Something Old, Something New
Something Old, Something New
David Owen Sermon
Sermons exist on two levels, both immediate and timeless. The best illustrations a pastor employs are usually timely and relevant. And so in this sermon, we'll see citations to long-ago events. But don't think for a moment those references don't transcend their time. Their impulses and motivations are with us today as we struggle through a pivotal election, when so many of our fellow citizens envision a different America than we would hope. So David Owens speaks to us from the past, pointing the way forward.
- Philip Gulley
For more information on David Owen and, When You Don't Know the Length of the Race, visit the Owen Legacy Project by clicking below.
Matthew 13:51-52
A few weeks ago, I was reading in the Gospel of Matthew, thinking that I knew what was coming next, when I stumbled upon a section that I don’t remember ever having seen before. I have read these parables of the kingdom many times, but I had never before noticed the verses that accompany them: The Jerusalem Bible translates them:
“Have you understood all this?” Jesus asked. They said, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Well then, every scribe who becomes a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his storeroom things both new and old.”
I enjoy finding a saying like that which is new for me, but I found this one somewhat difficult to crack open—especially with regard to how it might intersect with our own daily lives—but I’d like to take a stab at it.
Let’s start with the scribes. Scribes in the New Testament are teachers of the religious law. They are those who have absolutely mastered the religious tradition. Unfortunately, they sometimes mastered the outward form without grasping the inward spirit. Thus, the common people saw a big difference between the scribes and Jesus. Elsewhere, Mark writes,
“The people were astonished at Jesus’s teaching, for he taught them as
one who had authority, and not as the scribes.”
To say that Jesus taught as one who had authority is to note that he taught out of his own insights, his own understandings, and his own experience. The scribes, on the other hand, were scrupulous scholars who did not awaken you with their insights but subdued you with their footnotes. If you asked them what they felt or thought, they told you what someone a century earlier had said. They were unable themselves to cut to the heart of the matter, apparently. Instead, they memorized the past.
They taught entirely on the basis of precedent. But the times were changing. The past they knew so well was coming loose. As the Apostle Paul might have said, “The kairos was hitting the chronos!” In Jesus’s language, “The kingdom of heaven was coming!”
That is, God was bringing into being a brand-new state of things. A big issue that the passage was addressing is this: “What can those, like the scribes, who are deeply rooted in the past do when history shifts? When our old world is breaking up, what strategies will best help us to enter the new state of things?”
• What can you do if you are Mikhail Gorbachev, for example, and despite your best efforts, the Soviet economy keeps unraveling and East Germany, your most successful satellite, wants to join NATO?
• What can you do if you are George Bush and your own accountants predict a budget deficit of $160 billion, you were elected saying “No more taxes!” and people are closely watching your lips?
• What can you do if you are a manufacturer of CFCs and worldwide concern over your product’s role in dissolving the ozone layer is building?
• How are you to respond, if during all your adulthood you have seen yourself as a wife and mother and a year ago your husband left and in a few weeks your last child is going off to college?
• What are you to do if all your training and experience are in an industry that is rapidly shrinking? Or if you are a fifty-five-year-old middle manager who is being squeezed out and is being pressured toward an early retirement?
• When we are being faced with major change, is there a Jesus-recommended way to proceed?
I consider all of these questions hard questions. They are not easily answered. But I am wondering if there aren’t general clues here about the strategies that are most helpful when the foundations begin to crumble and history shifts. Listen again: “Well then, every scribe who becomes a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his storeroom things both new and old.”
When history shifts, go into your storeroom and bring out something old. What could that mean? I’ve thought about that a lot the past few weeks. After a while, I began to hear Jesus saying, “When major change hits, go into your storehouse and bring out something old”—that is, don’t try to enter the new state of things while dragging along everything that is old.
In the film The Mission, a character played by Robert de Niro joined Jesuit missionaries in the 1600s for a trip deep into a South American jungle to live and work with Indians. He was moving toward a new life—a new beginning. That new life was made necessary by his guilt and grief over having killed in a duel his brother whom he loved. Previously he had been a violent man, a warrior. For penance, as he labored upstream into the jungle—even when climbing up mountainous waterfalls—de Niro dragged behind him a net which contained all of his old armor and weapons. He was trying to drag the burden of his past into his future. Dragging his past made the journey more difficult. It impeded and endangered him. Exhausted, he fell into a raging river and was being dragged down by his burden, when a priest took a knife and cut him loose from his past. Only when he was freed from his past was he able to continue his journey into the new state of things.
Again, I remember the film clips that appeared on news programs several years ago when U.S. Embassy personnel and others fled Cambodia. Do you remember the scene as helicopters hovered above the embassy roof and people hurried to get on board? History was making a big shift. The kairos was hitting the chronos. And, if you understand at all what’s happening at a time like that, you travel light. When the Khmer Rouge are coming up the street firing weapons and the last helicopter is beginning to lift off, that is not the moment to go back inside for your stamp collection or your favorite tennis racket. That is a time to face and accept your losses.
