Three of the four gospels each includes a version of this morning’s Scripture lesson.
When the Holy Spirit moves not one, not two, but three Gospel authors – Matthew, Mark and Luke – to add the exact-same scene to their narratives, that’s a reliable sign that the Spirit is putting divine emphasis on a particular story for holy reason – and that you and I do well to pay particularly close attention its takeaway.
Our scene opens at dinner with friends in the house of Levi, a new convert to discipleship who – upon receiving Jesus’s simple, two-word invitation to “follow me” – leaves behind his day job as a tax collector to become the Lord’s full-time follower.
Making that kind of life-change is jaw-dropping, but it’s par for the course: When you come to faith in Christ, you don’t just conveniently add him to your old way of life. You don’t just custom-fit him into your old ways of living. Accepting the Lord’s claim on your life means nothing less than complete transformation of your heart and mind, behavior and priority. To prove the point, Jesus this morning provides a helpful lesson in sewing fabric and a fruitful tip for curating fine wine.
From the Gospel of Mark, you are about to hear the unvarnished Word of the Lord, which bears full witness to his authority and truth. Please receive it as such, and let us pray: Again, O Lord, we ask that you touch our souls and spirits by the interpretive work of your Holy Spirit, that she may open hearts and minds to fresh understanding and deeper faith. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together be pleasing and acceptable in your sight.
Since our lesson opens with a question about fasting, let’s unpack that spiritual discipline first.
In the Old Testament, God commands God’s people to fast on only one occasion: Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the Jewish holiday solely devoted to making amends for one’s sin. But beyond that single day, the practice of fasting is strictly voluntary.
At times, according to Scripture, the Israelites fast to seek deeper, sharper focus on the things of God. They withdraw from daily routine and exclusively devote themselves to holy contemplation and meditation. Other times, fasting expresses grief and mourning. When a loved one dies, or a great defeat befalls a nation, or a spiritual clock tolls a time of repentance, God’s people enact sorrow and lamentation in the tearing of their clothes and entrance to a fast.
Jesus has no beef with any of that. But he does take issue with the Pharisees, the uber-conservative religious right of his day. The Pharisees create new laws that the Lord never imposes on his people. The Pharisees create their own traditions and thrust them upon the Jews – supposedly mandatory behaviors like fasting at least a portion of the day twice a week.
Then they double-down on their zeal for righteousness, teaching the faithful that fasting is such a righteous endeavor so as to earn special merit and status for the one who “eats light” and limits his or her calories twice weekly, foolishly believing that God’s peace and grace are somehow earnable and achievable, faithlessly denying that such divine gifts are never-to-be-earned, always-undeserved expressions of God’s love and mercy.
Jesus sharply criticizes the Pharisees’s zealous hold on traditionalism that seeks to conserve things not of God’s desire. Perhaps you know such souls: People who absolutely love all things old and adamantly refuse to make space for anything new. Tenacious conservatism writ large: “If it’s new, then it can’t be good. If it demands I change, then count me out.”
On the other hand, perhaps you know the soul who believes nothing but new is good. Unbridled progressivism run amok: The old is always outmoded and outdated. And if you don’t like the latest fad, or if the trending shiny trinket of politics and culture doesn’t memorize, just wait. What once was new will soon be old and ready for replacement with something else, the latest in all that’s “new and improved.” Thus it takes great discernment, nuanced wisdom, and inspired knowledge – the stuff of the Holy Spirit – to know when to remain in place and when to move forward.
If you are a conservative, you we must always ask: Exactly what is it that I’m trying to preserve and, more importantly, what’s driving my desire to cling to the status quo? Likewise for a liberal: Exactly what is it that you’re trying to change, and why are you so passionate for change? And the vital, even-better question that threads both sides of the aisle: Does the tradition to which you so fiercely cling or so desperately want to change give glory to God or merely service to self?
To drive home the point, Jesus shares these two short parables – one about cloth, the other about wineskin.
“I know you Pharisees aren’t tailors, but you should know something basic about sewing,” Jesus in as much proclaims. “If you have a pair of pants, and you tear a hole in it, and want to patch it, you don’t cut a new piece from a pair of new pants. You don’t slice into the new pants and add a piece to the old pants without first shrinking the cloth of the patch.
“If you sew an unshrunk piece of new material into the old piece, the patch will shrink when you wash the pants. And when it shrinks, it will pull off the threads of the patch, and the hole in your pants before you patched them will be worse than when you started.”
Lost to history is knowing how closely the Pharisees listen to that illustration. But their ears surely perk up at the next, because Jesus now challenges something more important to them than sewing. Jesus threatens to cut off their wine with practical reality.
