Opening Reflection 2 Cor. 5:17-18

I expect that many of you think that Annual Conference, like church in general, is where we come to do OLD. We build most of our churches to look like they are at least 200 years older than they are. Church loves words that, 1000 years ago, everybody knew – redemption, atonement, justification – but today nobody hears on TV. It’s been a couple of hundred years since professional people like doctors, teachers and lawyers wore black robes: we preachers still wear them every Sunday. Church loves OLD.

We open Annual Conference with a hymn that Charles Wesley wrote for us 250 year ago. Nobody sings it anymore, but we do, because it’s old. Most of the procedures that will govern our deliberation were made before our great grandparents were born. The challenges with which we will grapple are tied to decisions that were made and institutions that were created over a hundred years ago by our grandparents. We spend 10 times more on pensions for retired clergy than we do on preparation of new clergy. This is church. We love OLD.

Now, our church has challenges and problems, but at least we don’t have as many problems as First Church Corinth! Divisions, immorality, fighting and feuding – Corinth First was as sorry a church as ever was. Paul begins his Second Letter to the Corinthians admitting that he wrote them a letter because he couldn’t stand to make “another painful visit.” Paul didn’t want a repeat of the knock down drag out brawl they had last time!

Corinth was bad! Yet Paul says to them, “We don’t lose heart.” (It’s so easy, when you are working in the old church, to lose heart.) Why don’t we lose heart? Because we are incurable optimists? Because we hope that down deep, church people are good people who will one day straighten up and fly right?

Paul says that he doesn’t loose heart because, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away, everything is new! All this is from God.” (2 Cor. 5:17)

Our Bibles once translated this: If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. But that’s not what it says. It says, “If anyone is in Christ; it’s a whole new world!” Paul isn’t talking about a change of heart; he is talking about creation redone. When Christ Jesus appears, it’s Genesis 1 all over again – new heaven, new earth. The Bible begins at Genesis with God making all things new and ends in Revelation, with all things new.

God is better at creation than preservation. Something in this God loves to make new out of nothing and to raise the dead. Our Methodist Movement was born when a tight little Oxford don who knew so much about God got done over, reborn one night at a church meeting at Aldersgate Street.

I don’t know why when we preachers went to seminary we studied Bible under historians. Scripture is more interested in promising what God will do than in rehashing what God has done. If Jesus Christ is raised from the dead, as we believe him to be, and if he has promised to take us with him along the way, then we’ve always got more tomorrow with Jesus than yesterday.

So our theme is “New!” Not because we get easily bored and want to try some new stuff, but because we really believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, that he loves to raise the dead, and that he commands us to be “born again” (and again!). If Jesus can make all things new — new heaven, new earth — he can do that to our church. We can’t go back and do it the way our grandparents did, not because we lack good historians but because we’ve got a good Savior who is always moving forward, setting his face to the future he is determined to own.

New is not a set of radical plans by our planning committee, new is not something weird concocted by Dale Cohen. New is what you get when you step out with Jesus. New is what Jesus does to everything he touches. I point to a painting by our own Jarrett Rutland, given by Mary and Mickey Morgan as a memorial to Jarrett’s grandfather, John Rutland, Sr. It hangs in my office as a reminder of 2 Corinthians 5:17. In the picture, you see a procession of people, black and white, walking toward a sunrise, walking through a blue river. In the back of the procession there is one row of white people and one row of black. But when they move through the river, they are holding hands, walking together. They are leaving an old world where you can see symbols of our sad past in Alabama. As they cross the river, they enter a new Birmingham, a new creation.

Get it? When we pass through the waters of baptism, we are reborn, the old passes away, the new is born. We don’t just come out of baptism with a new sense of self-worth; we open up our eyes to a whole new world.

The worst danger in our church is not homosexuality or bad stewardship. It’s cynicism — the atheistic suspicion that God cannot or will not work a new thing in the United Methodist church, that when we were baptized and God promised to birth us into the new creations God intended, God lied.

The best part of this Annual Conference, I predict, will be all the ways that you will witness Easter in the stories and the images of what God is doing among us, all the ways that this will not only be a productive Annual Conference, but also a grand remembrance of your baptism. My prayer is that you will leave this meeting (no later than 5:00 pm on Saturday!) saying to yourself, “It’s true! If anyone, including any church, is ‘in Christ’ it’s like a whole new world.” Amen.

William H. Willimon