Mosaic Study Guide

For Personal Reflection or Smaller Group Encounters
Week of 30 November

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Questions for Everyone: When do you traditionally put up your Christmas tree?  Live or artificial?  Why? White lights or multi-colored lights?  Do you have a fun/silly/interesting Christmas tree story you would like to share? 

 Isaiah 43.15-21:

¹⁵I am the LORD, your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King. ¹⁶Thus says the LORD, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, ¹⁷who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick: ¹⁸Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. ¹⁹I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. ²⁰The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, ²¹the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise (NRSV).

It was mentioned on Sunday that scholars differ on what Isaiah meant by “former things.”  Whatever the case may be it is certain that the people of God had an unhealthy relationship with their past.  This is why the great prophets called them to “not remember the former things.”

Questions: Can you think of an example of what it might mean to have an unhealthy relationship to the past?  In what positive ways should our past shape us?  How might a community have an unhealthy relationship with the past?

Ebenezer Scrooge had a very unhealthy relationship with his past.  The reader learns from the ghost of Christmas past that Ebenezer had
an unkind father, a broken relationship with a woman he loved due to his growing greed and a sister he adored who died too early.  We learn that Scrooge carried scars deep within himself.  These scars, it is assumed, are the source of his cold heart and mean spirit. 

Questions: Do you think mean people are mean because they carry invisible scares?  Why is it that some folk go through hardship and come out stronger and kindlier while others go through similar circumstances only to come out bitter and angry?  How is it that similar circumstances can produce such variant responses?

The prophet Isaiah invites the people of God to forget the former things in order for God to do a new thing among them. 

Questions: How is this possible?  How does one free oneself from an unhealthy relationship to the past?  How does a Christian community do this?

By the end of the story Scrooge is a completely changed man.  One of the central questions of this Advent series is simply: Is real change possible?   

Questions: What do you think?  Is real change possible?  Have you ever experienced significant change? Does significant change happen all at once or incrementally? 

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