No one pours new wine into old wineskins. The wine would swell and burst the old skins. Mark 2:22

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1 February 26, 2006 Mark 2:13-22 New Wine and Tadpoles No one pours new wine into old wineskins. The wine would swell and burst the old skins. Mark 2:22 My freshman year in college we made wine in chemistry class. There are some boring things you do in class your freshman year. This was not one of them; this was fun. The only problem was -- in the excitement we drank our wine before its time. (Those of you who are old enough will remember that ad from years ago. I think it was Orson Welles, the aged and dignified spokesperson who declared that his wine company would: Sell no wine before its time. ) Well, we did. We didn t sell it; we drank it, and it made us sick. We weren t willing to wait for our creation to age properly. Please understand that what we were doing was perfectly legal. The drinking age was 18 in those days. We were old enough, just not smart enough. Wine has to age. There s a process of development and chemical change that has to take place in wine making. Until it s done, the stuff is just old grape juice. One thing that happens as the juice becomes wine is that the mixture expands. In fact I ve read that in the modern bottling of sparkling wines, such as champagne, the pressure can increase to 100 pounds or more per square inch. If the glass containers aren t strong enough they will explode like bombs. 1 In the ancient world, wine wasn t aged in vats or barrels or bottles but in specially sewn animal hides called wineskins. It was the winemaker s job to make sure his or her wineskins stayed fresh and supple. As the gasses given off by the wine increased the pressure inside, fresh skins had to expand. If the skins became hard and brittle (either from age or neglect) then the wine 1 Wine 101, Professional Friends of Wine web site,

2 2 would burst the skins. Then all you d have was a big mess. Jesus had this remarkable way of using the most ordinary aspects of life to make his extraordinary points. To him the whole earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. 2 He saw evidence of God s hand everywhere. In the days before refrigeration wine was as commonplace as coffee or soft drinks. Everyone drank wine, and everyone had a pretty good idea of how it was made. So when Jesus took a cup of wine and said This cup is the new covenant in my blood... poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins. 3 When he turned water into wine at a wedding feast, when he drank wine and ate food with despised people like a tax-collector named Levi, he was giving us a new symbol. In Jesus hand, a cup of wine became much more than something to drink. It became a symbol or sign of his inclusive, embracing, transforming love: The wine of the Covenant, the cup of salvation mellow, aged to perfection. Like Orson Welles? Not exactly. Jesus doesn t compare the church to perfectly aged wine. He called us new wine. And as I learned my freshman year, new wine can be a shock to the system. Ah, but sometimes the system needs to be shocked. Take, for instance, the question of who eats with whom. The polite people of Jesus day were scandalized by the fact that he broke bread and drank wine with some very unpopular people. The bible calls them sinners. We might call them criminals. You kids probably have some terms you use to describe people at your school who are just scary. These are not the sketchy 2 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. 3 Matthew 26:27-28

3 3 people; the oddballs. These people are bad. They will hurt you. (The kind of things the kids at Padua High said about Heath Ledger s character in Ten Things I Hate About You.) Jesus not only sits down at the lunch table with people like that, he singles out one of them to be part of his inner circle. Levi, the son of Alphaeus, is known by everyone in town as a sleazeball. Yet when Jesus comes by and suggests that he might want to drop everything, including his criminal activity and follow me, Levi not only follows, no questions asked, he invites the whole group over to his house for dinner. The cool people, the in crowd never offered Jesus that kind of hospitality. Instead they question him, call him out: Why doesn t he support their causes? Shop at their stores? Play by their rules? His answer is kind of sarcastic. Because they are such good healthy people, they don t need a doctor. Right? Then he reaches into his bag of illustrations and pulls one out that everybody will understand. He describes what he came to give as new wine. Yes, new wine can upset the system. Think, for instance, about the occasions we ve had lately to remember some of the pioneers and heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. The new wine of Jesus offered by people like Rosa Parks and Martin and Coretta Scott King upended the evil system of apartheid that gripped America for hundreds of years. In large measure, the Civil Rights Movement began as a question of who eats and drinks with whom. Slowly and consistently, at lunch counters and water fountains, restaurants and hotels all over this land the new wine of Jesus embracing, inclusive, transforming love proved stronger than the hatred of bigotry. But a bus in Montgomery and at the Woolworth s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina weren t the first venues for a taste of new wine. Nearly two thousand years earlier, a guy named Levi, and others like him -- people like Zacchaeus, Mary, Martha, Simon -- sat down to eat and drink with Jesus. The world has not been the same. 1Students from North Carolina A & T sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, NC in 1960.

