and read this morning from the gospel according to Mark chapter two. Verses eighteen to twenty two. Page nine hundred eighty two in your view. Pray before you read God's Word. Or grant us to understand the import of your word, as it was first spoken here by Jesus, as it is written in an account. And it's important for us in our lives that we live. And we ask this in Christ's name. The disciples of John and of the Pharisees were fasting. Then they came and said to him, Why did the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast? And Jesus said to them, Can the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days. No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, or else the new piece pulls away from the old and the tear is made worse. and no one put new wine into old wineskins, or else the new wine bursts the wineskins, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins. Well, here is the setting. John the Baptist's disciples were fasting. The young man whom the Pharisees were discipling. By the way, I think disciple used as a verb is, I don't, it irritates me, but you understand it's a lot of people use it. So the young man that the Pharisees were discipling, they were fasting. And then you turn around, you look at Jesus' disciples and they're not fasting. That's the setting. And so they ask, well, what's going on here? You understand, and this should be something that we should be all aware of, that each of us has a sort of ideal in our minds as to what a pastor should be like. So when you call a pastor or somebody new comes, you have an ideal. And it's a mixture of ideas you've taken directly from the scriptures, from what you've seen other pastors do, maybe from something you've read. I mean, it's kind of a mixture of all these different ideals and expectations. And it's all there in your head. And if the pastor deviates too far from your picture of what he should be like, you're going to have some serious questions about him. Maybe you might have some questions about what's in your head, but your initial reaction is going to be questions about him. The Jews had a picture in their minds of what a prophet should be like. Elijah is probably the summary best in history of what they thought a prophet should be like, and maybe Moses. Did John the Baptist fit their expectations of a prophet? And the answer is absolutely yes. John was everything the Jews thought a prophet should be. And so he didn't produce this kind of, why are you doing this question? No, he was out in the wilderness. He was in vain against evil. He was calling people to repentance. He was doing just like Elijah had done, just like Jeremiah had done. He was clothed in this distinctive way. You know, Elijah was too. At some point, there's a story about the king of Israel sends a messenger to go to the wrong place. He meets Elijah. Elijah says, you've sent to the wrong God. Go back home. The king's son is going to die. And the king says to the messenger, how did you get back so soon? He said, well, I met a man and he gave me the answer, so I came home. The king said, is he dressed like this? The man says, well, actually, yes. And the king says, it's Elijah. John the Baptist dressed that way. He fit the expectations. The Jews had ideas about what teachers should be like. I don't mean teachers in the classroom, but teachers like the Pharisees, the rabbis. Alright, there's a certain way they behaved, a certain way they dressed, a certain way they acted. Alright, they had expectations. And Jesus was obviously a teacher. Alright, he's called teacher more often in the Gospels than he's called anything else. He was often called and thought of to be a prophet, although he wasn't addressed that way. And Jesus just kept breaking the mold of people's expectations. You understand that's what's going on in this chapter? He doesn't fit what they think a preacher or a teacher or a prophet should be like. I mean, he really doesn't fit. And so Peter, in his preaching, and Mark writes down Peter's preaching, he collects four of the most common things that people just looked at Jesus and shook their heads and said, What is going on here? He would say, and he said it more than once, my son, your sins are forgiven. No rabbi ever said such a thing. No prophet ever said such a thing. Jesus said something that looks like tremendous personal overreach. And Jesus doesn't back down. not a bitch remember his answer well which is easier to say your sins are forgiven or take up your bed and walk home well so that you know that I have authority to say your sins are forgiven take your bed up walk and go home man gets up picks up his bed and goes home and everybody else's have you ever seen people so astonished the jaw drops that's what I expect everybody sort of looked And then we looked at last week. You know, there's company you're supposed to keep and company you're not supposed to keep. I'm just going back. My students always had expectations of me. Their expectation was that I appeared magically in the classroom and had no other life. And so if I would run across a student from Westchester in a mall, they would look at me with, what are you doing here? as though teachers don't do those sorts of things. I can think of other places that they'd see me they really would have been astonished. And then we have this one. His disciples weren't fasting. Now I want you to I want you to