On Levi’s Jeans and Wine
Church leaders spend a lot of energy on how to make things better. Worship services, Bible school programming, small-group ministry, and how to do livestreaming can quickly dominate meetings and haunt troubled minds searching for answers to the tiredness of congregations. So in my work with congregational leaders, I am beginning to ask a different question: “What is new and lifegiving for your congregation?”
Let’s get a little theology going here to help us. To do that, I think we can turn to the words of Jesus! Mark’s Gospel (as well as Matthew’s and Luke’s) relates an occasion when Jesus is confronted by people who are focusing their energy and their conversation on some seemingly important “why” questions. The story, which begins in Mark 2:18, prompts a provocative response from Jesus that could prove useful for us.
Some people – the church leaders of their day – come to Jesus asking, “Why do John’s disciples and the Pharisees’ disciples fast, but your disciples don’t?” In other words, “Why are your disciples not doing things the way we have always done things? You’re messing with tradition and our traditional way of doing things!”
Jesus’s response instructs them and us if we have ears to hear. In short, Jesus says there is always a newness that is present when he is present. And that newness cannot be bound up with oldness. He uses two examples:
You don’t sew a new, unshrunk cloth patch onto an old pair of jeans. If you do, when you wash it, the new patch will shrink while the jeans won’t. The patch will tear away.
You don’t put new wine that will expand and ferment into an old wineskin. If you do, the new wine will stretch the old wineskin (which has already been stretched to accommodate the last batch of wine!) and break. New wine is too precious to be placed in old wineskins; it needs a new wineskin with the capacity to stretch and accommodate the expanding, fermenting possibilities of the wine!
What’s the theology for us? God’s work – God’s good news of reconciliation and transformation – is always new. Like the line from Lamentations, “your mercy is new every morning,” God is always doing a new thing. Of course, the message of God’s newness is not new. God’s action in Jesus is anchored within the history of his death, burial and resurrection. Yet the possibilities of what that ancient-yet-new message means for women and men in our neighborhoods and cities, is always new.
Yet in many established churches, we continue to assume that our jeans and wineskins received from a previous generation are still capable of holding the dynamic, electrifying power of the gospel. That is sort of like pouring this year’s harvest of grape juice into an old wineskin. You might as well get out a mop and bucket, because you’ll have a really big mess in a couple of weeks!
Or, and I know I’m getting personal here, it’s like that pair of jeans I found in my closet from my college days. Those Levi 501s looked good on me in 1981, but the “new” me definitely needs a slightly different shape and, yes, a larger size!
If God’s gospel message is always new, then our task as persons called to partner with God, will be to discern new ways of carrying that newness. I have NO doubt about the capacity of God to transform lives, restore communities, and draw people together. But church leaders will need, with prayerful imagination, to ask what sort of vessel or article of clothing is useful and needed to carry this lively and life-giving message.
So you may be asking how we might begin to engage a prayerful imagination. In other words, what is the next step? Maybe Jesus gives us a clue on that point as well (isn’t it just like Jesus to actually help us?). In the prior paragraph in Mark 2, we find Jesus hanging out with – are you ready for this? – ordinary people! Rather than expecting all the ordinary people to show up at the synagogue, wondering why they don’t get out of bed on Sabbath to come to service, and then shrugging his shoulders about how bad things are going in the culture of his day, Jesus gets himself invited to a dinner party with the neighbors. And he listens and joins them in their world.
What does this look like for us? We tend to sit in our church buildings and in our church meetings and plot about how to get people into our building and into our carefully (or not so carefully) planned worship services and programs. And no one comes. Or, if they do, they never come back!
What if we did what second- and third-century Christians did? They absolutely refused to bring people to a worship service! (Yes, I said that.) Rather, they went and lived and worked and shared and prayed with people in their homes and in the streets and common places of the ancient world. Frankly, it is high time for Elvis and Christian folk to leave the building!
We just might begin to understand how and what the Christian practices of worship and discipleship and community might need to look like for our day. Remember, God’s gospel is ever new and very much alive. If what we are experiencing is deadness, then maybe it’s time to find some new wineskins!
