In the Midst of New Dimensions

Sunday, November 22, 2020 • Reign of Christ Sunday
Readings: Excerpt from The Price of the Ticket a collection of essays by James Baldwin, Luke 5:36-39 (NRSV), In the Midst of New Dimensions (stanzas 1 & 2)
Dr. Larry Rasmussen, guest preacher

The sermon is underway. You began it with two stanzas of In the Midst of New Dimensions. Now the sermon continues with Rabbi Jesus. Hear well what he says.

“He told them a parable: No one tears a piece from a new garment and sews it on an old garment; otherwise the new will be torn, and the piece from the new will not match the old.  And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed.  But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, ‘The old is good.’” (Luke 5:36-39)

Jesus says “no one” does this. But some must have tried it. Otherwise, there’s no good reason for Jesus to instruct his disciples about it. Or maybe he did so because the disciples themselves weren’t ready for this Jesus journey into new dimensions. Maybe it was the disciples who said, “But, rabbi, the old is good. You know aged wine is better. And our old clothes are good friends.” 

But what is the new wine and cloth we must now heed? And why do we say, “Thanks, but no thanks, the old is good? Aged wine is better.”

Have you not seen, have you not heard, did you miss it?  The planet you were born on, came to love, and have grown accustomed to is no longer the planet on which you live. The “sweet spot” that has harbored all human civilizations from 10,000 BCE to the present is in jeopardy, at our hands. Geologists call that “sweet spot” the late Holocene. Its full body tattoo has been relative climate stability, sufficient stability to see the triumph of life over and again. But the Holocene is taking leave as we witness the dawn of the Anthropocene. “Anthropocene” is from anthropos, Greek for “human,” given that name because its mark is the impact of cumulative human activities on the planet. Even places far from where we live feel our reach—the polar regions, ocean waters, the air high above your heads. The tattoo of this new age is climate instability, mass uncertainty, and breath-taking extinction. Beloved Earth, then, is now a different planet, ending the only geological epoch we have known. Yet the uncertain ways of a different Earth strike us as “rumors of unfathomable things, and because we [cannot] fathom them we [don’t] believe them.” Instead we say “the old wine is good. So are trusty old wineskins.”

We did not expect the new wine of a new geological age. Who thought that the third rock from the sun could not be counted on in the ways we always have? Who thought Planet Home could not be relied on for steady seasons of seedtime and harvest; for glacial waters feeding great rivers; for sea levels trustworthy enough to host most of the great cities and much of the human population; for adaptation time sufficient to let flora and fauna adjust to new insect predators and diseases, or drought and deluge; for governments capable of marshaling sufficient resources to handle disasters of greater number and intensity; or governments capable enough, and willing, to allay the kind of conflicts that arise when desperate people are rendered homeless en masse; for rainfall and snowpack and enough resources to assure that future generations will survive and thrive on their diminished planet; and for ocean biochemistry stable enough to host the underwater rainforests they have known for eons? Who thought that nature would up and change course on our watch—and at our hands? 

How, then, do we hymn the Earth differently? How do we compose a new song for a strange land, even though it be our own? It is so much easier to do what Jesus feared we would; namely, do everything to put the new wine in the old wineskins. We try to solve our problems with the same frame of mind and the same habits and the same institutions that produced them. Thus do many of us work furiously to get the fossil-fueled economy and the same white privilege and the same gender, sexual and social strata back on track, the same strata that bring more storms of every kind. We ache for a return to normal. But normal is what brought us to this abnormal time. Normal brought us climate change.

In the midst of new dimensions, then, is a betwixt and between time. In his work Democratic Vistas (1871) Walt Whitman called it an “after time.” In his case, the aftertime was soon after the rage and fury of the Civil War when Whitman saw a different nation trying to emerge from the ashes. It was a time between times, a time between the deepest and deadliest divisions in this nation and whatever might come next.

Eddie Glaude, Jr., in his book on James Baldwin entitled Begin Again, picks up Whitman’s “after time” to refer to both the “disruption and splintering of the old ways of living” and “the making of a new community after the fall.” [1] The aftertime thus falls betwixt and between. It’s filled with “what has gone before and what is [trying to come] into view.” [2] It’s amidst dimensions and it’s time to begin again, with new wineskins.

Baldwin himself said what it requires. In The Price of the Ticket he says that “[i]n the church I grew up in, which is not the church white Americans attend, we were admonished from time to time to do our first works over. To do your first works over means to reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.”

Baldwin had two aftertimes, with a betrayal in each. Both were about a national moral reckoning. The first aftertime was Whitman’s, the aftertime after the Civil War and into Reconstruction. But that descended into Jim Crow and the first betrayal of America’s promise of liberty and justice for all. 

Baldwin’s second aftertime was the civil rights struggle. The murder of his friends, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medger Evers, left him despondent as the air went out of the gains of those years and the second American betrayal marked Baldwin’s last days. The gap he wanted to cross wouldn’t be, the gap between America experienced and America promised. 

