OLD AND NEW AT MARKET SQUARE
A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown
Market Square Presbyterian Church
September 23, 2007
Scripture: Isaiah 65:17-25 and Luke 5:27-39
I am of the mind—I am convicted—I am convinced that we are entering a very important chapter in our congregation’s life. It’s a hunch I have, an intuition, a vision if you will of the working of God’s spirit in our midst to bring newness and freshness and vigor in every aspect of our common life. This is a heady stuff. So let me say more about why I feel the way I do.
Today’s lesson from Luke will be my springboard, especially the pressure packed little parables with which Jesus concludes. Let me read them again—they bear savoring:
No one [says Jesus] 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 the
new wine must be put into fresh wineskins.
On first hearing the wallop of these two yeasty little stories may elude us. I won’t take a poll, but I’m certain there is a huge generational divide among us when it comes to understanding any story grounded in the art of sewing. Some of you remember well sewing patches on old clothes during the Great Depression, don’t you? And others of you have never patched one single pair of pants or old shirt. Am I right?
This hit me the other day as I tossed a couple of socks in the waste basket. Each of them had a hole in the toe. I stopped for an instant and closed my eyes and could see my mother darning the heels and toes in my Dad’s wool socks, making repairs on top of old repairs. She had some sort of a gourd-like gadget she pulled the sock over, and then she carefully mended the holes. Saturday nights we often sat at the kitchen table listening to the radio—I can remember phrases to this day like: The FBI in Peace and War, The Shadow Knows, and The Green Hornet. When she was finished with darning socks she would patch my Lee Rider Jeans, using a piece from an old pair I’d pretty well worn out.
Margaret Brown knew well that you wouldn’t waste a piece of new cloth mending an old jacket. Before long the new cloth would shrink and tear itself loose from the old, leaving you right where you started. Jesus tells his disciples that the new occasion of his presence among them called for a radically new way of living in the world in obedience to God. You can almost see them squinting their eyes and furrowing their brows in recognition that Jesus was prepared to turn their worlds upside down. This had to leave them both scared and exhilarated.
Jesus” second parable is like unto the first. Now he’s pouring it on. No one, he says, puts new wine into old wineskins. We catch Jesus’ drift a little faster on this one. Well, maybe. It depends on what we know about wine. The other day I was getting off the elevator in a retirement home and overheard this snippet of conversation between two men who had to be in their 90’s.
The first one said, “I’m pretty upset with everything that been happening to me.” His companion replied, “I’d think it’s enough to make you go out and get drunk.” You’d have thought the first gentleman had been kicked in the teeth he replied so fast, “I’ve never been drunk in my life. I don’t drink!”
So even this parable needs a bit of explanation. Almost all of Jesus’ listeners would have known that as wine ferments it gives off gas that causes the leather bag containing the wine to stretch. If new wine is put into a brittle old wineskin, the likelihood is that the skin will burst, spilling the wine and ruining the wineskin at the same time. Jesus’ listeners would have nodded in agreement that new wine belonged in new wineskins.
Jesus employs these two stories to explain why his disciples are unlike those of John the Baptist or the Pharisees. On days when they should be fasting they are celebrating like guests at a wedding. Their table fellowship with Jesus is out of control—they are breaking bread with tax collectors like Levi and consorting with all sorts of disreputable folks. The religious traditionalists were chastised by Jesus for their constant efforts to patch up the old way of doing things and preserve the old wineskins. It’s no wonder people began to plot to kill Jesus early on.
Just listen to the punch line with which Luke concludes this dramatic scene.
And no one after drinking old wine desires
new wine, but says, “The old wine is good.”
One commentator says this retort is full of subtlety, wit and humor.[1] Did you catch it? You have to picture the wine snob who turns up his nose at someone drinking a glass of middle of the road Merlot, boasting about his own glass of perfectly aged red wine that cost a small fortune. Jesus’ rag tag followers would have gotten a kick out of this—and the religious snobs who opposed him would have been given one more reason to dislike Jesus a lot.
It has been well worth our time to let these two pithy parables reverberate within these hallowed walls on a Sunday when we are thinking about newness and freshness and vigor in our life together. You see, change still comes hard within venerable institutions, and we do well to face this head on. A few years ago Ben Johnson, a Presbyterian professor at Columbia Seminary in Georgia, wrote 95 Theses for the Church, modeled on Martin Luther’s challenge to the church posted on the door of the church in Wittenburg in Germany that helped launch the Protestant Reformation.[2]
Johnson believes we are at a similar turning point, and in our gut we know he’s right. Listen to just a few of his theses:
To manifest the Presence of God in our time
the church must respond to its changed context.