just I want to get the force of how weird this looked to people. Suppose I were in the habit, which I am not, and there are reasons, I'm not even going to go into them, but suppose I were in the habit of picking out two or three young men in the congregation periodically and saying, would you like me to disciple you? And they say yes. And so we begin meeting together once a week for discipling sessions. And I do this with guys for about six months and somebody comes along and says, How has Mr. Edgar taught you to do personal devotions? And the guy says, well, he's never mentioned that. They come to me and say, wait, wait, wait, you're discipling these guys? You haven't taught them to read the Bible and pray? Or, in an earlier era, suppose I'm meeting with somebody and it's been with me for a while. and I never tell them not to dance or drink alcohol. People have serious questions about what I'm up to. That's what it felt like in Jesus' day. We're fasting with concern. Now, we don't fast much in our society. And I think there are actually some... I'm not going to talk about why, but we don't. But, fasting has often been popular in Christian circles down through the years. Maybe it should be more popular today. It was certainly popular in Jesus' day. If you go through the Old Testament, fasting turns up a lot of times. We've sung two songs that talk about fasting. There's a third we're going to sing in a little while. There was fasting once a year on the Day of Atonement. That was the only required fast. But when things got tough for Israel, they automatically fasted and prayed. The two went together. Esther says to Mordecai, OK, I'll do what you ask. I'll go to the king. I may lose my head. Get everybody to fast and pray for me for three days. Mordecai says, OK, we'll do that. The people and the Jews in the capital city do that for three days. And Esther then goes in to see the king. Ezra, before he starts his journey back with some more returnees to Jerusalem from exile, is ashamed to ask the king for an armed escort to dangerous territory. But when it comes time to leave, they're all afraid. And so they fast and pray before they set out on their journey, where they will be relatively easy pickings for marauding Bedouins. After Benjamin behaves abominably defending one of their own members against the rest of Israel for behavior that would shock anybody anytime. It's right up there with ISIS. Israel gathers at Bethel and fasts because one of the tribes has gone so badly astray and says, what should we do about it? Nehemiah, when he heard that the walls of Jerusalem were still not put up, a hundred years after the return. He is well, well located in the Persian court, but he fasts and prays in his sorrow at Israel. Nineveh. Jonah goes and says, you've got 40 days and your time's up. And Nineveh fasts and prays for mercy. And you know, all Israel, this is not a piece that you pick up easily from the Bible. All Israel, after the fall of their kingdom to the Babylonians, adopted a three times a year fast and memoriam for their defeat. One fast on the day that the city fell, one fast on the day of the anniversary that the temple was burnt, and one fast on the anniversary of the day that the king was executed. in Zechariah chapter 8 verse 19 and the Lord saying, now who are you doing this for? Yourselves or me? So he has a question about it, but that was their pattern. Fasting was so expected and so common among the Jewish pious leaders that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses it. And the question is not about whether you should fast or not. What he says is when you fast, Don't let anybody know that you're fasting. Don't put on a lean, hungry face. Don't hold your empty stomach in agony. Don't be telling people, oh, I can't wait until this fast is over. I've been doing it for two days. He says, that's what the actors do. And they do their fasting so that everybody else will say, what a good man. What a good man. He fasts twice a week. Now he says, keep it to yourself. Fast before God and God who sees in secret will reward you openly. As he says about a number of other good deeds. Actually, the prophets have a few negative things to say about fasting. You can find this in both Jeremiah and Isaiah. Where the Lord says to Israel, you know what, I'm getting tired of your fasting. I'd rather see a little justice instead. I'd rather see it be fair to the poor instead. I'd rather see it telling the truth instead. I'm a little tired of all this fasting. And, you know, you could probably take all of our spiritual disciplines, which are good and in their right place, and I could hear the Lord saying the same thing. It's great you read your Bible every day. How about you treat your wife right? It's great that you pray every day. How about you be honest at work? It's great that you go to church every week. How about you be thoughtful to your neighbor? See, fasting is in the same category of all these things that we do as children of God. They're good and they're right. and Jesus' disciples weren't fasting at all. To everybody else, you'll notice in this case it doesn't say his enemies came and asked. It's just they. It's a vague they. I think it's probably John's disciples are asking. They're perplexed. The Pharisees are perplexed. Jesus isn't fitting the mold of a teacher because his disciples are not doing what anybody being discipled