Courageous Imagination: Everybody In!
This morning I want to jump right into the main Matthew Scripture passage, and start at the end of it – this image or metaphor that Jesus uses about new wine and what kind of wineskins to use. I have been captivated and confused by this saying all week and keep trying to figure it out and what it might be saying to us today. The parables and the metaphors of Jesus do this to you – they get in your head and rattle around there, and just when you think you might have figured them out, they raise another twist in your thoughts. That’s what it has been like for me with this wineskins metaphor.
Matthew, Mark and Luke all have this same series and order of stories we heard today – the calling of the tax collector to follow Jesus, the dinner with Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners and the Pharisee’s objections, the question from the Pharisees about why Jesus and his disciples do not practice fasting, and then these metaphors of first the new un-shrunk cloth on an old cloak and then the wine and the wineskins – ‘Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.’ At first glance, you would think that is pretty straightforward, at least for someone like me who knows basically nothing about the making of wine. It’s obvious, put new into new – new wine into new wineskins, whatever they are. Jesus is all about bringing in the new, and those Pharisees better just get with the program and throw out all of their religious structures and practices, and we’d better do the same. Jesus supersedes everything before him. Throw out the Old Testament. Throw out the Jewish roots. Throw out the rituals. Throw out any form of religious institution. Move on with Jesus. Get with the program. Get with the new.
But maybe it is not so simple. Yes, in the gospels, Jesus keeps challenging the Pharisees and religious leaders of the day and how faith was being practiced, but he also keeps quoting the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures and their fulfillment, and drawing on the wisdom and faith tradition he was a part of. It is not the teaching, the Torah, but how it is being lived out that is the problem. Jesus sees himself as a continuation of what has been, how God has already been at work. Even here in this passage, Jesus points out that the lack of fasting is for this time, when he, the bridegroom is present with his disciples, but that day will come again for fasting, for that religious ritual.
Back to these wineskins. Wineskins in the time of Jesus were made out of animal or goat hides. That is how you stored liquids. Wine ferments, and so the flexible skins would expand in that process of becoming good wine. I love that idea of flexibility, being malleable, able to adjust to changing circumstances. One theory is that over time, an old wineskin will have been so stretched, to its outer limit that it becomes brittle, that any new wine now fermenting would tear the seams and burst the skins, spilling and destroying the wine. You need to start again with new wineskins. But does that mean that the old skins hadn’t done their job well? They had held fermenting wines for many years, expanding all along to allow good wine to form. It is just that now their time is over, and the process needs to start over again – with new wineskins that will themselves start their own expanding to their limits. There is always that danger of drying out, becoming stilted and inflexible. The version of this metaphor in Luke mixes things up even more by ending with the line – ‘None of you, after drinking old wine, wants the new, for you say ‘The old is better.’ (Luke 5:39). Isn’t it aged wine that tastes better than new wine anyways? Jesus does say at the end of the metaphor in Matthew that ‘both are preserved’ – presumably both the old and new wine, and the old and new wineskins. Is there this cycle of faith where you keep needing to be flexible and open to the expanding work of the Spirit, and that is good, and then, when you think you have arrived, you might actually be starting to calcify, to become brittle and stuck, and you need to start over again, being flexible and open to expanding faith yet again.
I decided I better also check in with the wine expert in our congregation – Sommelier Michael Lutzmann – and keep your eye spy glasses ready for his video later in the service. The idea of already stretched wineskins didn’t quite ring true to him. He writes ‘What I really think Jesus was referring to (boy does that ever sound out of my depth!), is that the old wineskins would still have yeast in them. Adding new wine to them would activate those dormant yeasts and begin what is called ‘secondary fermentation’. This, in turn, creates Carbon Dioxide and that would burst a properly sealed wineskin.’ He goes on to say that is actually how some sparkling wines are made with the Carbon Dioxide carbonating the wine and being made in heftier bottles able to take the extra pressure. I like this idea of ‘secondary fermentation’ that can bring new life to wine by using some of the yeast that was already present earlier and expanding on it – how faith often works – we come back to a learning or experience in our past and expand on it in fresh new ways. That’s what Jesus was doing.
Perhaps the main point of this whole wine and wineskins metaphor is not so much that the old wineskins or religious structures no longer work and everything needs to be thrown out, but that Jesus and God and faith is all about the process of fermentation – of the every expanding nature of faith and the Spirit in our lives? That’s where the focus should be. I also wonder how often in the time of Jesus did actual wineskins literally burst open. We know that Jesus often spoke in exaggeration – like the tiny Mustard Seed growing into the greatest of all trees, which were probably shrubs, or seeing the speck in the other’s eye when you have a huge log sticking out of your own. Maybe this was the same kind of thing – an exaggerated metaphor. The audience would have laughed but caught the meaning. The Spirit too works in exaggeration – constantly expanding within and beyond what any of our structures can hold.
