Vintage Wine

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.