The Sermons at Calvary
By Father Richard Humke
TRADITIONS
August 31, 2003, 17-B, Calvary
Church
Deuteronomy 4:1-9
Psalm 15
Ephesians 6:10-20
Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23
Today's
Gospel is about the keeping of traditions.
The Pharisees and the scribes ask Jesus, "Why do your
disciples not live according to the tradition of
the elders, but eat with defiled hands?"
And Jesus answers by quoting the prophet Isaiah, "'This people
honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me...'"
We
know that strong emotions can be raised in people when one talks about
traditions and which of them are good to keep and which are them are not worth
keeping. It is not easy to agree on
tradition, nor do we agree as to how old something must be before it is
a tradition.
In
the Church it sometimes doesn't have to be very old! Take for instance notices of the First Annual Easter Egg Hunt or
the Second Annual Fish Fry. I pity the
person who suggests that something else might be tried. "Why we've always done it that
way!" one is certain to hear. And
the cynic mumbles, "Yes, for two years."
For
most of us traditions mean what we know, what brings back memories for us, what
appears important, even though we don't know why. I suspect that real traditions develop somewhat unselfconsciously
and are not planned.
When
I see that Hallmark or American Greeting Cards calls something a
"tradition," I suspect that it isn't anything of the sort, but they
wish it were for the sake of business.
Like "Grandparents' Day," for instance. Hardly a tradition! We don't need it.
I
don't think family traditions happen because a family early in its life decides
to develop traditions. Rather, it
happens in the other direction: a
family finds, upon reflection, that it is doing something similar each year,
and so it has a tradition. These
traditions give it a kind of stability and a sense of unity, and it helps to
bind it together.
In
the musical "Fiddler on the Roof" we have Tevye saying;
Because of our
traditions, we've kept our balance for many, many years. Here...we have traditions for everything --
how to eat, how to sleep, how to wear clothes.
For instance, we always keep our heads covered and always wear a little
prayer shawl. This shows our constant
devotion to God. You may ask, "How
did this tradition start?" I'll
tell you -- I don't know! But it's a
tradition. Because of our traditions,
everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.
That's
a very strong statement for traditions, but you might ask a person who
has left a very traditional religion for another religious expression (or none)
about the matter, and that person may tell you that he or she felt smothered by
traditions from another time. Traditions
can be very good -- and they can be damaging as well.
Some
traditions are merely hollow shells, no longer meaning what they were meant to
mean, but being observed nonetheless, either with no meaning that anyone could
put to them, or with a new meaning that has been imposed on them so that the
original meaning is now lost.
There's
the story of the woman who always cut the end of a roast before she put it in
the pan that was to go in the oven. One
day her husband asked her why she always did that, and she said she did it
because that was the way her mother did it.
So the next time she saw her mother she asked her why she did that, and
her mother said, "Oh, I never had a pan that was large enough." So you have a tradition that was faithfully
followed but had lost its meaning.
The
matter of traditions will be one of the tensions you will be facing in the next
year or so after you receive a new rector.
If he's smart, he will get to know you and your traditions before making
any changes. But then there will come
the time when he will begin to shape things so as to reflect his
understanding of liturgy and parish life.
Not
everything will go out the door, but some things will. There is, after all, nothing sacred about
the way Ben Sanders did things -- or the way Dick Humke does things. And if your new rector has been considerate
of you, then he should not have to negotiate every single thing he does nor
should he have to feel that everything at Calvary is an uphill battle.
I
would hope, if I were to return to visit in three years, to see some changes in
the liturgy on Sunday morning, a different look to the bulletin, a new
newsletter, a different way for acolytes and chalice bearers to serve,
announcements about things that were never dreamt about today, and a new
vitality in the parish.
Does
that say that the present way is wrong or lacking? Not in every case, but that's not the point. The point is that you are not calling him to
maintain the status quo but to point you in a new direction; and in doing that
he will of necessity begin to shape some things differently.
In
today's Gospel Jesus talks about traditions in religion and about placing too
much importance upon them, as if the essence of true religion were the keeping
of traditions and not what the traditions meant. If one must make a choice between tradition and what is at the
heart of religious faith, there is no choice:
it must always be what is at the heart.
Jesus
says in today's Gospel:
Listen to me, all of
you, and understand: there is nothing
outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are
what defile.
Then he lists those things that "come
out" and defile:
For it is from within,
from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness,
deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these things come from within, and they defile a person.
You
see, Jesus was in rebellion against religion that was only externalized but
never got to the heart of the matter -- which is, of course, the heart. The first part of our Gospel speaks to this
as it says the Pharisees noted that some of Jesus' disciples ate with unwashed
hands, which traditionally a good Jew did not do. Now if you are thinking that has something to do with hygiene,
you have forgotten just how recent our knowledge of germs is. Some of our own great-grandparents didn't
know about them. At the time of Jesus
it was a ritual matter: a prescribed
minimum of water was to be poured on the hands in a prescribed way so that any
ritual uncleanness contracted by touching, for instance, a Gentile, or
something a Gentile had touched, would be done away.
It
was like the ritual washing of hands that the priest does at the altar after
the preparation and before beginning the Great Thanksgiving. It doesn't do any actual physical
cleansing. It is purely a symbolic act
reminding him and you that one must come before God's altar with a cleansed heart.
And
so it was, too, with pots and pans and cups in Jesus' time. Life was regulated by such traditions; and
in the same manner as the prophets of the Old Testament Jesus condemned
exterior form that took the place of a change of heart and a change of
action. Traditions were not important
when held up against the need for a person's life to be converted.
There
was a fundamental division between Jesus and the religious authorities. They spoke different languages even though
they spoke the same tongue. That same
division remains between those who see the essence of religion as what you do
in religious observances and those who see the essence of religion to be a
change of heart that will then issue in a new way of loving God and your
neighbor.
By
all means, let us treasure our traditions.
But let us not forget that they are not really what it is all
about. It is really all about loving
the Lord our God with all our heart and mind and soul and loving our neighbor
as ourselves.
Richard
H. Humke