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April 27, 2003
Should Old Clothes be Patched?
Should Old Clothes be Patched?
Psalm 16 / Proverbs 15: 13-23
Luke 5: 33-39
April 27th, 2003
Every generation faces collisions between the new and the old. People of my generation, “baby boomers”, I think we’re called, are sometimes startled at you Y-generation folk. I walk on the Purdue campus on a warm Spring day and do a double take when I see what young men and women will wear in public. Students watch me walk by in my necktie and sport coat. “What a dinosaur!” Young fellows my age feel funny being thought of as dinosaurs. What I wear was quite a hit in the 1960s.
What’s going on is not really a collision between the old and the new, because what is new today is mostly a rehash of something old. In women’s fashions, necklines and hemlines are forever like a yo-yo, going up and down. Men warble between frumpy and tidy. Goatees and ear-rings were popular in Shakespeare’s day. What is old now once seemed new. What seems new was popular ages ago. As the observant and sometimes grumpy old preacher says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
These things came to mind as I pondered the collision between Jesus and the religious leadership of His day as described in the Gospel of Luke this morning. “Why do your disciples eat and drink when our disciples and John the Baptist’s disciples are known for fasting and praying?” Jesus was introducing something apparently new, challenging the popular religious practices of public fasting and public praying. Jesus and His disciples ate and drank with sinners, in fact.
Instinctively we imagine that we side with Jesus against the Pharisees who asked this question, but we are far more in the Pharisees’ camp than we realize. And we understand Jesus’ response to them far less than we realize.
The Pharisees’ question was very reasonable, given their understanding of the purpose of religion. The purpose of religion had developed considerably since God revealed His plans to Moses and the prophets. The great rules God gave Israel were not ends in themselves, just means to an end. They forgot.
The end, the goal of life with God was “fullness of joy.” It still is. The vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible is rich with words for joy, the goal of life with God. The psalmist wrote, “I will go to God my exceeding joy.” Ezra and Nehemiah told people not to weep when they heard for the first time the Word of God, “the joy of the Lord is your strength.” The prophet Isaiah proclaimed that “Jerusalem was to be a rejoicing and her people a delight.”
Jesus remembered that this was the goal of life with God, so He encouraged His disciples to eat and to drink when they were hungry and thirsty. It’s strange that they had to find the company of sinners to do this, but it was the sinners who invited them, and not often the religious leaders. Jesus said, “I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly.”
Sinners in their sinning are often trying to find abundant life, joy. They’re not very wise, however, in their search. Most sins are bad stabs at joy. I wonder if Jesus went to sinners because at least they had the right idea, though they were going after joy in a way they’d never find it. Jesus found it easier to guide people to joy who still wanted joy, than to make some religious people want joy. What a joyless thing religion had become. So often it still is.
The life and faith of God’s people, Israel, didn’t go according to plan. Joy faded from the curriculum of the would-be righteous. In place of joy the negative aspects of religious duty grabbed center stage. Fasting, a sign of mourning, became an essential public act. Prayer, the communion of the heart with God, stepped from the serenity of the closet into the bustle of the Temple. Prayer became formal. Gone was the goal of joy, God’s intent for His people. What the Pharisees thought was the old-time religion, good enough for them, was a tiny fragment of the ancient way, put under a microscope, and then projected onto the big screen of life.
I remember what the prophet Jeremiah told his people 2700 years ago. “Thus says the Lord, stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies, and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.” Then people replied to him, “We will not walk in it.”
Jesus remembered the ancient paths, the good way, where rest was available for the soul. When He invited people, “Come to me and find rest,” it was an invitation to the ancient path, the path wending its way to fullness of joy. But popular religion in Jesus’ day forgot that really ancient path.
How impressive the followers of John and the Pharisees were with their patina of sobriety, their long faces, all these evidences of how serious they were. They fasted, and people were aware of it. They gave up eating twice a week because they thought it was the right thing to do. When they fasted, they let God and other people know how serious they were. Why all this fasting anyway?
Mondays and Thursdays were fast days because it was on a Monday that Moses went up on Mt. Sinai to get the Law, and on a Thursday he came down. How careful they were to remember those two important days in Moses’ life! They fasted to remember when Jerusalem was destroyed, and when the first Temple was destroyed. They fasted when they prayed for rain. Though God gave us food to enjoy, not eating became a sacrament. Not eating became very important among seriously religious people.
Why didn’t Jesus and His disciples fast, they asked? The Pharisees really wondered. The disciples of John the Baptist fasted. Jesus fasted too, of course, when it was important. It’s just that He didn’t advertise it when He did. He began His work with a forty-day fast, all alone in the desert. He taught His disciples that they should fast to prepare for heavy responsibility. Fasting is an act of self-discipline that helps to bring focus to your heart and mind. Once when Jesus’ disciples could not cast out the demon from a little boy, Jesus told them “this kind comes out only with prayer and fasting.” He meant that they had been too casual in approaching such a demand as this. Big duties call for serious preparation.
But fasting and praying were preparations to be done in secret or they lost their power. Jesus said, “When you fast, don’t proclaim it by moping around. When you pray, get into your closet and be with God alone.”
The Pharisees who watched Jesus had no way of knowing whether Jesus or His disciples fasted, because they were looking for the outward signs of fasting—long faces, dowdy clothes. What was conspicuous to them was Jesus and His disciples eating and drinking with sinners. Good people don’t eat and drink with sinners, they thought. Good people perform religious exercises—like fasting.
