Grace and peace to you from the one who is, and who was, and who is to come.  Last week, perhaps while trying to avoid my questions about what he had been studying, a confirmation student asked me, “So, what’s new?”  I told him that over the weekend I had gone to see the movie “Shutter Island.” 

He asked me what I thought about the thriller, and I told him, then he said, “Well, my mom ruined the end for me.”  This is the kind of movie where if the ending is old news to you, the movie just isn’t worth sitting through.  This got me thinking about other movies I’ve seen with surprise endings, and how sometimes I’d really like to see them again as if they were new to me. 

But movie endings, like so many other things, can only really be new once.  Sometimes, this is a good thing.  When you’re giving blood for the first time, everything is new, and is probably at least a little scary.  But after the first time when it’s new, you know what is going to happen, and that nerve-racking newness is gone.  But other times, we would give anything to be able to make something new again.  Maybe we’d like to recover the enthusiasm for our workout routine that has since become just one more thing to do. 

We might want to get back the zeal we once had for a job we’ve grown indifferent to.  Perhaps we yearn for a new start to our relationship with a loved one who has fallen away or grown distant from us.  Even if we are blessed with the opportunity to start something in our lives anew, anything that grows from that fresh start is never truly new.  Whatever has brought us to the point where we need to break from the old and seek the new will always be a part of us.  We can never fully erase the vestiges of the old to completely clear the way for the new.

So it seems that answering the question, “What’s new?” gets harder and harder, since any one thing can only be new once.  Beyond this, finding something that is truly novel, new in type and not just a more recent iteration of something that has come before, is exceptionally difficult.  Add to this the reticence we often feel towards new things or experiences, and the challenge of boldly proclaiming something as completely new and then asking people to embrace it, as Paul spent his life doing, starts to become clear. 

Perhaps there’s a grain of truth in the old joke about how many Lutherans it takes to change a light bulb; the answer of course, is “(gasp) - CHANGE?!”

That attitude of regarding everything new as suspect was a nearly-universal stance when Paul was writing to the Corinthians.  This was a culture in which the “good old days” were not just fond memories, but an ideal to which society aspired.  These were people who would have answered the question, “what’s new” by saying, “Hopefully as little as possible.”  And here, in the midst of a near-reactionary culture, was Paul – proclaiming an entirely new way of relating to God, a new way to live our lives, a new creation. 

We don’t have to look far to see that the relationship between God and us is far from what it was intended it to be, and far from what brings us life.  We’ve tried to make ourselves the center, we’ve tried to put ourselves in control of all things.  And when this reliance on ourselves pushes our Creator out of relationship with us – the ones God created from the dust of the earth – our relationships with all of creation, including those we have with one another, go awry.  The relationships between nations and peoples break down.  The relationships we have with each other are strained.  Even the relationship we have with our own self can falter or fail. 

When Paul speaks of the human point of view, he means the view from this broken relationship.  In this point of view, the one where we put ourselves in the center and in control, we believe that if we work hard enough and do everything properly, we can make that relationship with God right, and if we make that right, everything will fall into place.  This is a community where people work plenty hard enough.  For instance, I saw a congregation member here at the church one afternoon, and I asked her, “What’s new?”  She told me, “My husband is out of town on business and he’s left me alone with the kids again, and you know what?  I blame you, Vicar Eric, because every time you plan a meeting, he’s traveling for work.” 

This is also a community where a lot of people do a lot of things right.  I’ve see lots of newspaper clippings about people here being recognized for being exceptionally good at what they do.  Hard work and good use of the gifts God has given us do a lot of good in this community.   If hard work and talent were enough to begin a new relationship between Creator and creation, it could very well start here.  But I doubt any of us believe that any amount of work or achievement of perfection will change our standing with God.  Even if we could renew the relationship we have with the Lord through our own efforts, we could not make it truly new. 

Like the places in our own lives we would like to renew, it is not possible for us to begin a truly new relationship with God because we cannot completely wipe away the habits and traces of the old relationship.  Since we cannot make this new, anything done to improve our standing with God must come from the one who can make all things new.  So what’s new between God and us?

Jesus comes into this world, where becoming new is beyond our grasp, not just as a newborn, but one born new in kind.  Jesus comes from God, who, as Paul says, “reconciled us to himself through Christ.”  This is one of the times I’m glad I spent all that time learning Greek, because “reconciled” does not do justice to the gospel Paul is preaching here.  “Reconcile” comes with the connotation that we are somehow setting things back to how they once were in the good old days.  What Paul says Christ does is change the relationship between us and God from one of hostility to one of friendship.  Jesus does for us what we cannot: he makes the relationship between God and us completely new.  Unlike the new beginnings we make in our lives, God can leave behind everything that was before, including whatever has come between God and us in the past. 

In the waters of baptism, everything old is washed away – our sin, our guilt, our need to live only for ourselves.  The language we typically use like “New and improved” or “new from the ground up” doesn’t do Jesus’ action on our behalf justice – after all, in the new creation God is ushering in, even the ground is new.

Just as the ill-effects of our broken relationship with God have been felt throughout all of creation, the new relationship we have with God through Christ Jesus blesses us.  Since this most important relationship between Creator and created is new, all creation is made new through Christ.  In this new creation, we can let God be at the center, and we can let God be in control.  Jesus makes it possible for us to leave behind that human point of view in which we try to work to make things right, and brings us into the new creation God is making where we can trust God’s work to make things right.  Living through Lent together, we are in a time of reflection, a time when we focus on repentance – on changing our ways and finding new ones. 

I would encourage you to think of this as a time to look at how we are tied to ways that grew out of a broken relationship with God, and to see what’s new because Christ is reconciling us to God, allowing us to live a new life as part of God’s new creation.  This is a season that prepares us for and points us to the most powerful sign of the new creation we become a part of, the sign we will joyfully welcome on Easter Sunday.  We have new joy and hope through the new relationship God has offered us through Christ and the new creation it allows.  But we know that this new creation is not yet complete. 

While we know that only God’s work can complete it and only God’s grace promises us a place in it, part of this new creation is the new opportunity offered us to work with God as “ambassadors for Christ.”  One pastor wrote that an ambassador is “someone called out of their own nation to represent it in a foreign land.  We are called out from the human point of view…to know Christ in a totally new relationship based on forgiveness and reconciliation…so that we might begin to reveal what a right relationship with God really means.”  Being called on to reveal a new, right relationship with God sounds like a daunting task.  But the right relationship that springs from what Jesus did means we can serve this call in our lives everyday. 

When Jesus makes it possible to leave that human point of view, we take ourselves from the center of things.  We allow God to be at the center, and when God is at the center of our lives, the ways we live out our callings – at work, at home, in our communities – become the ways we serve as ambassadors.  As a community, we are living this call to reflect the new relationship we have with God through our lives here this morning.  Our teens are creating a new relationship between the good things we are blessed with and the hungry people who need them.  I hope many of you will join in creating a new relationship between people who are sick and their bodies through giving the gift of blood. 

Today is Sunday, the day that marks the beginning of a new week.  It is the day we gather to celebrate and to give thanks for Jesus giving us a new relationship with God.  As you go out from this place renewed in that relationship by God’s word and the meal we share at this table, I invite you to look at your life in the light of the one who makes all things new, and to ask yourself, “What’s new?”

Amen