should be doing. They're not fasting. And so they asked. Have you noticed how, I think it was partly just a different culture, people were, from the Gospels I pick up, people were much more ready to just go right to somebody and say, why are you doing this? We're kind of reticent about that. But people were quite ready to go to Jesus himself and say, why are you doing this? And so they come to Jesus and they say, why? Your disciples don't fast. John's disciples fast. versus disciples fast, all pious people fast. Your disciples don't fast. And I can just sort of imagine the disciples walking along with Jesus day after day, just eating everything in sight. You know, if they could, they filled themselves up. If they had caught a lot of fish, they cooked a lot of fish. If they went to house and somebody served a lot, they ate the food. Jesus says when he sent them out two by two, you go into some place, stay in a place, eat the food set before you. He's known for feeding people, actually. We've just read in our family worship, the feeding of the 5,000 and then the feeding of the 4,000. Now, if Jesus' failure to be a proper teacher is a little startling to the people then, his answer is... You know, we've read the answer so often that we probably just nod our heads and don't quite get. This is an absolutely audacious answer. And it's twofold. The first is, can the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? I want you to think about that rhetorical question. Can the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is there? Now, obviously, if you think about a wedding, think about the wedding you've been to most recently. What always follows in our society and in all societies? What actually follows the ceremony? Food, a reception. What's at the reception? Food. Imagine that this whole church is invited to somebody's wedding. Pick somebody you know in the church here who might get married someday. Alright, so we're all invited to their wedding and they put out all this tremendous food and we all say, I'm sorry, I'm fasting today. Or we don't say anything because Jesus said, just keep it to yourselves. We just won't eat. I mean, really, we won't. We'll just leave all the food there. We won't eat. The guys putting on the reception are going to get irritated. They're going to say, what is the matter with you people? You see, I call this an Ecclesiastes 3 category mistake. All right, let me turn to Ecclesiastes 3 if you don't all quickly recognize what I'm talking about here. Ecclesiastes 3, category mistake. This chapter was made, has been made into several popular songs over the years. You'll recognize it when I read it. To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck what is planted. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. All right, maybe you're aware right now that right now our president is being accused of an Ecclesiastes 3 mistake. That's the mistake he's making. Nobody's saying that, but that's what he's asking. Everybody gets it. You go out and you give a press conference and you say you were angry and distraught that an American journalist has had his head cut off and the video put out for the whole world to see of the most brutal, brutal kind of behavior. Right up there with Benjamin in the time of judges. And then you allow the photographers to photograph you, six minutes later, high-fiving your friends, and riding your golf cart, and swinging the golf club, and smiling and laughing as though nothing's wrong in the world. And the whole American people, I checked out on the cable channels the other night, I checked out MSNBC, not my usual watching, I checked out CNN, Still as boring as ever. I checked out Fox and they were all, they were all basically saying Ecclesiastes 3 mistake. Another way of saying is, I thought the optics weren't so good. Yeah, that's that's what that means. This does not look good. So Jesus is saying it would be an Ecclesiastes 3 mistake for my disciples to be fasting while I am here. Now that's audacious. Isaiah would never have said such a thing. The proud, proud Pharisees would never have said such a thing. Maybe King David would have said such a thing when he was inaugurated. Remember, there's an account of all the food he gave people. Big reception when he's crowned king. Maybe King Solomon would have said such a thing. But not a teacher, not a prophet, not a rabbi. Well, what's he saying? Well, you know, one of the things about a bridegroom is in any given wedding, there's only one. By the way, in the ancient weddings, the bridegroom was more the key figure than the bride. We've reversed it. So we've talked about the bridegroom. There's only one bridegroom. Which means Jesus is claiming there is nobody else that is my, in the same category as me. Not only that, if you read the Song of Songs, we go back to the wisdom literature. If you read the Song of Songs, the bridegroom is portrayed as a king in all his glory. And the bride is portrayed as Mrs. King. Solomon is the king and the Shulamite, which is very close in Hebrew to Solomon, is the bride. Bridegroom. King. Only one of a kind. So wonderful that when he's here, it's just utterly inappropriate to fast. Now, this amounted to a sly claim to be the Messiah. That's really what this is. And Jesus, surrounded by enemies, and aiming not to be arrested and put to death until the time came, often spoke in parables, and