Sermon from May 21, 2000
I sometimes think that people get divorced just when they have a chance to make their marriage great. For the first time in years they have begun to speak the truth to each other. For the first time in years they have begun to acknowledge their profound ignorance of each other. "I really don't know this person I married." For the first time in years they have begun to admit they cannot make each other happy.

All the things that make for great romance – truth, mystery, and impossible odds – have finally burst out of their prison with power to rejuvenate a moribund marriage. They seldom do. They have been strangers too long to have much authority.

Instead of speaking truth to each other, people deny, play games with each other, or stop talking altogether. Instead of a sense of mystery about each other, men and women take each other for granted and then wonder why each seems predictable and boring. Unreasonably, they agree on what will make each other happy, and when they get it, neither is particularly happy. They underestimated the voracious appetite of each for happiness.

This is not a sermon about marriage, but miseries of marriage I mentioned serve as models of what may happen in our experience of Christianity. In his masterpiece, Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak called Christianity "this glorious holiday, this liberation from the curse of mediocrity, the soaring flight above the dullness of a humdrum existence." Does our experience of the faith bear that out? For some it does not, for clear reasons.

For instance, if a person declares great slabs of his life off-limits to Christ and then solemny declares Christianity to be irrelevant, where is any truth in that? If people picture Christianity as a list of rules forbidding grosser forms of behavior and as a more or less predictable ceremony, how can they help but be bored by the tedium of it all? They have missed its mystery. And we refuse weakness as an affront to our capabilities and are surprised that God seems far away. But God said His strength is made perfect in our weakness, when the odds are against us.

If we have banished truth, mystery and weakness from our experience of the faith, what is to be done about it? We have an answer in the Gospel of Mark 2:21-22.

Beginning with the forgiveness of the paralytic in Mark 2:1-12, Mark crafted a sequence of five events in which conflict between Jesus and some of the religious authorities escalates dangerously. Do you remember what Mark told us in Mark 2:6-7? Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, "Why does this fellow talk like that? He's blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?" Jesus in His wonderful ability to read people spoke directly to their unexpressed thoughts.

After the dinner at Levi's house, He did not have to read their thoughts. The teachers of the law who were Pharisees did not keep their thoughts to themselves that time. Neither did they say them to Jesus' face. They cornered Andrew, Peter, James, and John and (perhaps in an effort to intimidate them) expressed their objection to Jesus' choice of company. They did it in the form of another question. "Why does he eat with tax collectors and 'sinners'?"

Jesus did not have to read anyone's thoughts or wait to hear the question of verse 18 from His disciples. People came to Him with their concerns about His failure to fast. Fasting was part of an observant Jew's piety. More pointedly, John the Baptist and his disciples practiced fasting. Jesus and His disciples did not. Why not?

It was a fair question. It was His answer that floored people then and floors people now. Listen to verse 19. Jesus answered, "How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? They cannot, so long as they have him with them."

In this exquisitely chiseled sequence of stories in Mark 2:1-3:6, two more episodes will bring two more occasions of conflict between Jesus and some of the religious authorities. As we shall see, the conflict will only escalate. The conflict over fasting stands right in the middle of these five episodes.

This middle story ends with two verses that are crucial to the meaning of all five episodes of Jesus' conflict with the Pharisees and teachers of the law. I want to read those two verses and then spend the rest of our time reflecting on their meaning then and now. Verses 21-22:

"No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins."

These verses have to do with the integration of new things into old things. How shall new, unshrunk cloth be attached to old cloth that needs repair? How shall new wine be stored while it ages? That is obvious, and like so many obvious things Jesus said, it invites listeners to ask what He was driving at. What do cloth and wine have to do with anything? Let's try paitently to follow His lead and see where it takes us.

First of all, His words point to a danger of destruction. If a worse tear is made in an already torn garment, it may not be worth trying again to repair it. You will just have to throw it away, and the piece of new, unshrunk cloth will have been wasted as well. That is also clearly the point about the new wine and the old wineskins. The wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. Both the old and the new are at risk when we try to integrate the new into the old.

This leads to a second observation, which is a corollary of the first. Jesus' words seem to imply that the old is worth preserving, even though its uses may become increasingly few and in time may cease altogether. Those old wineskins, e.g., which cannot contain new wine, will have no more old wine in them. What good are they for then? That old shirt may be patched up, but then it is only good for working around the house on a day off. Before long, it will end up in the ragbag. The integration of the new into the old numbers the days that the old will remain useful.

This in turn leads to a third observation. If the new threatens to damage or destroy the old and if the old is going to become less and less useful, then the new becomes steadily more desirable than the old. In any case the wine will need replenishing, and it would be nice to have a new garment instead of a patched-up garment.

All of which brings us back to our original question: What do cloth and wine have to do with anything? You do not have to be a biblical scholar to know that Jesus was talking about Himself, when He spoke those words. The very word He used of Himself in verse 19 speaks of newness. "How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them?" Bridegrooms and brides celebrate the beginning of a new life together.

Jesus meant for people to see in Him the new thing that was being introduced into the old thing that was Israel. His decision to party and not to fast, His decision to party with tax collectors and sinners instead of keeping a kosher table, and His decision to forgive a man his sins without benefit of priest or temple introduced into the old thing that was Israel the new thing He had come to bring, whatever it was.

