Friday, February 24, 2023

Today’s Scripture Reading 
Mark 2:19–22

Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.

“No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.” (NRSV)

Reflection

For many years I didn’t understand the new wine in old wineskins analogy. I grew up in a faith tradition that didn’t permit alcohol consumption, so we didn’t spend a lot of time discussing wine or wineskins. We just pretended wine didn’t exist. As an adult I switched to a different faith tradition, and as I participated in church committees, the old/new wine example became abundantly clear. It didn’t matter what committee I served on — from congregational life to mission to personnel to property — there were plentiful new ideas and plenty of reasons to stick with what we had always done. A committee member would excitedly explain a new idea, and people would be swept up in the excitement until ... we realized that something else would need to be dropped or dissolved. Then we would shift to discussions about legacies and traditions.

It would be much easier if we could classify people according to whether they were new-idea people or legacy people, but we are much more complicated than that. Spend enough time in curious conversation with someone and you’ll find that we are all a mixture of both.

There are times when we need to dismantle an existing program, ministry, or system in order to make room for God to work through us in new ways. As Presbyterians, we call this being reformed and always reforming according to the Word of God. The hard work of loving one another means attending to the movement of the Spirit and attending to the grief felt when people lose the way things used to be. Jesus taught of a new way of being, but he did not discard people because they valued legacy and tradition.

Prayer

God, inspire our dreams to the new ways of being your church. Expand our empathy with those who are grieving loss and the patient grace to bring everyone along together. Amen.

Written by Andrea Denney, Executive Director of Operational Ministries

Reflection and prayer © Fourth Presbyterian Church

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