“Filled With New Wine”
Day of Pentecost
June 8, 2025
Burnt Hills United Methodist Church
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There’s an old joke that gets passed around from one generation of preachers to the next: Why can’t you bend a nickel?
Because change is hard.
[shoutout to Rev. Dr. Michelle Bogue Trost over at Asbury First UMC in Rochester for sharing that one with me]
Why can’t you bend a nickel? Because change is hard, friends!
And look, I’m right there with you. I’ve never been a fan of change. At all. You can ask my mother—when I was growing up and in the car on the way home, I would throw an absolute fit if the route deviated from what I was expecting even slightly.
And yet, the truth of the matter is that change is perhaps the only constant we can rely on in this life. As we age from infancy to childhood, from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, and from adulthood to old age we know that our bodies change. We know that the way our bodies move change. We know that the way we see the world changes—literally; my eyesight is nowhere near what it was when I was fourteen years old.
As a brief aside, I want to know why we have all this research on child and adolescent physiological and emotional development, but next to nothing on how adults physiologically and emotionally develop as we age? Is that tightness in my knee or back something I need to worry about? Do I need to see a doctor about that eye spasm? Is that new skin spot normal?
We’ve got What to Expect When You’re Expecting; where’s the What to Expect When You’re Aging picture book?
Octavia Butler reminds us that “the only lasting truth is change”. Change is a part of life. Change is a part of our faith. And perhaps the only thing that doesn’t change is our resistance to change itself.
Hang around long enough and you’ll find that nowhere is that more true than in the Church.
But Pentecost is fundamentally a story about change. It’s a story about Spirit-led transformation. About God doing something so new and so bizarre through the community of faith that it looks like drunkenness.
Pentecost is a story about the Holy Spirit blowing wide open faithful, but scared group, huddled together in a locked room with wind and fire and carrying them beyond the walls of that room to be proclaim the mighty works of God in ways and in languages that even they didn’t understand. They threw politeness and respectability and common sense out the window because what is wise to God is foolish to humans and what is wise to humans is foolish to God.
And let me be clear. Whether they were locked in the room or outside living in the power of the Spirit, they knew that Christ and Christ crucified and risen was Lord. The message didn’t change.
Their medium changed.
Their language changed.
Their way of living and being church changed.
A church that lives in the power of the Spirit is one that is firm and steadfast in their convictions and flexible in their practices. And yet, I fear that the story of far too many churches in our day and age—churches of all shapes and sizes and bents and stripes—is the exact opposite: we’ll give up our convictions so that we can keep on doing things the way we’ve always done it because, by God, that’s the way we’ve always done it.
Pentecost calls us back to being a church that lives in the power of the Spirit. To have a faith that’s unwavering and practices and customs that are adaptive. Passers by saw the apostles and said they must be filled with new wine. It was a sarcastic dig, an insult, but there was truth in it too. The Spirit does ferment newness, and yet the church is so often drunk on the past.
In a 1739 letter, John Wesley wrote to one of his colleagues who chastised him for going beyond the walls of the parish to share good news with and care for the poorest and most downtrodden members of English society, and he concluded his letter with this:
Oh may you also be vile, exceedingly vile, for [Christ’s] sake! God forbid that you should ever be other than generally scandalous.
Are we willing to be vile? Exceedingly vile for Christ’s sake?
Are we capable of being generally scandalous?
A church that lives in the power of the Spirit will always keep Christ at its center. Not a vibe. Not a program. But a man who, through his crucifixion and resurrection delivered every last man and woman and everyone beyond and in between the binary from captivity to sin and death.
A church that lives in the power of the Spirit will always stand alongside the poor and the marginalized. Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.
A church that lives in the power of the Spirit will always fling its doors wide open for all who wish to enter because no one, absolutely no one stands outside of the love of God made manifest through Jesus Christ. Because every time we draw a border or build a wall that separates us from them, more often than not, Christ is going to be on the other side of that line and on the other side of that wall.
But a church that lives in the power of the Spirit will also speak in new tongues—tongues that are unfamiliar or maybe uncomfortable or even, heaven forbid, generally scandalous—to share that radical message of love and acceptance with new people. Because people need to hear good news in their language.
A church that lives in the power of the Spirit will go beyond its walls to new places and sit and dine at tables set by others. It will embrace newness because it knows that God’s love is steadfast.
A church that lives in the power of the Spirit will be aware of the new ways the forces of evil and wickedness sink their claws on the most vulnerable and get right in the middle—resisting evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.
And look, I know, friends. Change is hard. There’s comfort in the familiar.
But resisting change, resisting Spirit-led transformation? That’s even harder.
Pentecost teaches us that the Church can either move with the Spirit, adapt, and change for the sake of the Gospel, or it will have those changes thrust upon it.
And so my prayer for all of us on this day of Pentecost and every day is that rather than clinging to the old ways, the comfortable ways, the ways we’ve always done it, we hold fast to the cross of Jesus and live in the power of the Spirit. That we may be filled with new wine and that folks who pass us pay look at us and think man, they must be wasted.
I’ll have what they’re having.
May the one who began a good work be faithful to complete it in us.
The work continues. Amen.
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