New Wineskins for New Wine

This past Friday, the lectionary readings for the Catholic liturgy included that passage from Paul's Letter to the Colossions (1:15-20) and the Gospel was Luke 5:33-39. It goes like this:

And they said to him, "The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same; but yours eat and drink."
Jesus answered them, "Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days."
And he also told them a parable. "No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one. Otherwise, he will tear the new and the piece from it will not match the old cloak.
Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined. Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins.
(And) no one who has been drinking old wine desires new, for he says, 'The old is good.'"

In this passage, Jesus is in the midst of an instruction to both the religious teachers of his day and to the disciples, who are listening in. The subject of the lesson is the relationship that religious people have to the beliefs that they espouse, the moral codes and conventions that they follow, and the ways they worship/conduct rituals. You may be wondering what I am talking about in terms of this relationship. And you may have some ideas yourself, which you're welcome to share.

Over the next few days, I will proposing a variety of perspectives on how we frame our relationship with what we believe, based on where we are in our own religious and spiritual maturation. Stay tuned!