A Fourth Church Sermon by Victoria G. Curtiss

December 31, 2008 | 7:30 p.m. New Year’s Eve Service

Singing a New Song

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Mark 2:18–22

Ask a group of quilters whether you should prewash new fabric before using it in quilts and you will get a mixed response. Some always prewash fabric to allow shrinking before cutting or to prevent bleeding of the colors. Others don’t prewash, preferring the stiffness of unwashed fabric for machine quilting or for a different look. But everyone agrees on one point: all the fabric used must be one or the other. You must not mix new fabric with preshrunk material, or it will become misshapen, perhaps even tear.

Jesus taught with this same example: “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.” Jesus used another observation about mixing old and new: no one puts new wine into old wineskins because the wine—as it continues to ferment, expanding as it releases gas—will burst an old wineskin, which has become dry and brittle. Put new wine into new wineskins, which still have their elasticity and can expand with the new wine.

This teaching came in response to a question Jesus had been asked: “Why don’t you and your disciples fast like the followers of John the Baptist and the Pharisees do?” Fasting, prayer, and almsgiving were practices of a righteous person. But Jesus not only didn’t fast, he ate with sinners, plucked grain and ate it on the sabbath, and also on the sabbath healed a person who had a crippled hand. He wasn’t fitting into their framework for a righteous person.

Jesus was saying that who he was and what he was about could not be comprehended in the old forms of religiosity. He came to inaugurate the new age of salvation, the coming of the reign of God. In Jesus something fundamentally new has dawned, something that revolutionized previous understandings of God and of being faithful to God.

Embracing new understandings of God and of ourselves is difficult for most of us. Resistance to change is depicted in a film called Doubt, which is currently in the theaters. It is set in 1964, when the reforms of Vatican II were just beginning to trickle down to the nuns and priests of the Catholic church. In the movie, the young, energetic priest tells the stern, traditional school principal that things are changing. Her response is, “Nothing’s changed.” The playwright and screenwriter, John Patrick Shanley, grew up in a Catholic school in the Bronx in the 1960s. He wrote in the foreword to his play, “The faith, which held us together, went beyond the precincts of religion. It was a shared dream we agreed to call Reality. We didn’t know it, but we had a deal, a social contract. We would all believe the same thing. We would all believe.”

Shanley goes on,

I still long for a shared certainty, an assumption of safety, the reassurance of believing that others know better than me what’s for the best. But I have been led by the bitter necessities of an interesting life to value that age-old practice of the wise: Doubt.

It is Doubt (so often experienced initially as weakness) that changes things. When a man feels unsteady, when he falters, when hard-won knowledge evaporates before his eyes, he’s on the verge of growth. The subtle or violent reconciliation of the outer person and the inner core often seems at first a mistake, like you’ve gone the wrong way and you’re lost. But this is just emotion longing for the familiar. Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind. Doubt is nothing less than an opportunity to reenter the Present. (pp. viii, ix)

We usually think of Jesus igniting people’s faith. But certainly much of what he did and who he was stirred up doubt—doubt and questioning of the old certainties once cherished. Letting go of the old is necessary to embrace the new. But letting go can be a struggle. One of our church members, a retired social worker, Jeanne Sullivan, in reflecting on our economy, recently said to me, “These are stressful times. There is nothing more stressful than having a fantasy one’s held fall apart.”

We may be strengthened by drinking deeply of the words of the prophet Isaiah. During Isaiah’s time, great events were on the horizon and beginning to happen, but the captives were unable to see them and get ready to respond to them because they were living in the past (see John Buchanan’s sermon “God in the Present Tense,” 7 January 1996). Isaiah spoke for God: “Remember not the former things, or consider not the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; it springs forth now; can you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:18–19).

The great Psalm 98 says it liturgically: “O sing to the Lord a new song.” The old song isn’t adequate any longer. The old song is a lament, an expression of grief and despair, loneliness and exile. The lamenting people are so into it that they are about to miss the new thing God is doing, which is their liberation, their freedom, their salvation.

The most hopeful news we can hear is that slowly, surely, subtly, surprisingly a new world is moving in on the old world, “with all the awesome impetus of God’s purposes” behind it (David Buttrick, Preaching the New and the Now, p. 1). The Bible calls this “the coming of the kingdom of God.” We ourselves regularly ask for just such an overthrow of the status quo when we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” (see Joanna Adams’s sermon “Old Grain, New Grace,” 3 January 1999).

God does new things. It is one of the most significant themes in the Scriptures. God’s plan for creation is not yet complete. God’s kingdom of justice and equality and compassion is coming but not yet here. God continues to bring it. God chooses us to be builders of the new heaven and the new earth. But often our anxiety over what was or is keeps us from giving our lives to the new thing God is doing.

Poet and theologian Howard Thurman wrote:

Few can escape the urge to join in the general chorus of the age that we have fallen upon evil days. There seems to be a strange, weary comfort in taking one’s place against the wailing wall. There is a . . . danger ever present in all anxiety. . . . It can so easily become a substitute for thoughtful planning and action. . . . Have you ever said with real feeling, “I must do something about drinking so much coffee” or “I am alarmed over the fact that I can’t seem to get down to business with my own personal life”? Of the great number of people who feel outraged over what seems to be a terrible miscarriage of justice, how many do something concrete about it? All the energy is exhausted in such remarks: “How awful”—“What a tragedy”—“Something ought to be done”—“What a shame.”

. . . Our emotional reaction to situations causes us to adopt measures that bring quick and temporary relief from the immediate pressures on us but do not have much effect on the situations themselves. . . . Somehow we must find that which is big enough to absolve us from artificial and ineffective methods for increasing welfare and well-being. This means the large view, the great faith, which will release the vast courage capable of sustaining us. . . . It is for this reason that a religious faith about life and its meaning becomes a necessity for all who would work for a new heaven and a new earth. (The Inward Journey, pp. 34–35).

As one year ends and a new year begins, let your doubt become loud enough to shake off that which is no longer true. Let your faith become large enough to look for how God is working in our midst. Ask yourself, What new thing does God want to do through you and in the world? What new life is seeking to break forth? What new song is God wanting you to sing?

Let us pray:

Eternal God, you are our beginning and our ending.
Open our eyes to the Present, to see your presence in every day of our lives.
As the source and fulfillment of all creation, carry out your purposes through us.
Give us grace to receive the new, to trust you with our lives now, today,
and in all the days ahead. Amen.