Luke 5:33-35
And they said to him, "The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink." And Jesus said to them, "Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days."
God doesn't always follow a pattern or methodology. Especially ours. God operates through a diversity of gifts and a diversity of people in a diversity of operations. Different methods, same God. At best, all any of us can be is an instrument to which God embodies his power to make of it whatever he wills. Earlier we saw Jesus touch a leper as he healed him. In other instances, Jesus doesn't touch the leprous persons, yet they still have their healing. Even though nine out of ten weren't openly and thoughtfully thankful for it. When we pray and when we fast, though it is we who do it, and who decide to do it, nevertheless it is not our will being done, but God's will that is acting through it. Or at least, in a perfect world, that's as it should be.
God is not a genie in a bottle that we can rub with our rosary rubbings, or manipulate into performing our will with our many intercessory cohorts. God is not forced to reply because of our many saintly friends. God is not coerced into giving us our daily bread because we've danced to a methodical man-made tune. In fact, if we were going to apply a method to prayer in some repetitive methodical way; for instance, as many do, we sign off on a prayer with the obligatory "in Jesus' name"; I would say we might better say, "in your will not mine, thank you Jesus". At least then we'd be following Jesus' own pattern.
I admit to a prayer pattern of my own, I confess that I do have one. Because I have long felt that the perfect prayer is short and sweet, and it goes like this: "Father forgive me sinner that I am" It's the prayer of the tax collector. The prayer that Jesus said helped the man found peace with God. And he said that about the tax collector juxtaposing that man's prayer against the prayer of a Pharisee, who was exulting himself in his voluminous public prayers. What you need to know about these men is it was their custom to stop among the crowds of people and just begin praying. So that the people would be in awe of them and their prayerfulness.
I think if there's anything that frightens me when I come in prayer to God, it is that he's possbily rolling his eyes or shaking his head at me. I feel this way because I always want to come to him in a genuine and sincere way. I don't want to come off as false and disingenuous in my recognition that I fully rely upon Him for everything. And I think in part I feel this way because there was a time when I mocked him in prayer. When I operated out of an agnostic spirit, and I flagrantly mocked him in prayer. I was fool and he didn't give up on me. Maybe he took it as a challenge. If so, he won. I want Him to know that I need Him in my everything. I want to hear from Him every day. And I want to share what I've heard from him so that He'll get the glory. I'm not really praying for my own consumption. I have no real need beyond all that He gives to me already before I've ever asked for anything. When I pray, I'm acknowledging His will and his promises and his provision.
I often say to Him in thanksgiving, "Thank you for what you've done, what you are doing, and what you will do". I have no need to give him a list of my needs because he already knows them, so I give him my heart and my head and my time. I give him everything and I leave it up to him to do with it as he wills. I truly believe not my will, but yours, Lord Jesus. Amen to that. "Lord if you are willing" Well of course he's willing. He comes to those who love Him, and he gives them what they need. But He doesn't always do it the same to all. One blind man receives his sight from a word, another gets spit, and mud rubbed into his eyes. One lady touches the hem of his cloak, and her disease is removed from her, and another is not healed. There is no pattern to any of it. Why is that? Because the Lord knows his creation and he knows their tendency to create institutionalized religion. And he knows that institutionalized religion creates apostasy and idolatry so that they can create for themselves a method of self-righteousness.
Jesus said, "I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." (Luke 5:32)
And Jesus explains this problem having to do with mankind's self-righteousness in a parable.
"No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. If he does, he will tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old."
He's saying that you can't patch up a hole in your jeans with a piece of new denim cloth and expect that it'll hold together or look the same. Especially after a couple of washings as the new cloth shrinks and the old cloth is already shrunk. You just don't do that. You use a preshrunk older piece of denim fabric to patch it up. And Jesus goes on to explain this further with another parable analogy:
Luke 5:37-38
"And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins."
He's talking about church and church reformation. So, if you understand, anything about wine making you know that it's all about the fermentation process. Something I learned when I first began studying horticulture was that plant parts; whether it's leaves or twigs or fruit and nuts; are all immediately beginning to decompose, or I should say rot, as soon as they are separated from the plant. Even though that apple looks beautiful on the table, it's rotting right before your eyes. And it's producing methane gas. This is one reason why you should be careful how you keep them in the refrigerator because the methane gas that they give off can damage other food. For instance, when I was very young, while studying in college, I worked in a grocery store and I worked in the produce section of that store. I had learned something about fruit production in school which I shared with my manager. I explained this methane gas issue to him and explained that we should no longer keep the head lettuce and the fruits in the same part of the cooler. We instead should keep them separated because the fruit were causing the lettuce to disintegrate very quickly. The apples and grapes were making the lettuce mushy. Which made me unhappy because one of my jobs was to clean the lettuce of all its rotten nasty leaves. So, I shared all sorts of methods I learned for preventing damaged produce with him. And I even grilled my college professors about hints they thought I could pass on to him.
