"Traditional, But Whose Tradition?"
August 14, 2005: A-Pentecost-13
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, co-pastor
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.newlights.org

So this morning, I want to remind us that what we hear in Matthew's story is not in and of itself a Christian-Jewish conflict. Sure, Matthew was writing around 75 C.E., after the destruction of the Second Temple and the dissolution of the Jewish state by the Romans and the final split between the new Christian church and the mainline Jewish traditions within which it grew up, so that tension is reflected in the text. But as it's written, everyone in this scene—the Pharisees, Jesus, his disciples, the crowd—everyone is Jewish. This is a conflict between differing points of view, different ways of believing within a common faith.

Historically, the Pharisees represent an anti-clerical movement within First Century Judaism. Their devotion was expressed not in the obsessive legalism with which we often caricature them, but by extreme personal piety and strict observance of ritual purity laws in accordance with a line of tradition they claimed extended all the way back to Sinai. They come into conflict with Jesus here because his disciples are not performing the ritual hand-washing before meals they believe God demands of observant Jews. But in good rabbinical fashion, Jesus turns their question back on the Pharisees to make his point that as he understands faith, it is inward, not outward devotion that marks the faithful believer.

Scripture:
Matthew 15:1-20
Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, "Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat." He answered them, "And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, 'Honor your father and your mother,' and, 'Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.' But you say that whoever tells father or mother, 'Whatever support you might have had from me is given to God,' then that person need not honor the father. So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God. You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said: 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.'" Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, "Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles." Then the disciples approached and said to him, "Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?" He answered, "Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit." But Peter said to him, "Explain this parable to us." Then he said, "Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile."

Sermon:
You know, I have tried to be nice, but I have had it up to here with fundamentalists. I know they're just one voice among many in the family of faith, but you'd never know that listening to them. They go around acting like they are the only voice. I mean, you have to admire their "evangelical courage." They certainly are not shy about sharing their faith. At home, at work, at play—they'll be happy to tell you what they believe. They'll also be happy to tell you what you should believe and how you should behave... and increasingly, what you can believe and do and what you can't. Over the last dozen years they have inserted themselves into every level of public life, until today even government officials hardly dare make a move without consulting them.

They even have taken over the language of faith. They've snatched it right out from under us. They are "fundamentalists," as if only they have deeply held, fundamental beliefs. They are "conservatives," as if only they have a desire to preserve the truth of God. They are "evangelicals," as if they have a lock on God's good news. They are "Bible-believing," as if the rest of us have chucked the Bible out the window and are simply making our religion as we go along. They are "traditionalists," as if only they know the real, the true tradition of our faith. What words do we have left to use?

And I think that's what galls me most: They are just one strand of belief within the much, much deeper tradition of our faith—and not a very old one, at that, only a couple of hundred years really—and yet they act like they are the tradition. They stubbornly refuse to see themselves in the larger context. No, no, they are above all that sort of "radical relativism," they say. "The truth is eternal. It never changes. God said it. I believe it. That settles it." As if they have a direct line to God, as if God handed them the tablets on Sinai, not Moses.

And having spoken this, Jesus turned to the Pharisees and addressed them directly:

You ask me why my disciples ignore the "traditional" teaching of our faith and don't wash their hands before a meal the way you do? Well, I'll ask you a question in return. It's true, you're better than we are at washing your hands, but why do you worry about hand washing and ignore the core teaching of God? Why do you wash your hands of your responsibility to your parents under the torah? As I read the scriptures, God didn't say anything about hand-washing, but honoring your father and mother? That made it into the top ten commandments; in fact, we're supposed to put people to death for ignoring the needs of their parents.

Yet this tradition of yours that you claim is so fundamental to faith gives you a way around God, doesn't it? You just have to give a little money to the temple treasury and all is forgiven, no harm, no foul. Isn't that convenient? So you claim to be the real deal, to be super-believers, but your precious tradition stands in direct opposition to the word of God. You have co-opted much of the vocabulary of faith, but there is still one word left for people like you: hypocrites. The prophet Isaiah was familiar with your kind ages ago, and what he said then still applies today. The word "God" is constantly on your lips, but the Spirit of God is conspicuously absent from your heart. You have hopelessly confused your own little tradition of faith with the living word of God. But we're not buying it any more.

Faith is not about keeping this or that particular nit-picky rule. It's not about touching or nor touching, eating or not eating this thing or that. The world is lot more complicated than that—Samaritans can be neighbors. The poor can be blessed. A woman can get step out of the kitchen to sit at her rabbi's feet. I mean, really, we all know that, kosher or not, whatever we put in our mouths, whatever we eat just ends up in the same place anyway. But what comes out of our mouths, what we say and do in the world, that's what's important, that's where real faith is lived out.

