SOMETHING OLD - SOMETHING NEW John M, Buchanan
Mark 2:18-22 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
February 25, 1979 Columbus, Ohio

The cartoon which appeared on the first page of the lead article in Time Mag-
azine this week caught my eye, President Carter is at his desk in the Oval Office,
flanked by the Stars and Stripes and Harry Truman's "The Buck Stops Here" sign, Off
to one side is the large world globe which is always in the background of pictures
of the Oval Office - broken apart, shattered, chunks of it strewn on the floor, That
cartoon caught the mood of the moment, I thought. The world feels like it is coming
apart at the seams, literally.

If you still have the courage to keep abreast of the news you have felt some-~
thing akin to what the philosophers call "angst", or existential dread, recently,
The ominous confrontation in Southeast Asia between China and Vietnam and the spectre
of a larger confrontation between the Soviet Union and China makes us understandably
nervous, The total upheaval in Iran along with the thinly veiled hostility toward
all things American increased our anxiety. The kidnapping and murder of an Ambassador
and the subsequent lecture on foreign policy delivered by the Mexican President - pub-
lically - to our President - all of that, within a several week period conspired, it
seems, to loosen the mortar which holds our neat, tidy, predictable world together,

—¥ And behind those public and political concerns,\we find ourselves living in a
culture where the only thing stable is the probability of change. We are forced to
deal with the fact of our national vulnerability: having been weened on the idea of
American invincibility, we now are dealing with the end of that idea, We are forced
to cope with internal changes - such as the altering sexual roles, and a new and
frightening sexual morality. The referee at my son's basketball game last week was

a woman and the middle-aged fathers present, a chauvinistic bunch, had a problem -
how to boo a petite, twenty-four year old woman, Sometime in the second quarter we
learned how to do it, And if you want a real shock to your traditional sensibilities,
observe the coeducational openness of any dormitory on any American college campus.

All in all it's a frightening time to be alive. A modern theologian has de-
scribed the 1970's as the "end of the stable state"; the time when all the truths of
the past are under question; all the nailed-down verities are coming loose and
“blowin' in the wind" of radical social change, Mr. Carter's broken globe is a
meaningful symbol for all of us,

It is never easy to live with instability - rapid change, Those pillars of
First Century Judaic culture, the Pharisees, must have felt the same way when they
encountered Jesus of Nazareth. They saw in Him a threat to their stable state of
affairs, He simply didn't take very seriously those customs which they thought were
the adhesive which kept their neat little world glued together, They kept sounding
like Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof", hanging onto "tradition" for dear life, Tradition
is the organizing principle of life, Do you remember that marvelous moment when he
sings.,..

"Tradition, tradition,,,Who, day and night must scramble for a Living?
Feed a wife and children, Say his daily prayers? And who has the
right as master of the house to have the final word at home? The
papa,..Tradition,..Who must know the way to make a proper home, A
quiet home, a kosher home? Who must raise a family and run the
home So papa's free to read the holy book? The mama,,.Tradition,"

The Mosaic Law prescribed fasting on one day of the year, the Day of Atonement,

“age

But by Jesus’ day it had become traditional for the very pious to fast much more
frequently than that, In fact, the most devout men were fasting twice a week,

People assumed that. fasting was a zood thing to do, Among the more vigorous fasters
were the Pharisees and the followers of John the Baptist, So, someone raised the
question - "Why are the Pharisees and John's disciples fasting, Jesus, but your
disciples are not?" Elsewhere they would ask Him why His disciples ate with unwashed
hands, why He broke bread with sinners, why they flouted the Sabbath customs, All of
it is a variation on a very familiar theme - "By what right do you break tradition?"

