Beyond traditionalism - Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 7: 1 - 23

I do not know what the word “tradition” means to you. For me the word conjures up conflicting responses.

You see, tradition can be a good thing. It reminds us of things that have gone before us . We do not have to reinvent the wheel for we are the heirs to a lot that has hapened before we were born. We inherit a story of our community, our country and its institutions albeit often in a somewhat doctored form. We inherit values and customs which are thought to be helpful for right conduct and for harmony

It is similar within the church. We treasure a tradition which goes back to the Scriptures and which has developed through the Apostles and 2,000 years of church history. Within Methodism, at times it seems as of we have a cult of veneration of the Wesley brothers with even now candidates for the office of local preacher and the ordained ministry being examined on what are now rather dated sermons by John Wesley.

Now I don’t want to decry tradition. In a sense it reminds us of who we are and of our reason for being. As the President of the Methodist Conference, Martyn Atkins, would put it, there is great value in knowing our DNA. And yet when we become obsessed with tradition, it can become every bit as stifling as a hangman’s noose. For all too often the problem is not one of honouring tradition and learning from it but of being fossilised in one particular bit of tradition.

Back in the 1960s, Bob Dylan sang, “The times, they are a changing.” And in those words lie the problem with traditionalism. The problem of traditionalism is that it still seeks to impose yesterday’s answers on today’s questions. And this fails when we consider that we are living through a time of unparalleled social change.

Back for a moment to Martyn Atkins. I heard Martyn speaking a few weeks ago at Edgehill College’s Speech Day. There, he told us of an organisation in America that had run childrens’ orphanages. There came a time when these orphanages began to empty and it seemed as it was time to give up. That was until the archivist of the organisation told them of the story of how the organisation had begun. The orphanages had been a response to the problem of abandoned and neglected children. Responding to this need was their DNA. But now the old means of addressing the problem had come to an end. Yet, children were still facing problems and so the organisation dared to express its DNA in a new way by turning what had been orphanages into Day Centres where they were able put on a range of childrens’ activities and parenting classes. Had they abandoned their calling? No! What had happened was that they were implementing what John Prescott (even St John Prescott) has called “traditional values in a modern setting.”

So, where does this leave the church? Well whilst we should not think of ignoring or jettisoning our past, we do need to be also about the questioning of how we can remain true to our DNA in a modern setting? And traditionalism or seeking a return to past glories is not a viable option. For too often, the last words of the dying church have been;

“We’ve always done it this way.”

This doesn’t mean that there are not treasures from the past that we need to be reacquainted with. Indeed the “emerging church” movement has found value in revisiting traditions that have been long discarded. But it does mean that we need to explore the possibilities of “fresh expressions” of being church as we seek to envision what the church of Christ will be in the post modernity of the west.

And yet, we are not the first people to face the challenge of how we respond to tradition. The question of tradition is at the heart of the clash between the Pharisees and Jesus in our Gospel reading. You see, back in the desert days, the Israelites had developed a concern for purity. The law given to Moses includes what is known as the Purity Code. Some of this concerned hygiene. Some of it was commonsense and included the sorts of things which we gladly follow today. Much of it related to forming a people who would be very much a nation under God. However, by the time of Jesus, much of this Law would seem to have served its time. Indeed, too often, that which was the basis of the foundation of Israel, now served the purpose of nationalising God as Lord of but one people.

In our Gospel reading, a group of Pharisees (unrepresentative as research suggests that their view was more extreme than most Judaism or Pharisaism of that time) challenge Jesus over his disciples eating without carrying out ritual hand washing to guard against impurity. The consequence is that things kick off big time for Jesus immediately accuses them of hypocrisy quoting from Isaiah of a people who worship with their lips but with hearts that are far away. Then he adds the killer punch;

“You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

And to reinforce the point, he reminds them of the law of Corban, through which people were encouraged to dedicate their estates to the Temple which meant that they were frozen until death so that they could not be used to meet the needs of dependent parents. So much for honouring one’s mother and father!

But what is really at stake in this clash? I think the real problem is that ritual purity had become a means of keeping outsiders as precisely that. It was a means of maintaining a sort of holy huddle which kept so many out. The radical message of Jesus is that God’s love is for all. This means that our barriers need to be broken down. Listen for a moment to Garry Will as he writes of the inclusive love of God;

“No outcasts were cast out far enough in Jesus’ world to make him shun them - not Roman collaborators, not lepers, not prostitutes, not the crazed, not the possessed. Are there people now who could possibly be outside his encompassing love?”

And too often, the church has barred the doors on people. For long it was the Jews and there is a guilt that the Christian church must bear for the terrible events of the 1940s. Often today, the barriers are erected against gay people or the new enemy, Muslims. And others come to mind who have too often seemed to be rejected - the poor, those who have been married on a number of occasions, those who are mentally ill. And we could add others whom we might be tempted to think of as outsiders.

And yet, the message of Jesus is that true religion must hold on to the humanity of all peoples and encourage all to see that they are the recipients of Divine love. If the religious traditions to which we give our allegiances, serve to be an obstacle to love and compassion, then we need to revisit our theology.

We are the heirs and respecters of tradition. Yet the challenge that we face today is be constantly reinterpreting tradition in such a way that the God of love is accessible to all manner of peoples. It is not good enough to say that we will go on as we always have done. Our calling is to serve the present age. And if our traditions, be they how we worship or the message we share, are barriers, then such traditions need to be let go. And in these things there is little that is new. For the church at its best has always been prepared to question the place at which it is. Why should we be different?

May we respect what has been handed down to us whilst being prepared to move with God beyond traditionalism?


This sermon was preached at Torrington Methodist Church on Sunday July 15th 2007