,000. God says, ‘Come on Son, you’re not listening, you’ve got entirely too many soldiers. If you go in there and achieve a victory over the Mideonites, you’re going to be under the impression you did it because of the power of your military might! You’ve got too many folks, get rid of them.’ Finally God suggests that against this innumerable force that Gideon has 300 soldiers. ‘Take those in to battle’, God says. ‘Then you will know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the victory has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me.’

This God can create victory out of certain defeat. This God can create extraordinary things out of practically nothing.

Isaiah announced to those people of God, those hopeless people in exile, that God was at work making all things new. The heavens and the earth, everything! Isaiah further announced that this creation was going to look like this, ‘the wolf and the lamb shall feed together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox’! How many lions have you ever known that made a habit of eating straw? Maybe only if it was attached to the dead carcass of whatever it was consuming. That’s impossible, isn’t it? Changing the dietary habits of a carnivore into a herbivore? Unprecedented in my experience! Absolutely impossible! And I’m sure that the people of God said that to Isaiah, just as we are liable to say that to Isaiah.

When the barren Sarah was told at the age of 90 that she was going to bare a son, what did she do? She laughed at the improbability of it all. When Mary was told by another angelic messenger that she was going to birth the Messiah, she joined her voice with that of Sarah. ‘That is impossible’, they said. And the angelic messengers were quick to respond, “Nothing, nothing is impossible with God”. God was at work creating new possibilities, impossible possibilities, if you will for people who thought there would never be any new possibilities.

Christmas is our yearly reminder that God is up to something up to something far greater than we can imagine. It has always been that way from that very first morning in a manger; it is still that way. God is at work creating new hope, new possibilities, new opportunities for you, for me, for all of God’s people, for the Presbyterian Church USA which is need of a few new possibilities and new opportunities. Indeed God is at work creating new possibilities and new opportunities for Central Presbyterian Church. Is it easy to see the new thing that God is doing? Anybody notice? Anybody see something new? It’s not always easy. I can promise you that I have a very difficult time seeing the new thing that God is doing in my life. That’s why God always keeps handy a two-by-four to catch me right up side the head and say, “No, fool, not that way, this way!!” We’re not very good at this. I don’t want to claim that you all are in the same league that I am of being thick-headed but we’re not very good at seeing the new thing that God is doing. But we are a people who do not live by what we see. We live by faith. If we had to see it in order to believe it, then that wouldn’t be faith, would it? The admonition of scripture is not that we live not by sight but by faith. We don’t live by sight. What we see oftentimes is just deceiving to us. If that’s not evident to you, you need to look closer at the world in which we live. God’s ways are not our ways; God’s thoughts are not our thoughts; and therefore we have to live by faith.

This God, who in Jesus Christ became incarnate in the world, if you haven’t figured it out by now, is a very unpredictable God and if what you’re searching for in your heart of hearts is a God who is absolutely predictable, that will do only what you expect God to do, don’t have anything to do with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; have nothing to with the Father of Jesus Christ because that God will disappoint you because that God is incredibly unpredictable! In fact the only thing predictable about this God is that God will be unpredictable. You can predict that. We’re not sure what God is going to do next and if we think we are, we’re not worshipping the real God, but one we’ve created to make ourselves comfortable.

But that raises the question--how do we relate to a God who is unpredictable, who will do new things which stagger our imagination, things we can not possibly be prepared for. Well, if we look back in scripture, we will find that the people, who could not relate to this God in any way shape or form, were the ones who did not want to let go of what they believed about God or let go of the ways they thought God wanted them to live, individually and collectively. Those folks had a very, very hard time with this God. On the other hand, those who were ready, not always willing with all their hearts, but ready to relinquish old ways in order to receive God’s new ways have done remarkably well relating to this God. Think back across history. Think back even across the history of the church. When has the church wanted to hold fast to something when God was doing something new and then we only found out later we were holding fast to that which we should have let go a long time ago.

You perhaps remember the children of Israel on their way from Egypt from slavery and oppression to the Promised Land. And what began to happen as they had a difficulty and then another difficulty. Pretty soon they began to murmur the Bible tells us. That’s a polite way of putting it. They began to complain and they complained to Moses, they complained to God--“What did you do, bring us out here to kill us?!” “Let’s go back to Egypt. Let’s go back to that which was predictable. It was not fun, it was not great, but at least we had water and at least we had food. They wanted something ‘certain’. They wanted what our culture lusts after--certitude! This God doesn’t allow for that kind of certitude. I’m sorry. We may want it and I understand that we want it because there’s a part of me that wants it too! But God doesn’t invite us to live by certitude, but by faith!

