Making the Old Ever New and Keeping It So: Right Here on Grace Street
My Dear People,
What have we done?... What are we? What are we going to do and to be?... What can we put, not only into shape but into motion here... for the Church, for our country, and for our time?... No doubt the questions have come to many of us in the form: What new thing can we devise, what new interest arouse, what new movement inaugurate? I suggest a better form of query: How can we acquire the spirit of making the old ever new, and keeping it so?
These words were spoken by the saintly William Porcher DuBose, whose feast day we, in the Episcopal Church, celebrated just last month, as we do every August. DuBose was the founder of the School of Theology at Sewanee, and he is recognized as one of the most original and important theologians in the history of the Episcopal Church. He preached these words a century ago in Sewanee, at All Saints' Chapel. His words are, however, as relevant today as they were then, and as relevant to St. Paul's as to Sewanee.
Making the old ever new and keeping it so. That is our mission, as we live out the same faith lived out by our forebears in the faith, the faith of Paul himself, the faith of the founders of St. Paul's Church, the faith of all those who have gone before us. We live out the same faith, the same "old" faith, if you want to put it that way; and yet we live it out in new ways--or, to put it still more aptly: we live out that same old faith in renewed ways, in refreshed ways. The old ever made ever new, by the ever-creative power of the ever-present Spirit of God.
And Jesus teaches us this over and over; and nowhere more vividly than in the fifth chapter of the Sermon on the Mount, where he says, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished." Then Jesus turns right around and says five times over, "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times...," in each instance citing an explicit teaching from the ancient Jewish tradition, and then, in each instance, he immediately says, "But...," and then calls his followers to go still further than what Torah requires.
He says, for instance, "You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven..."
The New of Renewal
Jesus was not abolishing what had come before, as he said; he was fulfilling what had come before. And so are we. We do not want change for change's sake. We do not want the new simply for the sake of newness. That is empty, as the consumer culture around us demonstrates to us daily.
We want the new of renewal, as in the old made new, as in our faith and our life and our parish church renewed by the presence of the very same Spirit that descended on Jesus at his baptism, and which descended on us in our baptism: the very same Spirit that guided Jesus in all that he did and taught, as he called his immediate followers, and us as well, always into a new day.
It is indeed a new day here at St. Paul's Church. Like our forebears before us, we live into our own new day, in which the Spirit makes the old ever new. And so a new Minister of Music has come. And so our mission in Tanzania grows. And so pastoral care grows, and small group ministry grows. And so we grow closer and closer to one another, and still closer to our God, as those relationships are deepened and renewed.
The old ever made new, right here on Grace Street. Every day, by the power of the Spirit of God.
Your brother in Christ,
Wallace+
