How many of you remember the 60’s? Some of us lived through that period, some of us have heard or read about it, and for some of us it’s as distant as the American Revolution. The 60’s were a kind of revolution too, complete with ideology and pamphleteers and civil unrest and rather more bloodshed than we like to remember. Do you remember draft-dodging, free love, flower power and campus sit-ins? Well, I was right in the middle of it all, and that gives you an idea of how old I feel sometimes. But the reason I bring it up is because one of the themes of the decade was about throwing out the past. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was one popular saying, and “We are the people our parents warned us against,” was another. All the old certainties were up for debate; authority figures were automatically suspect instead of automatically heeded. Half the people I knew wore buttons saying "Question authority."
Well, here we are some sixty years later, and things change even faster than it did in that volatile decade. How many of you have computers? That phenomenon is only forty years old! It was in 1983 that the Pillsbury Company pioneered using a PC for departmental accounting. It was my department, and I was the one who did it. I still love my computer - though nowadays I carry it around in my pocket. It's called a smart phone. They are so much easier to train than my secretary was! But as a senior vice president and the controller of the corporation once put it, the computer makes it possible for us to make mistakes faster than ever before in history.
People react to change in a lot of different ways, don’t they. There’s a nifty web site that the many religious organizations subscribe to, called Link2Lead, that has a number of tests you can take. There’s one on how you deal with change: you can instigate it, you can accept it, you can kind of tag along half-heartedly, or you can dig in your heels and resist it with all of your might. Some people even practically worship change - change for change’s sake, without considering that not all change is for the better! How often do you hear a politician promising change? Well, it always makes me suspicious if they don’t spell out what they are planning to change, and in what direction!
Well, Jesus’ day was full of changes, too, even if not going at quite the dizzying pace we’ve come to expect in our own time. There was a lot of political unrest, and a lot of uncertainty about the future, a lot of speculation about the coming of the Messiah - rather like some of the hysteria we saw at the turn of the millennium. And Jesus wasn’t the only itinerant rabbi wandering around the Palestinian landscape calling for change.
People reacted in different ways then, too. Those who were doing okay under the current system didn’t want to rock the boat; those who had little or nothing left to lose, or who simply wanted more out of life, were willing to listen to almost anyone who looked like they might have an answer. And since the Pharisees were mostly doing all right, it was in their interest to keep the lid on any popular movement which might upset their applecart. What was wrong with their world is that the Romans ran the place instead of the Jews. Their discomfort was more political than religious.
That’s the context of these two parables which Jesus told that long-ago day. They both teach the same lesson: “No one tears a piece from a new garment and sews it on an old garment; otherwise, the new will be torn, and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins." [Lk 5:36-38]
Have any of you ever made wine? My grandmother made elderberry wine when I was a child in New York, before we went to South America. And later my parents made home brew, pretty good stuff, too, and also apple wine. Eventually we had to buy bottles from a plant, but when we first began, we’d save empties and reuse them. Most of the time things went pretty well. But you had to be careful about the bottles you used. No-deposit, no-return bottles were unusable, because they couldn’t take a second exposure to the pressure of fermentation, even though we didn’t fill the bottles until the fermentation had already passed its peak. If you let a few second-class containers sneak past, you’d find yourself ankle-deep in broken glass and flat beer the next time you went down to the cellar to get a brew. No fun.
That’s what Jesus was talking about when he said you can’t put new wine into old wineskins. You see, a new wineskin, made of freshly tanned goatskin, would stretch as the grape juice fermented into wine. Fermentation is a chemical process which changes the natural sugar in grapes - or hops - or whatever you’ve started with - into alcohol. In the process, it creates gases which have to expand or escape somehow. And the new skins can do that. An old wineskin, on the other hand, doesn’t have any more give left. It’s stiff. If you try to put new wine in it, it will rip wide open and spill all your lovely wine right into the dust.
The lesson of these parables is, of course, that you can’t just carelessly mix new and old without knowing what you’re doing. Old wine, for instance, goes just fine into new wineskins. And, as any quilter knows, if you pre-wash your fabric you can alternate with old squares. This parable does not warn against ever mixing old and new. Jesus himself pointed that out in another parable, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” [Mt 13:52] The point is that change requires thought and planning and intentionality.
