Sun sermon: parables wk 3 - 'New and old'

READINGS: Galatians 3:1-9, 23-29; Luke 5:27-39

SERMON
Let’s pray: May the words of my mouth and the thoughts of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

This is a story about another time and a different congregation...

Shona was adorable.
A blue-eyed, golden-haired, friendly wee soul
who would turn up to Sunday School each week –
giving Mummy a moment for herself to take a little breathing space,
drink coffee,
read the paper,
and be thankful for the gift of this one small window in the week
that the church gave her to relax from her duties as a single mum.
They weren’t really a traditional church-going kind of family –
in fact, they’d never really ‘done’ church before, one week, they decided to dip their toes in...
and yet, somehow, Shona’s mum felt welcome –
felt able to bring her daughter and leave her in our care awhile
and we were pleased to be able to give her the space she needed.
It was a happy arrangement all round.

Shona loved singing the songs,
doing the actions –
listening in rapt attention to the stories told each week.
Everything was fresh and new,
and she soaked it all up like a sponge.
This six year old asked great questions,
was a real philosopher,
and came out with some amazing quite ‘out there’ points of view
that also made me see the stories in new ways.
She was a fabulous, gentle, fun, and utterly lovely small person.

One day, Shona arrived –
we both waved to her mum as she headed off,
and then we began to head into church.
But, something was different.
Shona wasn’t quite as chatty as usual.
Instead, she was quiet –
something big was on her mind.
‘So, how are you?’ I asked her.
She looked up at me, very solemnly,
those bright blue eyes big and round and filled with
something that looked a little like ... wonder.
‘Nikki’, she said, in a hushed wee voice,
‘Mmmhmm?’
‘Mummy bought me...,’
there was a wee pause, and then with utter reverence:
‘Mummy bought me ... a bible.’
She was clearly amazed –
this was a special thing.
And it was.
But, in the moment, I forgot her non-church background –
and wanting to know if it was a child-friendly one with piccies,
or another kind altogether, I said to her:
‘That’s lovely. What kind is it?’
The blue eyes grew even rounder, if possible.
And in an awed whisper she said
‘It’s...a holy bible.’ ....

While I learnt a lot from Shona, and hopefully she from me,
that was the day I realised that although
I had also come from a non-church going family,
I’d been in church just long enough
to have settled into a sort of routine,
was happy with the familiar –
comfortable with it...
forgetting that up until 4 years earlier,
everything was as new and fresh to me
as it was to young Shona;
forgetting that the God I worshipped
is also the God of surprises,
the One who makes everything new.

Our readings this morning are a mix of being called into discipleship
and lessons about old and new.
As with last week’s gospel reading, we’re in the early stages of Jesus’ ministry.
And just before his meeting and calling of Levi,
he’s caused quite a stooshie among the Pharisees and teachers of the law –
sometimes referred to as the scribes.
The cause of the commotion centres around a healing:
several friends carry a friend to meet Jesus –
in the hope that he’ll be able to perform a miracle.
When they get to the place, it’s so crowded that the only way for it
is to go up to the roof, dig a hole, and lower their friend through it.
Some of you know the story.
Jesus, impressed by the faith of the friends
first forgives the man from his sins
and then heals him.
The man picks up his mat and can walk away
into new life –
a fresh start.
But it’s not the healing that causes the controversy among the scribes and pharisees,
it’s Jesus’ forgiving the man’s sins.
‘Only God can do that!’ they cry, outraged.
Well, in part, they’re right:
only God can...
they just don’t understand who Jesus is.
To them, he’s done something utterly horrifying:
broken a major commandment punishable by stoning:
they believe he’s committed blasphemy.
It’s at this point that he becomes a marked man by the religious authorities –
and where they begin plotting to destroy this upstart new rabbi.

Immediately following this, we meet Levi.
Levi is a tax collector.
It’s a well-paying job –
because it’s pretty usual to skim extra money for yourself.
It’s also a job not guaranteed to make you popular:
tax collectors are seen, by a community living under Roman occupation, as colluders –
they work for the enemy, the oppressor, are seen as corrupt.
Everyone hates them.
So, having agitated the scribes and pharisees by forgiving the sins of the paralysed man,
it’s interesting that Jesus heads directly toward someone who is very publicly thought of
as the worst of the worst.
‘Follow me’ he says to Levi.
And...
Levi does.
Immediately.
Puts his old life behind him
and strides out into a new life,
a fresh start.

