I’m a teacher. My tools are metaphor, analogy, and the recognition of relationship. My job requires me to take things people don’t already know (or, sometimes, only think they don’t know) and give them something familiar to hang their thoughts on.

“You can understand this because it’s just the same thing as when we talked about that—only with a few more wrinkles that I’ll explain along the way.”

My inclination, if I’m going to explain something, is to tell a story—most likely from my past. Stories are like meta-metaphors. They give us access to things we can understand by offering recognizable reference points in narrative form.

We give parents a hard time about that, don’t we?

“Oh, sure Dad. Of course you had to ford a river and battle the Demogorgon in the Upside Down every day just to get to fifth grade. Please go back to watching the Golf Channel and leave reality to us.”

“We know we have it easy; we never had to chop a cord of wood before lunch or repair a faulty fan belt with dental floss and some WD40.”

Or, “Oh please do tell us about how you used to make your own clothes as a child out of old bits of lint and discarded bourbon boxes from the liquor store.”

But our stories are an important part not only of who we are but of how we see the world. Our ability to connect the past to the present helps us learn and gives us confidence that if we’ve survived the past, maybe we can keep going. They keep hope alive that we’ll find a future we can endure again.

Storytelling is an eminently human practice. We’re always sifting through the past, trying to make some sense of the present, trying to get a line on the future, aren’t we?

You know how this works. It’s simple, really. Try this one on: The Iraq War was this generation’s Viet Nam.

We haven’t seen inflation like that since Jimmy Carter was President.

Snow in November is like bolting upright in bed when you suddenly remember the root canal you scheduled last month, then promptly forgot about … until now.

We like to think of the past as connected to the future by a common plot. This impulse is generally a good one. We can understand a great deal of what the world is like by referring to the way the world used to be.

But what if the past is discontinuous with the future? What if the world we want isn’t like any world for which we have a story?

That’s an especially important question just now, isn’t it? How do we tell the story of a world for which our words are inadequate?

How do you describe what a grape tastes like?

What grammar is robust enough to order the necessary words to communicate the disappointment of a broken promise, the devastation of a broken heart?

Or, how do you put into words what it feels like to kiss the face of the child you thought you’d never see … or the child you thought you’d never see again?

This is the problem Isaiah’s got. In our passage for today, God lays out a new future that explodes our understanding of what the world should look like. And we don’t have anywhere to look over our shoulders for a referent.

The stuff in the past … is past. No going back. In fact, God says, “I am going to create a new heaven and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind” (65:17).