Shrinking Jeans and Broken Bottles
Homecoming 2006
Luke 5:33-39
My daughter Briley and I (this is Briley - PIC) were driving down the road in my car the other day and she was sitting up front and found this 4 cassette copy of Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale. She pulled it out and said, “Hey Dad! Have you watched this?” I said, “Briley, it’s not a DVD.” She said “What is it?” I told her that inside were 4 cassettes. She said “What do you do with them?” I explained that we used them before we had CDs to listen to music. She asked if we could listen. I said sure and told her to put it in. You should have seen this kid trying to put a cassette in the deck. She was trying to make it fit like a VCR tape. We finally got it in and she said “Dad, you need a CD player in your car….”
Man times are changing aren’t they? You know life is passing you by when your kids say “what do you do with cassettes?” And as everything around us is changing at break neck speed, the church of yesterday is faced with a decision regarding today. How do we in faithfulness to an ancient message and in contrast to a wicked culture, how do we move along as well?
Some of you are here because it is homecoming. You have history at this place. But the place looks a little different these days. Different people, different styles of worship, dress….whatever. And the truth is that for every year that passes in time for CCC, each homecoming will make it real clear that things are changing around here. And for those of you who haven’t been around for a while and have come back to celebrate as our guests, just wait….homecoming in a few years from now will find this place looking even more different.
But that’s a good question. How does the church balance a changeless message in an ever changing culture? Well, just like anything and everything else we encounter in life, Jesus has dealt with this one too.
Turn to Luke 5:33-39.
In this story we find Jesus at a little get together at Matthew’s (the tax collector) house. Luke 5:29 tells us that Matthew’s fellow tax collectors and “other guests” were there. You don’t have to be too creative to figure out what kind of shady characters would be the guests at a party that a tax collector is having.
And verse 30 tells us that the Religious leaders of the day were pretty concerned with the fact that Jesus is hanging out with these types of people. One version says “scum”. That’s how they viewed broken people who didn’t know God.
Finally they have had enough. You know that feeling when you can’t just stand there anymore? When your convictions about something have reached the passion boiling point and you have to just say something to somebody? They do. Here’s what they say………..
Luke 5:33
“The religious leaders complained that Jesus’ disciples were feasting instead of fasting. “John the Baptist’s disciples always fast and pray and so the disciples of the Pharisees. Why are yours always feasting?”
Fasting was like a HUGE part of the religious fabric of Judaism. They practiced and encouraged fasting as display of one’s level of religious temperature. The more you fasted….the more spiritual you were. And to prove this, the Pharisees fasted twice a week minimum.
The funny thing about this is that only one time in the OT were the Jews commanded by God to fast – the day of Atonement. Jesus himself really only spent time teaching about fast once, in the “sermon on the mount”, where He said NOT to do it for the wrong reasons (i.e. to look spiritual).
So when they question Jesus about why his disciples spend more time feasting than fasting, Jesus knows that their question has very little to do with fasting and very much to do with – change.
Jesus’ entire ministry (3 ½ years worth) was viewed as an attempt to take the old way (the Law) and trash it to bring in a new way (grace). The only problem with that thinking is that this isn’t what Jesus wanted to do at all.
He said in Matthew 5:17 “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy them, but to fulfill them.”
In other words, I came to finish what God used the law to start. His intention was never to say that the old system of reconnection to God was a bad one, it was just that – it was the way God intended to get things moving along. The Old Testament practices of sacrifice and fasting on the day of atonement were meant to teach people that God loves to forgive our sins more than anything.
The problem was what the problem always is. Along the way the means to the end became the end. The purpose of fasting has always been to remove the physical to focus on the spiritual. But somehow the act of removing the physical became how we defined the spiritual. And how much you did that was the measurement for how much you loved God.
Jesus’ ministry was all about moving people from an old way of doing things to a new way of doing things. Same thing needed done (people needed to be reconnected back to God) but new way to do it. And the religious leaders just couldn’t see making the shift. They had gotten pretty good at approaching God this way – and to think of doing it another way was……was not gonna happen.
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So what does this have to do with homecoming? I mean we are talking about fasting when we are about 20 minutes away from lining up at the feeding trough and bustin’ out some bar-b-que! What’s the connection?
The connection is that 6 year old girls don’t know what cassettes are what we do with them.
And if you want to connect people who don’t know the language to Jesus, then you have to figure out a way to speak their language.