To my mind, the key phrase in this passage is the last verse. “No one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, ‘The old is good.’” [v. 39] Freshly pressed grapes are just grape juice. No buzz at all. You do need to know what you're doing, though. A good red should probably age five to ten years at most. Although people have spent thousands on famous vintages, they're usually not drinkable. If wine hasn’t aged properly, or if it's been kept too long, it will turn into vinegar and set your teeth on edge. But ask any sommelier: the old wine - the good wine - needs to be decanted to breathe. It needs to be exposed to the air.
The point is that it’s as much our attitudes to change that create the problems, as change itself. Change is going to come. If we’re too eager to change, without thinking it through, we find ourselves - as the old saying has it - throwing the baby out with the bathwater. On the other hand, if we’re too resistant to change, we’ll find ourselves nursing blisters by the side of the road while the rest of the world speeds by at seventy MPH.
There are a lot of religious groups which have more or less frozen themselves into a particular culture and convinced themselves that the culture is the religion, and vice versa. Catholic vestments date from the fifth-and sixth c. Byzantine empire; most nuns’ habits are fourteenth c. medieval. Hasidic Jews wear 1nineteenh century Eastern European clothing rather bizarrely mixed with Old Testament shawls and tassels. Closer to home, the Amish cling to their eighteenth c. ways of life.
Anyway, what Jesus was bringing into the world was at the same time both brand new and older than the hills. As our call to worship reminds us, “Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.” [Ps 90:1-2] And the writer to the Hebrews also tells us that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” [He 13:8]
God’s grace has not changed. From the beginning God has always been a God of grace, of love, of forgiveness, and redemption. But does that make it old? Jesus brought God’s grace in a new form, the final form, the completed form - but it is the same grace, the same love, the same redemption that was poured out on the Israelites when they were freed from Pharaoh, when they were brought back from exile in Babylon. The grace of God poured out on us in Jesus Christ cannot grow old. It is new every morning. But we can grow old, and we can become inflexible, and the church can, too.
There’s a lot of conflict in the church about contemporary vs. traditional worship. The hymn we will be singing following the sermon illustrates the importance of keeping aware of changing musical expressions. “By Cool Siloam’s Shady Rill” was the favorite hymn of one of our nineteenth century pastors. And it’s a beautiful one. But I don’t think it speaks to the modern ear with quite the poignancy it had for our forebears. The language is simply too archaic. Siloam, incidentally, was the pool at the south end of Jerusalem where Jesus healed the man who had been born blind. [Jn 9] The message - about how wonderful a blessing it is to know and follow God from birth - is just as relevant, but it needs to be said in a much simpler way.
And, of course, there’s the ever-present challenge of deciding which programs and ministries are being kept out of habit and which are vital, life-giving, life-communicating vehicles of grace. Those are ongoing discussions which we will be holding as a body of believers as long as we are seeking together to discern and follow God’s leading in an often confusing world. And there’s just as much discussion - if not more - about how we should interpret Scripture to our changing world. But that's a subject for another day. Today we are focusing on the containers of our faith.
Even more important than making sure the forms of our worship, the forms of our service, and the forms of our doctrinal statements are open to change as the Holy Spirit leads us, we have to make sure that our own spirits are flexible enough to contain the new wine which Jesus continually pours out upon us. Are we - am I - are you - ready to change, to move in a new direction? Spiritual growth can be very uncomfortable, even painful at times. But Jesus will not allow us to stagnate. The only way we can keep from being stretched and made new is if we cut ourselves off from the flow of the Holy Spirit.
A Christian who stops learning and growing, remaining content with their established ideas and habits of faith, is in trouble. We can be the busiest people in the world with the forms of worship and service we’ve become used to, but if your relationship with Jesus Christ isn’t causing change and fermentation within you, the heady wine of a living faith is passing you by.
Don’t let your faith go sour, don’t let it turn to vinegar. Keep it fresh by letting the newness of Jesus Christ flow through you continually. This vintage doesn’t belong in a cellar. Bring it out and serve it to the world.