You go, Jesus! You tell 'em. Because truth be told, I am fed up, too. I am fed up with "fundamentalists" or "conservatives" or "traditionalists" or "Bible-believing" Christians telling me that because I do not believe the way they do, because I do not read the Bible the way they do, because I do not hate the same people they do, I am not a good Christian—or a Christian at all, really, just some kind of faux-Christian. I am tired of the "if you're not with us, you're against us" mindset their way of believing fosters in our churches and in our country, as if theirs was not a Christian voice but the Christian voice, as if their Christian tradition was the one, true Christian tradition. And for the record, I am also tired of the media following their lead and glossing over the diversity of belief and practice across Christian traditions or—worse—treating that diversity as cause for alarm.

The Big Lie, of course, is that things have always been this way, that theirs has been the mainstream of Christian belief down through the millennia and ours just some kind of peculiarly modern perversion. That's what words like "fundamentalist," "conservative," and "traditional" are meant to convey—a purebred pedigree. They are designed to perpetuate the mistaken idea that the hallmarks of their way of believing—Biblical literalism, strict uniformity of practice, belief as intellectual assent to a laundry list of improbabilities—that these have formed the essential core of the Christian way in the world since the very beginning.

But they haven't; in fact, as much as anything else, they are one of those peculiarly modern... additions, let's say... to the broad sweep of Christian history. In his beautifully distilled little book, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith, Marcus Borg takes on this false sense of longevity, making the case against an ahistorical idea of Biblical literalism, for instance, saying:

The notions of Biblical infallibility and inerrancy first appeared in the 1600s, and became insistently affirmed by some Protestants only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Papal infallibility was affirmed only in 1870. An emphasis upon the literal-factual interpretation of the Bible is also modern, a reaction the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment, it was not the literal meaning of the Bible that mattered most for Christians, but its 'more-than-literal' meaning... But the Enlightenment largely identified truth with factuality... And so for the earlier paradigm [that's Borg's kind way of referring to our fundamentalist brothers and sisters], defending the truth of the Bible meant defending its literal-factual truth.

So, Biblical literalism is a relatively new invention, and the same could be said of so much of the conservative Christian platform. Their beliefs didn't fall direct from heaven any more than did ours. They didn't uncover a cache of wisdom hidden since Jesus' own day. They haven't recovered the "original" Biblical text—nor will they, since there is no such text to be found. No matter what they say, their faith, just like ours, is formed in the messy mixture of history and divine inspiration. And like us, they are susceptible to inserting their own biases, their hopes, their fears, their foibles into the mix. Put another way, we are every bit as traditional as they. We, like they, participate in a particular set of traditions within the larger body of the historical church.

But unlike our fellow traditionalists, we own our mutt's pedigree. We believe it is a blessing, not a curse, to follow God in this winding way. We mourn our mistakes, to be sure—though surely not enough—and we laud our successes, but all in all, we believe the incarnational nature of our faith, the way it takes shape from our human blood, sweat, and tears over time and under the influence of the Holy Spirit is a great blessing from God who was incarnate among us in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. It means that God is in us, with us, and among us, moving in our lives.

And lucky for us, God didn't stop with Jesus, didn't stop with the Bible. It is not just that "God said it," but that God is still saying it... and more. That's what we mean when we say "God is still speaking." We believe God transcends our little words to speak the Word of life in the intimate, embodied accent of every generation. Thus the tradition of the Protestant Reformers still is meaningful for us today when they said, "Reformata, semper reformanda," that is, "Reformed, and always being reformed." God is constantly forming and reforming the church's traditions of faith in response to the needs of the world in which we live, the needs of all God's children.

And thanks be to God for that! Where the church faltered on the sin of slavery, God spoke and the church was changed. And know what? Where we still are mired in sexism and racism and the abuse of the poor in church and society, God has a word for us today. Where we are exploiting and exterminating the natural environment around us, God has a word for us. Where we are persecuting God's gay children, God has a word for us. Where we are pursuing war instead of peace, God has a word for us. And that word is not "conservative." The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, certainly a man of his times and still a mighty prophet of God, had this to say about the "conservative" trend in the life of the church:

Of course the Church is conservative for it has much to conserve. But let it conserve a vision of the world's destiny and not the structures of the world's past. Let the Church in remembering Christ remember that it is conserving the most uprooting, the most revolutionary force in all human history. For it was Christ who crossed every boundary, broke down every barrier... If ever there was a man who trusted his origins and had the courage to emerge from them, it was Christ.

