URC Daily Devotion for 2-12-2025

St Matthew 9: 14 – 17

Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, ‘Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?’ And Jesus said to them, ‘The wedding-guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.  No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.’

Reflection

How homely Jesus’s illustrations are! We get a picture of home life where old clothes had to be mended, and that done wisely!  My grandmother was a seamstress and she and my mother made many of our clothes. As the second in line in the family, my older sister’s clothes needed to be adapted or mended so I could wear them. And now we live in a society where clothes are cheap, fashion is fast, and the products are disposable. A recent statistic shows that 92 million tons of clothes-related waste is disposed of each year. And the amount of water used to dye fabric, and the amount of energy needed to produce it, is horrifying.

We live in a very wasteful age compared to when Jesus watched his mum mend an old cloak.  I’d suggest disposability has become part of our landscape. Relationships, church membership, belonging to a political party or other organisation – we stick with it for as long as it provides us with what we need (consumerism, anybody?) and when it no longer does what we want, we dump it like an old pair of jeans.

Jesus was good at mending. He did a lot of it. As he went around, he seemed to home in on the people who needed mending, physically, mentally, spiritually. There’s a quote from somewhere that church is less a social club for the healthy than a hospital (repair shop!) for those needing mending.

Prayer

Give us wisdom 
in our use of the earth’s resources, Lord, 
and care as we encounter lives and hearts 
that may be wounded and in need of mending.
Amen