the parables weren't just things we label parables. The point of the parables is, I tell the truth, but in such a way that you can't get me for having said it. So here he is, talking about who he is, but in a sly way that doesn't open him up to, he claims to be the Messiah, arrest him. The day will come, he says, when I'm taken away, that my followers will fast. And so the church has. The church militant, the church often suffering, the church distressed and confused, the church persecuted, that church has often fasted. The church in this country has been very little persecuted, has faced very few challenges, and fasts relatively little. At White Lake Camp this summer, I got talking to one of my favorite people to talk to at camp, who was Ruth Squiric, who's a member of the Trinity congregation. And I don't know how it came up, but she reminded me of something that I had completely forgotten about in the life of this congregation. And that is when Betsy Carson fell deathly sick and was just bedridden for months. She said, I remember that the church fasted and prayed for a day. And I said, oh, I'd forgotten we did that. Yes, we did. She was a teenager at the time, I think, and she said that had a great, great effect on me, that the church would do this for one of its members who was at the point of death, a young woman who should not have been so ill as we would think. Yes, when events call it forth, the church knows what to do. And with Jesus absent, that's our time, and we know when to fast. Jesus' answer is not over. You know, the next part of the answer is almost as audacious as the first part. He just gives a simple illustration, which as a kid I never understood. He says, when you're patching an old piece of clothing, you don't take a brand new piece of cloth and put it on the hole in the old piece of clothing. And he says, the reason is the new piece will pull away from the old and you'll make a bigger hole in the end than first. Now, I'm going to explain it for people who, like me, had no clue about clothing and things like that. A lot of clothing, especially, I think it's wool. Does wool especially shrink? Yeah, especially wool clothing. You buy it and you've got to buy it size large because when it gets washed it's going to shrink and then it should fit right. and after it's shrunk, it usually doesn't shrink more. So if you have a nice piece of clothing that has shrunk and it's got a hole in it and you take a piece that hasn't shrunk yet and you sew it in there, the first time you wash the garment, the new piece is going to shrink and it's going to pull away from the old piece and you're going to get a bigger hole than you started with. Similar illustration, which is even further from my experience and probably yours also. If you are Producing wine. Just curious, how many of you out here have ever made wine? Zero. Okay. At the children's and teen camps this year, Duren had all the kids making wine. He bought this huge amount of grapes. They didn't ferment it, they just got the grape juice. But huge amount of grapes and he talked them through. They didn't use their feet to stop on it, but I wish that would have been fun. But they did make grape juice with crushing all these grapes. In the ancient world, everybody knew how wine was made. We don't know. I saw photographs recently of ancient depiction of people making wine. It was two men hanging on to what looked like monkey bars, you know, on a kid's climber in the backyard, so that they wouldn't fall deep into the pit, and they were there stomping away on the grapes, and then there was a place where the The juice would run out in a little funnel and you collect your wine. Now once you get that, it's called new wine because you just made it new. And you put it away and give it time and it will turn into the stuff with a little kick to it. While it's doing that and fermenting, it gives off gases. That's as good as I can do. It gives off gases. Now, the old wineskins were made of leather. And so they were stretching. And so they could stretch with the gases that got put off, and a little bit would escape, but they would be okay. But if you've got an old stretched wine skin and put the new wine in, it has no more stretch to it, and when it starts to ferment, you're going to spring a leak and there goes all your wine. So Jesus says, nobody is so stupid as to do that. I might be because I would have no idea what I was doing if I just went off to make wine. But nobody in the ancient world would have been so stupid as to do that. No, he says you have to put new wine into new wine's case. Now what's this about? It's not exactly directing so clearly the fasting. The first answer answers the fasting question really clearly. The second answer suggests that some or maybe all of the accepted ways of being pious among Jews may have to go. Now this is almost more far-reaching. The first says, it's a category mistake, Ecclesiastes 3. The bridegroom's here, I'm the bridegroom, it's not appropriate to fast right now, that's why they don't fast. They'll fast later. The next answer says, maybe This is new wine, and that's part of an old wineskin, and we're just going to make things worse if we keep all the old patterns of piety going in a new era. And this is the sly hint that Jesus is a new Moses to bring a new law. Doesn't say so directly. It's sly. It's so sly, it slides right past his hearers