The church today stands at the end of an era;
a new day lies before the church.
The church ministers in a rapidly changing culture
and if the church does not adapt its message, strategy
and structure to these changes it will fail in its mission.
Johnson is especially harsh in his indictment of the contemporary church in his commentary on this last thesis. “Local congregations have unwisely been structured so that persons are enlisted to do tasks they did not conceive and to carry out plans they had no part in making. Many structures have cumbersome and slow to react to changes. Programs have been conducted out of loyalty to the past, not in response to a specific need.”
Phew! Let’s listen to two more of Johnson’s theses:
The culture in which the church ministers has become increasingly
secular, meaning that most persons believe they can manage
life, politics and morals without reference to God.
[and finally]
Because the electronic media had become the dominant
mode of communication the church must discover
how to minister to a visual culture.
Johnson cites the statistic that by the age of 20, the average American has watched 22,000 hours of television. He goes in language as provocative as that of Jesus to assert that when a child has had television for a baby sitter, this subtle instructor has taught our children via advertisements that “they should have the best, have it when they desire it, and have as much of it as they like.” It’s no wonder that we are back on our heels as parents, as teachers, as religious leaders.
In a strange sort of way, I find all this liberating. It helps to know what we’re up against, to know how hard it is to change, how easy it is to do what one congregation did with its new minister, telling him, “The liturgy we use has been in the church for 100 years and we do not expect you nor anyone to change it.” Reverend, welcome aboard a ship of faith that will remain moored to the dock where it has always been.
Johnson’s theses suggest that each and every congregation faces the urgent task of taking stock of what it means to be putting wine into new wineskins. We are taught that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. But we are not taught that a particular order of worship must be the same yesterday and today and forever.
The challenge we face is the one the church has faced from the beginning: that of finding the words and songs and insights to convey the Good News of God’s restorative love revealed to us across the ages. Isaiah sings about a God who calls us to rejoice in a promised future when no more will the sound of weeping be heard. The story of Jesus, who shook up the leaders of his day, is one intended to shake us up in similar ways so we can experience the present power of God’s “newness” in our own lives.
Our prayer of confession today by Madeleine L’Engle and Lucy Shaw is, for me, a good illustration of the eternal truth of our faith in the new wineskin of fresh language. I don’t know about you, but there are times when I don’t pay enough attention to the printed words in corporate prayers. In fact, I’m always taken aback when I realize how easy it is to say the words without attending to what they mean. Do you ever do this? Of course!
Today’s prayer is one that wakes me from my spiritual slumber because it’s true. “God, I’m pretty sure only you see us as we really are.” That says it all. God—we are affirming that God exists. We are acknowledging that God alone knows us as we are, and then hanging our hope on the conviction that God is ready to help us to grow into God’s image of us at our best. What good news.
So let’s go back to the subject at hand—renewal in our personal life and the life of our congregation. I said at the onset that I believe that a fresh wind is blowing among us. Eric Riley, our new Director of Music, is coming soon. All of us, choir members, pastors, church officers, young and old, are keenly anticipating his arrival. He will not be the Messiah, of course, but he promises to bring new ideas, new vision, new energy to our music and worship.
These past six months since Pierce Getz’s death have reinforced for all of us that ours is a singing faith. Music, along with word and sacrament, makes up the heart and soul of our worship. It’s no wonder we are so eager to have Eric join us. It’s no wonder that his coming to Harrisburg this Tuesday with his wife Chris to search for a house and talk with us about the music for Consecration Sunday is an occasion for celebration.
This leads me to my punch line for the day. Be certain to put November 4 in your calendar. It’s Consecration Sunday. Dean John Welch from Pittsburgh Seminary will be our preacher, Eric Riley will play the organ and direct the choir, we will dedicate our pledges to God, and we will make our way to the Hilton to rejoice in our life together.
Do you remember the line from the Elvis Presley song, “I’m all shook up”? Jesus has every intention of shaking us up so we might, in Albert Schweitzer’s famous words, in our own experience learn who Jesus is. We best be attentive and expectant as we pray for the grace to see ourselves truly, the way our Lord sees us, and then to follow him.