New and Old (Ninth Sunday after Pentecost)

Sermons on YouTube…

As many of you may remember, refreshing the bathrooms in the main building here at Prince of Peace was one of the main priorities the congregation identified for the Feast Fund at our Annual Meeting back in January.  And recently, a committee has been formed to begin working on that.

Purely coincidentally, in these past few months, I’ve also been at work at home renovating my guest bathroom.  It’s really the last room in the house that desperately needs to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the 80’s, and I decided that now was the time.  I’ve also now got incentive to get it done, since it’s the only bathroom in the house with a tub to bathe the doggie!

And like any decent home improvement project I get involved with, this one has already required me to:

• Buy new tools! And as a few of you may know about me, this is one of the reasons I do new projects – I get an excuse to buy new tools!  New tools are great, because they often allow me to do things I couldn’t do before.  And, most importantly, they usually allow me to develop new skills I didn’t have.  And learning new skills is one of the things that keeps projects interesting and fun…

• Use skills and tools I’ve had for years.  One thing I remember learning about developing skills both personally and professionally, is that you should try to find tasks that push you to get outside your comfort zone, but not so far that you become frustrated or overwhelmed.  To do that, you start with a project where you know you have many of the basic skills and tools you need to accomplish the task.  And so far in this project, I’ve used skills I’ve had for decades, and I take note when I use tools that were my grandfather’s, and have been in use since before I was born…

• Adapt both the new and old techniques to new situations and applications. After all, no project is exactly the same as the last one, even though in this case I’ve done work on the other bathrooms in my house.  And, you never know what “interesting” things you’re gonna find that the contractors who built the house did until you open up the walls!  And that means adapting to situations that you might not have planned on…

Now, I actually really enjoy my home renovation projects for all of these reasons.  I get to buy new tools, and learn new techniques.  I get to practice old skills and even use some of my grandfather’s tools.  And I feel a deep sense of satisfaction when I’ve been able to adapt both the old and the new to address an unexpected situation.

And yet, at the same time, I realize as I’m going through any project that I often resist all of these things at some point!  There are times when, in spite of the fact that I know better, I resist:

• Buying the new tool, or using the new technique.  After all, I am cheap and even when I know I should buy the new tool, I sometimes don’t want to spend the money.  And at other times, the urge to just do something the way it was done before gets in the way of seeing that there really is a better way now…!

• Doing things the old way – because often, the old way is difficult, and time consuming and messy!  I really want the magic tool that makes something quick and easy.  And even when my extension courses on the University of YouTube insist that the old way is actually what’s needed, I still keep searching hoping there’s an alternative…!

• The whole process – this is usually at the end of the project, where I’m happy about the new skills I’ve learned and the new tools I’ve acquired.  And now, I sit back and think I’ve got both new and old tools and skills and now I should be set for anything that comes along… until the next thing, when the process starts all over again.  And sometimes, I wish I could just coast with what I have and what I know…

I suspect I am not alone in these feelings.  And I suspect that Jesus’ first disciples shared them as well.  Throughout the past chapter, Jesus has been teaching his disciples with many different parables.  They are indeed about new things that Jesus is bringing about.  But at the same time, they’re rooted in ancient images and the same God the disciples have known since birth.

So at the end of all this, Jesus asks them, “have you understood all this?”  And they answer emphatically, “Sure!  You bet!”  And every time I read that, I think to myself, “you guys gotta be kidding!”  The next few chapters will show that they clearly don’t, at least not entirely.

Yet I think these disciples are at the point where I am when I finish a project.  The disciples have indeed learned some new things from Jesus.  And they’ve been refreshed with some of the old things that they should have known from long ago.  And now, they figure they’ve got it all!  They’re done.  And they can handle life as disciples of Jesus from here on out.

And so Jesus adds this comment: “every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”  At first glance, that doesn’t seem to make sense with any of these preceding parables.  But I think what Jesus is telling his disciples, and telling us, is that following Jesus is about continuous growth and learning and practice.  It requires what is old, and what is new, and the ability and willingness to put those things together to address new times and different situations.  And that’s true for our individual lives as Christians, as well as our life together as a congregation.

And so these words of Jesus are sort of a cautionary reminder that, as we move into the future, we need to resist the temptations I so often face when I’m working on home projects.  That is, to be aware of when, in spite of knowing better, we might resist:

• Using or learning a new skill or a new way of doing something; sometimes, especially lately, it’s not clear if there is a new or better way to do something that hasn’t been working well. And at those times, it’s often easy to default to “the way we’ve always done it… (that’s often a temptation I find for myself both at church and in my personal life…) But sometimes, what’s new is what needs to be pulled out of the treasure…

• Doing something the old way, because frankly, it’s difficult, time consuming and messy; It’s also sometimes the case that we get enthralled by the “new and easy” way to solve a complex problem.  After all, there’s a multi-billion dollar industry of companies telling us that weight loss is simple and easy if we just buy their product.  And those things are tempting because they’re always easier and faster than “eat less and exercise more”… But sometimes, the old is what needs to be pulled out of the treasure…

• Adapting both the old and the new, in different ways and in other combinations, if that’s the way to address a challenge we haven’t been through before.  Note that the householder pulls both the old and the new out of his treasure, and that necessarily implies that they’re used together in ways that they haven’t been used before; that’s sort of what we were doing at VBS this month – there were some new things, but a lot of what we did was simply to put things together differently and modify how we did them… And more often than not, what’s needed in an increasingly changing world is the ability to take what’s old and what’s new and put them together in new and creative ways…

Just as in any area of our lives, Jesus’ call to be his disciples means constantly learning new things, honing old skills and being willing to reapply and adapt all of those things to new times and different situations.

And that’s why it was important for the first disciples, and it’s important for us, to always be open to the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives and the new things that Jesus is showing and teaching us.  It’s important for us, as it was for the first disciples, to practice the ways of following Jesus that we may have known from childhood.  And it’s most important for us, as it was for Jesus’ first disciples, never to think that we’ve got it all figured out, but instead be willing to creatively adapt and reapply the treasure of the Gospel to new times and different situations.

Amen.