First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
“Treasure the Old, Embrace the New”
Rev. Bill Trump
September 29, 2013

In today’s lesson, Jesus has been speaking a whole string of parables to his disciples.Through all these analogies, He hopes to get them to understand the Kingdom of Heaven. He has said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure.”

He ends by noting that The Master knows how, wisely, to bring out of his treasure, “what is new, and what is old.” In a way, this could be a description of the whole of Jesus’ teaching. Isn’t this what He does when He speaks a parable to His disciples? He’s bringing out, from the treasure of Israel, that which is precious and old –– in this case, the hope for, and dream of, the Kingdom of Heaven –– and speaks it in such a way that His hearers gain new insight and understanding. From out of the old, comes newness. The etaching of Jesus embraces the richness of the Jewish law. Something has been received, something from the old. Yet Jesus shows its message in a whole new way.

This is so typical of Matthew’s approach to the Good News. Matthew, more than any other gospel, keeps quoting the Hebrew scripture. The Jews were looking for the Messiah, and Matthew presents Jesus as the fulfillment of the promise of God.

Yet, at the same time, from the very beginning of the gospel, those expectations are being challenged, rearranged, and transformed in Jesus. If Jesus were merely the Messiah which had been conventionally expected, then why the conflict, the doubt, and the confusion, when the multitudes looked upon Jesus?

Every Sunday, when we gather, we are busy bringing treasure out of the ancient texts which we have received. But we are, at the same time, living in the light of Easter, where God defeated death and brought newness and life. We are living in the time after Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended and disrupted everything with its power.

From out of the old, in conversation with the new, our faith is formed.

Jesus ends his string of parables, and their interpretation, by saying, “Therefore, 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.” (V. 52)

I can visualize that man . . . with a large trunk open before him. Joyfully, he reaches into the trunk and brings out surprising, wonderful objects, some of them very old and valuable, some of them very surprising and new, and, therefore, valuable.

As Christians, we are people who are disciplined to know how, on Sunday, to bring out of God’s great treasure what is old, and what is new.

Not long ago, I read a survey asking laypeople about their attitudes toward preaching. What did they look for in a good sermon? The predominant response was: I like a sermon which helps me see things in a new way.

They said that they liked sermons which helped them tgake some old, familiar Christian concept and see that concept in a whole new way.

You know that joy. You are listening to a sermon about the Prodigal Son, thinking, “Here we go again!”

But then, you received some new insight, a new surprise which you had not seen before, and you say, “Wow! I’ve never been here before!” And that is a joy.

There’s also joy in the old. When Christmastime comes around, you don’t want us to go looking for new Christmas songs for you to sing; you rejoice in the old, familiar carols which you know by heart. That’s what the old, beloved texts and songs mean to us; they are deep in our hearts. We know them not just with our heads, but also with our hearts, which makes them all the more dear to us. Sometimes, the church gets accused of backward, old, and out-of-date. But we have learned the joy of not having to create our faith in Jesus anew in each generation. We have a treasure, committed to our care, in what is old.

At the same time, new generations come along with new spiritual needs. The world presents us with new challenges. So we keep going back to our treasure chest of what is old, rummaging about, praying to God to give some new insight for our time and place.

When Jesus taught, people thought they knew what he meant when he said “The Kingdom of Heaven.” But then, when he told his parables about that Kingdom, they were surprised to hear it compared to a place where lost sheep are found, and secrets are secretly growing, or a man finding a treasure buried in a field. Jesus was bringing something new out of what was old.

Christopher Lasch reminds us that nostalgia and memory are two quite-different things. Nostalgia idealizes the past, and a frozen past at that; but memory links the past with a living present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present.

I think, therefore, that good Christian worship strives for a mix between the comfortable, the reassuring, and the familiar –– mixed with the surprising, and the even-shocking, and the new. We need both; God ministers to us through both.

A couple of years ago, in a workshop on worship, a speaker had been talking about the need for new Christian music . . . and the way that our “old music” is deadening . . . difficult to sing . . . and out-of-date.

A woman rose and said, “What you say has much truth in it, but we also ought to remember that (Johann Sebastian) Bach was also a Christian.”

Her words hit home. We are not the first to live this faith. We have the treasure of those who have walked this way before us. We have Bach to help us sing the Lord’s song. Let us love the past.

Yet, Jesus has commanded us to out into all the world to proclaim the Good News. That means the world. Our world. NOW. We must proclaim in a way which can be heard. If we don’t lay the Good News alongside today’s newspaper, we might give some people the wrong impression that Christianity is some sort of escape into some fantasy world . . . one that has no relationship to where we live today. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the presence of God with us now, leading us forward into the future. To love the past too much, in the wrong way, would be a sin against that enlivening spirit.

Note that Jesus says, “Every scribe who has been trained for the Kingdom of Heaven is like a master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is old, and what is new.”

He doesn’t say, “Who brings out of his treasure what is old out of what is new.” He doesn’t say, “What is new instead of what is old.” There is no privileging of the old, or the new, here. We are to embrace both, to love both what has been received and to be ready to embrace what is yet to be given, the old and the new.

At our best, we do this. We submit to the ancient wisdom of the saints. We try to read and to understand scripture. We try to listen and learn their music, their hymns and songs of praise. And we listen for God’s word in today’s newspaper, in contemporary events. We try a new tune now and then, as we attempt to sing God’s song in a new way. We bring, out of the treasure of God’s revelation, both what is new and what is old.

Jesus encourages us to draw from the wealth of the tradition of the faith of Israel and the church, to treasure the old ways of wisdom. Yet, at the same time, He also encourages us to be willing to embrace the new, to be open to additional revelation. As Christians, we are beneficiaries of both the past and the future in our walk with God.

I suppose that some of us are better at one than the other. Some of us love the past and nurture it joyfully. Others of us are always looking for the “new and improved model” of everything. Perhaps it takes both kinds in a congregation. Perhaps it takes both kinds of faith within an individual Christian . Perhaps, at one tyime, your spiritual need is such that you need the Word from the past –– that reassuring confession that Jesus Christ has been Lord for those who have come before us, and will therefore be Lord for us as well.

At other times, you need the gift of some freshness, some stunningly new insight.

The good thing is that our Sunday worship moves back and forth between the two, bringing out among us the treasure that God has given us, in what is old . . . and what is new.

. . . Amen