There's Nothing New Under the Sun

‘…and there is no new thing under the sun’  Ecclesiastes 1:9 [KJV]

I imagine most of you already recognize this saying as being from the bible when you hear hear it repeated as  “There is nothing new under the sun”. It came to mind again for me recently when in conversation I happened to mention a magic lantern that had been use in my Sunday School days to project words onto a screen and was met with a blank look. Now when you go into a modern church, you might well see the words still being projected on a screen at the front, with the only change being in the method projection. But I bet you will hear people saying, “I don’t like the words projected up there. Why can’t they do it the old way!” My answer would be “They are.”

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. 

 Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’?

It has already been, in the ages before us. 

The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them. [Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 NRSV]

Then there are those people - and I’m sure you all know at least one of them - who say loudly and often, “I don’t shop online!”, followed with the words, “That’s what’s causing so may stores to close.” And my answer to them, albeit under my breathe, is “And what about catalogue shopping? Other than seeing the merchandise on a screen rather than on a page tell me just what the difference is!”

Back in 1440 when the printing press was invented , it was revolutionary …. and also put all those scribes who had earned their livelihood by hand-copying manuscripts out of business. But it made books available to the common people. Today you hear those people who say they would never read a digital book because they like the feel of ‘real books’.  But then digital books have brought books to the masses cheaply and easily without the need to have access to stores to obtain them.

So while screens in the sanctuary displaying words to hymns, on-line shopping and digital books are just a few of the new-fangled things we all have access to in the 21st century, they really aren’t all that new, rather just better ways of doing old things while making use of available improvements in knowledge and skills. After all who would want to be hand-feeding the slides into a magic lantern during a church service, going through numerous catalogues trying to locate ‘just the right thing’, or waiting a week for that long-anticipated book to arrive only to dump a cup of coffee on it and have it undecipherable! 

Yet every time we insist the the way we have always done something is the only way, that new knowledge and discoveries are at best suspect and at worse heretical and that those who champion them are our enemies, we are denying not only ourselves but others, the opportunity to experience something old in a new and refreshing way that just might give us some more insight into it.

I want to end with what I began with, that passage from Ecclesiastes, but this time from the Message (Bible) published in 2002.  It is an idiomatic translation, using current slang, of the original languages of the Bible. Does it have the beauty of the King James version? Not to me. But even compared to the NRSV published in 1989, it does speak to me, here and in this time, in a fresh and exciting way.

What was will be again, what happened will happen again.

There’s nothing new on this earth.

Year after year it’s the same old thing.

Does someone call out, “Hey, this is new”?

 Don’t get excited—it’s the same old story.

Nobody remembers what happened yesterday.

And the things that will happen tomorrow?

Nobody’ll remember them either. [Ecclesiastes 1:9-11a MSG]