When Tradition Gets in the Way
Mark 7:1-23
Sermon
by Donald B. Strobe

Do you remember the opening soliloquy which begins the musical “Fiddler on the Roof?” Tevye, the dairyman who is always carrying on lengthy conversations with God, says to the audience: “A fiddler on the roof.  Sounds crazy, no?  But in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck.  It isn’t easy.  You may ask, why do we stay up here if it’s so dangerous?  We stay because Anatevka is our home.  And how do we keep our balance?  That I can tell you in one word - tradition!  Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years.  Here in Anatevka 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 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.” (FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, based on Sholom Aleichem’s Stories.  Book by Joseph Stein, Music by Jerry Bock, Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick.  New York: Pocket Books, 1965, pp.3-4)

I.  TRADITION CAN BE A GOOD THING.  Tradition comes from the Latin traditio, “handing over.” We are here this morning because somebody cared enough to hand over the faith to us.  Folks will be worshipping and serving God here in this church a hundred years from now because we will have handed over the faith to them.  There is the story of a small boy who came to his parents one day with a guilty look all over his face.  He said, “Mom, Dad, do you remember that valuable vase which has been passed down in our family for generations?  Well, this generation just dropped it!” It is possible for our generation to drop it, to fumble the ball, as it were, and become the weak link in the chain of tradition which gets the Gospel across the gap from one generation to the next.  It is a bit sobering to realize that there will not be a Christian Faith a hundred years from now if we do not care enough to hand it over to future generations.  It is as simple as that.  That is what makes teaching and preaching so important. 

In recent years we have jettisoned so much that our forebears thought valuable.  Elton Trueblood calls us a “cut-flower civilization.” We have cut ourselves off from our roots in so many ways, that there is a real danger that we become a rootless and fruitless generation.  Novelist John O’Hara once defined America as “a country that has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.” That’s not a bad description of us.  We have been able to put a man on the moon, but have not made significant progress toward ensuring that mankind will remain here on the earth without burning or blowing itself up.  Cut off from our roots, we keep having to re-invent the wheel.  George Santayana’s oft-quoted words seem to be true: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” No, tradition is not necessarily a bad thing.  It links us to our past. 

Lawrence of Arabia brought a group of Arab chieftains to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and they were very impressed by all of the then-modern conveniences of France.  Those men of the desert were amazed at the marvel of modern technology, but nothing astonished them as much as the running water in their hotel bathrooms.  Water for them in their arid countries meant life and power and wealth.  They knew its scarcity and its value, yet here it could be acquired by the turning of a faucet, free and seemingly inexhaustible.  When they prepared to leave Paris, Lawrence found them trying to detach the faucet so that they might always have an ample supply of water.  He tried to explain that behind the flowing taps were huge reservoirs, and that if they were cut off from this supply, the faucets were useless...but they could not understand.  They thought that the water faucets were magic instruments that would give them water forever.  (From a sermon by C.  Thomas Hilton, The Clergy Journal, July, 1988, p.32)

In the sixties, many young people in America thought that they could cut themselves off from the sources of civilization and start anew.  Many wanted to bring the present society down around their heads, without having the foggiest notion of what they were going to replace it with.  They had an overly-optimistic view of human nature which seemed to think that whatever happens after revolution has got to be better.  But usually it is worse - the American Revolution perhaps being one notable exception.  Though one might speculate whether we are all that much better off than Canada, or whether we might be better off with a Queen or a King instead of a politician as symbolic Head of State.  But I digress.  Tradition comes from traditio - “handing over,” and refers in the Christian Faith to what God has handed over to the Church in Jesus Christ and the succession of believers.  But such tradition, as the great Roman Catholic scholar Yves Congar reminded his fellow-Roman Catholics, is a flowing stream, not a stagnant pond.  Motion, development, flow, these characterize true traditionalism...but are often anathema to modern day traditionalists.  They were certainly anathema to the traditionalists in Jesus’ day.

