In the Face of Change

Written by Ed Kauffman

In The Face of Change
January 9, 2011
Based on Material written By Dan Epp-Tiessen for Prayer Week, 2011

In 1964, Bob Dylan released a song that became sort of an anthem for my generation.  It went like this:

Come gather ‘round people wherever you roam,
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone,
If you’re time to you is worth saving,
Then you’d better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone,
For the times they are a’changin’.

He even got Biblical;

The line it is drawn and the curse it is cast
The slow ones now will later be fast,
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly changing
And the first one now will later be last
For the times, they are a’changin’

That was in 1964.  I was just entering high school.  Some of you don’t remember 1964, others of you will, but let me tell you a few things that happened in 1964.

Lester Pearson was Prime Minister of Canada, and Ernest Manning, premier of Alberta.  In 1964 Social Insurance cards were first issued, and at the end of 1964, the new Canadian flag was adopted.  The Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup, beating Detroit, and the population of Calgary was around 300,000.  In mid-year Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip paid an 8 day visit to Canada.

 In the broader world, The Beatles burst on the scene as their first album Meet the Beatles was released in North America, and later the Beatles themselves came to the US and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.  And the girls went wild!  The Rolling Stones also released their first album in 1964. 

Ford introduced a new car, the Mustang.  And in 1964 I could probably name every car model on the road, on sight.

 In the US, both the civil rights struggle, and the Vietnam War were heating up, which led to riots, protests and killings.

In the Soviet Union, Nikita Kruschev was deposed and Leonid Breznev and Andre Kosygin assumed power.

Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize, and Che Guavera addressed the UN General Assembly.

In 1964, plans were announced to build the massive twin-towered World Trade Center in New York City, although construction would not begin for another two years.

 The US launched the unmanned Gemini 1 in April, testing whether we could send two men into orbit rather than just one.

 The Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code or BASIC computer language was introduced in 1964.  It became a standard for computer use for many years. 

And speaking of computers, in 1964 IBM introduced the revolutionary System 360 computers, which were a line of computers all running the same software, so you could start with a low-end computer and move up without having to change software.  It was an 8 –bit system, with 4K of memory and the largest system had up to 256Kb of storage on disc drives, like those pictured in the upper right.

I recall my Grade 12 physics class traveling to the University of Notre Dame one day to work in their computer lab.  We spent the day typing punch cards, and trying to get them to run on the massive, room size computer. 

Who knew then that one day we would be able to carry around in our pocket something with much more computing power, that would be cheaper and able to do more useless things than we could even imagine. 

We thought times were really changing in 1964!  And of course, they were changing.  Change is a constant and the 60s are seen as a time of massive change.  Think of how things have changed since 1964!!  But commentators and people who think about these things suggest that the world we live in today in changing in new and different ways.  It’s often called discontinuous change.  What does that mean? 

Continuous change is change that grows out of what we have known, what has come before, so it is predictable in many ways.  It is simply an improvement on what was before and we know basically what to expect.  Continuous change doesn’t require a lot of new skills.  New car models, the advancement from black and white pictures to color would be instances of continuous change, or our children growing up – we know from past experience what to expect and about when.  There is continuity with the past.

Discontinuous change, on the other hand, is disruptive change, unanticipated.  It means our past skills aren’t all that helpful.  Just working harder doesn’t help, rather we need to learn new skills, new ways of doing things.  I have to think of my in-laws who moved to a new home a number of years ago and suddenly had new appliances that were all digital.  There was no longer a dial to set the oven temperature, and they were simply not prepared for the change and so everything got baked at 350 since that was the preset temperature.  The old skills simply become useless. Discontinuous change is change that ‘changes everything” and there is no going back to the previous “normal.”  The printing press could be cited. Let me illustrate with one of my favorite YouTube videos entitled Medieval Help Desk.  It’s in Norwegian, so don’t worry about the sound.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRBIVRwvUeE&feature=related

You probably all know the feeling.  Discontinuous change leaves us unsure of where things are headed.  It requires not just technical changes in our ways of doing things, but radical adaptive changes.  It means learning new skills, new ways of living, and new relationships.  So how do we cope with such change?  One way, of course, it to reject it – to refuse to adapt and adopt.  And sometimes the church, or parts of it, has taken that route.  Those groups tend to be seen as quaint, interesting, but ultimately irrelevant.

But we are not the first people to experience such radical change.  In fact, one could say that our change is relatively minor compared to what the children of Israel were about to experience as we enter the world of Joshua 24.  For more than a generation, the children of Israel had been a nomad people.  They had spent their years of slavery in Egypt, and been delivered by God.  But since that time, for 40 years, they had been nomads, living off the land and whatever God provided for them.  The people whom Joshua led now knew no other life than this nomadic one. But now they were about ready to settle in the land of Canaan.  It was a major shift in lifestyle, from being nomads to taking up farming, raising cattle and vineyards, staying in one place and accumulating things.  When you travel around you can’t accumulate much, but now they were about to become settled and the possibilities looked good for prosperity and even wealth.