then. And you know who else it often slides right past? Readers now. It's easy to read this and just go right past and not realize what he is getting at and hinting. And like I said, it's sly. You know, in the end, the Christians had to argue this out. What old ways went with the coming of Jesus? Circumcision? Gone. That used to mark who was in and who was out of the people of God. And it's gone. That's a huge change. What's out? The priesthood. Out. Sacrifice. Out. Dietary laws. Out. Temple. Out. Jesus brings huge changes. Why? Well, you can't put new wine into old wineskins. You can't take new piece of cloth on old piece of cloth and mend it successfully. Other things go. All those legal rules that were for Israel as a nation, they go. I don't know a single country that follows Old Testament landholding laws. I don't know a single country. I don't even know a single country that has ever aimed to do so. Can you imagine the chaos in this country if we said every 50 years all the land goes back to the previous owner? Now I like that idea of going back far enough because I have ancestors who owned a farm where Wall Street is now. So it works for me. But the legalities would just be amazing. No society has ever tried to do that, as far as I know. The inheritance rules. Maybe some societies have followed them, but most societies have not followed the inheritance rules. By the way, I would like the inheritance rules too. Oldest son gets double. How many oldest sons do we got here? Yeah, good idea Larry, right? The Penal Code. The Penal Code heavily influenced Western law, but it was never taken over wholesale. As our Confession says, we try to follow the general equity thereof, meaning the rules of what's basically right and wrong and what should be legal and illegal, we try to follow that. To follow it directly, the Christian Church has not done. Now we've got a new Moses. And the gospel now goes to all kinds of nations with all kinds of customs, but wherever the gospel goes, the old spiritual ways and the old legal ways in those societies change. Often some protests about that, there's struggle and strife, but they always change. Because every place the gospel goes, It's because now the one that the world was waiting for from the very beginning after Adam and Eve sinned and were expelled from the garden, that one has come. And he calls men and women and children into his kingdom to live by his laws and the old ways get broken apart. Whether the missionaries aim to change things or not, they will change. But the details you can't go back to just reproduce Israel's law that's not how it's done. Well, here's the here's the conclusion. Jesus answered. Jesus answered. What was really an obvious question in those days from everybody. Again, with, you can't hold me to your prior expectations of a teacher. Wouldn't be appropriate. You can't hold me to your prior expectations of a prophet. Wouldn't be appropriate. He wouldn't even let people hold him to their prior expectations of the Messiah. They had it wrong, he had it right. Why is the Christian Church the way it is? At bottom, it's the way it is because this is what Jesus taught. There are deviations, of course, but basically this is Jesus' church in following his teachings. That's why it's not the old Jewish ways. And that's why we now live with this strange mixture of the King has come Long live the king. May he return soon. That's how we live now. And aim to obey him. So we live with a life of joy mixed with sorrow. I referred to it last week. It fits again. Wheat and tares grow together. We can't be surprised when evil erupts. The tares are being allowed to grow. And it's a mistake. It's an Ecclesiastes 3 mistake. To try to make all the field wheat right now by ourselves. That's a mistake. And when times call for it, we should be fasting. The bridegroom has been taken away for now. And we should be fasting. But we understand that he has brought a new era to the world. It's new wherever the gospel goes for the first time, and it's constantly new wherever the gospel is. And the old ways simply can't continue where Christ goes. How come your disciples don't fast? I'll be a category mistake. Ecclesiastes 3 mistake. You can't fast when the bridegroom's there. And not only that, you can't put new wine into old wineskins, you'll just have a big mess. That's Jesus' unapologetic answer. Have you ever noticed in the Gospels how Jesus would attract crowds and then lose them? This is why he would lose them. When people aren't satisfied with what they expect their leaders to be, you lose a lot of people. That's why Jesus constantly would attract a crowd and then it would go. The other thing I want you to notice is, and this is something I envy for myself, the ability when faced with a difficult question in a hostile environment to answer in such a way that you don't lose your head and you say the truth and you leave people who want to think about it with something to think about. Because that's what Jesus actually does over and over again. Asks an awkward question in a potentially hostile situation, and he answers truly, and people want to listen and think, they go away. He often even tells them, now you should go think about this. He was ears to hear, let him hear. Think about this. That I think is part of our calling to be in a hostile society, wise as serpents and harmless as dogs. God's called us.