II.  AS WE SEE IN OUR SCRIPTURE LESSON FOR THE MORNING -TRADITION CAN GET IN THE WAY.  Most of us know that In the Gospels Jesus was always getting into arguments with the Pharisees.  From that we might get the erroneous impression that the Pharisees were bad people.  They were not.  They were good people.  In fact, they were very, very, very good people.  Their only problem is that they knew it!  I have often thought that they were the nearest thing to Methodists we have in the Bible.  They had a very good idea - which was that the commandments of God must be put into practice in one’s daily life.  That’s a good idea.  The only problem is that they thought that they had done it!  They set up hundreds of rules and regulations...trying to interpret the Ten Commandments and make them apply to every conceivable situation.  The problem is that people got lost in the process.  As William Barclay says so eloquently: In attacking the Pharisees “Jesus was attacking a system which put rules and regulations before the claim of human need.  The commandment of God was that the claim of human love and human ties should come first; the commandment of the scribes was that the claim of legal rules and regulations should come first.  Jesus was quite sure that any rule and regulation which prevented a man from giving help where help was needed was nothing less than a contradiction of the law of God.  We must have a care that we never allow rules and regulations to paralyze the claims of charity and love.  Nothing that prevents us from helping a fellow-man can ever be a rule approved by God.” (Barclay, William, Daily Study Bible, The Gospel of Mark, Phila: The Westminster Press, 1956, p. 174)

When tradition gets in the way of love it becomes a bad thing.  In “Fiddler on the Roof” tradition causes Tevye, a good man, to turn out his daughter Chava because she married outside the faith.  Now I understand the necessity of compatible marriages.  I understand the necessity of preserving the faith and keeping the family together.  From ancient times, the Jews forbade intermarriage because it was so easy not only to take a spouse but to espouse that spouse’s gods as well.  That is why is it almost impossible these days to find a rabbi who will assist in a wedding performed by a priest or minister.  Intermarriage has cost Jews (and Catholics and Protestants as well) many members who, when they marry outside the faith often end up with no faith at all.  Still, one can only weep at the tragic scene in “Fiddler on the Roof” when Tevye announces to Golde his wife that their daughter Chava is now “dead to us.” “How utterly wasteful and unnecessary,” we might think.  But whatever else Tevye is, he is a man of principle, and he says that if he bends that far, he will break.  I can understand that, I guess, but I weep at the waste.  Tradition can become deadly when it disrupts human relationships.  One can only grieve at the tragedy of religion becoming a thing to divide and hurt when God intends for it to unite and heal.  Tradition gets in the way when it harms human beings. 

Tradition can become deadly around the Church, I know.  Remember the famous “Seven Last Words of the Church” which somebody thought up a few years back: “We’ve never done it that way before!” That reminds me of the late Bishop Gerald Kennedy’s comments about a church he had where one layperson held the opinion that “nothing ought ever to be done for the first time.” The only thing worse, he said, was another layperson in that same church who said that “Once in awhile you can do something for the first time - but not now.” I’ve known churches and church people like that.  Haven’t you?  Halford Luccock once wrote an article on “The Devil’s Creed,” containing a number of devilish dicta.  One was this: “The time is not ripe.” Almost any good cause can be hit in the head by intoning these solemn words: “The time is not ripe.” One of the problems is that if we wait until the time is ripe, it may well be rotten.  And so we have the “Seven Last Words of the Church”: “We’ve never done it that way before.” If there is an “Eighth Last Word” I would suggest that it might well be: “Restructure.” John Gardner, in his book “Self-Renewal,” says: “The last act of a dying organization is to get out a new and enlarged edition of the rule book.” What that says about Methodists and their quadrennial editions of the “Discipline,” I don’t know.  But the Pharisees were always getting out a new and enlarged edition of the rule book.  They had hold of a good idea-the laws of God ought to be operative in the daily lives of people.  The problem is that they felt that they knew HOW God’s laws ought to operate, and appointed themselves as self-proclaimed arbiters of God’s laws in other people’s lives.  They knew what God required of people.  They would say with Tevye, “Because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.”

David H.C. Read, in a sermon titled “The Power of Christian Tradition” says: “Certainly traditions can be fossilized.  Certainly traditions can be corrupted.  I am not for a moment pleading that nothing whatever should be changed in the words we use to formulate our beliefs, or the forms in which we worship.  That is why I believe not just in the Church Catholic, but in the Church Catholic and Reforming.  Traditions must always be exposed to the reforming spirit of the living God.  But true reformation in the Christian Church never means a total rejection of the Gospel which ‘was once delivered to the saints.’ The reformers had no intention whatever of starting up a new Church....at the heart of the Reformation was a passion to return to the true tradition enshrined in the scriptures..” (National Radio Pulpit, Oct.  1981, pp.4-5)

