Some of you will have deduced from the increased flow of bloggages that I am now back in harness. The shoulder surgery seems to have been successful and while it is still painful to move in some directions I am gaining greater mobility each day (thank you if you prayed or asked about it). The house move went well and (despite the weather) the shed is now built and is ready for us to fill it with gubbins from the garage to release that space… (see Tuesday’s bloggage for details about the sequencing).

Today is a day dedicated to writing. There are some documents I have been working on that are unfinished and need more attention, and yesterday I promised that I would write something else for a meeting coming up next month. Of course, when I say ‘writing’ I mean that I will be putting fingers to keyboard, or I might use my voice recognition software (although I may get complaints from the room next door as the walls are not soundproofed).

But only a few years ago if I had said I was going to do some writing I would have meant that I was going to pick up one of those ancient artefacts known as a ‘pen’ and make symbols on some parchment that resemble letters, numbers and words. It’s archaic, I know, but there are times when I still do that. Even though there are touch screens, voice controls, mice and keyboards that make interacting with technology very easy there is something pleasant, perhaps even therapeutic, about taking a pen and writing on paper. I even use a fountain pen with a nib sometimes!

Oh, nostalgia… it’s not what it used to be.

When Jesus was responding to some of his critics he told a couple of slapstick parables (Luke 5):

³⁶ He told them this parable: ‘No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. ³⁷ And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. ³⁸ No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. ³⁹ And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, “The old is better.”’

It’s ridiculous to buy a new coat and cut out a patch from it to repair an old one. And if ytou were going to store new, still fermenting wine you needed new, flexible wineskins (leather bottles that preceded glass ones) that would expand as the fermentation took place. If you used old, rigid wineskins they would burst.

But Jesus seems to be commending nostalgia at the end of this, doesn’t he? Which is strange bearing in mind what he had been saying beforehand. I think, bearing in mind the slapstick humour and the thrust of the parables that new is good, he was parodying the intransigent, reluctant-to-change attitude he had encountered from his critics. He was talking about and demonstrating God’s new, exciting, radical Kingdom and inviting people to be part of it but instead some were preferring the comfortable, fusty, safe ways of the past.

How often have we missed out on what God is doing because we’ve never done it that way before?

Be blessed, be a blessing