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Jesus didn't leave anything
"chocolate brown"
Reflections on the
lessons
for the Eighth Sunday after The Epiphany
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Hosea
2:14-23
Psalm 103:1-6
2 Corinthians
3:17-4:2
Mark 2:18-22
Over the years I have heard people speak out lots of times on what makes a sermon good, or interesting, or memorable. Or whatever. And it's always the same thing. No one ever says they love sermons that use lots of big words and theological jargon. No one ever says they love sermons that have lots of quotations from books. I have never had anyone say that the longer a sermon is the better. In one way or another, everyone who comments says that sermons are good to the extent that they can use understandable stories to make ideas from scripture connect with life as we live it. And they're right.
A few years ago, when I was pretty
new
at the Church of Our Saviour,
it was time to freshen up the interior a little bit.
It needed carpet, paint, several things.
And so we started figuring out how to do that.
And what to do.
One thing on the list:
The woodwork.
The rafters and beams and moldings needed painting.
But what color?
I'm not great with color.
So, we started talking among ourselves and one color would
be planned and then another and no one could quite decide
and a recurring refrain started to appear.
"Let's just leave it natural wood."
The trouble was, though,
that all the woodwork was painted chocolate brown.
For several go-rounds I would say:
"Well, we can paint the woodwork red, or we can paint it brown again, or we can leave it alone, or we can strip off all the paint and finish it in natural wood. But out of all the choices there are in the world, the only one NOT available to us is to LEAVE it natural wood."
There'd be another round of debates and then:
"Let's just leave it natural wood."
After a few cycles of this,
the paint job came and went without any controversy.
No one got ruffled about it.
But I learned a big, big lesson.
A lesson that leaps out at me from all of today's
readings.
I had learned this lesson in a
classroom in seminary.
But, as usual, I didn't get it until I saw it in real
life.
My old teacher said in class one day
"One thing I just don't understand about churches is why people always look to what has been done in the past when they're trying to figure out what to do in the future."
Oh, Barbara, I thought, how
embarrassing for you.
How ELSE could anyone look at the future?
What possible other way is there to proceed?
But, slowly, I'm beginning to learn
something about human nature
that God has known all along.
People very, very often
are hungry for the deepest roots of their lives
or their tradition
or their faith
and at the same time equally hungry
for something very new,
something never seen before.
And then they confuse those things
with an idealized view of the threadbare present.
When we think we're honoring the
past and the future,
church people so often idolize the present.
And then we freeze.
And then we fight.
And then we're lost.
And God has to go to extraordinary lengths
to call our attention to the real world,
and real life.
Just think about family stress
and church uproars
and political conflicts of all kinds.
"You don't love me like you used to love me."
"We've ALWAYS done it that way here."
"We have to defend the traditional family."
The feelings are strong and
natural.
I believe I hear behind them a longing
for a life that has not lost sight of its roots
and at the same time has not closed the doors to the
future.
But the key word is "behind."
Because at the forefront is a knee jerk reaction
that makes people cling to what's at hand
and try to make it be something different,
and yet still the same.
It's futile, says the Bible.
That isn't God's way.
The Old Testament reading is very
complex -
- but plain enough at the same time.
We're also talking about God and the People of God,
but on the surface we have the prophet Hosea
and his wife, Gomer,
who has run off to make a second career
as a prostitute in a nearby town.
The present is intolerable for
Hosea.
But his song rises above the natural instinct to wail about
it and cling.
His love for Gomer, he says, is such that he can get past
the present
and into a new future when
this is
important
it will be an all new place
where they feel feelings
like they felt when they were first married,
but feel them in a whole new way.
The bit from Paul's letter to the
church at Corinth comes at the end of a long passage.
This new religion we're making up
is causing us lots of trouble, they write.
Can't we just go back and follow the rules
we followed when we were Jews
and just CALL ourselves Christians?
It would be a lot more clear cut.
Nope, Paul writes.
We're off on a new path.
We're going somewhere new and uncharted,
but we can reach back to our roots and take the best of it
all,
live by what we can glean from it.
But we can't just slide back
and stick where we were the last time we felt
comfortable.
In the gospel, Jesus and his
friends don't follow the same rulebook as the neighbors.
They don't fast the same way at the same traditional
times.
Why?
For the same reason you don't sew unshrunk patches on old
cloth.
The old and the new pull each other apart.
The same reason you don't put new wine in used
wineskins.
The fermentation will split the stiffened leather.
The passage from Mark says that
something really new cannot be accommodated in the status
quo.
And the new has to take priority.
And that might have been the thinking in the church when
Mark was around.
But only about 15 or 20 years
later
the Jesus revolution was getting a little more mellow,
more mature.
Mark was writing about the year 60,
about 30 years after Jesus' crucifixion.
But Matthew came along in the mid-to late-70s.
He tells the very same story about Jesus
but adds something interesting.
Matthew says No one puts new wine
in old wineskins,
otherwise the wine will break the skin and you lose them
both.
Put the new wine in new skins.
Then he adds to Mark
"And both will be saved."
You'll have your wine and you'll
have your old wineskins, too.
And there are plenty of appropriate uses for good old
wineskins.
The gospel insists that losing the
old
for them the history and
teaching, and wisdom of the long Jewish experience
just to accept the new
for them, the different
twist Jesus brought into the mix
may not be the only way.
But, Jesus warns,
it's as great a change to break out of the capsule
of the immediate present
and connect with the deep past
as it is to step into the unknown future.
What is impossible,
the gospels say is to stay still in the religious,
(or political or social,)
establishment of the
present.
All the gospels are convinced that
the best way to preserve
the essential treasures of Judaism in their day
was centered in the movement led by Jesus.
It was scandalous to the
"respectable" people of the day:
The way the oldest old
and the newest new were being brought forward.
Jesus taught an older interpretation of scriptures
that threatened to displace the prevailing attitudes of the
time.
And exactly that was what was so
dramatically new about him.
He didn't build on the most recent developments.
He stripped the world back to the natural wood
and then chose a bright new color to go on it.
He didn't LEAVE anything chocolate brown.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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