By The Rev. J.C. Austin
One of the great gifts my father gave me growing up was a thorough education in movies. We watched something of everything, from all-time classic to blockbuster popcorn flicks, from silly comedies to highbrow dramas, from movies with massive commercial success to ones that I feel like only my family ever saw.
One of those obscure ones was an action comedy called The Gumball Rally, which was about a cast of outrageous drivers competing in an illegal coast-to-coast car race from New York to Los Angeles. It’s probably not as funny as I remember it being when I watched it as a 13 year-old, but there is one scene in particular that I’ve never forgotten.
As the race is about to begin in a parking garage in 
Manhattan, the cars are all lined up and revving their engines, among them a Porsche, a Corvette, a Camaro, a Shelby Cobra, and a Ferrari. The driver in the convertible Ferrari is the epitome of Italian cool, supremely confident and stylishly dressed. The navigator he’s paired with to guide him across the country, though, is a large American with a scraggly beard and a cheesy nylon jacket, who seems both awed and intimidated by the driver.
As they are warned that the race is about to start, the driver revs the Ferrari, looks at the navigator, raises a finger dramatically, and announces the “first rule” of his driving philosophy. He grasps the rearview mirror, rips it off of the windshield, and tosses it over his shoulder and out the back of the car without even looking at it.
He then turns back to the navigator, who stares first in the direction that the review mirror disappeared and then back to the driver in total disbelief, as the driver proclaims: “what’s behind me is not important.” Then the car peels out of the garage and onto the streets of Manhattan, and the race has begun.
If it had been a bigger movie, I’m convinced that would be one of those movie lines that takes on an iconic status of its own far beyond the film itself. People would have written thought pieces about it as a philosophy of life, not simply driving: throw away that rearview mirror so you’re not tempted to look at it so much, because “what’s behind me is not important.”
And there is important truth in that. It is very easy to get distracted by what’s behind us, or even to get so focused on it that we forget that we’re still moving forward and need to pay attention to where we’re going. The past is supposed to be what has passed, what we have passed and is now behind us in both time and distance.
And yet it can exert such a gravitational pull on our attention and identity and imagination that it sometimes seems more real to us than where we are or where we are going. We fall into defining ourselves in terms of our past, whether that past was good or bad, or we think other people are doing that, or would if they knew about it.
I think this mistake is what the prophet Isaiah is warning us about in this passage. “Do not remember the former things,” he says, “or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” It’s a bit more complex and nuanced than the Italian driver’s rule. It’s not really that what’s behind us is not important. Maybe it is; but important or not, it should not the focus of our attention or identity or present reality.
Both the Hebrew language and culture had a much more dynamic understanding of remembrance than we do. When you and I talk about remembering something, it’s largely a mental exercise. Even when the memory has real emotional substance to it, we are usually remembering how we felt then, which may in turn impact how we’re feeling in the present.
But the Hebrew understanding is different. When Isaiah says “do not remember the former things,” he’s not saying, “don’t think about how things used to be,” which is more or less how we would talk about it. For the Hebrews as well as other ancient peoples, including the Greeks, remembrance was an existential experience, not a mental one. It’s more like bringing the past into the present as something you can experience directly, rather than what we would call a “memory.”
The remembrance isn’t just thought or imagination; it dissolves the gap between past and present so that what happened then is happening now, even if the individuals who are doing the remembering now weren’t even born when the “former things” happened.
What God is really warning the people against through Isaiah is not thinking about the past or recalling it; God is warning the people not to live in the past, remembering “the former things” as what defines them and is best about them, what is the ideal they are trying recapture and the reality they’re trying to live in. Don’t remember the former things and consider the things of old in a way that you are trying to get back to them or bring them back to you.
Because that’s not what I’m up to any more, God says: “look, I am doing a new thing.” And that new thing is coming to life even in the moment that God is speaking: “now it springs forth,” God says; “do you not perceive it?” Because God is in motion from the present to the future, not the past to the present, and the Israelites and we today are being urged to focus on what God is up to right now so that we can recognize it and be part of it moving forward.
And this is where it’s important that we can recall the former things without giving in to the temptation to be defined by and limited to them. Because recalling what we have seen God do before and how God has called us to be before helps us recognize the new thing that God is doing now; it helps orient us in terms of where we are now by reminding us of how God tends to act.