Jesus surprised his pious critics by replying to their challenge about fasting, “You cannot make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you?” What did that have to do with the question, they wondered. What wedding? What bridegroom? They may have thought back to the parts of their Bible that refer to Israel as God’s bride, but what did that have to do with Jesus and His disciples not fasting?
Jesus illustrated His point by giving two illustrations. First, you don’t sew new patches onto old clothing because the new cloth won’t match the old—it won’t look any good. And the old cloth will tear when a new patch shrinks. Second, you don’t put new wine into old wineskins because the new wine will ferment and burst the old wineskins. Luke doesn’t tell us how the Pharisees responded to these two illustrations. Maybe they rubbed their heads. “Say what?” they asked.
What did Jesus mean? What Jesus meant then is as essential to life for us today as it was then. And the problem he addressed then is as modern as ever.
Jesus wasn’t calling for new religious practices at all. He said the old wine is best. Religion itself is only a wineskin, a container. The pendulum keeps on swinging back and forth in styles of containers. Christianity moves back and forth between very well ordered worship and free-form worship as if it’s the form that counts. We move between relaxed standards of behavior and Puritanism. Devout Protestants today do without a blush what devout Protestants in my youth considered sinful. What we need is the old wine, Jesus still says.
Some people nowadays are discovering the beauty of liturgical worship who once only knew looser forms. Other people who grew up with a beautiful liturgy discover the exuberance of freeform worship and dive in to the “new” way. A contemporary author has written a book about “Blended Worship,” that tries to mix the old with the new. But this is only toying with the wineskin.
When Jesus spoke of putting a new patch on an old garment, He may have been talking about our tendency of trying to improve our religion by trying on new styles of worship. What we need is not a rock ‘n roll band to replace the pipe organ, but to discover fullness of joy. When you try to stir interest in religion by jazzing up the service, it may appeal to some people and not appeal to others. But guitars and drums don’t guarantee us joy.
The joy Jesus felt and that He introduced could not be contained in the old wineskins of religion. He did not say, get rid of the laws of Moses. “I came not to destroy, but to fulfill the law,” He said. Jesus didn’t mean get rid of the moral law. Not a jot or a tittle of that would pass away either. He didn’t mean necessarily get rid of anything except the idea that we please God with long faces and routines of religion that we practice as ends in themselves.
What is joy? It is genuine gladness at being alive. It is looking forward to the day because of the sense of God’s blessing on life. Joy brings, unconsciously, a feeling of self-worth. It brings genuine esteem for others, genuine compassion for those who hurt. Joy is accessible to all personality types because all people want to be happy. Joy is happy. Joy is happiness that does not depend on favorable circumstances. Joy is anchored in the eternal God.
Some years ago an Episcopal layman, Keith Miller, wrote a little book called “The Taste of New Wine, in which he described a fresh movement that was sweeping across denominational lines, bringing life where life had faded from the church. In this movement the author found that “Christ is tearing out the partitions in people’s souls between vocation, church, and home and making a one room dwelling place for Himself in their whole lives.”
Though this book was written nearly forty years ago, it rings true still. The beginning point for the taste of what is really the old wine, the taste of joy waits until we are honest with ourselves. So long as we are satisfied with appearances, we will avoid the reality of joy. I have the feeling very often that we expect little more than appearances. And I sometimes feel as a pastor that my job is making sure that we keep up the appearances.
There are various kinds of approved appearances—some are theological, some have to do with life style and diet, some have to do with social life, or with appearances of philanthropy. We try to keep approved in the categories we think important.
Jesus wanted the Pharisees and the disciples of John the Baptist to admit what they really knew, that keeping up the appearances was not good enough. It failed to find joy. “At thy right hand are pleasures forevermore,” their Scriptures told them. But their religion offered mostly a dull life, self approval with a lot of judgment toward others. Very little, if any, joy.
I would like to make four suggestions in conclusion this morning that aim at joy. First, I invite you to step out from the familiar comfort zone in which you now are and take a risk. In the congregation this morning are many different kinds of comfort zones. Step out from your comfort zone that leaves you a fallow Christian. Think honestly. Are you living as unto yourself, basking in self-approval, or are you self-consciously living for God’s glory and for the encouragement of others. Is there joy in your life--love of yourself, love of God, in the groove you have carved for yourself?
Second, begin to do something you have been reluctant to try. I invite you to come on Wednesday morning to pray with us. It will be worth it to you to set your alarm to join us. I am convinced that something rare will happen at Faith Church when Wednesday morning finds many of us here together, at some personal inconvenience, to pray together. You need the discipline of doing something that goes beyond your comfort zone. Begin the discipline of praying with us. Some of you need to risk being at an event whose only purpose is to pray.
Third, discover others in the congregation with whom you will share your life deliberately. Look around you this morning. Begin during the fellowship hour today. Invite another family to your home. Don’t wait to be invited. Take the initiative. Eat together around the table in your dining room or kitchen. Talk together. Pray together. Start a project of service together, something small, something useful. Read the Bible together. And, hard as it is, pray together—asking God’s blessing on your new fellowship. Keep it going. There is nothing less Christian than an isolated Christian. In this intimate fellowship begin to share your life with one another.
Fourth, begin a private life of private devotion. Discover your closet. And if you find this hard, give me the privilege of being a resource for you. This may be my most important usefulness to you.
God has good old wine to pour into us. Will you become a part of this venture of faith? Our Bible says, “Eye has not seen, nor has ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man the things God has prepared for them that love Him.” I am eager that you and I discover the things God has prepared for us.
Let us pray: O Lord, pour into us the refreshment you hold ready in your hand. Grant to us the taste of new wine. Grant to us the joy that you offer those who love you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at April 27, 2003 09:30 AM