With all this in mind, we go back to the earlier part of our Scripture passage where we see evidence of this fermentation and expansion of the Spirit. You don’t expect someone like Matthew, the tax collector, to drop everything and follow Jesus. You also don’t expect a man of faith to join a house party with other tax collectors and what is referred to as ‘sinners.’ I loved the creative dialogue Brent wrote between the 2 people at this dinner party. I had never thought about the ‘sinners’ also being those of means, and those who had probably taken advantage of others financially. One commentator referred as well to ‘persons careless in observing the strict requirements of the law, who the Pharisees likewise tried to avoid as much as possible. (Matthew – Believer’s Church Commentary, Richard Gardner, Herald Press, 1991, p.156). It is in other parts of the gospel, (like the Great Banquet from the children’s story) that we see Jesus reaching out to the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind – to those on the lower socio economic scale that were also outside of respectable religious circles. This draws so heavily on the Old Testament concern for justice for the oppressed – the least of these – the orphan and widow and foreigner – that ‘yeast’ of the idea that was already there in the Old Testament – and Jesus expands on it – secondary fermentation. It is all about who eats at the table with Jesus. Jesus keeps expanding that vision – Everybody In! It is for the rich. It is for the poor. It is for those who are sick – in other words, those who need and can find healing with Jesus the Physician. It is for the sinners and not the righteous. Jesus sums it up by telling the audience to desire mercy, not sacrifice – mercy being something forgiving and flexible and restoring. This is what the incredible fermentation and expansion of the Spirit will bring! To go back to a wine analogy – normally you would pick the very best and finest grapes to make your wine. With Jesus, he is getting grapes and ingredients from all over to make up his community of followers, quite the motley crew, and it will turn into a different type of wine – like Ted Swartz said in his video a few weeks ago – a different kind of soup than you started with. But what a sweet and beautiful wine it will be! It will burst all expectations. It will expand any notion one might have had of who is part of the community of faith. As Richard Rohr wrote in one of his email devotionals this week (January 5, 2022) entitled ‘Welcoming Table’: ‘Jesus’ most consistent social action was eating in new ways and with new people, encountering those who were oppressed or excluded from the system. It seems Jesus didn’t please anybody by breaking rules to make a bigger table…. (But) we are one, we are equal in dignity, we all eat of the same divine food, and Jesus still and always “Eats with sinners,” just as he did when on Earth.’ New Wine needing new wineskins to hold it all.
Here at St Jacobs, we are in the middle of this Courageous Imagination Worship Series, looking at the nature and vision of faith and the church. We are looking to the example of Jesus and particularly some of his parables and metaphors, teachings and actions, to guide us. In the last few Sundays we dove into the stories and witness of our larger church bodies – MCEC – Mennonite Church Eastern Canada, and Mennonite World Conference with guest César Garcia. At their best, they present an expansive vision of a diverse church and peoplehood – with so many examples of the Spirit bursting any wineskins we might have and doing new things. This morning and the remaining weeks, our series turns back to us as a congregation and the very nature of faith and church itself. What is the Spirit fermenting at SJMC and what kinds of wineskins do we need to use? What might be about to burst open within us? How do we listen for God? Where is God at work doing new things? How do we prepare our hearts and minds for what God might be doing within us? What Courageous Imagination do we need at such a time as this?
This is a good time to be asking these kinds of questions. It feels like the 2 year pandemic has thrown everything up in the air, including how we experience church. For most of these 2 years we have been apart from each other, or in limited contact. Our worship has been mostly on-line with some limited gathering in person as we switched to live streaming. We are very familiar with the words pivot, and hybrid and Zoom and Isolation and Languishing. There is so much we miss – in person community, smiles and hugs, sharing communion and washing feet, potlucks and celebration meals, singing together, simply breathing together as a full gathered congregation in worship – yes, breathing each other’s air as the Spirit of God moves in our midst.
