Relevance
Luke 5:33-39
Rabbi Rev. Dr. Michael H. Koplitz
Luke 5:33 And they said to Him, “The disciples of John often fast and offer prayers, the disciples of the Pharisees also do 1the same, but Yours eat and drink.” 34 And Jesus said to them, “You cannot make the attendants of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? 35 “But the days will come; and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days.” 36 And He was also telling them a parable: “No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and puts it on an old garment; otherwise he will both tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. 37 “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. 38 “But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. 39 “And no one, after drinking old wine wishes for new; for he says, ‘The old is good enough.’”
This short narrative about questioning Jesus about eating and drinking has many Aramaic and Semitic idioms. I would like to explain some of these idioms.
The phrase, “He has eaten and drunk” means “he was fed and well taken care of.” Today, we would use the expression that a person “had three square meals a day.” People did not consume wine at meals; instead, they would drink cold water, even though it was scarce and precious.
People used wine at marriage feasts and on other occasions. Wine was seldom had during a meal. The phrase “eating and drinking” simply means a complete meal.
Some of the religious people in Jesus’s day would stay away from anything that they considered a luxury. Some of these religious people would fast from food and water. John the Baptist was of the group that believed that one should fast often. Jesus accepted invitations and lived comfortably. This means that he would eat whatever was put before him when he visited the different houses.
Jesus showed us that religious character was not by the food you ate or did not eat, but through your gracious ways of life. In Jesus’s case, he brought spirituality to people who desperately needed it but didn’t have it.
In the near East, any wine that was over six months old was called old wine. As soon as wine was produced, it was immediately consumed. People did not age their wine. They crushed the grapes in October and had the wine ready within two weeks. Rich families would have enough wine to last them for an entire year. Wine turns to vinegar when it’s kept in goatskins or earthenware. The people in Jesus’s time did not know how to make glass bottles. So, they developed special skins for the wine.
The Jewish people would devote themselves to the theology and ancient customs they had followed for years. They were very reluctant to change for new teachings. They preferred the old ways because it was better for them, and they had been drinking from their traditions and their teaching for some centuries. Thus, old wine was a metaphor for old teachings. Yes, they referred to Jesus’ teachings as new wine because they were radically different from what the Jewish people had been living under for years. Jesus said when a person can drink old wine or new wine, they want the old wine because it was still delicious to them. This tells us that the people preferred their old traditions than to the new ones that Jesus was bringing in.
Now that we’ve gone through the idioms, you can see how important this passage. The emphasis was that Jesus brought a new way of thinking. And the religious leadership did not like this new way of thinking because it really pushed them out of power. It is unfortunate for those leaders in Jesus' day it was more important to be in power than it was to be concerned about the people’s spiritual welfare. Unfortunately, this happens today in many aspects of our society.
But I don’t want to talk about that as much as I want to talk about the need for change. It is very clear to any of us who were looking at statistics that church attendance is down significantly from where it was 80 years ago. Despite the growth in our population in the United States, the percentage of church attendance has significantly decreased. We have to ask ourselves the question of what’s going on.
Unfortunately, one conclusion from the studies that I read have studied and I know some of you are going to not be happy with this, but it is that church, the organization, has become somewhat irrelevant in our society. We can go all the way back to the 1950s and prior to see that Sunday morning for Christians was the day to go to church. Clearly, in 2024 that is not the case. Attendance in church has been dropping off since 1958 in most states in the United States. So, we're looking at 66 years of declining membership and there were no significant actions taken to address it.
Now I should say in the United Methodist church conference that my Conference had a bishop, 15 years ago, who started enacting all kinds of programs. She would let these programs run for 3 to 5 months and when they didn’t produce any fruit, she would just cut them off and go to another program. Attendance kept dropping in my conference. I told her that the church has become irrelevant to people today and we need to figure out how to regain that relevance.
I had done extensive studies in the middle of the 1990s for the Freemasons of Pennsylvania and we came up with the same conclusion as we do for the churches even today. You have to be relevant to the life of your community if you want people to attend your church. One of the interesting stats was that a man only has five hours a month that were considered open. That is he had nothing scheduled. Now this number relates to men who had families where the children were under 18 years old. How do you make the Masonic Lodge relevant to this person? The same question back in the 1990s would have been: how do you make the church relevant to this person so that they will give up some of their free time to be in church?