And so Joshua gathers all the people together and recites for them their story, beginning with God calling Abram from the land of his father, Terah.  Joshua recalls the sojourn in Egypt, the exodus out of slavery, and the deliverance by God’s hand from the pursuing army.  And then after the many years of wandering in the wilderness, Joshua reminds them of how God led them to the land and gave them victory over all the people of the land – the stories of Balaam, of Jericho, and of the victories over the Amorites.

So now, Joshua says, since you have been given this new land, since you are in the midst of massive changes in your lifestyle, you need to choose what god you will serve.  A time of change is a time when we are tempted by many choices, and many gods.  One of the principles of the church Growth movement back in the 70s was that if you wanted to grow a church, your best bet was to move into a new neighborhood that people were just moving into, because people in transition were more open to new associations, new allegiances. 

And so Joshua recognized that moving into the new land, with all the adjustments of change meant that the people would be open and vulnerable to all the options around them, including the gods of their ancestors or the gods of the people already living in the land.  And so we have that famous question, “choose this day whom you will serve.”  At the same time Joshua declares clearly where he stands, “as for me and my house, we will serve Yahweh, the Lord.”

We do live in a time of rapid and discontinuous change.  Change is happening at a more rapid pace, and with more consequences than any time in history.  So how do we cope?  How do we remain faithful, while not burying our heads in the sand and becoming irrelevant, or simply giving in and worshipping the gods of the society around us?  And what about the next generation?

I believe the answer lies in the story.  One of the interesting things I learned as I worked with groups who were interested in joining the Mennonite church was that they wanted some connection with a history, a story, of faithfulness.  And these were young adults who are often portrayed as wanting nothing to do with the past.  But they wanted a connection. They wanted to know that God’s people have been faithful through the centuries, and many of them were finding that story in the stories of our ancestors and on back to the early church and to Jesus, and on back to the children of Israel and Joshua.

The way to stay connected is to continue to tell the story, and the stories.  There is a reason we repeat the stories of Christmas and Easter each year.  There is a reason we learn Bible stories in Sunday School and tell our children those stories in our homes.  And there is a reason to learn the stories of church history and of our ancestors, and to tell our own stories of faith and God’s leading in our lives.  And the reason is not to look back and wish we could return to the good old days. Rather it is to remind us of God’s faithfulness in the past and draw us into a new covenant with that same God who goes before us into the future. 

Over and over we are called to choose this day whom we will serve. Whether it will be the gods of a distant past, or the gods of the society around us, or the God who has called forth a people to serve him and who has sustained that people through all the centuries of change and brought us now to this time and place to tell the story to the next generation and to call people to join that story. 

We don’t know what the future holds. We don’t know what the next major change in our lives will be and what skills we will need to cope.  I remember clearly watching the first manned space flight in the US as Alan Shepherd took off from Cape Canaveral.  I remember clearly watching the grainy TV pictures as humans took their first steps on the moon.  Some of you don’t remember a time before those took place. And we thought those were amazing. But our kids will undoubtedly see things we haven’t even thought of yet.  And they will be tempted by gods as yet unnamed.

Our anchor in the midst of such challenging times is to continue to tell the story, for it is the story that connects us with all the faithful who have come before.  Who have chosen, like the people of Joshua’s day to renew their covenant.  To say, “Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods. For it is the Lord our God who brought us up out of the land of Egypt. It was God who sent us Jesus, who led the early church, who inspired the reformers of the 16th century, who were with our ancestors during times of persecution and war, who delivered us and brought us to this time and place. Therefore, we also will serve the Lord, for he is or God.” 

Throughout this week we will be talking about change and how we can remain faithful in times of change.  Part of that will be sharing stories, and I invite you to join us for those sessions. Since we had a theme song during Advent, I thought it might be good to have a theme song for this week of prayer as well, and I recalled a song I learned a few years ago appropriately entitled, Changes. I thought it was another song by my friend Herm Weaver and so I contacted him to get the words, but he corrected me and said it is actually a Jim Croegaert song. In any case I’d like to share it with you, and invite you to learn it through this week.  I’ll sing it though once, and then invite you to join on the second time through.

Changes coming upon us
It keeps moving, moving around us
Got to keep dancing knowing He loves us
Got to keep joy in our hearts

He knows all of our needs and
He will meet them following His plan
Even the changes turning in His hand
Soon will be part of it all

So we enter a new time
There are places where its a hard climb
But there are faces carrying sunshine
Warming our path as we go

Sometimes we may be lonely
Its a hard job making us holy
But in the long run there will be glory
Glory to rival the sun