3/3/68

Scripture: Luke 5: 27-38.

The postman on our route knows just how many days of winter are left until spring! He, and all the other postmen of our city, have carried the mail from house to house, through rain and snow and slush and sleet -- in mild weather when the sun moderates winter’s severity and in wild weather when wind and chill and ice make only the indoors nice. And so, some of us who live in this clime get eager for spring! An older member of this congregation, Miss Ella Hasbrouck, used to tell me that she always felt that the worst of winter was over when February came, for after that it was easier to look ahead to spring! Of course one could push it farther back than that by; reasoning that, with the passing of December 21st, the days thereafter get steadily longer! At any rate, I now join the postman in celebrating that spring is only some 18 days away; hooray, hooray!

It is easy to become enthusiastic over the approach of spring. Those who plan to visit our nation’s capital wax expectant if the trip comes at a time when one may see the cherry blossoms and forsythia in full color. I am told that visitors in Korea note the long, mild, flower-blessed lingering of spring. Even in a summer climate like that of Honolulu, one feels that nature reaches for a peak of loveliness as the spring pushes every flowering tree and shrub to prepare its loveliest blossoms for the summer.

During my youth in South Dakota, I had an unusual teacher at high school in the person of Grant O. G. Rahn. He had started his adult life in business, but had such a terrific desire to teach young people that he joined the English department of Huron High School. His introductions to some of the gems of English literature were an inspiration. He required every member of one of his classes to memorize, and repeat before the class, Hamlet’s “Soliloquy” from the Shakespearean drama. When we had all done our awkward best, we asked Mr. Rahn to recite the “Soliloquy.” He took a moment or two to enter into the mood, and then gave us a version of it that, I am sure, would have done great credit to the best of Shakespearean theaters.

I think it was that same teacher who thought it well at least to introduce his pupils to a bit of Chaucer. And because of that teacher’s love for it, I find the sound of a few lines from the Prologue of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” still haunting my ears. “Whan that Aprille with hise shoures soote the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote and balked every veyne in swich licour of which vertue engendered is the flour;” ... If anyone here present knows how to read and pronounce Chaucer’s English the way Chaucer spoke it, I hope I may be forgiven for my pronunciation!

At any rate, Chaucer seemed to wax poetically eloquent over the way March severity gives way to April’s sweet showers, encouraging the running of the sap of life in tree and vine and shrub until flowering bursts forth again. (My “translation” is far from literal, but I think I get the meaning, which I want to share with you!)

Now my reason for all of this comment thus far today is simply to call attention to one meaning of Lent. The word “Lent” is simply a contraction of the Anglo-Saxon “lenten” which suggests the lengthening of day --- in other words, spring. But, of course, this lenten -- this spring -- is the season of preparation for Easter in all branches of the Christian Church -- the Western and the Eastern Catholic, and the various Protestant bodies. We remind ourselves of the forty days of fasting and preparation of our Lord for his ministry. We recall his later determination to go to Jerusalem at the time of the Passover. And we try not only to recall his sayings; to receive his teachings; but to apply them to our own situation as we live in another pre-Easter season in 1968. I hope you will join with many others on Wednesday evening, when we shall see an excellent motion picture version of the earthly life of Jesus as it is recounted in the gospel according to Matthew. His teachings become more vivid when we see a competent actor’s interpretation of Jesus’ face at the same time we hear his words.

For the Lenten sermons which I hope to bring to you this year, I want to rely on some of the parables of Jesus --- those “stories with a point” which he told so briefly and so skillfully. That parable to which I will refer today grew out of his experience after he had called Levi, a tax collector, to come and follow him. Levi had said “yes.” He had left the tax business to others and had come along with Jesus. In fact he got up quite a dinner at his house -- Luke says “feast.” There were a lot of people there -- other tax collectors, quite a lot of people who were commonly called sinners, some of the scribes and Pharisees who were awfully particular about every detail of the religious law of that time. And Jesus was criticized by the scribes and Pharisees because these followers of his were feasting together and Jesus himself was eating with these common, ordinary, sinners --- a thing which just was not done, you know! Jesus’ answer to the criticism was that it was natural for his followers to want to feast a little while he was around --- it was like a wedding occasion with the bridegroom present. (People made a lot of those occasions). As for some of them being sinners, that didn’t bother him a bit. He said he came for people like that.

Then he told this story --- this parable. “No one,” he said, “would tear a piece from a new garment to make a patch on an old one. For if he does, he spoils the new garment; the new patch does not match the old garment.” Further, he said, “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins: if he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins.” Jesus refers here to the wine maker’s custom of putting freshly made wine into a fresh bag made from the skin of an animal to keep it and carry it and store it and age it.

