There’s the chemistry we learn in high school and then there’s the chemistry we learn the hard way.  In the summer of 1976, just when I started seminary, I was called to the first church I ever served as pastor.  They had a tiny trailer house next to the church that served as the parsonage.  It was really more like an overgrown tin can.  Whatever the temperature was outside, it was multiplied many times over on the inside.  My salary was $115 a week, and there was no such thing as “Super Suppers,” where you could stop by and pick up a casserole on the way home and the nearest Dairy Queen was at least 20 miles away.  Whoever lived in that parsonage had better learn how to cook if they wanted to survive.  I was single, and so I learned how to cook, the hard way.

The first time I bought a can of biscuits, I had a lesson in chemistry I had not anticipated.  It was late in the summer, very hot.  I left to go to school for a couple of days and just turned air conditioner off.  The house basically became an oven.  Not knowing I was supposed to refrigerate it, I left the can of biscuits out on the counter.  This is the chemistry lesson I learned the hard way. 

When yeast begins to ferment it feeds itself on the complex carbohydrates in the dough.  The byproduct of this microscopic banquet is, among other things, carbon dioxide.  As long as the dough is kept cool the yeast goes on what you might call a low-carb diet.  When it gets warm, such as when the can of biscuits is left out on the counter for two days in a 100°+ room, the feasting of the yeasting goes into overdrive and so does the production of carbon dioxide.  At some point, because the increased production of the carbon dioxide creates an air pressure that is greater on the inside of the can than on the outside, well, you can guess the rest.

When I walked back into the trailer house after being gone for a couple of days and having left the biscuits out on the counter there was dough everywhere, all over the counter.  Hundreds upon hundreds of ants had paid with their lives as their little feet got stuck in the muck while trying to climb Mt. Pillsbury.  The chemistry lesson I learned the hard way comes down to this.  When the life on the inside of the can became greater than the capacity of the can to contain it, it burst through the can, and both the can and the dough were ruined.

Jesus said, “You don’t put new wine into old wineskins.  Otherwise, when the wine ferments and creates, among other things, carbon dioxide, and the air pressure on the inside of the old wineskin becomes greater than the wineskin’s capacity to contain it, the skins are destroyed.  But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”

Since most of us, I assume, have never seen a wineskin, I decided to use something we all have seen, the can of biscuits, to illustrate the point that Jesus was really trying to make.  The principles of chemistry at work in both wineskins and biscuit cans are basically the same.  When a container is holding something that is alive, it better be able to give and flex as that life grows and transforms from within, or the growth of that life will eventually destroy whatever is trying to contain it.

It seems that with each and every gospel truth Jesus teaches, there comes both a warning and a promise.  The wine and wineskins teaching of Jesus is no different.  There is a warning.  In the context of this particular scripture we read this morning, Jesus just didn’t seem to be able to do much of anything to make those happy who saw themselves as the self-appointed protectors of religious tradition and custom.  He went out to dinner with the wrong people, tax collectors and sinners, and when they complained to him about that, he said, “Why don’t you pay attention to what I’m trying to show you here?  What God really desires is mercy, not sacrifice.  What he has a passion for is people who are more concerned about people than custom.  For I have come not to call the righteous, (people who’ve got it all figured out, whoever that might be),” he said, “but sinners.  People in need of mercy.”

Then the protectors of religious tradition and custom complained that Jesus wasn’t taking life seriously enough.  He was not fasting.  He was banqueting instead.  Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they?  While the party is still going on, is a time for celebration.  Prophesying his own death, Jesus said, “when the bridegroom will be taken away from this world, then they will fast.”  Jesus was simply repeating truth he had learned as a boy when he read from the same book of Ecclesiastes you and I read from.  There is “a time to mourn and a time to dance” (Ecclesiastes 3:4, NIV).  As far as Jesus could see and tell in the moment he was living, it was a time to dance, not a time to mourn.  The Messiah had come.  New hope, new life was breaking out all over.  It was time for celebration, for banqueting.  For drinking the new wine, not for mourning.

Jesus was not rejecting Judaism, per se.  You see, he was, from the time of his birth, a Jew.  From the time he was born until the time he died, Jesus was a faithful Jew.  He attended the synagogue.  He participated in the Jewish feasts and rituals.  Jesus was not criticizing the faith tradition that had literally birthed him into this world.  What he was saying was that some of the customs that some had used to express their faith had gotten in the way of faith.  We all do that, by the way.  Jesus was saying that new life had come and that life would not be contained by religious custom that was lifeless.  That new life would not be, could not be, restricted, contained, controlled, or minimized by any human structure.

Jesus’ disciples weren’t grieving as the old structures demanded, because they were spending most of their time with Jesus, who seemed, for some strange reason, to have a great deal of hope for humanity and God’s children.  (We do tend to become like those with whom we most often associate.)  Jesus knew there would come a time for grieving, but not yet.  Jesus was spending time with broken and sinful people, not disassociating with them, because the new life he had come to bring, the gospel, was more concerned with mercy than strict adherence to religious customs that demonstrated whatever strict adherence to religious customs seems to demonstrate.

