HOMILY
Proper 17
August 30, 2009
“Tradition vs. Traditionalism”
As the deer longs for the waterbrooks, so longs my
soul for you O God.
I ended my homily last week at the early service by inviting people to build their personal theology out of one central tenant: We are loved by God for no reason of our own, rather we are recipients of a grace that is neither requested or earned. I commented how difficult it has been over the last two thousand years for people to comprehend a true gift with no strings attached. Many still do not believe this because in our human experience, we have come to expect that there is no such thing as a “free lunch”.
We read from the Song of Solomon today about the end of winter and the onset spring and summer. “The flowers appear on the earth…the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise my love, my fair one, and come away.” All of these things, the flowers, the birds, the fruit, and the fragrance are all free and do not cost us anything! They are a gift and some would say from God, but they are none-the-less at no cost to us. Too often we ignore the simple things we have for nothing. God’s love is like that…
The author of tonight’s reading from James describes us as the first fruits of God’s creation and invites everyone to “be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger…rid yourselves of all sordidness and…welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save…” Most importantly, he says to “…be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves… For religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to care for the orphans and widows in their distress…” James is talking about a religion or spirituality that is not about oneself, rather with constant attention to the other. This is the most profound aspect of ethics: to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The attention is always to the other and not what we are going to get out of our being good to others. This is the one-way street that we referred to earlier with regard to the gift of God’s love, as it is not just about what we have received, it is what we do with what we have received. This is a perfect segue to tonight’s Gospel from Mark.
Mark, not his real name, and not the Mark that followed Jesus around the Galilean region, wrote from his community in Southern Syria around 70 of the Common Era. It was just after the Jewish-Roman war that had forever changed the traditional Temple worship in Jerusalem as the Romans had destroyed the second temple. In tonight’s Gospel, Mark describes an exchange between the Pharisees and the scribes, the intelligentsia of the Jewish religion, who belittle Jesus for the lack of attention by his followers to the tradition of the elders. They ask Jesus: “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” (Never mind that there is no record of the Pharisees and scribes traveling from Judea to the Northern Galilean region, so the writer of Mark—who was not Jewish—can perhaps be forgiven for his lack of understanding of the Jewish traditions, customs and geography.)
What is really happening behind the scenes is that the fledgling followers of Jesus are having an identity crisis as to whether to continue to acknowledge their Jewish roots or to break away entirely. Within a short time, they would be ejected from the synagogues and on their own because of their belief in Jesus as the Christ. So the writer of Mark is setting up an implausible confrontation between these Pharisees and scribes and Jesus who, ironically, is just as much a traditional and conforming Jew just as they are.[1]
It would be too easy to read into this evening’s lesson that Jesus is beginning this separation from traditional Judaism and the Law. In fact, many interpret that part of Jesus’ mission was to attack some of the excessive traditions associated with purity codes around food, women, the lame, halt and diseased. But Jesus never broke from Judaism and the Law, in fact, he was there to fulfill them. Jesus’ responded to his critics by citing Isaiah, calling the Pharisees and scribes hypocrites who “…honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” He accuses them of abandoning the commandment of God, holding instead to human traditions.
The take home lesson from Mark’s message is about the Pharisees and scribes excessive deference to tradition, which others can observe and critique. It is about the misplaced attention to a man-made personal religious practice as opposed to attention to the needs of the other. Jesus speaks of the source of defilement—that it is not what comes from without that defiles the body, rather what comes from within the body that counts and how you use those gifts and talents in the world at large. He speaks of what comes from the heart and that can be both good and bad. If evil things, rather than good things, come from within, they will defile a person. So this message is about misplaced priorities. If one fully understands the message of Jesus, who proclaimed that the kingdom of God was already in their hearing, it is about acknowledging the free gift of God’s love and living and acting in the world knowing that that free gift we have been given must be given away to others in need. It is not about personal religious piety.
I am reminded of a definition of tradition that I like. It is a quote from Jerosalav Pelikan:[2]
“Tradition
is the living faith of the dead.” I personally adhere to this and am fond
of this definition because it reminds me of the richness of the stories and
actions of those loved ones who came before me and what they did and
accomplished prior to and during my early life. However, Pelikan goes on to say that there is a problem when
tradition can turn into “traditionalism”, the worship of tradition. Pelikan defines traditionalism as “The
dead faith of the living”.
Therefore, it would seem that this was what Jesus was railing about with regard to having been challenged by the Pharisees and scribes about whether his followers did a ritual washing before they ate their meals, because it was not about washing for cleanliness, rather in deference to tradition that had turned into traditionalism.
This past
week we have witnessed the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, whose funeral mass
was celebrated just yesterday.
Despite having been born into money and comfort, he was a relentless
advocate for the poor and those who had little. He personally made a difference in many of those lives and
had he lived that quest would have continued. My point in bringing up Kennedy’s life work is that he was
one who understood that his “job” in life was to utilize his gifts and talents
in the service of others. One
could say of Kennedy, as I hope they would say of us some day in the words of
the prophet Micah (6:8) “…and what does the Lord require of you but to do
justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
AMEN
Thomas J.
Lindell