Texts: Isaiah 51: 1-11; Matthew 9: 31-38
My father was a child of the Great Depression and he had this habit of re-using everything until it just wouldn’t be used any longer. This was especially true of ordinary household objects, like cans and bottles. I remember -- now I am really dating myself -- when milk first came in non-glass containers.
Squinting at the rectangular container, he began to figure out what he could do with it if he wasn’t going to leave it out for a milkman. And the next thing my poor mother knew was that there were these waxed containers all over the house, holding everything from seedlings, which they were good for to home frozen packed fish from his fishing expeditions -- we wasted nothing in my parents’ home -- to holders for all of the many kinds of nails and screws my grandfather would carefully remove from anything broken beyond repair. But, as I found out, they weren’t good for my bug collection. allll dead they got moldy in those waxed containers.
In ancient Palestine, no one could afford to waste anything either, but as Jesus pointed out, for new wine, you need new wineskins. I have to admit, as I read the description of wineskin production, summarized in this morning’s bulletin, I had to wonder what wine would taste like when drawn from the inside of a goatskin.
Jesus had a deep insight into human nature and understood how we try to fit new experiences into old paradigms. Using our past experiences to analyze a present situation is a common approach to solving problems; it makes sense because our past experience is what we have to go on. But when we are faced with totally new situations, we are forced to struggle with designing not just new approaches but sometimes have to develop totally new paradigms or frames of reference to address the new situation. There are times when relying on the past just doesn’t work anymore.
For instance, those of us who have had relationships or marriages that haven’t worked had to learn that in beginning a new relationship, whether it’s at work or with another person, old ways of relating don’t work. This is perhaps the hardest thing about trying something new because it makes sense that we rely on past experience.
The ability to reason through our past experience usually enables us to figure out how to get through a new situation. But sometimes reasoning through past experience makes us realize that the old paradigm, the old way of doing something doesn’t work anymore.
The same is true for how we think theologically. Years ago, I was working with a young Sudanese woman whose family had been brutally murdered. She managed to escape, and through the help of a grandmother had obtained a plane ticket that got her to the United States via Amsterdam. She had been detained by immigration officials and I had taken this case on at the behest of the priest who visited detainees.
One day I asked her about her experience of being in an airplane. She told me that she had been afraid the plane would fall off the edge of the earth, which she had conceptualized as a large pie. So I brought a Walt Disney book that explained how the earth was round with pictures of the earth circling the sun and the moon circling the earth. I was really curious to see her reaction.
A devout Roman Catholic, she looked at me in amazement. This is true? She asked. Yes, I replied. How wondrous! She exclaimed, God is even more glorious than I thought. Now, why couldn’t those sixteenth century bishops have had the same response to Galileo? For her, shifting the paradigm wasn’t an impossibility. We think, well, that’s a no-brainer! But there are many other areas where it isn’t such a no-brainer.
As a community of faith, we need to think about new paradigms. The religious landscape in America has changed, and these changes have to do with more than just the fact that families don’t live together in small villages or the same neighborhoods anymore. The new generation, the twenty and thirty somethings, as they are called, will bring even more changes to our religious landscape, not to mention the children of people in their forties, now teenagers. This is true even in areas where beliefs are more rigid than ours may be. They are seeking to find an experience of God and they experience God differently than we have in the past.
Makes sense, if you think about it, because our traditional paradigms of the world have changed. People respond differently to the world that comes in on us too quickly. Some hold firmly onto a past that either no longer exists or that never did. The so-called science of creationism is one response to a world that seems out of joint. We all have our areas where it’s difficult to move beyond our old paradigms or frames of reference.
But, move beyond them we must. The question becomes how we take and use what is the core, that which cannot change, and adapt it to today. The reading from Isaiah this morning gives a few clues. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, the quarry from which you were dug. That’s our foundation, but when a sculptor takes the marble and creates from it a statue of David, as did Michelangelo, something new and wondrous emerges.
We really can make an Eden of the wilderness we may feel trapped in, but it will take imagination and commitment. It will take developing new frames of reference and working out new ways to be the face of Christ in the world. As we reach out to the world around us, we cannot use old wineskins, for as Jesus so perceptively put it, they will burst and the wine will be lost.
We face new challenges as a congregation and as a community of faith. We need to use our God-given talents and make investments that we have not previously made not just in order to survive, but to become a place where people are transformed because they experience God’s love and care for them here. Just imagine the possibilities that exist. Just imagine.
Let us pray: We come to you, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer, for guidance as we face a new world of challenges that lay before us. Bring us into your presence and help us be a reflection of that presence to the world where we live. In the name of the One who can move us forward, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.