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The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin ’s Church
February 19, 2006
Epiphany VII B

I first realized that I was no longer young a few years ago, when our newly arrived campus minister in Blacksburg gave me his cell phone number.

I carefully wrote it down, and then asked him for his REAL phone number - you know, the one in your house – the one that puts you in the phone book and means you have to wait at home for hours in case you ever need repairs. When Scott said that no, the cell phone was his only phone, I realized that he and I were separated by more than years. My experience with technology has put me in a particular kind of box, and it’s very hard for me to think outside that box. I would feel naked and incomplete were I to rely only on a cell phone, a circumstance that Scott accepts as normal, indeed desirable.

One of my all-time favorite movies is “Strictly Ballroom”, which came out of Australia in the mid-1990s. The main character is a young man, born into a family entirely dedicated to competitive ballroom dancing. He loves to dance, but he chafes at the restrictions of competitions – the rigidity of the steps, the highly styled presentation. He begins to show off his own choreography when he competes, responding to the music and his own artistic vision. Of course, this causes deep offense and outrage in the official ballroom dance world. He is chastised and ostracized; there’s no room for his passion in the highly controlled world of competitive dance. After yet another verbal confrontation, where the young man pleads for the chance to dance his new steps, the frustrated judge bellows “There are no new steps!”

“I am about to do a new thing,” God says in the passage from Isaiah we just heard. Beginning with the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, the prophet begins to speak about the end of exile, about a desolate nation’s return to its home, about the restoration of hope and vision and purpose. God will not be limited by the past, God will not be limited even by the laws of nature itself – rivers will spring up in the desert, wild animals will pay homage to their creator – glories people had never even dared to dream of will be revealed.

“Let’s do a new thing,” say the friends of the paralyzed man in the second chapter of Mark. “Let’s not let anything stand between our friend and this man we believe can do something good for him. We can’t get through the crowd – let’s take off the roof and lower him right into the middle of it all.”

“Listen – he’s saying a new thing!” gasp the scribes when they hear Jesus forgiving the paralyzed man’s sins. “He is speaking blasphemy! How dare he claim for himself a power that belongs to God alone.”

“You think forgiving sins is a new thing?” responds Jesus, “Then what will you say to this?” And he commands the paralyzed man to take up his mat and walk.

The crowd is amazed and glorifies God and says, “We have never seen anything like this!” A new thing indeed has been done.

The phrase “thinking outside the box” is one of those bits of management jargon that has crept into our general conversation. It means, of course, to allow our thinking to be challenged by new ideas, and to be vigilant about how our thinking might be limited by assumptions, habits, past experiences, lack of knowledge – by all kinds of forces that operate so deeply within us that they may never rise to our conscious minds.

I have said to just about anyone who will listen that if I had realized how hard it was going to be to move in mid-life, I would never have left Blacksburg. It gets harder and harder to do new things as we get older. Our emotional flexibility seems to diminish just like our physical flexibility does. And we find ourselves loaded with more and more freight. I used to be able to move everything I owned in the back of a ’74 Mustang, and I used to be willing to try anything and go anywhere. Moving has been hard on my whole family, but I knew I needed to get out of the nice comfortable box ministry in Blacksburg had become, and Gerry and I both knew we needed to find more challenges and opportunities for our children.

“I am about to do a new thing.” The Gospel is much more than just another way to think outside the box. God, revealed to us in Christ, breaks open all the boxes that limit us – in fact explodes all the boxes, destroys them in a tremendous outpouring of grace. All of the things that seem to be barriers – sin, despair, addiction, pain, even death itself – cannot keep God’s love out, cannot constrain or limit how God works in us and for us.

This is glorious good news – but it is terrifying, too and as soon as the boxes are destroyed, it is our human inclination to build new ones in order to bring that glorious, extravagant good news back into control. It is easy to make fun of the scribes who are so horrified when Jesus forgives the lame man’s sins; we are sure that we would never be so close-minded, so limited in our thinking, so unwilling to embrace what is new and unforeseen. It is always going to be easier for us to point out how other people are trapped inside rigid thought-boxes, than to recognize and move outside our own.

One of the most exciting presentations at diocesan convention last fall was from four congregations who had very deliberately set about to do some new things. They all wanted to grow, and so they started thinking about how they might become more inviting, how they could open themselves to growth and think strategically about welcoming new members. One of the things they all had to do was to think about what ideas and habits might be limiting them, to consider how they might be shutting people out without ever realizing it. They never mentioned the second chapter of Mark, but I wonder if every congregation doesn’t need to think about tearing open the roof, about doing something that might have seemed unthinkable before, to make the impossible not only possible, but a reality. If God is stirring up such wonderful good things for us, then the very least we should do is be aware of how we might be stifling the same wonderful, good things we long for.

The Epiphany season is about doing new things, about seeing things in new ways and expanding beyond the limits of human perception and understanding. The messiah is not just for people of a certain culture, or a certain religious tradition. Christ is revealed to be the savior of the world – a revelation that transcends culture, ethnicity, historicity, aesthetics, language, politics – a revelation that shatters every box the human mind and heart can build.

Doing new things at St. Martin’s presents some interesting challenges. I have been amazed at how flexible this congregation is when it comes to worship. Oh – there are plenty of individual preferences and opinions, but over the years, you’ve seen so many liturgical styles come and go, that no one ever says to me “This is the way we’ve always done it – change it at your peril.” In fact, when the worship commission met in January, some members kept telling me to make more changes faster.

Those kinds of changes are actually pretty easy to make. It’s easy to put the announcements in a new place, or get new vestments, or rearrange the furniture.

But the vestry and other parish leaders and I have been talking about other changes – other new things – new ways to think about who we are, new ways we can identify what God is calling us to do, and new ways we can organize ourselves to respond to that call. Maybe we can find a better way for commissions to work together – maybe there’s a better way to organize Christian formation – maybe there’s a better way to help newer members find their way into the heart of the parish.

Talking about doing new things has been generating a lot of energy and enthusiasm, but my recent experience of how hard it is to actually DO a new thing reminds me that talking is not the same thing as doing. We can generate all kinds of fabulous new ideas, but to put those new ideas into action we might have to think about opening up the roof. We might have to think about making changes that operate at a deeper level than just whether we say the dismissal before or after the final hymn. And I expect that we will find it hard to make those changes – not because we don’t agree with them, but just because doing something new is harder than we think.

On Tuesday, I’m going to begin to interview what promises to be a very strong pool of candidates for the position of Assistant Rector. We are looking first at students graduating from seminary this spring. I’m willing to work with someone less experienced in order to take advantage of that person knowing some new stuff. I looking forward to working with someone whose shelves are loaded with books published in this millennium, who is more technologically adept than I am, who knows something about new developments in the theory and practice of ministry, and who is full of new ideas. I expect that I may sometimes feel like that frustrated official in “Strictly Ballroom” and I expect I’ll find myself, sooner or later, bellowing “There are no new steps!”

The scribes and the Pharisees were afraid that somehow Jesus threatened everything they treasured and held sacred. But again and again Jesus says that he has not come to abolish religious traditions, but to fulfill them. Nothing is Gospel just because it is new – what is new is Gospel only when it builds up the body of Christ, strengthens us to do God’s work in the world, transforms us into the holy people we are called by our baptisms to be.

The lame man gets up and walks and the crowd gasps, “We have never seen anything like this!” God can do more than we can ask for or imagine. There are new possibilities, new directions, new revelations being created for us every day. Rivers spring up in the desert, an exiled people are brought home, sins are forgiven and human hearts are made whole. “I am about to do a new thing.” Thanks be to God.