That was the situation to which Jesus addressed three marvelous little parables:
- you don't fast while the bridegroom is present
- you don't patch an old garment with a piece of new cloth
- you don't pour new wine into old wine skins

The first of those parables tells us a lot about religious style, a la Jesus,
it isn't morose, sad, sober, In fact, if you know how good the news is your religious
observances are going to look and feel like a party, a real celebration,

In the second and third parables, Jesus says something very provocative about the
new and the old, about new truth and traditional custom,

He had watched His mother patching His own garments, He knew that if you wanted
to patch a hole in an old pair of britches you had to use old cloth, If new material
was used it would shrink whenever the garment was washed, and the original hole
would be made bigger,

He had seen how wine was stored, The fermentation precess contined for a while
after new wine was declared suitable for drinking. One of the products of the
process is gas, If you put new wine into old skins - skins that are no longer
elastic, the pressure will cause them to break, He had seen it happen many times.
New wine is put into new skins, Old wine is put into old skins,

Jesus was telling His contemporaries that their traditions had become too’
important, The wineskins exist for the sake of the wine, The wine is what you want
to preserve and protect, In matters religious it is God, His will and truth and holy
law, that matters, not the particular forms of the religion itself, Pharisaic
Judaism of the First Century had forgotten that, The customs and rituals and tradi-
tions of religion had become more important than their original intent, Religion
had become an end in itself,

The Word of God here, I think, is quite plain, The Gospel of Jesus Christ is
dynamic, alive, It cannot be contained in anybody's favorite customs and traditions.
The Gospel transcends the very religious forms it has inspired: it measures and
judges the customs it has stimulated, It is always slightly at war with institu-
tional religion, the very nature of which is to want to nail down once and for all
that which can never be nailed down permanently. It judges us when our loyalty to
Protestantism or Roman Catholicism or Presbyterianism or Lutheranism becomes more
important than our loyalty to Jesus Christ,

The Word here is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ may often be in tension, as
well, with those truths secular society regards as traditional,

The Gospel stretched the traditional way of thinking about slavery, and later

we

about the inherent equality of every man and woman = and today much of the ferment
for new ways of thinking about the role of women, international relations, hunger
and a myriad of other concerns is coming at the instigation of Christian people.

The Word here is that this is the nature of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, It is
new wine, When Christians question the effectiveness and faithfulness of traditional
moral standards, for instance, they aren't being radical and irresponsibly liberal.
In fact, they're doing exactly what their Lord did, When Christians advocate a whole
new way of thinking about national security and the arms race, they are being very
faithful to their Lord, When churches discuss alternate life styles as a response
to the ecological crisis, and point the finger of judgment at a culture that simply
refuses to acknowledge its complicity in the rape of the ecosystem - those churches
are faithful to their Lord Jesus Christ.

The Gospel is New Wine in every age. And yet it is less than honest to portray
Jesus as a revolutionary and an enemy of all tradition, In Luke's version of this
series of parables there is an intriguing sentence which some scholars believe was
added later, but which I choose to believe Jesus said: "No one after drinking old
wine desires new: for he says 'The old is good,'" That sheds a whole new light on
the matter, You don't put new wine in old skins, But that fact doesn't alter
another fact which everybody knows - old wine is better than new wine, Just because
old wineskins have lost some elasticity doesn't mean they're good for nothing. In
fact, their purpose is an important one: they're what you store old wine in - until
you need it for an important occasion,

The opposite of a culture imprisoned by its own traditions is one floating
around loose, with no roots, The opposite of a religion completely entrapped in its
own rituals and customs is one which acknowledges no past, celebrates no history and
therefore has about as much vitality as a bunch of cut flowers, Sociologists are
concerned that the "Me generation" - the generation obsessed with instant gratifica~
tion ~- may forget that there are enduring truths which are passed down from genera-
tion to generation, Arnold Toynbee taught that “civilization consists of commonly
held values...and is possible only because of great affection of people for old ways
and old values,"

The experience of Roots II reminded us again of the importance of the past and
the absolute necessity of celebrating some kind of past if we are to have identity
in the present, Who is not moved by Alex Haley's marvelous discovery of that
"old African" - Kunta Kinte?