Yet it has been amazing to see and observe a vibrancy of congregational life and spirit despite all the challenges. If nothing else, we have learned to be flexible and had the ability to adapt and shift and yes, pivot. We have learned to use technology in so many new ways, and in ways that will serve us well even in a post pandemic world. We have created a weekly pastoral newsletter to keep us together while apart. Our worship, whether pre-recorded or live streamed, has been creative and life-giving. Our worship is also much more public and accessible to people from all over – and it has been a joy to have many of you worshipping with us from wherever you watching. The circle is expanding. Everybody in. We have welcomed new people into active congregational life, even if hardly ever meeting in person. Somehow, we managed to sponsor a refugee family, start a new Peace, Justice and Social Concerns Working Group, deliver meals to Land Back Lane and Seven Generations, tackle significant issues of racism, Black Lives Matter, Residential Schools, and what it means to be an intercultural church, have an interim pastor (Liz Weber) come and go without ever being at an in-person worship service in that year, and candidate and call a new long term pastor – Janet Bauman. Our table of welcome, of who’s in, has been expanding. We have been changed as a congregation. There is lots that has been fermenting, even as we wonder what kinds of wineskins will hold the moving of the Spirit. What will ‘church’ look like in this new pandemic, endemic, post-pandemic world filled with so much uncertainty?
Over these last weeks, I have attended the virtual book launch and read the new book by long time church leader and former General Secretary of Mennonite Church Canada, Robert (or Jack) Suderman, called ‘The Baby and the Bathwater – Aspiration and Reality in the Life of the Church ‘(Tellwell, 2021). In that previous MC Canada role, he visited and had conversation with every Mennonite Church Canada congregation, including our own. In this short book, he attempts ‘to articulate a compelling, biblical case for the centrality of the church in our Christian understanding and life.’ (p.xiv) He acknowledges the many failings of the church as an institution, its checkered history, ‘its oppression, injustice and inequality in every way imaginable.’ (p.xvii). So often the church has been on the wrong side of history. So often the wineskins have dried right out. The maybe obvious and logical conclusion is to throw out the church entirely – in the language of today’s service, to get rid of all the wineskins, all the structures, all the potential to do things wrong. But Suderman urges us not to ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater.’ There is a profound and expansive Biblical call and vision and witness of the very church that is life-giving and can lead us forward. From Genesis to Revelation there is a biblical dream of the restoration of all creation. The First indispensable ingredient in that dream is people – real living, breathing, people. God calls and forms a peoplehood and God’s vision takes place with people within real history. It is God’s project within history and it has to do with living towards the vision of the Kingdom of God in partnership with humans. That is what incarnation is all about – Jesus entering human history in the flesh in Jesus, and this continuing to be en-fleshed over and over again in the church, in God’s people. It is like the new wine that keeps on needing flexible wineskins to hold it. It can’t happen without the wineskins. He even makes a comment at one point that good things need to be institutionalized, organized, remembered, so that the good things of God can happen more than once. ‘Every spirituality requires flesh for its existence.’ (p.33). Jesus did this himself when he washed feet or broke bread and blessed wine, or asked disciples to continue to cloth the naked, visit the prisoners, feed the hungry and more. (p.32) Repeat these. Make them a regular part of your life together. There are lots of ways to do this. The church has often failed and gone in destructive directions, the wineskins have dried out and become brittle, but the Biblical vision of what the church can be is still there and valid and terribly compelling. He writes ‘These were expanding enterprises, elastic in nature, and they must remain so today.’ (p. 34)
This is an expansive vision that keeps getting played out over and over again. I love his description: ‘These signs are macro and micro, personal and systemic. Generosity is evident, both spontaneous and structured. Hospitality is offered even at significant personal risk. There are efforts to implement justice, to structure equality, and to ensure compassion. Love is offered and received. Forgiveness is sought and granted. Lives are voluntarily sacrificed for the sake of others. Prejudice is confronted, racism is addressed, power is shared. Relationships are reconciled, acts of kindness are offered, lives are transformed. In other words, there is significant evidence of life sought at fountains that nurture life.’ (End Quote) (p.14) This is the nature of God’s kingdom, this is the fermenting and ever-expanding wine that gets poured into the structures, ways of living and wineskins of our lives and the church. As Suderman quotes from Ephesians 3, ‘so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known.’ If this does not give us goosebumps, we are numbed, apathetic zombies.’ (p.55) Well done Jack!
In the next few weeks in worship and worship response, we want to keep exploring what this rich vision of the church, of God’s people in the world, might mean for us. What is the nature and gift of this ever expanding and fermenting wine? What wineskins do we need to hold and shape and live out God’s vision for us? Where have we become brittle and dried out and need confession and repentance and God’s forgiveness before starting on a new path? Who might all become a part of God’s table in this place? What might it mean more fully for us to say – Everybody In! God welcomes all! Where might there be secondary fermentation, where the seed of something in our past, the small remaining yeast, gets re-ignited in a fresh new way to bring life again? Where might we be so blown away by God’s vision, full of goosebumps, that we need entirely new wineskins before we literally burst? How might we desire mercy instead of sacrifice? The vision is there. What we need are the wineskins to hold it and give it life. God has called us to follow, and like Matthew the tax collector, let us get up and follow Jesus wherever he may lead. Amen.