Old wineskins made of goatskin or sheepskin become stretched, because the wine within continues to ferment, thus straining the leather to its limit. If you put new wine in that old wineskin, the new wine’s ongoing fermentation produces gases that stretch the already-thin skins ever more. So, pour in new wine, and you’re going to lose the wineskin, because it’s going to break. And along the way you also lose the wine. But put new wine in new wineskin, and you preserve the fruit of the vine for future benefit and enjoyment.
It’s not enough to talk about some kind of new inebriating wine, some collection of new ideas. For without new wineskins – without changed systems and structures, transformation cannot be deep or lasting. It’s unquestionable folly to talk about new wine without new wineskins, to talk about new life without new order.
Sadly, Christianity has not always nurtured the sweet fruit of positive impact. So-called Judeo-Christian nations around the globe are often the most militaristic, most greedy, and most unfaithful to the teacher we claim to follow. Our societies – here and abroad – are more often based not upon the servant leadership that Jesus models but on the common domination of control that produces racism, classism, sexism, authoritarianism, and any number of other -isms that sprout deeper fear and greater brokenness.
That’s not to say our ancestors weren’t faithful, that our parents and grandparents weren’t good people striving to do the right thing, or that the Church hasn’t been a force for goodness and healing, justice and righteousness. But, with notable exception, we Christians aren’t producing radical changes in culture and institution, or operating all that differently than the world around us.
Indeed, Christianity has shaped some wonderfully faithful saints, and some of those righteous disciples live and move at arm’s length in our community, striving to fashion new wineskins to cradle the truths we hold self-evident. But the powers that be – and even the Church itself – resist their Spirit-led, Gospel calls to reform. Consider the much-beloved St. Francis of Assisi. In his Middle Age time centuries ago, mainliners marginalized him as a fanatic, an eccentric, a kook, an oddball, a trouble-maker. Which explains why no pope before Francis ever took that name!
Even today, too many Christians keep Jesus on a pedestal, worshiping a caricature on a cross or a bumper-sticker slogan, while conveniently avoiding what Jesus says and does. “We love Jesus,” yes, but more as a figurehead than as someone whose will awaits our imitation. It seems like the more we talk about Jesus, the less time and energy we devote to what he said.
We Christians too often preach a Gospel largely composed of words, attitudes, and inner salvation experiences. People say they are baptized, saved, “born again,” yet the Holy Spirit continues her uncomfortable probing: Is your ego in check? Are you actually following Jesus? Do you love the poor? The widow and the orphan? The outcast and the stranger? Are you patient and hopeful in the face of persecution?
This Scripture lesson of Mark, Matthew, and Luke – and the challenges to discipleship that it wields – have been much on my heart in recent weeks. Among other things, the Lord’s instructions on sewing and wine-keeping have served as the guiding Scripture for Session’s several months of conversation around church staffing. The Lord’s caution about the dangers of putting new wine in old wineskins led the elders and me to make the changes that this morning’s bulletin announcement explains.
The creation of a new position – coordinator of congregational life, filled by our new friend Lee Ann Knutson – is a good-faith effort toward new wineskin – a changed vessel in which to hold fast to the traditions we hold dear, a new structure for stewardship of the gifts we already enjoy and the new gifts we’ve been given. In addition to Lee Ann as coordinator of congregational life, we also welcome Becky Benjegerdes as our new volunteer bookkeeper, even as we express our appreciation to Jim Johnson for serving in that role for more than two years. The fullness of grace that lies within this new wine remains a mystery. But without a little mystery, what need is there of faith?
The mixing of old and new is risky business, and change always rends with anxiety. In the presence of old and new, facing the reality of chaos and uncertainty which are the measures of our moment, the safe option is to reject the new and stick with the old. There are no neat-and-tidy answers, no sure rule of thumb – other than this: Jesus affirms both old and new, even as he challenges both conservative and liberal.
So never be so smugly sure you’ve chosen the right path. But remember that the liminal space of in-betweens and already-but-no-yets is the earthly life to which Jesus calls us. And none of us stands alone in times and places of uncertainty and change. Be assured that the Lord continues to abide, and that you and I have skin in the game. For the Good News of the Gospel is this: The Kingdom of God inaugurated in the coming of Jesus and the resurrection of Christ is far greater than anything that comes before.
And thus we sing: Walk with gladness in the morning. See what love can do and dare. Drink the wine of resurrection. Joy and peace shall never end. Amen, and amen!
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message in worship on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, May 11, 2025, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by R. Alan Culpepper, M. Eugene Boring, Pheme Perkins, Richard Rohr, and R.C. Sproul inform the message.