Mark 2:21-22
I enjoy wandering through our wonderful building. I love our sanctuary with its simple design and clear windows so we can feel the sunlight inside and appreciate the world outside. Another favorite place is the third-floor Community Room where you can see the exposed timbers and the plaque that tell us by all reasonable guess, these are the timbers cut and hand-hewn for the building the 1734 meeting house.
You may remember it was built across the street (then a dirt path), and the cemetery grew around it. The second building, in 1834, was built using timbers from the original building and expanding the size. About 1892 the building was moved cross the street and sited just the other side of this wall. Then there were the building renovations of 1954, 1960, 1972, 1998.
So, the old hewn timbers from 1734 are still here. Like a New England farmhouse, our church building has been enlarged, changed, moved, reconfigured by each generation. But the original is still at the heart.
We can look back with gratitude at the people who labored so hard to build the first meeting house and the second meeting house, and who moved it across the road. We can thank Vinton Lewis and a host of others who gathered here during World War Two after a long shift at the ship yards and who pulled nails from the donated timbers that were then used to build the Parish House wing where Guptill Hall and the church offices are located.
But would we want to go back and try to live out our ministries in that original building? I wouldn’t! I like central heat and electric lights and the ramp and elevator and the sound system.
And frankly, I have no desire to go back to the particular way our forebears expressed the faith in those days either. One of so many things I love about our church is that the heart, the core is still clear, but we’ve adapted the language and the application in each generation. We haven’t rejected the old, old story of Jesus and his love; we’ve built around it.
We expect things to change over the decades, but often want that change to come so slowly that we don’t notice. The truth is we’re in constant transition. That’s the nature of life.
Some changes create feelings of loss, so we may resist them or, at least, deny they’re happening. They say the famous final words of the church are simply: “we’ve never done it this way before.”
However we feel about change I believe we have to find a place that both trusts the constancy of God and accepts the truth that change is inevitable. To both the old ways and new ways we say “yes!” God is so good and God is still speaking.
This has certainly been a hallmark of our congregation – formed as a place of worship, fellowship and service for the early European settlers who gathered here 280 years ago. Through depressions, recessions, wars, plagues, rivalries, church fights and financial crises, the good folks who’ve gathered here have kept the faith.
We haven’t always agreed and haven’t always pulled in the same direction. But we’ve prayed for God’s guidance and we’ve held to the conviction that when we’re open to the Holy Spirit we’ll find the right path. Through all the chances and changes we’ve confessed Jesus Christ as our center point and our guide.
Today’s Gospel reading lifts the old and new in two short parables – conventional wisdom in their day, but not so familiar to us. First, it says, when you get a tear in your robe you don’t throw it away or take it to Goodwill. You patch it. And everyone knows you don’t use new cloth, not yet shrunk. If you do, the first time you wash it the patch will shrink and tear the old fabric, making the problem worse.
Furthermore when you’re ready to ferment new wine you put it in a new leather wineskin. An old, used wineskin is brittle and set. The effervescence of the new wine will burst the old skin and everything will be lost. Put new wine in new wineskins.
Jesus may have been talking about the old laws of the covenant that couldn’t sufficiently contain the new law of love. He may have been saying that rigid ways can’t stretch enough to contain the movement of the spirit. But clearly he was saying that new forms and new vessels are part of God’s creation – not enemies that stand in opposition. In the first century he, himself, was a startling change that many rejected.
Our perspectives do change over time, but he is the center, the constant, the unchanging example of God’s life-transforming presence.
Our congregation has moved away from that rigid orthodoxy and has faithfully found that place where we hold Jesus at the center – the same yesterday, today, and forever – while still inviting each other to stand in our own place. We have learned to testify to our own experience of Jesus’ presence and still be open to what others have experienced. We have learned that God’s light and truth always exceed our language, our worship, our grasp.
Some Christians – especially conservatives who seem to get all the press coverage – will tell you that you have to experience Jesus from their point of view. If you stand in a different place (still looking at the same Jesus) you’re wrong. They may even try to tell you that you’re not really a Christian.
Imagine you’re wandering through the Portland Museum of Art and go over to that breath-taking marble sculpture in the rotunda, called the Dead Pearl Diver, sculpted by Benjamin Akers in 1858. You can move around it and view it from every angle. You can look at it in the morning light or late afternoon shadows.
You can get close up or far away. You can stand in different places and experience the same reality in quite different ways. If twenty people see the same sculpture each will have a different experience of the same reality. Wouldn’t it sound ridiculous if someone told you that your perspective was wrong unless you stood exactly where they told you to? Wasn’t it the master sculptors desire that we could stand in many places and have different perceptions?
That’s how I understand Jesus: as a three-dimensional model of the God-filled life. You decide where you’ll stand in relation to the center point. Then imagine that you go to the gift shop and get a postcard of that sculpture and take it home. Now you have a two-dimensional likeness of the real thing – you can’t walk around it or change your perspective. That’s been determined by the photographer.
In a similar way the stories of the real Jesus were written down, and what we have is the perspective of those authors. Even the Bible is two-dimensional. And discipleship can remain that way until Spirit gets your attention and wakes you to the wonder.
Across these 280 years, across the generations, we’ve learned we can stand in different places. As long as we’re keeping Jesus at the center, our diversity is a blessing not a burden.
I think that’s the way we can be faithful to scripture, open to change, confident in the presence of God, and excited about following Jesus. And I think that’s the common thread that keeps Jesus at the center then and now, through all the ages and all the changes.
As the composer and author Isaac Watts wrote in a beloved hymn, paraphrasing Psalm 90: “Our God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, be thou our guide while troubles last, and our eternal home.”