In a cafeteria I once saw an acquaintance with whom I hadn’t talked for some time. He was sitting alone, so I stopped to chat. He was reading a book that he said he’d purchased at a Christian bookstore, entitled What Every Man Should Know About Women. Knowing that he had been divorced at least five years before, I asked, “Does this book mean you are in a new relationship?” He said, “No, I’m reading this because in my eyes, my wife and I are still married.” This amazed me, for as he and I both knew, his former wife had moved to Chicago, remarried, and had already had two new children with her second husband. She was not coming back. History had shifted—his world had broken up—and he was unable to enter the new state of things because he was clinging to a marital relationship that no longer existed.
When history shifts, go into your storeroom and bring out something old, I hear Jesus saying. We can’t take everything old along. When change comes in this way, we are going to have losses. Admitting, assessing, and accepting those losses is the first step toward entering the new state of things.
If the first step is admitting that something has been lost, the second step is seeing that something is left. Go into your storehouse and bring out something old. When history shifts, those who have the best chance of making it into the new state of things are those who discover that, despite their losses, they have something valuable left.
Meilyn Kruesser is an Indianapolis woman who was honored by the Mental Health Association last spring for her courage and perseverance. A few years ago, she suffered a massive stroke. Seventy percent of her brain is not functioning. She is partially paralyzed, walks very slowly, and leans heavily on a cane. She must talk in a whisper because her voice is gone. Every life task has become more time consuming and complicated for her. Still, she works professionally in a creative field, runs her own business, is writing a book about her experience, maintains nurturing relationships, is active in her church, and also volunteers some of her time. She has suffered huge losses. But she is moving forward because she has discovered what is left.
I like Jesus’s image of the storeroom or storehouse. In some translations, it is a “treasure house.” At every point in our lives—even when it may feel as though everything is lost—this image suggests that we still have a storehouse or a treasure house. That treasure may be friends or family members who care for us, or the goodwill of others that we have previously earned, or our personal talents—what vocational counselors call “transferable skills”—that can be rearranged and redirected, wisdom or savvy that we have gathered along the way, or capacities or resources we didn’t even know we had. Our treasure may be love we have for another or concern about a cause—whatever can give us a reason to continue living
When history shifts—when our familiar world breaks up—no matter what we have lost we still have a storehouse. Those who are best able to enter the new state of things are those who reach into their storehouse and find that they have something very valuable that is left.
When reality does shift significantly in our lives, no matter who we are—whether we’re Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush, a corporate executive, a suddenly single parent, a stroke victim, or a you or a me—we all have one thing in common. For us the future is no longer where it used to be. That’s what it means to have losses—it means that our future is no longer where it used to be. Either we will have a new future or no future. Those with the best chance of entering the unexpected future that has come upon them are not only those who reach into their storehouse and lay hold of something valuable, but are also those who are able to reach into that storehouse and bring forth something new.
Gareth Morgan has written a book for managers and executives entitled Riding the Waves of Change. It’s trying to help businesspersons deal with the observable fact that often the future isn’t where it used to be because something fundamental in the external world shifts. He says that the most important investment that an organization can make today is to build in the capacity to change when “fractures” occur in the environment. That capacity grows within an organization when people begin to look at those fractures differently. He quotes one manager who says:
Let’s face it, most people when they look at something, tend to see the obstacles. The trick is to turn around and say, “What is actionable about this? What is the opportunity in this? How can I make an opportunity out of it?”
Writing from a quite different perspective, John Schneider, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University, says much the same thing. He writes that it is important to ask three questions in the face of major change: What’s lost? What’s left? and What’s possible? He says that we can ask “What’s possible?” and thereby decide to live fully, any time in our life. He says that it’s never too late to ask “What’s possible?” We always have the chance to do something meaningful and creative with what is left.
I enjoy the art of Henri Matisse, whom one critic has said “revolutionized the art of painting three times in his lifetime.” The last time he revolutionized art, he was lying in bed. He was an old man then—chronically ill. But art was still his passion, and he did what he could with what was left. For a time, he had his secretary tape brown butcher paper to the ceiling over his bed. Then he drew designs on it, using a piece of charcoal tied to a long bamboo stick. He did that as long as his strength permitted and designed stained-glass windows for a celebrated French chapel that way. When his strength waned even more, he found yet another way to extend his life project. Sitting up in bed, he would cut very basic shapes from bright-colored paper. Then, he’d direct his secretary to place the shape on the wall, telling him, “No, six inches to the left—now a little higher—yes, there—that’s it!” Then he would cut another shape and repeat the process all over again. That’s how the bright and playful Matisse cutouts were born, sending contemporary art off in a brand-new direction.
We probably have no reason to be interested in the New Testament’s scribes, you and I, for they have been gone from the human scene almost two thousand years—unless we understand that they were those who had mastered what was past for them, just as you and I may have mastered what is past for us. But history was changing. One morning they woke up to find that the future wasn’t where it used to be. So did Henri Matisse. So will we. And those among us, like those among the scribes, who inherit the promise of whatever new future God gives them, will be those who don’t try to hold onto everything, but honestly face that something important has changed and then dare to do something creative and new with whatever is left. There is always something beautiful to do with what is left.
Philip Gulley is the author of Unlearning God: How Unbelieveing Helped Me Believe and the popular Harmony series.
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Wow! This is incredible! What a total mind shift and the great questions! Thank you so much for sharing this with us!