4 4 New wine upsets the system, or it should. And we still have a long way to go. That s one reason why I think it s so important that Christians eat and drink together today. Last year our church spent nearly half a million dollars to repair the Fellowship Hall so that we can hold events, such as the ones we enjoyed last week in celebration of our centennial. That might sound extravagant, but it is absolutely essential. Gatherings such as these connect people from widely different social and economic backgrounds, as well as different political and theological points of view. As we break bread together barriers are overcome; strangers become friends. Eating together, like prayer, binds our hearts in Christian love. I ve also noticed that people who join in these kinds of events tend to stay around; they enjoy and grow in their relationship with Christ and with other Christians. Those who don t participate in things like potluck dinners, spaghetti suppers and Vacation Bible Schools often drop out. The bible says that the early Christians, Devoted themselves to the study and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 4 And they grew strong. The new wine that Jesus gives us is a new way of living, of being together. Sometimes it s as simple as sharing a bagel or a cup of coffee with someone of a different generation or background out in the courtyard, or taking a bag of snacks down to share with the workers and homeowners who are out there building their own houses on Habitat sites every Saturday, or taking a pot of soup to someone who s just come home from the hospital. These are the things that change the world. Make no mistake about it. Jesus is talking about change. The new wine that he s offering is an attitude, a way of being together, that destroys divisions and creates a new openness. The new wine of the gospel enables us to find the best in ourselves, in each other, and in the world around us. I think it was Aldous Huxley, the novelist, who said: I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is myself. 4 Acts 2:42.

5 5 Jesus is talking about change, and change, even when it is for the better, is always hard. The changes he initiated, particularly with regard to the question of who belongs caused all kinds of difficulty in his day. And they still do today. Change is never easy. But all around us we see the new wine of fresh beginning. Transformation, hope, acceptance are happening all around us. All of these have their source in the Spirit of the One who said: See, I am making all things new. 5 Sue Monk Kidd, the author of The Secret Life of Bees, grew up in the South. Her family had a housekeeper named Sweet who cared for Sue and her brothers as though they were her own. One day they were playing at their grandmother s house when they discovered a wheelbarrow full of rainwater. Swimming around in it were hundreds of tadpoles. Sue and the two boys ran inside and asked Sweet for jars to catch the creatures. As she was handing them out, Sue s grandmother appeared in the door. Girls don t catch tadpoles. she said with a laugh. Come along with me, Sue; I ll teach you to play Chopsticks on the piano. So while her brothers dashed off to the wheelbarrow, Sue ended up on the piano bench. A few days later Sweet and Sue started out for one of their frequent walks to the park. She loved to go there, but that day Sweet took her hand and started to walk in the other direction. Sue made a fuss but Sweet didn t relent. They had walked six blocks or so when Sweet stopped beside a ditch overflowing with water. Sue looked down and saw thousands of tadpoles wiggling wildly in the water! Sweet pulled a Mason jar out of her pocket, with nail holes already made in the lid. Inside her head, Sue heard her Grandmother s words: Only boys catch tadpoles. 5 Revelation 21:5.

6 6 Only boys. She hesitated, but Sweet nudged her with the jar. Soon she was elbow deep in the brown water chasing after her own batch of future frogs. Sue remembers it as one of the sweetest moments of her childhood, when she learned to push the boundaries and discovered a whole new world. Like the tiny tadpoles, she was casting off the old and changing, becoming something new. 6 Friends, our Lord taught us that change is not the enemy. At our best, his church is like new wine lively, changing, expanding, dynamic. God designed it that way. So it must be contained in wineskins, that is, in forms that are supple and yielding. Brittle, hardened forms will never do. Last Sunday, Dr. LaMotte reminded us that when this church was founded in 1906 the women who were members of this church couldn t vote, except in church. I hope we will always continue to lead that way to grow, and change, and always, always to bringing the new wine of Jesus inclusive, embracing, transforming love to the world. Dr. Susan F. DeWyngaert First Presbyterian Church Sarasota, Florida 6 Sue Monk Kidd, by Janet Ewart, Chopsticks and Tadpoles, a sermon preached at Calvary Presbyterian Church, San Francisco, CA, June 26, 2005.