To my way of thinking, the world could do with a lot more of this kind of conservatism. And where is that going to come from, if not from us, from this congregation and from others in the United Church of Christ and across the family of faith like us? As the old hymn says, "We've a story to tell to the nations," a story of love, justice, and peace and most of all, a story of grace. Yet when it comes to doing just that, to sharing the story, to <gasp!> evangelism, it seems that's where we really are conservative. It seems we're still working from a model of evangelism that comes straight out of the 1950s, when nice people went to church, but never talked about it—partly because Christianity was just assumed and partly because it was deemed impolite. You didn't mention your faith at the grocery store or over dinner with friends or at your daughter's soccer game. Restaurants and movies and everybody's last vacation—those were safe topics, but not faith. That was simply too, too outré.

But in case you hadn't noticed, those days are gone... long gone. In the United States today, the topic of faith—and, yes, sadly, it's still very much an assumed Christian faith we're talking about—the topic is unavoidable. It touches nearly every aspect of our lives, public and private, local and national and international. But the God-talk flooding the airwaves comes almost entirely from our fundamentalist colleagues, and they speak so often and so loudly and with such assumed authority that the world cannot help but listen and believe they represent "the Christian way." They are controlling the debate about faith and morality and turning it to their political advantage. They have inserted themselves into every level of public life, until today even government officials hardly dare make a move without consulting them, with the goal of remaking the world in their own image, which they mistake for God's. Like it or not, the relationship between the church and the world has changed irrevocably since the 1950s, but we haven't, not on this point. It's as though we are still wearing those dainty little white gloves, afraid to get our hands dirty.

Well, folks, it's time for the gloves to come off. It's time for us to lift up a another vision of what it means to be Christian today, a vision of a living, breathing faith in love with the God's messy world of memory, growth, and change. I hope we will. I hope we will tap into the deep joy that lies somewhere buried in the heart of our faith—not the cold comfort of dutiful obedience to a sovereign God high up and far away somewhere, but the real, earthy blood-and-guts joy of personal, intimate relationship with a God who cared enough to send God's very best, Jesus, to share our all-too-common human lot in life.

Now, I know we are so-called Mainline Protestants—more like Sideline these days. I know we were very carefully taught to be the "Frozen Chosen." But, Lord, I feel a thaw coming on! God has begun to warm our hearts and loose our tongues. God is still speaking, and so we must speak, too. Not the way we hear every day on the radio and television and read in the newspapers, certainly. We must work to find our own voice. But we must find language to share the good news God has shared with us. We must find new, appropriate, respectful ways to spread the Word—caring, careful, humorous, smart, surprising, sometimes even shocking ways. But what we cannot do is remain silent. There are too many life-denying voices in the world today, and too many of those claim to speak for God. There are too many people who will never set foot in a church because of what they've been told being Christian means. As a church we are called to do our best to clear the air and speak plainly so others can hear the same word of liberating, life-giving grace we have received.

So what words should we use? Can we not reclaim a few for ourselves? Taking a cue from Bill Coffin, can we not conserve the memory of our brother, Jesus, who acted up and acted out and shook the world to its foundations? Can we not take back some of the vocabulary of our faith and fill it up again with the new thing God is doing today. Let's be fundamentalists—not hopelessly mired in simplistic world that never was, but looking to the future with courage founded on the immovable rock of God's grace. Let's be evangelical—not puffed up in pride, thinking we alone have access to the truth, but looking always for the good news of God already at work in our neighbors and the world around us. Let's be traditional—thankful for the legacy of the historical church, for the generations that have gone before us in unimaginable diversity, and for the lessons of their remarkable successes and their dismal failures.

But how about we find some new language, too? I've found a favorite. I've decided I want to be the "radical" church. I want to pluck that nasty epithet from the mouths of those who seek to silence us and put it to new use. I want to be radical, as Merriam-Webster defines it. I want to be "marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional" <oops!> "tending or disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions." Heck yeah, I want to make extreme changes! I want to change the world! I pray night and day that God will save, redeem, transform the whole dang thing, all of us, here and now!

But here's the sneaky part about the word "radical," the part I love: At its Latin root, radical means "at its root." Again Merriam-Webster says, "of, relating to, or proceeding from a root," and "of or relating to the origin" or, get this, "fundamental." I swear, I didn't make that last bit up! So I want to be radical, I am disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions, because at root, I believe that is who God is and what God does. God is radical, grounded and yet growing. God is our root, Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. As branches, God is calling us to stretch out and grow so that we might offer shade and sweetness and spirit to a world athirst for the grace of God. We are but one branch, it's true, one of many, many, many, and cut off from our root we can do nothing, but invigorated by the power of the Holy Spirit we may yet bear fruit that will change hearts, that will save lives, fruit that will be for the healing of the nations. May God make is so among us today.