NEW WINE SKINS

Sermon Summary, 2/4/18, “New Wine Skins” (Mk 2:22; Jn 13 selected)

²² And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins. (Mark 2:22)

In Earnest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (a biblical title), the lost generation travels from Paris to Spain to see the running of the bulls and there celebrates the week passing wine skins among themselves squirting wine into one another’s mouths.

Not the wine skins Jesus was talking about.  In Jesus’ time, skins were used to ferment the wine.  Pressed in a vat, maybe a little yeast added, the new wine was poured into fresh skins pouches and sealed.  The new skins expanded as the wine gave off gases as part of the fermentation process.  But if old, used skins were used, they would burst instead of expanding and both the new wine and the old skin would be lost.

Jesus came not just to give us wine, but Brand New Wine which could never be placed in the old skins of the ancient religion.  Jesus gave us something brand new based on a New Covenant in his sacrifice, a New Command to love one another, a New Ethic, and created a New Movement.

How are we doing with Jesus’ Brand New thing?  Unfortunately, we have reverted to the old form, sprinkling a little Jesus on top.  We are all about Sacred Places instead of sacred people.  We hold fast to sacred texts and use them against one another, interpreting and guarding them by sacred men (almost always men), and use them to control special people instead of freeing them with the gift of salvation.

We say, “How far can I go without sinning?” (Old thinking)  We say, “I feel guiltier about missing church than how I might have treated someone.”  (Old thinking)  We say when we fail morally (and we all fail morally), “I am more concerned about what God will do than what I might have done to another.” (Old thinking)

Andy Stanley imagines heaven as a great balcony with Jesus, Paul and Peter watching from heaven, Jesus saying, “Can you believe what’s going on down there?  Love has been lost.  And you know, on the night before I died I showed them what love looked like.  I got down on my hands and knees and washed their feet, their stinking feet!  Then I made it simple for them, I told them “to love one another.””

Paul said, “I told them too; I even wrote it down.  I said, “The only thing that counts in faith expressing itself in love.”” (Gal 5:6b)  Peter said, “I wrote it down, too; “Love one another deeply from the heart.”” (1 Ptr 1:22b)

We all agree, we don’t want love lost.  We don’t want to put the new wine into old skins and lose both.  We need to understand “What does love require of us?”  That waits until Next time.