GOD OF NEW WINE
A sermon preached by
Rev. David C. Gregg
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, May 2, 2010

Texts: Mark 2:18 - 3:6; Revelation 21:1-6

I’ve been especially aware, lately, of a new turn of phrase that’s getting very popular among the minister crowd. Increasingly, I find myself in conversation with colleagues about how to “do church.” Everyone is thinking of new ways to do church. But you have to get the emphasis on the right syllable. You don’t “do church” the way you “do lunch,” as in, “Hey, let’s do church.” It’s more portentous than that, as in, “we have to discover new ways to do church.” It’s born out of a kind of humility, I think — we’re trying hard not to predetermine what all is entailed, whether we are talking about church structure, or about worship and liturgy, or about an informal set of cultural expectations. It also carries an overtone of something fundamentally, and helpfully, practical: let’s not tarry on theory, let’s do church — do something! — that will break through. Behind it all is a basic question of how. Something is broken, we think, with how we are doing church.

This has been going on for some time now, particularly in evangelical circles. In my back yard, the version of it that’s most well-known is Willow Creek. My snooty liberal friends and I are all alternately fascinated with and appalled by these megachurches. “Surely,” we say, “they must be a bunch of conscience binding, shallow thinking fundamentalists. Their appeal must be to the small minded and easily led — people who want easy answers,” we comfort ourselves. As their numbers swell, and ours shrink. But when we go to check it out, we have a great time. And everyone is lovely. And somebody thinks he saw his doctor there, and she’s neither small minded nor easily fooled. And they put on a great show, which is not all bad — How are they doing church?

A newer, more respectable version, from the point of view of me & my snooty liberal friends, is the Emerging Church Movement. They are devoted to exploring old liturgies — lots of incense and impressive music of many different kinds — and to reclaiming neo-orthodox theology — luxuriating in the mysteries of Christian doctrine — all blended with free-church forms of organization and authority. Intensely post-modern, intensely pragmatic.

And now, there seems to be an even newer wave, at least in Chicago. I’ve recently seen ads on the el train for two new churches — glitzy, expensive ads for new church startups. They give vague geographical directions, but a precise internet URL. The one I’m more familiar with is called the Urban Village Church. It’s a United Methodist church plant, renting space, and running a multiplicity of small groups in existing coffee shops and taverns around the city. No building. No central geographic location, but a very glitzy website, with urban hip testimonial headshots and accompanying sound bytes of invitation, tag lines, and video. And there it is right there on the website: they say, “Urban Village Church is a new community of people in Chicago trying to do church differently.”

It is a useful enough turn of phrase, and asks a helpful question. But as you might can tell, I’m also a bit doubtful that it asks the most important question. Some of my doubt is due to my own distemper. I’m as committed to sacred trendyness as the next guy, and I’m pretty clear that one of the things that riles me here is that these cats are claiming to be more trendy than I am. But even beyond that, I still have misgivings.

My misgivings start when I remember what the point of religion is. The point of religion is to — from time to time, once a week, a few times a day — remind you of what life is all about, and death, and the difference between the two. I say “remind you,” because I believe this is knowledge we all have, in deep ways, usually too deep to recognize, like an inaudibly deep, whale-song background noise of our lives. As we lead our lives, we need explicit, foreground reminders. That’s where religion comes in. We know, always and everywhere, that God is love — even when we are most tempted toward hatred and indifference. But it’s so hard to remember. Then Jesus comes along, and you see him healing and freeing and tenderly caring for and raising from the dead people who are just like you, and it becomes harder to forget. For those who can cultivate a life of faith, with reminders like that, it becomes decisively, transformingly, salvationally hard to forget.

And so the final measure of all of us who are doing church will not be in the sheen on our website or the cleverness of our worship. It will be in how we sit with the broken-hearted and grief-shattered; how we stand with the neglected, exploited, and oppressed; and how they leap and dance with all those who once were dead but now are alive again. That is, how well we live in remembrance that God is Love. I have no doubt that many of these church doers will do just fine. But as we put increasing amounts of energy into shining up how of church, are we missing the deeper question of what? Are the churches we are doing reminding us of the right things?

Jesus gives us this little aphorism you just heard read, and it gives me a way of thinking about all this. He teaches, “No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; rather, put new wine into fresh wineskins.” Goodness knows, we have neglected our wineskins, which is the truth that all my church doing colleagues have seized onto. We’ve too often drained worship of all the mystery, lamentation, and joy; we’ve too often shrunk the community into an institution, or, worse yet, merely a building. We do need to do church differently. We do need new wineskins.