Having been welcomed by Jesus,
so he welcomes Jesus into his home for a meal.
Gathers those friends he does have –
other outcasts and colluders,
a great company of tax collectors  –
and they sit and eat together.
To sit alongside this group and to eat with them
offends the sensibilities of the law-loving scribes and pharisees.
They complain.
But the only thing that they can think of is
to compare Jesus and the disciples
to John the Baptist and his followers.
‘Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners,’
and a little later:
‘John’s disciples fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the pharisees,
but yours go on eating and drinking.’
Basically, Jesus and his disciples just aren’t playing the game:
they’re not following the familiar old rules,
they don’t seem ... ‘religious’ enough.

Now the scribes and pharisees aren’t necessarily the bad guys –
they very much want to live a life of faith,
they very much want to follow God.
They study the holy writings,
see the holiness codes laid down:
the Ten Commandments given to Moses, and the many other laws.
They very much want to get it right –
they learn every law,
they do their best not to break a single one.
They are so scrupulous, that when it comes to giving a tenth of all they have,
they even carefully measure and weigh every herb –
you can almost see them with their scissors and a handful of chives,
cutting exactly a tenth off for God.
These guys are precise –
and have become so focused upon following the law...
that they’ve forgotten the other side of faith:
if an animal falls in a ditch on the Sabbath,
even though it’s suffering, they won’t break the law to help it.
If a person is needing help on the Sabbath...
well that’s not going to happen either.
They’ve forgotten to balance law with mercy and compassion.
They’re so focused on getting it right and following rules
that their lives have become completely focused upon the rules themselves –
in the process, they’ve lost sight of the One who gave the rules as a helpful way of living.

Into their ordered, incredibly regulated lives comes Jesus –
doing things differently,
and, in the process, challenging everything they hold dear;
challenging the old ways of doing things;
daring to suggest that perhaps some of these ways are no longer helpful...
introducing new things,
reminding them and everyone around him
that there are many ways of following God:
it’s less about laws and more about the heart.
And that’s the context in which we find our parable about
new wine and old wineskins,
of new cloth on old.

It’s easy to get into a routine,
to get comfortable:
I suspect that human beings, for the most part, have always been creatures of habit,
feel better when we know what to expect:
not everybody dreams of finding themselves at the centre of a surprise party.
We know what we like, and we like what we know.
But how does that work for us, as a community of faith?
How do we worship, and live, with that tension of both
worshipping the God of the ages
and the One who makes all things new –
the God of surprises,
who, not only brought the world into being,
but who overturned natural law and brought life bursting forth from a grave –
our resurrection God?
Sometimes, are we ourselves in danger in focusing only upon the familiar,
and what we feel is the only correct way to worship God and live out our faith,
that we slightly lose sight of the God who calls us to be his people?
And, just as an aside, it’s interesting when you read Paul’s Letter to the Galatians:
here’s a young Christian community –
and even so early on, this fledgling community
has very quickly gone back to the old ways of doing things.
It’s so very easy to do.
But, what might we miss about who God is
and how God impacts on our lives,
our neighbourhood, and our world,
if we stay only with what we know?

Some of those questions are what the Local Church Review process
over the last year have been trying to explore a little more deeply.
We’ll be unpacking some of the reflections from that long process
at our Annual Stated Meeting in May.
But some questions to ponder, as we think about Jesus’ parable:
In the face of a rapidly changing society
with very different patterns from even 20 years ago,
how do we stay faithful to that old, old story,
yet embrace new ways of telling it
that make sense to the Shona’s
and the Levi’s of the world,
as much as it does to us?
That’s the challenge that the wider church, and the local church face.

Given that presently there are nearly 250 vacant charges in the Church of Scotland –
the majority of them, rural –
with about a third of current ministers due to retire within the next 5 to 10 years,
our own old ways of doing things are going to need to change right around Scotland.
For us, as a community:
how do we face that challenge head on together?
Rather than just letting changes happen,
how might we be the ones who determine what changes might best be suited
to being God’s people here in this place?
How might we go about making room for beloved traditions,
leaving some unhelpful ones behind,
and taking on finding new ways
of being a worshipping community –
God’s people in a changing world?
And, how might we show the generosity of grace
to one another in the midst of change,
when some prefer expressing their faith in one way, and others, in different ways?
Oddly, though, these are questions that have been asked all down through the centuries.

We’ve some interesting challenges ahead of us as a community,
and possibly, that comes with a mix of fear, discomfort, and, sometimes, resentment,
but also -  I’d like to think – it comes with hopeful curiosity.
While change for change-sake is often pointless,
change for God’s-sake always has a point:
it’s always about learning to follow him,
and about finding ways to share the good news of the kingdom:
sometimes using tried and tested old ways,
and sometimes trying new and different ways.
We’re in this together, and God is with us every step we take:
we walk forward in faith,
and pray for God’s guidance,
as worshipping communities have always done down through the ages...
And as we do so:
to God be the glory –
in all our thinking, our speaking, and our doing, this day and every day. Amen.