Another interesting one was it was very difficult to keep potatoes for very long while they were out on the shelves. One of the things I did very often was throw away potatoes every night because they've gone green and rotten. Turns out it was the fluorescent light that was causing it. You see it really makes sense if you think about it, potatoes like cool darkness. And the store shelves were exactly the opposite of that. So, every night one of my jobs was to restock the potatoes and everything else before I left the store around midnight. And the store was open 24 hours a day so the lights were never off. So we came up with a solution in which we would cover the potatoes with cloth, just as I was leaving. We established this "method" in order to deal with a problem of rot. Of course this could be problematic for the 2am potato shoppers. And so, we made a sign explaining our method. You have no idea how much food we threw away every day. Probably 99% of my job was throwing food away. If there's one thing we have in America, it's an abundance. And there's an awful lot of waste at the grocery store.
And so, we felt good that we were doing our level best to prevent as much waste as possible and to keep the store as clean as possible. And it's kind of like that with religion. There are people who have a genuine desire to do right by God. To have it be his will and not theirs. But they see the rot in everything. They see the waste. They see the unclean things in others and in themselves, and so they want to mitigate those things somehow. Maybe they can cover it up with a cloth. Maybe they can make a covering for their sin by building methods for self-righteousness. Maybe they can cover the stink of sin death with incense. They try to make the church into a sterilized hospital. And they try to make their theology systematic so that they can avoid error at every turn. And they don't want sinners among them so they come dressed up and play a role as something other than a sinner in a patterned way. And then they believe they are self-righteous because of the sheer numbers of people doing likewise, and because of the sheer number of years that they've been doing it.
The church, organized religion, is the old wine skins holding onto aged wine that is no longer "new" wine which is still fermenting at a high level of carbonation. The chemical reaction is nearly finished in the aged wine and the leather skins are already stretched to accommodate the gas that is nearly worked out. But if you were to empty those old wine skins that previously held the aged of wine, and put new wine in them, filling them, then as the new wine builds up gas, it would burst those old skins that can no longer stretch.
What Jesus was talking about was he is bringing a new thing into an old wine skin. And he's trying to explain to them that they are the old wine skins. That their methodology, their organized religion, could not hold the power of God any longer. Because now the king of the universe is among them, his kingdom has come. And the old system, the priesthood, the system of sacrifices, all the hints of paganism and idolatry that they have included into their worship throughout the centuries, all these things are old wine skins, that can no longer hold the power of God. So, what are the new skins? Well, the simple answer is that Jesus told us what they are, they are spirit and truth. They are you, and me, and everyone else who is in Christ. For it is they who are "the church". Jesus did indeed establish the church; he established it in his children. He reformed the church, not by creating the same old traditional systems and structures, but by making a new "Way", in Him. Not in sacraments and other forms of the old wineskins of animal sacrifices, asceticism, and through indulgences. And he didn't teach them to pray to the faithful who have passed on into glory. He didn't pray to Abraham, David, or any of them.
Jesus developed new skins for his new wine. He poured out his blood into those skins once and for all. And he sent his Spirit of Truth to bring his bride to him in remembrance, preparing them to be ready for the wedding day.
Final thought: The other day I was postulating on whether or not the disciples prayed while Jesus was with them. It occurred to me that our typical prayer methods would feel somewhat odd if we were sitting or standing there along with Jesus and someone starts praying. Would you pray looking at Jesus? Maybe phrase the words to direct that prayer directly to him? I mean why wouldn't you, he's right there, God is standing, or sitting, right there with you. Are you going to fast and raise your hands up to the sky, or are you going to reach across the room and touch Jesus?
The people asked Jesus why his disciples weren't fasting and praying. Why they didn't seem to keep all the old ways, the traditional ways, the organized religious ways. "But yours eat and drink" Your disciples don't pray right. They don't pray to the right people in the right places at the right times in the right manner for the right reasons. They don't seem to pray at all. And they were right. They weren't praying in the old ways, because Jesus was an arm's length away. Time after time we see them praying.
Like this:
"At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked..." "Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said..." "As soon as He was alone, His followers, along with the twelve, began asking Him" "His disciples questioned Him about..."
I could do this all day. I could do a Bible search for every instance in which Jesus' disciples came to him with questions, requests, and inquiring about parables and challenges that they faced. They asked about prayer, fasting, giving, worship, exorcism, and the kingdom to come, and so much more. They were praying to God every time they did that. Think about it. They had the new wine right there with them. And they could drink from him whenever they needed him. They could drink his drink and get his spiritual food whenever they needed him. So, their walk with him was a fast. Their talk with him was a prayer. Their life, in him, is a sacrifice of self, set apart from the world.
You know what's not set apart from the world? Organized religion.
In fact, it's very worldly. It's very human. And today it's become extremely humanistic. Jesus established "the church" to become new wine in new human skins. To become the bearers of his Spirit within them. The church of the Spirit and the Truth. Jesus established the visible church in his people. The Holy Spirit, on the day of Pentecost, breathed into the people of God and it became a living, breathing organism brought about for the purpose of bearing witness to the kingdom of God. Not brought about to become a method or an institution, but into people in fellowship in Christ. No new patches on the cloths of the old priestly robes. Not old, thin, stretched out wineskins, weakened by sin and spiritual sloth. But the Lord is always at hand, offering us his grace through Spirit and Truth. By the indwelling Holy Spirit and with the authority of the Scriptural truths that the Spirit brings remembrance of.
Amen and amen.
