CHANGE CAN BE DIFFICULT BUT CHANGE WE MUST

Engraving from Christoph Hartknoch's book Alt- und neues Preussen (1684; “Old and New Prussia”), depicting Nicolaus Copernicus as a saintly and humble figure. The astronomer is shown between a crucifix and a celestial globe, symbols of his vocation and work. The Latin text below the astronomer is an ode to Christ's suffering by Pope Pius II: “Not grace the equal of Paul's do I ask / Nor Peter's pardon seek, but what / To a thief you granted on the wood of the cross / This I do earnestly pray.”

I recall hearing about a man who was working on his farm in Wisconsin when when suddenly something dropped out of the sky onto the field near him. It was blue, pockmarked, frozen and mysterious.

Excitedly, the farmer chopped off a large chunk, put it in his deep freeze and called the local sheriff and geologists from the nearby village to examine it. They were all stumped and left wondering if it might be a meteor or a piece of glacier carried by a jet stream. The only thing they were sure off was that the mysterious sample was frozen hard and when it melted, it smelled terrible.

In due course someone solved the mystery -- it was blue "potty fluid" accidentally ejected from an airplane toilet.

You know, I bet that if anyone of us came across that same "gift from heaven" package we would do the very same thing the farmer did -- preserve it on our freezer. I suspect that over the years a great many things have dropped into my life out of the blue that I have treated just like that, assuming they were a gift from heaven.

So many of our customs and traditions are like that too and we preserve and defend them at all costs. Actually, the Copernican Revolution is a classic example of this tendency.

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The Copernican Revolution was the paradigm shift from the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, which described the cosmos as having Earth stationary at the center of the universe, to the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. This revolution consisted of two phases; the first being extremely mathematical in nature and the second phase starting in 1610 with the publication of a pamphlet by Galileo. Beginning with the publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, contributions to the “revolution” continued until finally ending with Isaac Newton’s work over a century later.

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Copernican came up with the idea that there was a basic flaw in understanding of the whole astronomical system. He said, "...let me suggest that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth; the earth revolves around the sun."

It took him 17 years to perfect the theory, and another 13 years to find a printer who would publish it. His basic truth was not really accepted until after his death.

If you consider yourself a reactionary, you're in good company. As author-theologian Bruce Larson has pointed out, the great churchmen for those days ridiculed Copernicus. Martin Luther said, "This fool will turn the art of astronomy upside down...The Scripture show and tells another lesson, not the earth." John Calvin asked, "Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?" The Catholic Vatican damned the Copernicus theory as both "philosophically false and formally heretical."

It seems that there is a tendency for Christians to want to look back -- to glamorize the past or to hold some outmoded truth, even using the Bible as the authority for preventing change. We are caught in the tension between preserving the good from the past and embracing the new.

Some 90 years ago William James, a great pioneer psychologist, correctly said "Any new theory first is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it seems to be important, so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it."

What James was saying is that each of us has a bit of the reactionist in us, some seeing themselves primarily as museum keepers, preservers of the past. And why is that, one might ask?

Perhaps there is a clue in the fact that Jesus likened us to sheep and, if true, this may well be one of the reasons we have trouble with change. If we are indeed like sheep -- stubborn, hostile and self-willed, we begin to understand our problem as seen in the eyes of that same Jesus.

But whether we are basically innovators or reactionaries, there is no possibility for health or life without change. Of course, not all change is good...Some change is unhealthy and a mark of decay and deterioration in our society.

Studies have proven that when too many changes come to any person at any given time, the resulting trauma produces physical illness, even death.

It is demonstrated time and again that the human body and mind and spirit cannot handle too much change at one time. And in the past half century we have all had to handle so much change that it is no wonder we talk about the good old days.

Everything around us is changing so radically.

As they say: Like it or lump it!

And that, finally, takes us back to the Bible for the message of promise and hope...God wants to make us new and assures us that we can change here and now. Know what I'm saying?

Tom Wolfe, one of our most popular writers, said in 1971, "The old dream of the alchemist was to turn base metals into gold. Today he dreams of changing his personality."