This reflection was delivered on Facebook Live for Paris Presbyterian Church, where I am on staff, on December 16, 2020.

Isaiah 43:14-21

It’s hard for me to believe it, but we’re already halfway through week 3 of Advent. Kelly, Jess, and Rev. Tina have led us through the practice of self-examination on Sundays, and in these Wednesday devotions we have considered the particular spiritual journey of this Advent as we wait for Christ through this time of Coronavirus.

Our theme for this time together has been the words of Jesus in Matthew 7:7 — “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”

No matter what is going on in our lives or in the world, all of us constantly have to ask, seek, and knock. We have concerns for which we need God’s intervention. We have questions we need God to answer. And so, we know what it is to ask and seek.

As we’ve explored the past two weeks, Advent in particular is a season of asking and seeking. The  traditional readings from the prophet Isaiah take us back to a time before the promised deliverance through Jesus Christ and they point us forward to a time in the future when Christ will come again.

This year, through these 278 days of the life season of Coronavirus, we have a very pressing concern for which we ask God and seek direction. We ask God to come, to end this deadly pandemic and bring healing to our land. And we seek after new ways of being together, loving each other, and living in a way that will not harm our neighbor.

The reason why we go to God in these times is that we know, or at least we are coming to find out through the events of this year, that we are incapable of saving ourselves. We cannot, by our own will, end the coronavirus pandemic, no matter how hard we try. 

If you’ve found the last two weeks challenging, then I’m glad you’ve been paying attention. This week’s theme and text may be the most challenging yet.

This week, we knock so the door may be opened to us.

—

Have you ever been working on a project in one room and realized that you need to go into another room to talk to someone or get something. But when you go through the doorway, it’s like your mind has been erased. You can’t for the life of you remember what you were supposed to be doing. Only after going back into the first room, where your memory has apparently been waiting for you, do you remember what you originally set out to do.

This happens to me all the time in the office. I’ll leave my office to talk to Judy or Rev. Tina only to enter their office and go, “uh, I need to ask you about something, but… I can’t remember what it is.”

We all do this. And because we do it, scientists spend time researching it.

One group of scientists created a computer program to test this phenomenon—we’ll call it The Doorway Effect. They tasked participants with picking up an object in one room and taking it to a table in another in a computer game. What they found is that, even in a video game, participants would enter a new room in the game and forget the color of the item they were bringing with them. Walking through a virtual doorway slowed their responses and made them less accurate.^⁠1

Going through a doorway causes us to forget what we are leaving behind. It resets and reprograms us for a new environment.

And so, as we in our faith are coming to a new doorway, as we prepare to open the door and enter into Christ’s presence this Christmas, we have to acknowledge the difficult and hopeful truth that we will forget much of what is behind us.

We have asked God to come and save us. We have gotten up and sought after God. And now at this doorway that leads into a new year, we have to take stock of what we are leaving behind and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

——

Our Scripture passage from Isaiah 43 describes this reality. When we looked at Isaiah 40 last week, the people of God were in the midst of a temporary peace. Isaiah was charged with providing comfort to those who were or would soon be in exile, stuck in a land that was not their own. Isaiah told them about this desert highway that would one day bring them back from exile in Babylon to their homeland. 

As our reading today from Isaiah 43:14-21 begins, God promises to “break down all the bars” incarcerating God’s people in Babylon. The exile in Babylon was thought of by the prophets as essentially a prison term. The people of God had disobeyed, so they were sent off to exile/prison in Babylon.

It was, in essence, a life sentence. The people would spend 70 years in Babylon. (Suddenly, our 228 days in Coronavirus quarantine doesn’t seem so bad!) 

Throughout those 70 years stuck in a land that was not theirs, the people of God went through all the stages of grief. They experienced denial, anger, bargaining with God, depression, and eventually, acceptance of their situation. But their situation, like ours, was not permanent.

After 70 years of asking God for deliverance and seeking after God’s way in exile, the prophet Isaiah promised them that God would make a door where there had once been a wall. God would break down the walls of their captivity and give them a hand to lead them through that doorway into a new normal. They would finally be able to start the journey home and rebuild the life they had before.

Just take a moment to imagine what we anticipate will happen in about 6 month’s time: we will achieve herd immunity through widespread acceptance of a Coronavirus vaccine. Steadily, restrictions will begin to be lifted. We will once again be able to leave our homes and gather in crowds without masks. What will that be like?

We might fool ourselves into thinking that we will be able to immediately take up the way we did things before, but the longer this goes on, the more and more I think that won’t be the case. Even those of us who are “huggers” and have smaller personal space bubbles will find ourselves wincing when people get too close. We have gotten used to our separation. We have been changed by this exile.

None of us know how we will react to the end of this pandemic. We will have to find out how we react when it happens.

But what God tells the people who are anticipating their return from a 70 year exile is this: “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

When we walk through the doorway on the other side of the present struggle, God seems to encourage us to let the Doorway Effect happen. He seems to encourage the people coming back from exile to forget what the exile was like.

What former things is God through Isaiah telling the people to “not remember?” I think God is telling them to “forget” two kinds of things: their old, sinful ways (and the sins themselves and the nostalgic memories of what God did in the past.

First, God wants them to forget their sinful ways and the shame of those sins. God wants to set these people free from their old ways. He doesn’t want them to be burdened with the memory of what they did wrong all those years ago that sent them into exile to begin with. In Isaiah 43:25, God says, “I will remember your sins no more.” And if God is going to forgive and forget their sins, then surely they are also to forget their own sins. They have learned their lesson and now they are charged with going in a new direction.

Surely there are some sins, mistakes, and old habits that you want to leave in the past. When we realize our own need for forgiveness and take those sins to God and engage steps of reconciliation with people we have wronged, we can truly leave those things in the past.

God wants us to leave our former sins in the past.

But second, God also wants us to leave some good things in the past. This one might seem counterintuitive to us. So much of our faith is based on remembering. What do we do every week in worship except call to mind and remember what God has done in the past: God created us in his image. God rescued the Israelites from captivity in Egypt. God delivered his people from captivity in Babylon. God sent his son Jesus to save us. All of those wonderful acts of divine grace are in the past.

The same is true about what God has done in our individual lives. We call to mind the day of our baptism. We remember the day at summer camp where we gave our lives to Jesus Christ. We remember joining the church. We remember, perhaps, a “golden age” of the church when everything seemed easy and everyone you knew was Christian. All of those acts of God’s grace and mercy are in the past.

It’s easy for us to live in those former realities. The Exodus was wonderful! The birth of Jesus was world changing! Our individual stories of salvation are transformative! But those stories are just what God has done for us in the past. We have a tendency to grasp onto these past stories for stability when the present and future are unknown and frightening. These stories can ground us in uncertain times.

The danger is, we then start to live in the past. We cut ourselves off from what God is doing and will do in our future!

It is for this reason that God tells the exiles through Isaiah, “do not remember the former things, because I am about to do a new thing.”

God’s future acts of deliverance are going to be so awesome that we’re going to forget the past in the light of their glory. The things that God is going to do in the future are going to be greater than the Exodus, greater than the first coming of Jesus, greater than the moment we were first saved. 

God, on the other side of this doorway, is going to do a new thing. That can be frightening to us because it requires that we trust God. None of us know what is on the other side of our exile. We don’t know where next year or the next 5 years will take us.

All we have is the assurance from God will be with us in the new challenges and opportunities the next phase has for us. 

We stand at the door and knock, that God might open to us the door to our future.

Christ has come. Christ will come again. Come, Lord Jesus.

¹ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-through-doorway-makes-you-forget/