“Behold I do a new thing!” Isaiah 43:19
“You have heard it said… but I say unto you…” Jesus in Matthew 5
The best sermon I’ve ever heard in my life was by Philip Gulley. “So Must We Think Anew” the moral of this was that God is always calling us from the future: the smoke by day, the pillar of fire by night, into the Promised Land and when we get there, God will rightly ask, “What took you so long?”
I love tradition. I was raised Roman Catholic and knew all sorts of things about the tradition and the relics and the made-up stuff like Victoria wiping the face of Jesus and all the stuff about Mary that’s not in the Bible. When faced with a new situation, the church would just look back or just wait the problem out. No innovation at all. The same stories repeated and we hoped and believed it was true. The bread was the Body and the wine was the Blood despite my doubts that the bread was even real bread and not just staleness incarnated.
Dalia Lama, “If science ever contradicts our tradition, I’m willing to throw out tradition and go with science.” Test the bread and the water… no molecular change. Throw out the concept of transubstantiation. Evolution and science gives us an older universe than tradition does and a much bigger, more expansive God. Time to rethink some traditions and theologies.
When I found the UCC, I found a denomination of firsts. Always trying to follow the still speaking God, even when it mean a loss in membership because what’s right isn’t always popular.
When I interviewed for Sylvania, I found an innovative congregation.
On my first day, I had to give an interview. In those videos, Cathy Hunter had a line that still sticks with me. “We are a permission giving church.” And Rev. Bill said, “We stretch people. We don’t fall back on the comfortable stereotypes of faith, but ask questions that give faith relevance to daily living.”
And so this church has done many innovative things: hosted a refugee family in the ’70s, established a parish nurse, director of outreach, and a pastor of family ministries.
There are solar panels on the roof!
The early church were doing new and crazy things. Crossing boundary lines all over the place. Yet we got set in our ways. We got comfortable. We sold out in many ways. We don’t like to bother with things often…
A big God stretches us. Sends us to places we’ve never been. Asks questions we can’t answer. Moves us. Transforms us. And this new way of living asks us to innovate.
After all, you can’t put new wine in old wine skins.