National moral reckoning is now part of our aftertime. And Baldwin’s questions are precisely ours for our aftertime: What sort of people do we take ourselves to be, and what sort of people do we aspire to be? The difference this time—Baldwin died in 1987—is that, together with white supremacy and white privilege front and center we must take on a set of related crises that are folding in upon one another—on race, on the economy, on public health, and on the planet’s health everywhere under the sun. These our first works over to be done over. Baldwin himself wanted all to be saved together, black, white, and other. If it’s not all together, then it’s not at all. That was his conclusion. So for us, it’s a new America—new Jerusalem, he called it—or it’s another betrayal, the post-George Floyd betrayal.

Doing our first works over will be hard, and maybe exhilarating as well. These years could be our chariots of fire and our vocation. How often does the chance to change civilization come knocking on your door?

Look to Jesus and the disciples. There may even be some consolation for us in recalling that the followers of Rabbi Jesus just didn’t “get it” the first time around. Yes, they knew that Jesus had a startling proclivity to challenge commonsense assumptions. He does it again and again: “Have you never read in the scriptures,” he says, “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” (Matt. 21: 42a) Then he crosses every threshold the disciples deemed a sure barrier—barriers to Samaritans and Gentiles, to women, to children, to the leprous, the diseased and the disfigured, to the outcast—and what do the disciples do? They try to protect him from himself; they try to stop him from embracing the taboos. It’s new wineskins time but they hold fast to aged wine and comfy clothes. So when Peter is asked three times if he knows this Jesus and says, “I don’t know the man,” he isn’t exactly lying. He doesn’t yet truly know Jesus. The Messiah Jesus Peter knew wouldn’t end, like so many other Jews, in shame on the Roman cross. Nor was Peter alone. Even after the women reported their amazement at an empty tomb, the disciples on the road to Emmaus say, “We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel.” “We had hoped”…”we had so hoped.” But alas, that hope was dashed, crucified on Calvary.

There were three shocks. That Rabbi Jesus was cruelly and shamefully put to death and was not the Messiah they left their nets for was the first and worst. But it was also a shock that, in the power of the Spirit, he was still with them, a sure living presence among them. The tomb was empty. This God of Jesus, who freed enslaved people from Egypt and led exiles home from Babylon, this God was, in Jesus and the Spirit, doing a new thing, again. The third shock was just as startling, perhaps the most startling. These followers, those who didn’t know him, these who didn’t “get it” the first time around, were themselves now new wineskins and full of chutzpah for a new world of new dimensions. They, the plain, the common, the outliers, even the wretched of the earth, were living the reign of God come among them, of all people. Their world, not just a paradigm or two, had shifted. Now they themselves plotted transformation and lived resurrection.

So buck up, friends. Yes, we face rolling apocalypse. But even science-validated apocalypse isn’t helpful motivation for setting people about making new wineskins. Evidently no one who’s scared to death is going to tap the renewable moral-spiritual energy for life well-lived in a tough, new age. No one anxious about the morrow is going to do the right thing with new wine.  Howard Thurman is surely right: to do the right thing in a hard and uncertain season (like ours), don’t ask what kills you; ask what brings you alive. 

No, we will not see the end of the Anthropocene, hardly even the beginning of the end, except by faith, faith as the conviction of things not yet seen (Hebrews 11:1). But you can take courage. And you can settle in for the long haul and the balm of good work. And you can hone your skills for tanning new wineskins and weaving new cloth in the midst of new dimensions. 

You are going to finish this sermon, with three more stanzas of “In the Midst of New Dimensions.” Note especially the tone of the refrain—the church inspired, exultant, ready to risk and journey with the God of rainbow, fiery pillar, leading where the eagles soar. We the church, we a people of God, ours the journey now and ever, now and ever, now and evermore. The church of new wineskins. We won’t see the end of the journey but we can be its beginning.

You can take your cue from a good New Yorker, Katherine White. Katherine White wrote on gardening for The New Yorker magazine. After she died, her husband, E. B. White, collected her essays for a book on gardening. He wrote an introduction, the end of which is his picture of Katherine in the fall, planning the spring garden she knew she would not see. Here is his account:

Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katherine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too large for her, put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair—a folding canvas thing—that had been placed for her at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while Henry Allen produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment. As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion—the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there could yet be another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection. [Katherine White, Onward and Upward in the Garden, Introduction by E. B. White (Beacon Press, 1979), xviii-xviiii.] 

There we have our calling, plain and clear: to put on our boots, pick up our clipboards, lose ourselves in wonder, and calmly plot the resurrection. It’s new wineskins time. 

It’s your turn. You finish the sermon—with the last three stanzas of In the Midst of New Dimensions.

(c) Dr. Larry Rasmussen 2020
All Rights Reserved.

[1], [2] Glaude, Begin Again, 16.