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Having spent my childhood Sunday School years in the beautiful little country church at Little Utica - to the West of here, not to be confused with Big Utica to the East - I appreciated a column by Bill McKibben about the little church he attends in the mountains.

New Song, Old Story - Matthew 13: 52 - July 27, 2009 - Cicero United Methodist Church - Everett J. Bassett

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            Having spent my childhood Sunday School years in the beautiful little country church at Little Utica - to the West of here, not to be confused with Big Utica to the East - I appreciated a column by Bill McKibben about the little church he attends in the mountains. He wrote about taking his turn vacuuming the church. When you get to the third pew on the right, he said, the vacuum cleaner gets noisy, because that's where Frank and Jean have sat every Sunday for decades. Then it's pretty quiet until you get to the sixth pew by the window, where Velda and Don have sat every Sunday forever. And then you pick up the sand from their shoes, and so on. The vacuum cleaner was almost like a Geiger counter for faithfulness - it knew where people sat Sunday after Sunday.

            This was all the more remarkable, McKibben writes, because that church, being a tiny church on the low end of the pastoral pecking order, had a high turnover of pastors ­students, part-time retired pastors, lay preachers, short-term fill-ins, and so on. All great people, but every one of them came with his or her own ideas. So, for example, one new pastor announced that they were going to have a Greet My Neighbor moment in the service - so Frank and Jean and Velda and Don and the others stood up and shook hands with each other. The next pastor stopped the practice. The next pastor, a year or so later, began a Fellowship Moment in the service. So, Frank and Jean and Velda and Don and the others stood up and shook hands with each other. Then a few months later, the next pastor put a stop to it. The next pastor put in the bulletin the Passing of the Peace. So, Frank and Jean and Velda and Don stood and shook hands with each other.

            It didn't occur to these pastors that that congregation of fifteen to twenty people saw each other all week, arrived to church early and had coffee together, and stayed after the service to share stories and laugh together, and could hardly make sense of this thirty seconds of standing up and shaking hands in the middle of worship. But they dutifully fulfilled each pastor's wishes, and waited for the next pastor.

            McKibben writes beautifully about one spring day, when he and Don took down the storm windows at church, and, before going home, decided to climb up into the steeple to look out over the town. The ladder was rickety, and Don was quite elderly, but he steadily climbed up, and McKibben understood why when they got up there. After they took in the beautiful view, Don showed McKibben where he had carved his initials, and Velda's, sometime back in the 1920s, when the two of them were in grade school.

            In our culture - and my generation was probably the one that started it -- we see people church shopping, and sometimes going from church to church so fast it's like they have a remote control in their hand, flipping from station to station until they find one that looks interesting. That sounds like a negative assessment, but I think it's a good thing to have a variety of churches, and different ways for God to speak in peoples' lives. More people today are staying in touch with several churches instead of choosing one.

            What we might lose there, however, is the beauty of long-term faithfulness - the longevity of a faith that has deep, deep roots. And it's not just about going to the same church for decades - many of you here have done that. It's about a faith that lives and breathes through all the stages of life; it's about a Savior who is faithful as we grow and learn and live out life's journey. It's about what we sing about -- 'the old, old story of Jesus and His love' - a Gospel that is unchanging through all the shifting sands of time. Up there in the steeple of his church, as he looked at the initials he carved as a boy, Don could replay the faithfulness of God over the decades in a way that many others - we who restlessly move around - cannot. And we lose something without those roots.

            Someone has said that there are two dangers regarding the past - the first is that we will be disconnected from it. And we know what that means. We know that we are in a busy, hectic world of multi-tasking and just barely keeping up with our new gadgets, and our frantic desires that we and our families receive every benefit and take in every experience. Somewhere in that hectic mix, we lose some things. And one of the things we're losing is our roots. We've all heard the horror stories of college students who can't tell you who lived first - Jesus or Moses. Or of the ignorance of our history. In Rob Reiner's movie When Harry Met Sally, an older adult asks a younger one, "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" To which the younger adult said, "Ted Kennedy was shot?" History is not being passed on, and there are many dangers in not knowing the lessons of our past. For one thing, as has been said many times, we repeat our mistakes. Another thing we've seen many times is how ill-intended leaders are able to distort the past for evil ends. But in general, without a strong connection to our heritage, we simply aren't anchored in this world, and drift without a sense of purpose and direction.

            This is why our Discipleship Team and others in our church are-working on a curriculum for teaching the basics of our faith - why are we Methodist? What does the Bible really say? What is prayer, really? Who was the apostle Paul? These are questions of our heritage. I pray many of us will join these discussions in basic faith when they unfold this fall. We need to re-connect with our roots.

