New Wineskins — And here's why

A sermon for Sunday, September 13, 2020, based on Matthew 9:9-17.

Would you pray with me?

God our Healer, who is making all things new, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presence known here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Have y’all ever picked out life verses, those verses of scripture that speak to you and have been with you all your life? It was a big thing when I was in high school and in college. I remember memorizing verses, writing them on index cards and taping them to my mirror, making collages out of them. And these verses, they were always something like Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future” or Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” or Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God,” or Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

And you know, Jesus has something like life verses in the gospel of Matthew. I mean, we see him quoting from the Jewish scriptures during his temptation and during the Sermon on the Mount, but there’s only a few times that he quotes scripture as is, without offering a reinterpretation, without out saying, “You have heard it said, …but I say to you…” One of these few scriptures that Jesus quotes with full approval, one of his life verses, if you will, is the one we hear him quote in our passage this morning, Hosea 6:6: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” He actually quotes it twice in Matthew, both here and in Matthew 12. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” is clearly important to Jesus.

Now, I know it’s not a competition, but oof. Jesus’ life verse really blows mine out of the water. I mean, Jeremiah 29:11 is nice and all, but it’s plucked out of the context of Jeremiah, a brief moment of light in the middle of the misery that Jeremiah and his people are going through, and it’s meant to apply to a nation, not to a person. Hosea 6:6, on the other hand, is a key verse in Hosea, a core part of the prophet’s teachings. Hosea, like most prophets, is preaching to Israel, asking them to turn back to God before destruction comes, because Israel has been putting its trust in foreign leaders and in going through the motions of faith, which has led to destruction and hurt felt most often by the vulnerable people in Israel. Hosea 6:6 gives us a vision of what the prophet and God long for. The full verse is, “For I desire steadfast love (which can also be translated as mercy) and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

I mean, this is powerful stuff. This is world-changing stuff. Even though these are the words of a prophet who was centuries dead by the time of Jesus, these words are words of newness, of renewal and new life. People who have been trapped by the corruption of others, by the violence of others, can be set free, if only the people turned to true worship of God: mercy, steadfast love, and knowledge of God.

This verse is important to Jesus and he makes it a part of how he lives his life. Jesus’ life verse shaped him more than any of mine have shaped me. And maybe that’s because all the verses I memorized, and most of the Christianity I was taught growing up, were about me. The verses I was taught to hold up as important, the ones that I wrote over and over again, were about God’s plans for me, all the things that I can do, my actions, and my mind. I’ve spent so much of my life as a Christian engaging in some magical thinking, assuming that if I learned the right verses and was patient enough, God would give me the things I wanted, would open the perfect door for me to walk through on my way to my dream career, relationship, family, home. Honestly and truly, the verses that I held closest to my heart taught me things about my heart, but not much about anything else.

But not Jesus. No, Jesus’ life verse is something that opens his ministry up wide, something that transforms him, his followers, and his world. Remember, last week, we had seen Jesus travelling to the Decapolis and learning something new about the people around him: it doesn’t matter that he’s casting out demons and healing people. If he’s disrupting the status quo, he’s got to go. So he goes back to his home, and continues healing, but I think that verse from Hosea had been bouncing around in his head for a while, because instead of going to the Pharisees, going to the people in charge of maintaining the status quo, he calls Matthew. He asks a tax collector, someone who makes money off of charging people more than their fair share, to be his follower.

And Jesus keeps at it. He eats with tax collectors and sinners. He doesn’t follow the religious rules of the day. He causes a commotion by who he decides to associate with. Now, my friends, Jesus would cause a commotion in our world today too, because Jesus would not be here with us in this place. He would not be talking with upstanding citizens and people who we all look up to. He would be with the meth heads, with people living on welfare, with the unmarried mothers who have children by five different fathers, with the person who’s been sleeping in their car or a tent out in the woods. If Jesus were here in the flesh among us today, he’d have the same words for us that he has for the Pharisees, because remember, the Pharisees were good, religious people of Jesus’ day. And friends, when we lean on the verses that I learned to lean on in my youth, we will always be the good religious people that Jesus won’t have much to do with.

Because Jesus isn’t focused on the things we are so often focused on. Jesus’ life verse isn’t “plans to prosper you,” it’s “mercy, not sacrifice.” It’s not, “I can do all things,” it’s “love God with all you are and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus is constantly focused on what is out there, because that’s who Jesus came to this world for: the rejected, the sinners, and not the included and the righteous. Jesus can see that what has been going on already, the people who have already been reached, the ones who are already comfortable, they don’t need his attention in the immediate way that others do.

And in that, Jesus is doing something new, and is calling us to something new as well, just as the prophet Hosea called his people to new action. And new is frightening, I know, and new is uncertain and new might not succeed the first time around. We have a whole Bible full of stories of the perpetual struggle God’s people have with newness. But Jesus knows that too, and so he reminds us: don’t put new wine into old wineskins, because that will burst the wineskin and spill the wine. Make a new wineskin for the new wine.

So what does that look like for us? How do we make new wineskins in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of such a divided time in our country, in the middle of so much difficulty? Well, through Christ who strengthens us, of course, but I think that maybe y’all and me have something in common. We have taken to heart parts of the Bible that have kept us focused on ourselves. And so before we go about making a new ministry or finding new ways to reach out or training ourselves to do new things, maybe we need to rethink the verses that we hold close to our hearts.

What was it Jesus said at the end of the Sermon on the Mount? Something about building on the solid ground his teachings and acting on them? Jesus offers us solid ground to stand on right now, when so much in the world seems like shifting sand. We just need to learn to see the world as he sees it, “orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right.” We can do that. I’m sure that we can. We just have to find the right verses, the ones that lead to new life.

Amen.