This parable seems to plunge us into a consideration of the tensions of our time between the new and the old --- the old versus the new --- a tension as ancient as history itself. The tension right there, at that feast which Levi was having served in honor of Jesus, was between the old, literal interpretations of religious requirement, and Jesus’ apparently new interpretation. This tension eventually cost the Pharisees their soul and Jesus his mortal life. Why should there continue to be this tension in every generation? Are not the old and the new inseparable in God’s economy? Do they always have to come into collision and conflict? Can’t the old and the new exist in cooperative, constructive peace as we build life?

One collision between old and new is written through all the New Testament. And we of the Christian churches ought to be tremendously concerned about it. The people who gave Jesus the most trouble were the “religious folk,” the church leaders, the “experts” of the time. These scribes and Pharisees knew more about the religious law -- after reading it, writing it, discussing it, memorizing it, teaching and preaching it -- than anyone else. Jesus had been trying to interest them in the great new concept of the Kingdom of God -- a kingdom of understanding and fairness and compassion and encouragement for all sorts of persons. But these experts brushed this aside. They wanted to argue the pros and cons of fasting and correct ceremonials. So long as they were devotees of that kind of oldness, they had outlived their usefulness to the newly unfolding Kingdom of God. Speaking in a kind of sorrow rather than in anger, but nevertheless quite firmly, he said quite simply, “God can not use you in the building of His kingdom. You are blinded by your own conceit; stifled by your righteousness; so enslaved to your way of doing things that God can not get through to you with anything more. He can not get you even to hear about the kingdom, let alone to volunteer to serve and to share in its coming.”

It was a fearful judgment to pronounce on these leaders of the old viewpoint. But Jesus felt that it had to be said. He must have said it with regret. For these Hebrew people, under leaders with honest purpose, had been the rock against which Persian, Greek, Egyptian and Roman despots beat in vain as they tried to enslave Israel. Their leaders had been strong, courageous, faithful, sincere; and they had fought to the death for the right to worship God.

And yet Jesus saw that, though God might have used them in the past, He could not entrust the future to them in the creation of His great new kingdom. For they had lost the spirit of their faith somewhere in the forms of that faith. They couldn’t believe in the sincerity of anyone who differed from them in unimportant little things --- who did not fast at the appointed times, who sometimes ate bread without ceremonial cleansing of hands, who had fellowship with sinners, who let his followers gather food on the Sabbath day, or did anything else at variance with the laws of the Sabbath.

After all Jesus advocated no tampering with, nor changing of, the solidly tested Ten Commandments. It was the minute rules and interpretations of them that he sometimes brushed aside -- because these things were getting in the way of the necessary new.

Before going too far into the area of conflict between the old and the new, we ought to note where the old welcomes the new and the new builds upon the old. A few years ago a minister was talking with a young chemist of his acquaintance. The young man had just taken employment with a great industrial concern. When asked what he would be doing, the young chemist replied, “I will be working with a group that has no definite assignment.” “What are you supposed to be doing, then?” the minister wanted to know. “Come up with something new -- some new technique, some new process, some new product --- perhaps a new industry,” he answered.

And this called to mind the man who perfected a new process in the manufacture of pigments. His discovery made obsolete millions of dollars of newly-installed equipment in the plant of his employers. Did they fire him for destroying the usefulness of that equipment? They did not! They made him a vice president! Science and industry and business are looking for people with new ideas, or the promise of new ideas. That is why they are such a driving force in the modern world.

Would that a similar friendliness to new ideas could be found in some other areas in life --- not change for change’s sake, but mutual respect between the old and the new, rather than ceaseless conflict in areas like home, religion, schools, and government. Probably every parent faces this tension. Our most trying problem is not in loving our children, or giving them proper nurture; or teaching them good manners --- though these are not always smooth! The most trying challenge is to recognize when to let go of our child enough so that he can make his own decisions, and to honor them --- to do his own thinking and respect his ideas --- to make some of his own mistakes without plaguing him with “I told you so.”

There is no scale or schedule which tells parents when to let go

--- if there were, we could do a thriving business in distributing copies of it, for it would be very widely used! Likely we could begin it much earlier than most of realize; and we could proceed with more peace and joy than most of realize if we begin training our children in the disciplines of freedom almost as soon as they are able to walk. Then it is easier to accept their later ventures in tastes, values, and choices. And there is a more reasonable hope that they may have some appreciation of the tastes and values that we developed and the choices we made. Similarly, one of the basic problems in our form of government is in the relationship between the old and the new. The tension involves us in continuous changes in fundamental policies and institutions.

Some time ago, a group of business and professional leaders met in Philadelphia to attempt a forecast as to what lies ahead of us for the next 50 years. They agreed on 3 things: (1) We face a strange period of change and expansion in every area of life; (2) it will be a period of untold danger to all people; (3) it will be a period when religious idealism must guide the thought of men of business and industry if we are to survive. We are caught up in “the wave of the future.” If we are wise, we will seek how to go along with it.