            Among the many parables that Jesus told, there is this little gem in Matthew 13:

" ... 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." Like many of them, this is a mysterious kind of parable that can be applied many ways. But one of them is that I think it is a beautiful description of the life of the church - of Christian disciples together. When Jesus talks about those who have "been trained for the kingdom of heaven," I read that as a definition of a disciple. That's who we want to be as disciples of Jesus - those who have been trained for the kingdom of heaven.

            And the best image I can think of for "the master of a household who brings out... his treasure," is about evangelism and hospitality. If we are disciples in the kingdom of God, we want to invite others in. And we want to treat them well. So, we're like the householder who sees company coming, and gets out the fine china, and the nice linens, and the better wine. We don't want to serve inferior stuff in the kingdom of heaven - we want our guests to feel welcomed and honored.

            But now here's the most interesting part of the parable: when you are extending hospitality in the kingdom of heaven, you bring out of the treasure "what is new and what is old." In that treasure chest that we hold there are both new and old items that are priceless. So far, I've talked about the old - we want to bring out of our kingdom­-treasure things that have been in place for centuries -- the sense of tradition, the roots of our faith, the longevity of the faithful, and, especially, the "old, old story of Jesus and His love." We can't lose those things, or we've lost everything.

            But it's also important that we bring the new things out of the treasure chest. And the second danger about the past is that we will be imprisoned by the past.

            Let me share a story: a young college woman home on break was helping her mother fix a roast for dinner. Before putting it in the oven, she watched her mother cut off a couple inches of meat at the end of the roast. "Why did you do that?" "Well," said her mother, "a roast tastes better if you cut off the end before cooking it." "Why is that?" And mother replied, "I don't know. It's just what my mother taught me." So they went to the phone and called Grandma, and Grandma said the same thing. "I don't know; I just know that every time my mother cooked a roast, she cut an inch or two of meat off the end." It happens that they were blessed that Great Grandma was still around, so they called her and asked her how cutting off the end of a roast improved the taste of the meat. "Improved the taste?" she said. "What are you talking about? My blasted oven was so small I couldn't fit a whole roast in. It broke my heart to cut off that meat every time, but I had no choice!"

            One of the dangers of the past is that we can carry on practices and traditions that have no understanding behind them and no practical use before them. And the church is one of the places that happens with a vengeance. We've all heard the stereotype of the stubbornly resistant church: Come weal or come woe, our status is quo. And the seven deadly words of the church - We've never done it that way before. Those are deadly words, because in the treasure chest of the kingdom of heaven there are new things that God wants to show us. And if we are imprisoned by the past, we won't let them happen.

            Jesus walked into a time and place where tradition was strong - in fact, so strong it had a hammerlock on people. And Jesus used the language and the media of his times to revolutionize the old ways of thinking and doing. He called what he brought "new wine", and he said it needs to burst out of the old containers. That's why, in the church, we're not afraid to do new things - to speak in the language of the times, to embrace new technologies, and new ideas. Not that we follow every fad that comes along. Not that we change just for the sake of changing. But that we stay relevant to the world around us just the way Jesus did.

            We also stay open to the new things God wants to teach us. The Bible is our guide into matters of faith. It tells the 'old, old story' that we hold dear. But the application of biblical truth has evolved to answer the new questions that have arisen in human life. For example, for centuries Christian societies accepted that slavery was acceptable in biblical faith. But the Holy Spirit led us to understand otherwise. For centuries, women were

denied positions of leadership in the church, on biblical grounds. But now we understand that that is not what God intends. New thinking evolves as the Spirit of God keeps revealing. And we all know the issues we struggle with today in the church ­homosexuality and other things - where the old and the new are struggling together, and we need to Spirit of God to lead us with wisdom.

            Let me say how wonderful it is to be a pastor in this church where the connection to the past is so strong - but, at the same time we are not afraid to knock down walls and move in new directions. That little mountain church Bill McKibben wrote about was full of faithful people, like Frank and Jean and Don and Velda who saw in the church a place to connect to the old, old story of Jesus. They found a Savior who watched over them through all the decades and stages of their lives. But they also weren't afraid when new ideas came along, and every Sunday when they attended church, what is new and what is old were brought out of the treasure chest.

            The Gospel is strong; the good news that Jesus died for you and me, and that God embraces each of us with transforming grace is just as appealing as ever. The world still hungers for spiritual truth, and Jesus has given it - and trying out new ways of sharing that isn't going to sink the ship. But fear of new ideas can beach the ship and make it irrelevant. Jesus started a revolution of faith, and then he invited us to be part of a kingdom where both the new and the old are essential.

            That's where I want to be; what about you? A while ago, our Administrative Council affirmed three values {or--our church - that we will be spiritual, we will be loving, and we will be relevant. That's the ministry I want to be part of - one that knows what can change, and one that holds on to the things that should never change. In the words of one of our great old hymns, we sing a 'new, new song' as we tell the 'old, old story.' And the love of Jesus will saves and guides us and carves our initials in God's great kingdom.