Here’s how Jesus put it. In Luke 5:36 he says, “No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and uses it to patch an old garment. For then the new garment would be torn, and the patch wouldn’t even match the old garment.
And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. The new wine would burst the old skins, spilling the new wine and ruining the skins. New wine must be put into new wineskins.”
See, because Jesus knows that the issue isn’t fasting nearly as much as the issue is “your changing the deal on us….” – he gives them an example that is so practical that it is undeniable. Yet it goes directly to the point that his ministry has been trying to make. God used the old wine to accomplish his purpose to this point….but he has new wine, a new direction that is not in replacement of the old so much as it is in connection to the old. It accomplished the same purpose, but it is a completely different approach to it.
But, the thing about wine is – if you pour the new stuff into the old bottles…it won’t work.
In Jesus’ day, they would take the skins of animals and sew them up often times using the actual neck part of the animal skin as the neck part of a wine container. The skins would hold the wine and flex with the wine as it fermented and developed. Then they would store the wine until it was used up.
When a new batch of wine was squeezed the wine people had a decision to make. They could either sew new wineskins or they had another option. If you took your wineskins and soaked them in water – the skin would become flexible again and would stretch enough that you could get maybe one more batch of wine to ferment in it.
But you would NEVER think of taking your new batch of wine and putting it in an old, un-stretched skin. Why? The result was inevitable. There was no mistaking what would happen. The wine would ferment and because the skin was old it would come apart and the wine would be lost. What a waste. It was unthinkable.
Can you imagine Wheaties trying to market their product with a picture of Bruce Genner on the box? Does anyone in here 20 and under even know who Bruce Genner is?
Unthinkable. If you want to sell Wheaties to a 2006 consumer market, you probably need to get like…Peyton Manning on there or something.
So to address the real issue, Jesus uses a common sense illustration in his day to say this: In order for God to continue his mission to reconnect people to himself, we have to recognize that there is a new way of doing it. It’s called Grace. It isn’t no longer about religion and carrying out systematic acts of worship – it is about relationship and pursuing worship in every aspect of who we are.
Jesus is saying. It is a new day in the kingdom of God. And this day doesn’t call for heavy fasting, it calls for feasting on this new wine that God is sending into the world.
And just like the religious leaders of the day, every church in every generation is faced with the same decision. Are we willing to see that God is a God of freshness and creativity and newness and that he recognizes that in order to communicate his message of reconnection to the ever changing world – it takes freshness and creativity and newness. It takes a church that is willing to say the old was good and it worked – but it Was good and it DID work and that doesn’t mean that it will now. Every church in every generation has the responsibility to ask itself are we willing to make the shift to keep the mission moving?
Homecomings are typically days when people from history come back to a place to recall the part of their spiritual past that this church played. Keep in mind that the reason you had a spiritual experience here is because somebody at some time was willing to say – we’ve got to keep moving forward so that we can keep connecting people to Jesus.
And my prayer for this place, whether I am leading or not, is that every year when people come back for homecoming they will be able to say – this place has really changed…look at all these people. There are new visions, and values and stories because we were willing to say “let’s keep moving forward.”
I can’t allow this moment to go by without saying how humbled I am and grateful I’ll ever be for those who came before and said “we must keep moving forward…it’s that big a deal”
I think often of men I don’t even know. Sid Woodruff and Richard Kiser and Ken Hensley and many others whose names I don’t know. These men and some of you were willing to keep moving forward. Who were open to the idea that just like with fasting in the O.T. – certain leadership structures and styles of worship and dress codes and whatever could never be more important than the central mission of what we now call “connecting people to Jesus Christ and a community of people committed to total life change.”
Thank you for the past and your courage and boldness and guts…..but get ready. Because it is safe to say that the world is moving a bit faster these days and that is going to take creative courage on our part to take this amazing message into the culture.
Before we exit this text, I think it would be good to look at verse 39. Incidentally Luke is the only one who includes this in his version of this story. But in verse 39 Jesus said, “But no one who drinks the old wine seems to want the fresh and the new. ‘The old is better’ they say.
Why do you suppose people think the old wine is better?
It’s because they know what it tastes like. They know what it looks like, smells like, how it feels and what it will do. There is a familiarity factor.
Nobody likes the unknown. But you don’t have to read far through the Scriptures to see a pattern develop. The pattern is that God uses the unknown in the lives of faithful people to unleash his biggest movements.
Because when we don’t know what to expect….we are more prone to lean.
So happy homecoming….and brace yourselves to lean into the unknown as we watch God do more than we ever thought possible.