That’s the trick to solving this attendance and prestige problem. If you were a pastor back in the 1950s walking around your town or community, people would stop you, say hello, shake your hand, and consider you something of a celebrity. Today if you go out and put your collar on and walk around, most people just can ignore you. The relevancy of the church’s change and this is one example that proves to us it’s happening.
If church was that important to people, they would come to it. So how do we make the church relevant to life today? There are many possibilities because every community in every town is different. We can look at this small section of Scripture and get an idea of what to do. First, let’s acknowledge that Jesus understood that the synagogue and the Temple in Jerusalem were no longer relevant to the common person. The temple at Jerusalem had restrictions, allowing only priests to enter certain rooms. A Levite, who was not a priest, was not even allowed into certain rooms. The high priest was the only person permitted to enter the holy of holies, where the Ark of the Covenant stood, once a year on the day of Yom Kippur.
Considering the restrictions that the Temple of Jerusalem had, one can see how that temple became irrelevant to an average person’s life. Now in Jesus' day, if you are Jewish, you followed traditions that existed for centuries. Some of those traditions were becoming irrelevant because the world was evolving. Technology was being discovered and new ways of doing things were happening. If you sit back and think about it, what new technologies have been discovered that could diminish the relevance of churches?
A lot of change has happened from the 1950s to 2024. People think differently, people act differently, people have computers, and they have phones and they have all kinds of things that didn’t exist in the 1950s. Let me give you one example of how technology was destroying the Freemasons because it’s doing the same thing to the church. In the 1950s, the Masonic Lodge and the church were places for people to have social interaction. They had radios, but they didn’t have television. If you wanted to be social, you could go to the Lodge or the church. That was one of the relevancy of those two organizations in 1950. They provided meeting places, and that was needed.
Then, in the 1960s, someone invented a thing called television and everyone had one. Therefore, you didn’t have to go to the church for social interaction. Your social interaction became watching TV shows. When my father was home on the weekends, you couldn’t tear him away from his television. He actually had two cable providers for the house. Yes, he had two different cable boxes connected by a video switch so that he could get double the amount of stations that he never watched. To him, this was the most magnificent thing ever. He belonged to the Knights of Pythias for about a year and ½ until he decided that staying home and watching television was easier and it didn’t cost them any money. Yes, it cost them some electricity, but he never thought about that. To him, the Knights of Pythias and their meetings for men to have social interaction became irrelevant.
I have suggested this at every church I have been at and unfortunately the idea gets rejected, but I think it’s a good one, so I’d like to share it with you. If you want your church to become relevant in the community, you need to identify a problem that exists in the community and that nobody is solving, but everybody wishes to be solved. That’s how you become relevant.
Unfortunately, churches don’t like to do these things. I’ve never figured out why. Here is an up-to-date example. I was assigned to a church in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. They assigned me to go there and build a building addition. It was a 7200 square-foot building had 4000 square-foot gymnasium all-purpose room. What I discovered in this little town was that the youth had nothing to do after school and pretty much nothing to do on Saturday or Sunday. They desperately needed someone to act. When the building was finished, I propose what the church start a youth center at the church on weekdays from 3 to 6 PM. That would allow the teenagers, especially, to come somewhere and have some organized activities instead of roaming the town and doing things they weren’t supposed to do. Unfortunately, the leadership of the church said that they wanted nothing to do with it. That act of creating that youth center would’ve made the church relevant and people would’ve flocked to it because it was a problem that everyone acknowledged existed, but nobody was working on solving.
We can say that the church is relevant because you need to learn about Jesus Christ to enter into heaven. That is not a prime problem anymore like it was in the 1950s and beforehand. There are people that believe that they are going to heaven because they were baptized in the church, and they never have to show up again because they have been told that once baptized they were saved by Jesus and they never have to do anything again. It is that belief that is causing the biggest problem in church attendance right now. So, I hope you’ll consider looking in your community and seeing how to make your church relevant and then when people start coming in. Then you will have the opportunity to teacher them about Jesus and about evangelism and hopefully your church will grow. I pray you can get your leadership to understand what’s going on and hopefully you can start making a difference.
