Canter Bridge

We feel we live in a reality that is far too fluid. We wish for some stasis, a chance to catch our breaths. We are overcome, sometimes, by nostalgia for a time when things remained the same. Perhaps this static time exists only in our minds, perhaps it once existed in the wider reality. Regardless, it seems not to exist now.

Even this meeting of the Overseas Council Europe (OCE) board occurs in a moment of pronounced change. We have a new director, the possibility of some newer board members, a new and close friendship between Andreas Kammer and the leader of OCTeam in the United Kingdom, to say nothing of his personal and professional network among the OC affiliates of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

Even as we speak of these positive changes—they are indeed both changes and positive things—we find our global economy immersed in a situation that almost no one predicted. We receive news daily about just how bad it is, with new actors involved and new unpleasant surprises discovered.

We are told that most of us have never seen anything like it. Comparisons reach back even to the Great Depression of the 1930s, which had terrible consequences for the nations of each one of us here.

We are also told the world has changed much since. Our institutions have changed radically. So indeed we are left without precedent. It seems that all things are new. Some of them are good. Some of them seem very bad indeed. Others are ambiguous. We are adrift on a sea of novelties and changes.

What are we to do about this?

The biblical witness

I believe the biblical witness offers robust and empowering testimony for times such as these. May I speak, then, of three biblical motifs that seems particularly pertinent?

(1) Go to the old, reliable things

Over and over again in the patriarchal narratives and in the history of Israel, opportunity and risk threaten to abort the story line. In those contexts, it is reference to the ancient promises of the Lord, those made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that provide reassurance, solid footing, reorientation, and energy for further action.

In the New Testament, Jesus and Paul show a developed instinct for referring to the ancient ways when facing a new development. The apostle, for examples, seems to put wind in the sails of those interpreters of the Israelite legacy on behalf of the Jesus community who find in Leviticus’ treatment of the sojourner a template for the early messianic community’s trauma-ridden coming to terms with a large-scale gentile response to the same message that had transformed the lives of the earliest Jewish followers of Yeshua (Acts 15).

We see this same instinct at work in the Master himself. Confronted with an absurdly hypothetical expansion ad nauseum of the levirate situation and the provocative challenge to pronounce upon the lucky (?) marriage partner in the afterlife of an oft-married (and apparently lethal!) woman, Jesus asks not about the minutiae presented to him but rather queries the ancient, enduring, original intention of the Creator. What is more, both of these New Testament figures seem to envisage the nascent church in terms of the ancient reality of Israel itself. The terms ‘new Israel’ and ‘grafted branch’ spring quickly to the Christian mind.

(2) Don’t panic

Change often prompts us into a kind of delirious activism. We cast around for help from any and all corners, sometimes without the discernment we’d practice in calmer times.

A remarkable passage in the context of the Assyrian crisis suggests that such frenetic activity runs sometimes—at the very least—at cross-purposes to YHWH’s counsel:

The LORD spoke to me with his strong hand upon me, warning me not to follow the way of this people. He said:
“Do not call conspiracy
everything that these people call conspiracy;
do not fear what they fear,
and do not dread it.
The LORD Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy,
he is the one you are to fear,
he is the one you are to dread,
and he will be a sanctuary;
but for both houses of Israel he will be
a stone that causes men to stumble
and a rock that makes them fall.
And for the people of Jerusalem he will be
a trap and a snare.
Many of them will stumble;
they will fall and be broken,
they will be snared and captured.”
Bind up the testimony
and seal up the law among my disciples.
I will wait for the LORD,
who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob.
I will put my trust in him.
Here am I, and the children the LORD has given me. We are signs and symbols in Israel from the LORD Almighty, who dwells on Mount Zion.
When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?
To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn.
Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their God.
Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom, and they will be thrust into utter darkness.

(3) Be ready to sing a new song

The nifla’ot (surprises) and the shiyr chadash (new song)

Quite often it is the sheer novelty of YHWH’s surprises that astonish his people yet again. Sensitive—more merely overwhelmed—souls among them respond with a new song. Nothing else suffices when YHWH has shown his capacity to surprise, redemptively, generously, and sometimes via a radical reordering of things we had understood to be permanent.

Psalm 98 strikes this note:

Sing to the LORD a new song,
for he has done marvelous things;
his right hand and his holy arm
have worked salvation for him.
The LORD has made his salvation known
and revealed his righteousness to the nations.
He has remembered his love
and his faithfulness to the house of Israel;
all the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation of our God.
Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth,
burst into jubilant song with music;
make music to the LORD with the harp,
with the harp and the sound of singing,
with trumpets and the blast of the ram’s horn—
shout for joy before the LORD, the King.
Let the sea resound, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it.
Let the rivers clap their hands,
let the mountains sing together for joy;
let them sing before the LORD,
for he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
and the peoples with equity.

The biblical new songs don’t disparage the old, trusty tunes. They do insist, however, that we have not yet captured all of God’s creativity in song and, so, that it is appropriate to keep singing, composing, and lustily belting out grateful response to his latest goodness.

It may be that solid, pertinent counsel is to be found in these three elements of trustworthy ancient wisdom: Go the to old, trustworthy things. Don’t panic. Prepare to sing a new song.