You simply can't force Jesus into a mold called "revolutionary". He didn't
advise discarding the old wine skins, He did not deny His own history, He simply
taught that some truth is new - and won't fit in the old containers,

_ There are times in history when that is more evident than others, The colonial
period in our own history, for instance, Old structures could not be patched up to
contain the new doctrine of liberty, Fortunately the founding fathers were concerned
enough about the wine, and not the wine skins, that after a dozen years they threw
away one structure, called another convention and wrote a new federal Constitution,

The 1860's was another such time, Men of good will tried valiantly to patch
up an old garment - but it wouldn't hold, It was time for preserving the old by
creating something new: a new nation, without slavery,

- i=

We seem to be living in another such time today: a time that demands fresh new
approaches, new ideas, new structures - to cope with a new world,

It is, almost everyone agrees, a very critical time for the Christian Church,
The Church, as is the case with all institutions, has a propensity for looking back-
wards, in the metaphor of one critic, "driving blindly into the future with its eyes
locked on the rear view mirror," The Church, as was the case with Judaism of Jesus'
day, is often guilty of preserving the wine skins, forgetting that its business is
the new wine of the Gospel,

That propensity shows itself in many ways: in an inclination to enshrine local
custom long after the custom is relevant, The "Seven last words of the Church"
someone said recently will be "We Never Did It That Way Before", And Martin Marty
writes: "I believe this thesis to be defensible, that ordinarily Christian people
produce institutional forms in each century which are well adapted to the needs and
orrasions of the previous century," (What's Ahead for the Churches?, p,11).

The result is that none really expects the Church to be relevant, Religion is
regarded as very peripheral activity - having little if anything to do with the
realities of life, Churches become museums not because governments clamp down on
religion - but because the religion in those churches had nothing to do with life..

In a scathing attack on the contemporary church John R, Fry cites a character
out of Joseph Heller's book, Something Happened, as typical of the new American -
'He doesn't give a damn about Christianity, and he doesn't give a damn about not
giving a damn, True, he's nominally a Christian and goes to church now and then,
but he goes just to humor his wife, Afterward he teases her about her preacher and.
the inanity of going to church,,,American Christians have given up on the Christian
enterprise, They are not angry,,,above all they're bored," (The Great Apostolic
Blunder Machine, p,1-2).

This, or any church, cannot afford to look back, We deny our faith - our Lord,
when we keep insisting that the wine skins are sacred; that our way of doing things
is the once-and-for-all way: that whatever else happens, traditions will not change,

A new and frightening world requires a faith big enough and secure enough to
be fresh, aggressive, innovative, new, relevant - without denying the validity of
its past, Our brave new world needs a church willing also to be new: to lay down
worn out structures and to create neW ones,

It's not easy. In point of fact, many of us look to religion, and religious
institutions, for the stability so totally absent from the rest of life, But we
dare not force our church - our faith ~ to become our security blanket,

James Russell Lowell wrote a poem in 1844 - This Present Crisis. Part of it
has become a fine hymn, the words to which I kept recalling as I thought about
this sermon, I looked up the poem and read it in its entirety; it is magnificent...
Lowell felt as if his world too was coming apart at the seams, Listen to his
words -

~ 5»

"New occasions teach nev duties: Time
makes ancient good uncouth,

They must upward still, and onward, who
would keep abreast of truth:

Lo, before us gleam her campfires! We
ourselves must Pilgrims be,

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly
throuch the desperate winter sea,

Nor attempt the Future's portal with the
Past's blood rusted key,"

(Complete Poetical Words, p.67-68),

God calis His people into the future, He calls us to be His people, unafraid
to think new thoughts, to assume nev duties,

In Jesus Christ God has called cach of us, personally, That call is always
to conversion, By that the New Testament does not mean an emotional spasm: it
means a turning around, deliberately: a willingness to think new thoughts and
walk new roads, Christianity ls not simply a set of spiritual calisthenics
designed to make you stronger, It is an invitation to become a new man of woman,
The promise is that into the old veneer of our lives God will pour something brand
new: something nav and exciting and fresh, full of goodness amd truth, It is
called salvation,

Almighty God, you create all things anew, So recreate us, Give us grace to
live, not in the past, but fully in this present, Give us courage to live
unafraid; to face our future in the full confidence of Your love, Save us,

Father, from the boredom of our own making: through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,