By uttering the words of verses 21-22 Jesus meant for people to understand that the new thing He came to bring brought with it the danger of destruction to the old; at the very least it implied the usefulness of the old was drawing to an end; and Jesus was saying that the new thing He came to bring was much more desirable than the old.

What we see in the first three episodes of these conflict stories is something we should understand only too well, if we have a conservative bone in our bodies. We see resistance to change. Jesus was touching one raw nerve after another, and every time the patient jumped. It hurt, and it seemed unnecessary.

Maybe, if it was just fasting, they could have let it go, but even there Jesus' refusal to fast seemed to contradict the practice of His greatest advocate, John the Baptist. "How is it that John's disciples ... are fasting, but yours are not?" "Are you too high and mighty to behave like every other truly pious Jew?"

But eating with tax collectors and sinners was another matter. What was at stake there was the identity of Israel, the boundaries that separated Israel from the surrounding Gentile world. In a world where pagan Romans were constantly chipping away at the distinctiveness of God's chosen people, how could a Jew show himself faithful and loyal to Israel's unique calling?

One of the answers to that question was to keep a kosher table. That meant that the food you ate, how it was prepared, and whom you ate with had to be regulated by Old Testament law and by the pious traditions that had grown up to guarantee obedience to that law. That put strict limits on eating with Gentiles, and it also put limits on eating with certain Jews, whom the Pharisees judged were acting like Gentiles and whom they called sinners.

When Jesus sat down to dine with tax collectors and sinners, He was defying what pious Jews saw as an indispensable badge of faithful and loyal Jews and also as a protection of the identity of Israel. He was abiding and abetting Israel's greatest enemy. It was unconscionable, and no one who cared about Israel's glorious past and unique relationship with God among all the nations of the world would overlook it.

Furthermore, the teachers of the law who thought to themselves that Jesus was guilty of blasphemy, when he forgave the paralytic, would tell us they were defending God's ordained method of forgiveness. That method centered in the Jerusalem temple. Sins for God to forgive them had to be atoned for, and atonement took place in the temple with the appropriate sacrifices offered by the appropriate people in the prescribed way.

I cannot see for the life of me why we should not be entirely sympathetic with the suspicions and intimidation and blunt questions that surrounded Jesus' highly irregular actions. God's law and God's people had enough antagonists among the Romans; they did not need to be undermined from within by a blasphemous, Galilean upstart.

Jesus made people angry, and the cavalier way in which they thought He behaved fueled their anger. I mean, He acted in these inflammatory ways without consulting anyone. They almost seemed calculated to offend the very people He could least afford to offend. Didn't He know that the people He was offending could really get behind His efforts and help Him succeed?

It may make us wince, but let us try not to whitewash the provocative nature of Jesus' behavior or the sharpness of His conflict with religious authorites. We call Him the Savior of the world. I should think we want to know as accurately as possible what He was like when He lived among us. It might shed some light on how He is going to save the world. I do not think He will save the world without conflict. Knowing Him more truly might even give us new ways of imitating Him as we seek to serve Him.

Based on what we know so far from the Gospel of Mark, how did Jesus answer His critics? As to bypassing the temple when He forgave the paralytic's sins, He said He had the authority to do that, and he supported his claim by healing the paralytic. As to His failure to keep a kosher table by eating with sinners and the implicit threat to Israel's inheritance in that failure, He asked His accusers in effect, "My eating with sinners is designed to include them in Israel's inheritance. What is your plan for doing that?" As to His refusal to fast, He said to His critics, "You don't fast at wedding parties, and the party has begun, because the bridegroom is here, and I am the bridegroom."

If people pushed Him to say more, I believe He would take them back to the heart of His message for that generation. "The kingdom of God is near." Whenever we hear about the kingdom of God, two words need to come at once to mind: authority and love. The kingdom of God means God's exercise of authority over all people in love.

As His love and authority begin to hold sway over our lives, He begins to set right what mars and threatens to destroy human life and human happiness. That is the ultimate human good toward which Jesus directed His revolutionary actions. How dare we think God means to maintain or return human experience to some previous status quo? When God's kingdom breaks into this world, it will look more like Jesus' tying the teachers of the law in knots than it will look like the good old days we sometimes long for.

Amid the seductions of our unparalleled liberty and unprincipled pleasure what will it take for us to see that Jesus Christ came to "make possible a new world, a new social order," (Hauerwas, 49)? What will it take for us to see our calling and the calling of every Christian congregation on earth "to embody an alternative order (of human life) that stands as a sign of God's redemptive purpose in the world," (Hays, 196)? He means us to be the new wineskins into which the new wine of Christ's love and authority is poured and aged and decanted to the masses of earth for their everlasting joy.

The process of making us into that will be painful. How do we look on the upsets and pain of living? C.S. Lewis pointed out long ago that "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains," (Problem of Pain, 81). He has to shout, because it may be the only way He can get our attention.

To look at our experience like this is an act of faith. It is neither exciting nor particularly appealing when you are at the bottom of the pile or laboring under emotional distress or physical pain. He is making us into new wineskins into which the kingdom of God can be safely decanted. By getting our attention like this, He will teach us our weakness; He will reintroduce a riddling sense of mystery back into our lives and our experience of Christianity; He will teach us to speak the truth. Pain has a way of rousing truth in a human being.