Certitude was the domain of the Pharisees. They knew exactly what was right and exactly what was wrong. They knew exactly what God would do and they knew exactly what God would never do. That’s why they never could get Jesus. They never had a moment’s understanding. Oh, some few of them did but most of them didn’t have a clue. But do you know what; we need not blame them for they were just picking up on a latter verse of a much earlier song. It was the song first sung “In The Garden”. When human kind decided, ‘you know God said not to eat of that tree, the one of the knowledge of good and evil but, you know the fruit looks pretty good. I think we will eat of it because then we’ll know what is good and what is evil and what is right and what is wrong’. So they did! Of course once they thought that they knew what was right and wrong, what was good and evil, what did they need God for?! One of the great problems of our age and of every age--once we think we know what is good and evil, we’re pretty tough on anybody else who sees it differently.

We have to let go of that which we think we understand if we’re to really have to do with this God whose thoughts are not our thoughts, whose ways are not our ways. It doesn’t work any other way. We have to be able to relinquish that so that God can give us new understanding, new possibilities.

God invites us on a journey of discernment to discern what God is doing in our midst; to discern the new creation that God is bringing into being even now. The further we go on this journey, the further we begin to understand what God is doing and I want to emphasize that! No matter how far along the journey we are, we’re only beginning to understand! Paul said it, ‘Now we see through a mirror dimly, but there will come a time when we will see more clearly.” it just won’t be in this life that we see so very clearly and therefore we will journey on in faith, trusting in God, not in what we can see and understand. Relinquishing in order to receive is the basic move of this journey of life, this journey of faith, letting go of old ways and being and doing and understanding in order that we might receive from God new ways of being and doing and understanding. It’s what Jesus was talking about when he said, “You cannot put new wine in old wine skins”. He wasn’t talking about our ages or anything else. He was just saying ‘it doesn’t work’. You can’t do it! We cannot put God’s new creation, our understandings of that into our old frames of reference. They won’t fit. We have to be open to God giving us new frames of reference. New ways of understanding what God is doing. It’s what Jeremiah spoke of also to exiles in Babylon. He said “the days are coming when God will make a new covenant with God’s people” but the new covenant wasn’t enough in and of itself. God would also have to put new hearts within God’s people so that they could receive that new covenant. The old hearts wouldn’t do. In order to receive the new creation that God is bringing into being in Jesus Christ we have to let go of the old ways of thinking about God; the old ways of thinking about ourselves; the old ways of thinking about the world in which we live; the old ways of thinking about the church so that we can receive the new that God is offering.

Now I do not pretend to know the new things that God is doing in Central Presbyterian Church. Bob Walcott used to say “I don’t know very much but I suspect a lot”. I don’t know what new things God is doing here but I will tell you that I do know some things. Not about what God is doing right now but about what God has done in the past in this church .

I do know that a long time ago there was a group of people at Government Street Presbyterian Church who sensed that God was doing something new and sensed that God was calling them out of Government Street Church (that corner of Government and Jackson Streets) to a new location on Jackson Street and building by the grace of God the Jackson Street Presbyterian Church. I know that for a fact. And I also know that their descendents also experienced God doing something new in their midst. And the upshot of that was the building of a church here on the corner of Dauphin and Ann. I know that for a fact. So what I’m trying to tell you is that built into your DNA in this congregation is the ability to be open to the new thing that God is doing. OK? All of us have certain things that are built into our DNA and we can ignore that, but oftentimes to our very harm, or we can be cognizant of what’s in our DNA and move forward into the new possibilities that God has given to us.

Recently you completed as a congregation the Percept Study, a study that tries to help you as a congregation understand what God is calling you to do and to be now and into the future. Not what God was calling you to do 100 years ago, when this church was established; not what God was calling you to do 50 years ago, but what God is calling you to do now. I exhort you to continue to be open to God’s unpredictability in doing a new thing here in your midst. As the God who became flesh in Jesus Christ creates among you new and extraordinary opportunities and possibilities, be open to that even if it means letting go of some things that you’ve long held on to because there is no way to receive the new, unfortunately, without letting go of some of the old. The One who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it. You can count on God for that. You can count on God that God loves you, and God holds you in the hollow of God’s hand and nothing can ever snatch you away from God. That is predictable. What God is calling you to do--now that’s something else again, isn’t it?--but I have faith in God that God will lead you to do those things that God is calling you to do, even now.

And may the God who created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, who even now is creating new heavens and a new earth, create a new Central Presbyterian Church, a rejoicing and her people a joy! AMEN