Herein lies the warning, then, for all of us, in the wine and the wineskins analogy.  The life of God cannot and will not be contained and restricted by those whose primary concern is to make certain that nothing happens they cannot control.  In time, even the best-built wineskin serves its purpose and must be discarded.  Otherwise, when the new wine of God which is continually flowing from the throne of grace, and that is still fermenting, is put into the old wineskin, it will destroy it.  God’s good purpose, God’s good work, God’s good word will not be contained in or restricted by the structures any person ever builds.

That’s why we must constantly be asking ourselves, in our own lives and in our church, if what we are doing in our lives and our church is making room for the gospel or restricting its merciful purpose.  That’s an ongoing task.  It never ends.

Let me give you an example.  For over a hundred years, Sunday School has been a really effective way of teaching the Bible.  It still is.  We have also begun to discover that there are a lot of people who will never have an exposure to the Bible if the only way they’re going to get it is at 9:30 on Sunday morning in a church building.  Like many churches, we have started experimenting with taking Bible study out into communities through home teams.  We have found, remarkably, that some people seem very open to that.  We only get in trouble when we decide that the only way the scripture can be taught is at 9:30 on Sunday morning in the church house.  That’s an old wineskin.  In time, Sunday school cannot contain what scripture means to accomplish.  So, we make new wineskins.  Hopefully, as the wine from heaven pours out into those new wineskins, and the fermenting of God’s grace takes place, it will expand and grow, and the Kingdom will grow, and we will reach people for Christ we never would have reached otherwise.  The list of these kinds of possibilities is endless.  But, the truth is the same.

If we build any structure, whether it be a program or a ministry, or even a staff position, or whatever it is, and we decide that that’s the only way the gospel work can be done is inside those structures, in time, the gospel will break out somewhere else where it is free to grow.  If there is any structure that ever becomes more important to us than the gospel that structure was meant to support, in time, that structure will be destroyed by the very life it tried to contain and restrict.  New wine, old wineskins.  That’s the warning.

Here’s the promise.  The promise is that wherever just a little tiny bit of the gospel is planted, it will multiply, and it will multiply until it cannot be contained by any structure, personal, political, geographic or religious.  It cannot be contained.

Richie Butler was telling me just this past week that he is going to be taking a group from Union Cathedral and some other community leaders from the city of Dallas on a mission trip to Cuba.  Union Cathedral has gone through a four-year process by which they gained a license from the United States State Department to travel directly to Cuba.  In two weeks, they will be traveling there to plant the gospel.  Richie told me he has two purposes in mind for this mission trip.  One purpose is to plant the gospel in Cuba but there’s another one.  He is hoping that, by taking a group to plant the gospel in Cuba, some of that gospel yeast will stick to their fingers and when they come back to Dallas, it will get planted here, too, in ways it might not have otherwise been planted.

Have you ever made bread before?  Do you remember the difficulty of the dough sticking to your fingers?  If you rub it off one hand it sticks to the other, and you just keep doing this process over and over, and no matter what, the dough keeps sticking to your fingers.  Richie is praying that when they go to Cuba and start kneading the gospel dough down there that some of it will stick to the fingers of those who are going with them and they will bring it back to Dallas, and whatever they touch here, that gospel yeast will stick there, too.  And, the work of the gospel will go on and on in ways that it might not have otherwise.  There’s a very good chance, you see, that the gospel meant for Cuba will end up actually helping to transform Dallas, too.  That’s because the gospel, the good news of Jesus, cannot be contained.

The church, the universal church, is not growing fastest in the United States, though we sometimes like to think we are the most religious nation on the planet.  If you want to go where the gospel is actually growing the fastest, where the yeast is fermenting the most quickly and transforming whole communities and even nations, you’ll have to travel to Africa, or China, or South America.  Those are the places where the church is growing exponentially.  I am told in some places, like Russia, worship services last for three and four hours and the crowds are standing room only.  There is a very good chance that we will live to see the day when those nations to whom we once sent missionaries will send missionaries back to America, indeed, they already are, to spread the gospel here.  Old wineskins cannot contain new wine. 

But, here’s is the wine and wineskin promise.  There’s a difference between a wineskin and our skin.  The wineskin is at the mercy of the owner of the vineyard.  We are at God’s mercy.  And, we have a choice.  If we let the gospel begin breaking through the places in our lives that are old and worn and dried out, instead of standing in its way, it will begin to change us and the people whose lives we touch.

This is a point, frankly, at which I really believe that our Baptist doctrine of salvation has left us lacking somewhat and could use some maturing.  The old wineskin, for example, defined becoming a Christian, or “getting saved,” as a one-moment-in-time event that was good for all time.  We lean heavily upon the doctrine of “once saved, always saved.”  Indeed, we lean too heavily on “once saved, always saved” so that most people who were “saved” as young children grew to a time in their life where, when they defined their moment of salvation, they had to think back upon a moment in time they could barely remember.  Once saved, always saved, right?  Yet, when called to give evidence that God’s salvation and hope is fermenting inside of them there is hardly anything in their life now to which they can point.  Do you ever grow weary of pointing back to a moment in time you can barely remember as evidence of your salvation?  Most of us not-so-jokingly say that we’ve done most of our sinning since we were saved. 