The problem, of course, comes when we pour into these hip new wineskins the same old wine. That’s my deeper concern. It’s not just our worship that has failed us, but too often our image of the God whom we are worshipping. Not just our church-craft, but our vision of the world in which the church should, like a vital heart, beat. And no matter how much energy we put into doing church differently, we’ll squander much of it unless we find new ways to imagine that reality that is the end to which we direct all this doing. Yes, we need new churches. But we need new churches in the service of a new God. New wine for our new wineskins.

There are many examples of the way the dogmatic Christian image of God has failed us. Most famous, perhaps, is the inability of this image of a perfect and absentee God to affirm the value of the world and of embodied human life within it. I want to offer a couple more subtle example, but equally devastating ones for true religion.

First, insidiously, the dogmatic Christian vision of God leaves us perennially confused about what is truth, what is The Truth, and how we can know and experience it. God gave us reason, but we have been taught to mistrust what we see and what we know of the Divine. “You can’t reason your way to God,” we’ve been told. Why not? Because God is a mystery. But they don’t mean mystery in the true sense of the word; dogmatic Christianity uses the word mystery as a conversation stopper, a theological version of “because I said so.” Obviously, there are mysteries. Obviously, we cannot know God fully by our reason. Obviously, we cannot think our way to faith. But reason can help, making sense of things that can be made sense of. The things reason can tell us, we’ve been denied. And worst of all, the true meaning of mystery has nearly disappeared. The true mysteries are all mysteries of the heart. And the final Truth is not concept at all, but feeling — that innate feeling of the divine we’ve all been given. When Christianity can affirm the fruits of our deepest feeling, our intuitions of the Divine, we’ll be well on the way to pressing new wine from those fruits.

Second, dogmatic Christianity has left us nearly unable to confront the tragic aspects of our lives. Grief, loss, guilt, pain, rage, regret, self-negation, self-inflation, disappointment, despair — these are not all of life, but they are surely in all of life. As best as I can tell, this was supposed to be the point of Jesus on the cross — a revelation to us that God also participates in the tragedy of our lives; and a reminder that tragedy need never be the final word in the face of the resurrection power of God’s love. But it all got botched: Jesus became our sacrifice — “better him than us,” as two-thousand years of confused believers have silently prayed. And faith became a matter of “going thou and doing likewise” — if only you sacrifice yourself fully, because Jesus did, somehow tragedy will not matter. As a result, we’ve tried to act as though our losses were not real, our grief was mere weakness, and the tragedy of life only a temporary condition. Tragedy is not the last word; but it sure feels like a permanent condition to me.

So, I think we need new wine to put in our new wineskins. I’m not just talking about theology here, although theology is involved. We need new ways to make sense of the stories of Jesus and the stories of our lives — both the new ways we get from theoretical, academic theologians, and the new ways we can come up with in the lay theological school of the local church. That’s hard work, and it’s necessary work. Reason must do its part.

But this is finally, not sufficient, and theology is not my final point. My final point has more to do with existential commitment, and with courage: The courage to deny the power of false mystery; And more profoundly, the courage to explore the true mystery, especially the mystery of tragedy, walking into it with a God who cannot finally fix things but can and does grieve alongside us. This is not only hard brain work, but hard soul work, too. As a mad prophet of the 20th century theater once said it, “If three is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”1 I worry that we might be dallying with new wineskins, instead of pressing out the new wine.

This is, I see, a bit of a screed. I don’t mean it to be. I want to share good news, today. The good news is, in part, that this is all possible — that God is always with us, and so are our feelings of God, and so we can always work to feel the truth, even in the face of tragedy. And there’s more good news than that: all this work on new wineskins is indeed preparing the way for the new wine; we will have somewhere to put it, as we press it out.

And finally, it is good news because, as we drink that new wine and claim that new vision of God, we will begin to see more clearly the new heaven and new earth promised us in that most remarkable book of religious mysterious imagination, the vision we heard read this morning. John the Revelator writes, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with us as our God; we will be her peoples, and God herself will be with us; God will wipe every tear from our eyes.’” As Jesus offered his disciples the cup of the new covenant in anticipation of the fulfillment of this revelation, even in the tragic spilling of his own blood, he offered them a foretaste of that new heaven-earth. A foreshadowing of a God who cannot fix it — that bitter cup could not pass from Jesus — but will never abandon us in it, a God who will wipe away every tear. The cup of the New Covenant served at the new table in the New Jerusalem. A cup of new wine.

Amen. 

 

 

Home | Who We Are | Ministries | Calendar | Sermons | Links | Map | Contact Us