In our national life some of us have seen, in our life time, the effective rise of the labor movement until the will of labor is a powerful force in the whole life of our society. No one, whether worker or manager, expects the clock or calendar to turn back. And all of us hope to see a growing sense of responsibility to the whole of society worked out in the labor movement.

When we turn to the conflict between the old and the new in the field of religion, we have cause for concern. For, while science places a premium on change and rewards it, religion in the churches tends to fear change, and penalizes it. Impatient young minds sometimes attack religious organizations as the last stand of reactionary conservatism. This appeared to be the case in the days of the prophets --- Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos. Jesus found it so in his day --- as we have seen in his encounter with the Pharisees and scribes who followed him, hoping to discredit him in the eyes of ordinary people who were attracted to his teaching. These faithful “preservers of the old” would not hear Jesus out in what he had to say. Whenever he criticized a hallowed belief or custom, they blacked out. They made up their minds that he was dangerous --- that he must be silenced in one way or another. He must have had them in mind when he said, “You have eyes, but do not see; and ears, but do not hear.” [Mark 8: 18]. And so it went throughout his ministry --- this tension between the old which they preserved, and the new which he preached. His effort was to bring forth the new out of the old which he treasured and in which he had trained himself from boyhood.

And the old wineskins of Judaism could not hold the new wine of Paul’s faith in Christ. For the first part of Paul’s public ministry, he fought the battle for freedom in the synagogues of major cities all over Asia Minor --- even into the city of Rome itself. He and other apostles fought a good fight, and they lost on this point. The old expelled the new. Judaism of that day disowned the Christians and the separate Christian church was forced into being.

The old wineskins of the medieval Christian church would not hold the new wine of the Reformation, though men like Luther and Calvin tried to stay in the church of their fathers. John Wesley managed to stay in the Church of England. But the old wineskins of that church were unable to hold the Wesleyan movement among common people. And so when Wesley died, he was hardly buried before his followers accepted the fact that they had been expelled in spirit, and set up a church of their own, which became the Methodist church.

The church of our own day is in ferment. I, for one, am eager to hear what a couple of lay voices in our Union Lenten services are going to bring us by way of understanding the tensions between the old and the new -- an appreciation of the past and a hope for the future.

Most of the changes in church life come about with some tension between the old and the new. The struggle breaks out in the life of almost any local church. Perhaps this is illustrated in a church where the new Revised Standard Version of the Bible was to be introduced some years ago. In the membership of that church was a man who prided himself on belonging to a manufacturing firm that was always bringing new products into existence. His company poured millions of dollars into processes by which new articles were developed. But this same man really “flipped” when the RSV Bible hit the market. His indignation knew no bounds. He opposed it in principle and wanted the church’s Sunday School to have no part of it. The pastor of the church talked earnestly and persuasively with him; explained the competence of the scholars who had made the translation; called attention to the fact that half a million dollars had gone into the project (That sobered him for a moment!) and emphasized that the best manuscripts available had been consulted in making the translation. But the man still shook his head sadly. “I like the King James version better, even if it isn’t as accurate as the new one,” he said. He never gave up his conviction, even though his church went right ahead and used the new Revised Standard Version.

One of the significant directions in which the church is moving is toward more unity of spirit and, in some cases, toward corporate union. No one can see the end result of the changes that begin to stir in today’s life. But all of this new wine had better be put in fresh wineskins lest the Lord of the Church should be saying to us, in our time, “God can’t use you. You have eyes but don’t see; and ears, but don’t hear; and hearts, but do not feel the pulsings of God’s purpose.”

We need not blame the Pharisees for loving and believing in the customs that had stood the test of hard times. We recognize that they were honor bound to protect those customs and beliefs against critics who would discard them. We need not question their testing of Jesus, nor their testing of any person who seemed to treat lightly the time-honored institutions of faith. But we do blame them for not giving Jesus a fair hearing; for refusing to face the meaning of the kingdom of God; for their apparent belief that God could work only through them as they were! We do blame the Pharisees of that time, and of our time, who fail to distinguish between attacks from outside and deep ferment within the church. Jesus was no outsider. He was deeply schooled in the heritage of their faith, and ours. But he brings new light upon both.

The old must be adaptable to change. For the new can not be stopped any more than one could cap a volcano.

When Pastor Robinson of the Pilgrim Fathers was strengthening them for their move from Holland to an utterly new world, he gave them counsel which you and I can use as nourishment for our spirit, when he said to them, “God hath yet more light to break forth from His Word.” And that is a word of blessing.

Amen.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, March 3, 1968.

Also at Kalahikiola Church, February 23, 1969.

And also at Waioli Hui’ia Church, February 27, 1972.