Isaiah even does this explicitly as he opens this passage: “Thus says the Lord,” he begins, which is a standard prophetic opening to remind the people that he’s communicating God’s Word, not his own words; “Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters… do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing…”
Did you hear the present tense there? The Lord makes a way in the sea, not made a way in the sea. Yes, God did this dramatically when God rescued the Hebrews from captivity in Egypt, literally making a way in the sea and a path in the mighty waters by parting the sea and revealing dry land at the bottom so that the Hebrews could escape the pursuing army, and then releasing the waters again to extinguish that army like a candle’s wick when it tried to follow them through the opening in the sea.
But this is the kind of thing that God does, not just that God did, and knowing that helps us look for and perceive what God is doing right now. Because the details of what God does are always in flux, but the character and commitments and intentions of God are as eternally constant as the stars themselves, and recalling those aspects of who God is and how God is helps orient us in terms of where we are and how to know the way that God wants us to go.
There’s actually a term and even a discipline for this; perhaps not surprisingly, it’s called wayfinding. Wayfinding is a discipline of, well, finding one’s way by perceiving signs, including where you’ve been, that allow you to orient yourself in terms of where you are and use that to point your way towards where you are trying to go.
One of the best depictions of this practice is, interestingly enough, in the children’s movie Moana that came out about five years ago. In the movie, the title character is the daughter of a Polynesian island chief who ends up on a quest to find the trickster demigod named Maui who stole a relic from a goddess a thousand years ago, which inadvertently released a corrupting blight in the world that has now arrived at her own island and threatens her people by destroying both the vegetation and fish that they rely on to survive.
Their only hope is that Moana can find Maui and convince him to restore the relic, which will remove the blight and save her island. She ends up on that quest thanks to her grandmother, who reveals to her the secret that their people were once voyagers, boldly crossing the ocean in search of new islands, a radical revelation when Moana grew up hearing that it was forbidden to even leave the confines of their island’s sheltered lagoon.
The grandmother shows her a cave where the old voyager boats have been hidden, and while exploring the cave Moana has a vision of how her voyager ancestors practiced wayfinding in the ocean travels. In fact, that vision unfolds as a particularly powerful musical number in the movie called, “We Know the Way” that shows the ancient Polynesian sailors navigating across the ocean by reading the currents, the wind, the birds, the clouds, the sun, and the stars and using those to guide them towards islands that they know are out there but which they have never seen before. The lyrics lay it all right out for us:
We read the wind and the sky when the sun is high
We sail the length of the seas on the ocean breeze
At night, we name every star
We know where we are
We know who we are, who we are
Aue, aue
We set a course to find
A brand new island everywhere we roam
Aue, aue
We keep our island in our mind
And when it’s time to find home
We know the way
And that is exactly what Polynesian voyagers did: they knew the way they were going to their destination, even when they did not know precisely what that destination was, where it was, or how long it would take to get there. But they were able to find the way in the sea, the path in the mighty waters, to use Isaiah’s language, because they had learned how to identify the way and follow it, and they knew that the new thing they were seeking would be there at the end of it.
And that’s essentially how the Polynesian voyagers became arguably the greatest seafaring people in the history of the world, spreading out across the Pacific all the way from Asia to South America, finding new islands to settle and explore, and then voyaging onward to the next one, and the next one, and the next; constantly perceiving the new thing springing forth in front of them on their way.
I think this is a crucial and powerful dimension of our calling and opportunity as a church right now, as well: to be a voyager church. There has been so much talk in our society about “going back” as the pandemic hopefully continues to recede: going back to normal, going back to the way things have been, the way things are supposed to be.
The Israelites to whom Isaiah is speaking knew that better than anyone; at the time of this prophecy, they were realizing that their life in the Babylonian exile was coming to an end, and they would be able to return to the land of Israel soon, the land that the Babylonians had invaded and conquered and destroyed so much of in the previous generation.
It would have been perfectly natural for them to want to go back, to make things the way they used to be, which is precisely why God says through Isaiah, “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?”
God is calling them and us to be voyagers, to follow the way in the sea that God has made, the path in the mighty waters that God would have us follow. And we can recognize and follow that path by reading the signs that tell us where we are and who we are, the signs of God’s grace and blessing and purpose and direction that has sustained us in the past, that is with us in the present, and are marking the way forward to the new things that are springing forth from God, that we are invited to perceive and be a part of.
And on that way, there will be opportunities to stop and rest and be restored, like islands rising out of the sea that are calling to us. And there will be opportunities to set sail again, voyaging forth to find more new things springing forth wherever we roam, and trusting that, indeed, when it’s time, we do know the way because Jesus Christ is the way and so the way knows us, and will never lose us, but always find us and bring us home.