But Protestant Christians have sometimes been guilty of doing the same thing they criticize in traditional Roman Catholicism, setting up a set of rules and regulations for everybody to follow.  Facing God’s terrible demand for ALL, they turn away from the Sermon on the Mount and set up another set of less demanding rules: “Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t dance, etc.” Methodists have fallen easy prey to this sort of thing over the years.  The view of most non-churchgoers is that Methodists are defined by what they don’t do.  Bishop Kennedy once described someone who did not drink, did not smoke, did not dance, and asked a layperson if that designated that one a Christian.  “Yes,” the man said.  “Well,” said Kennedy, “I’ve just described my dog.” Negativity is not the Christian Faith.  Christians ought to be people who are distinguished from others by what they do, not by what they don’t do: a quality of life lived in love toward God and toward others.  And you cannot really separate the two.  When Jesus was asked what was the “greatest” commandment in the law, he broke the rules of grammar and gave us two “greatest,” or one “greatest” with two sides to it, two sides which cannot be separated from one another: “Love God - and your neighbor as yourself.” (See Matthew 22:34-40.) If your obedience to the first half of that commandment obscures or hinders your obedience to the second half - then you’d better reconsider your position.  I know of no other barometer to measure one’s love for God than one’s attitudes toward one’s neighbors. 

III.  YOU SEE, FOR JESUS, PEOPLE WERE ALWAYS MORE IMPORTANT THAN RULES.  The welfare of human beings was, for Him, the summum bonum, the highest good.  That is why I believe that Jesus was the greatest Humanist of all time!  The word has been misused in our day, but we must never forget what it means: a concern for human beings, considering persons as being of supreme importance.  For Jesus nothing was of more importance than persons: no rule, no book, no day, no place.  Although I often do so, I am really not comfortable in calling the place I re-visit from time to time the “Holy” Land.  No land is holy.  Land can become important because of important things that happened there - but only persons are holy...because they are made in the image of the holy God.  For the Christian, rules ought never to become more important than persons.  If rules help people, well and good; if they do not, then what the Declaration of Independence says about forms of government ought to apply: we ought to feel free to change or abolish them.  The true test of any government or any religion, or any tradition, is what happens to persons who live under it. 

In his commentary on this passage in Mark’s Gospel, Prof.  Lamar Williamson writes: “If innovation is not always good, neither is tradition always bad.  Tradition (paradosis) is used elsewhere in the New Testament to refer to the basic teachings of the Gospel (e.g., I Cor.  11:2; 15:3; II Thess.  2:15; 3:6) All interpreters of Scripture are guardians and passers-on of tradition.  Jesus’ attack in the present text is against ‘your tradition which you hand on.’ (7:13, TEV).  The problem addressed is tradition alienated from the word of God.  By emphasizing the secondary place of human traditions and the primary place of the commandment of God, the text calls us beyond arguments over what is old and what is new to a concern for what is vital.” (INTERPRETATION, Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1983, p.  136)

Not all traditions are bad.  Some traditions, instead of getting in the way, become the way toward a deeper and more rewarding relationship with God.  After all, St.  Paul said in I Cor.  12: “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered (passed on, traditio), to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, ‘This is my body which is for you.  Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood.  Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’” (I Cor.  12:23-25) This tradition does not “get in the way,” but rather “opens up the way” by which we approach the Lord - the way He approached us.  In humility and lowliness of spirit, open to both the past and the future, and remembering what God would have us do now in the present: love one another as God has loved us. 

By this time you may have guessed that Presbyterian David Read of New York City is one of my favorite preachers.  What a way with words he has!  Here is what he says about our Christian tradition: “We all need moments of illumination, what you might call highlights in our Christian life, but we tend to forget the enveloping tradition of the Church which sustains us in our pilgrimage.  The picture Jesus gives of the Christian as a branch springing from the vine on which it depends and from which it derives its power to produce the grapes should nourish in us a sense of our dependence on the continuity of the Church which is his Body.  When he says, ‘Without me you can do nothing,’ he is reminding us that we are not isolated beings adrift in a stormy world, each seeking some passing gust of grace to keep our faith alive.  We’re not like the leaves of autumn, detached from the tree and blown in all directions.  We are engrafted into the great Vine of Christ, in that great company of his Church in heaven and on earth, deriving our strength of body, mind, and spirit from the Lord whose grace flows through the family of his disciples from century to century to the end of time.” (op.  cit., page 5)

Dynamic Preaching, Collected Words, by Donald B. Strobe