Do you know how the Bible defines the gospel?  “The gospel,” Paul wrote, “is the power of God unto salvation” (Romans 1:16, NIV).  That is a present tense description of a power that’s at work within us, changing, transforming us always.  As I understand Jesus’ analogy, he is comparing the gospel to wine, so that in some ways, what he’s saying is that as the gospel works in us, just like wine, we improve with age.  We thrive more, we live more, we breathe more deeply of the Spirit as that wine ferments within us and we are transformed by its presence in us.

Paul also once wrote that “It is by grace you have been saved through faith.  And this not from yourselves.  It is the gift of God.  Not by works, so that no one can boast.  For we are God’s workmanship” (Ephesians 2:8-10, NIV).  We were, past tense, created in Christ to do good works now, present tense.  Today.  In this moment!  Do you hear the tense of those verbs?  Wherever the Bible describes the work of God through the gospel, even if it is past tense terminology, it does so with present tense meaning.  The power of the gospel is fermenting in us now, not just something that happened to us long ago.  It would be fair for any of us to ask of ourselves, if we call ourselves a follower of Jesus, what real-time evidence is there in our lives, today, that we are following Jesus?  In the last 72 hours?  What is there different about our lives now, because Christ is in us?  Is the gospel that is fermenting within us pushing out the boundaries that we may have put on the gospel, even without realizing we’ve done it?  How is the gospel changing the way we spend our time, invest our money and treat people?  As I understand both the warning and the promise of this text, we live in the institutional and personal wineskins of our own choosing.

In the summers of 1974 and 1975, I was a youth minister at a church in Odessa, Texas.  There was a young lady in the church that I knew only at a distance.  She impressed me as standoffish and cocky and arrogant.  So, as we all tend to arrogantly do at times, with nothing but a long-distance impression to go on, I built this bigger idea of who she was, a stuck-up, cocky young lady.  Four years later, when I was sitting in a seminary classroom one day, I looked up, and there Judy sat in a chair right behind me.  I couldn’t believe it.  There this “unspiritual” young lady was, training for ministry, right alongside me, as though being in seminary necessarily makes one more spiritual!  I went up and introduced myself to her.  We learned each other’s names and began to share our lives’ experiences and stories.  Over a period of time, Judy became one of my very dearest and closest friends throughout those years in seminary.  Once I let the gospel transform the way I saw her, not as someone I perceived, but as the sister in Christ she in fact was, our relationship was transformed as well.  God forgive me, the arrogance of it all!  The way we stand at a distance and judge other people, and talk about them behind their backs and condemn them, when sometimes we don’t even know their names!

The gospel that was fermenting in me back then began to change the way I perceived her.  It also began to ask me to think about the way I was looking at other people.  And, this is the good news, the promise of the new wine.  If the gospel of Jesus Christ has ever found its way into your life, whether you’re 8 or 80, then that gospel is still at work in your life.  It is still fermenting.  It is still alive and seeking ways to expand its way out into your whole life and all of your relationships.  According to the promise of God’s word, we are a work still in progress.

Let me ask you some very pointed questions this morning.  Do you hate someone this morning?  Can you name someone you hate?  Or, if “hate” is too strong a word, because as a Christian, you could never really hate anybody, is there someone you just can’t stand?  You might say you love them in Jesus, but you just can’t stand them? 

The good news is, you don’t always have to hate them.  The gospel wine can transform your hate into love.

Is there someone you just won’t forgive?  They hurt you one time, way back, and everything they’ve done or said since then is seen through the prism of that one time they offended you.  You don’t always have to hold them accountable for how they hurt you once, maybe years ago!  The gospel wine can heal your unforgiving heart.

Is there some painful memory that keeps haunting you?  Maybe a painful memory of your own making.  You did something horrible and you just can’t forgive yourself.  You don’t always have to live as a haunted Christian!  The gospel wine can wash away yesterday’s ghosts.

Is there some prejudice that keeps you from letting other people into your life?  The black-brown-red-and-white ones that are precious in Jesus’ sight?  You don’t always have to live so narrowly?  The gospel wine can open new ways of seeing others.

Is there something you believe you ought to do with your life, but you’re too frightened to step out?  Maybe a career change?  Maybe a call to ministry or service?  You don’t always have to be afraid.  Because I’m telling you something.  With all my heart, I believe this to be true.  If the gospel is at work at you in all, and me, and we have put that gospel inside the old wineskin of hate and unforgiveness and haunting memories and judgment and prejudice, in time, one of two things will happen.  We will either let Jesus transform the skin the gospel is in, in us, or all that we hold dear and precious will be either be destroyed or transformed by the gospel wine that is in us.  That’s the new wine warning and promise.

When it comes to hate and prejudice, unforgiveness and judgmentalism or, fear or whatever, we can’t have our gospel cake and eat it, too.  The gospel is new wine, fermenting God’s power at work within, to transform and make us new.  If we’re living in a prison this morning, well, we’re living there because that’s where we choose to live.