Tradition: Beneficial, Benign, or Bane?

A sermon on Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-13

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Danielle Claude Belanger on Unsplash.]

I was in the office this week when Erin was working on the music slides for the livestream, so she asked me a question that she has apparently been wondering about for a while.

“What’s up with the colors? Why can’t we change them? It’s gonna be fall soon, wouldn’t a nice pumpkin background be nice, instead of the same old green week after week?”

I love that Erin feels comfortable asking me her (sometimes irreverent) questions about why church things are the way they are, so I laughed along with her, and then explained about different colors being linked to different liturgical seasons, which gives an added dimension and progression to worship over the year.

(By the way, if you are curious about the liturgical seasons, make sure to join worship on November 24, when we will be doing our journey through the whole church year in worship).

Erin wasn’t entirely won over by my explanation, which is fair. Liturgical colors are meaningful to many, but they are hardly an essential component of Christian worship.

Erin did, however, give me permission to share this little anecdote because it is a perfect illustration of the question at the heart of today’s gospel reading:

What is the proper place for human religious traditions within the practice of faith?

The institutional religious leaders who confront Jesus about his disciple’s casual approach to ritual purity laws clearly had one answer: Traditions are essential. Violating the traditions is equivalent to defiling oneself.

Jesus claps back, but his response is not as simple as him taking the opposite position that human traditions have no value…

because the traditions are not the essential thing.

God’s law is, and that’s about our hearts… the extent to which we embody or reject the love that center’s all of God’s commands.

Jesus uses the illustration to-hand in his explanation: the focus on defilement within ritual purity laws.

The religious leaders, and the crowds observing the conflict, are not misguided in their desire to be pure of defilement.

The hand-washing traditions had developed in the context of the awe-inspiring awareness that we serve a Holy God.

Reverence is well-placed. We should feel an urge to purge the things that might get in the way of approaching God’s holiness.

The problem is that human rituals making a show of removing potential dirt from the body don’t achieve that goal: they are a distraction at best and a smokescreen at worst.

The heart is what we need to look at, not the hands… and if we think that washing our hands will check the box, we will ignore things that genuinely do get in the way of reconciling our relationship with a holy God.

That’s all pretty clear.

But then, what do we do with other human traditions in the context of faith? Are they distractions too? Should we get rid of color-coded worship calendars and altar paraments and let Erin go wild with her aesthetic instincts on the livestream slides?

(Don’t worry Mary! My answer to those questions is no.)

I think here is where it’s important that Jesus doesn’t simply reverse the religious leaders’ teachings and throw out the traditions.

Traditions don’t have to stand in the way of a godly heart.

As a matter of fact, I always make a point of washing my hands before leading worship (and before eating) and I feel confident that Jesus is OK with that.

Instead of just throwing out traditions, Jesus gives us a discernment tool.

He reminds us of the purpose that any faith practice is supposed to serve: to help us in following God’s will… not by giving us a hollow ritual that is supposed to satisfy God’s requirements for holiness, but by drawing our attention to the state of our hearts.

To illustrate how we can put this discernment tool into practice, I thought we could use some “traditions” that often get confused in our time with things that come from God but that actually have entirely human origins.

So, I culled through some of the various lists you can find online of things that people think are from the Bible but aren’t.

It’s a search I would encourage anyone to do because I think it helps us to realize how easily “religious” language can be used to give authority to principles that are not necessarily consistent with the teachings of Christ.

If we aren’t intentionally discerning, some of these sayings can worm their way into our faith and lead us toward the same kinds of harmful mental patterns that caused the Pharisees of Jesus’s day to honestly believe they were calling out disobedience to God’s law in Jesus’s disciples.

We see this most obviously and dangerously with the arguments of Christian Nationalism, but there are plenty of other examples.

At the same time, not all of these religious-y teachings are problematic, as long as we do not assign them the authority of scripture.

Rather, I think they can fall into three categories, if we use Jesus’s tool of discernment.

The first is human traditions that are actually beneficial.

I would include the liturgical seasons (and colors) in this category because they can definitely add to the depth of our worship and the sense of how the story of our faith holds together and interweaves with the seasons of our lives.

I would also cite the aphorism “this too shall pass.”

Although this statement does not derive from scripture, I still remember a testimony I heard at least 25 years ago from a youth director at a former church about the ways that this simple reminder had guided her faith.

She talked about it as a touch stone that kept her joy and her hope grounded in God, rather than in her circumstances.

Going through a rough patch? This too shall pass – you can hold out for change.

Living life to its fullest? This too shall pass – don’t hold on too tightly or think your joy will disappear when this moment does.

It’s not a biblical precept, but the consequence of this teaching was to turn her heart always back to God as the source of her security and well-spring of her life.

It’s a human teaching, but it’s beneficial to faith.

There are other traditional sayings that may not be as directly helpful in turning our hearts toward God, but that probably don’t do any damage either. They are benign.

In this category I would include sayings like “cleanliness is next to godliness.”

It’s not biblical.

And, if taken to extremes it could skirt near the fringes of a Pharisaical obsession with “purity.”

But the saying is not “cleanliness is a substitute for godliness.”  

It’s just “next to.” It has genuine value, and we just use religious language to reinforce that value.

If we apply the discernment standard of examining the heart, a desire for cleanliness is not counter-productive.

As long as we don’t start superseding grace and establishing rules about cleanliness standards before we can worship… no harm no foul.

But that cannot be said for all such pseudo-biblical teachings. Some of them can do very real damage. So much so that I think we need to recognize them as a bane to faith.

In some cases this is because of how they distract us from the heart of God’s law… such as teachings that replace God’s grace with human effort.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the saying “God helps those who help themselves.”

Not only is this nowhere in the Bible; it also runs directly contrary to scripture’s teachings.

God helps those who call out in need (as with Hagar in the wilderness)

God helps those are sinking under the waves when their faith fails (as with Peter on the Sea of Galilee).

We are not called to prove our worthiness or our effort before God will reach out to us with help, and if we think we are we are not going to see God’s freely offer gift of grace because we will think we first have to earn it.

We will lose our touch point in the love that is at the heart of God’s will and in that loss, God’s law will be something to overcome, not something to live into.

But even worse are the teachings that directly countermand God’s law of love… that make us believe (like the ritual traditions that caused the religious leaders to reject Jesus’s disciples) that some people are outside of God’s grace.

Perhaps the more pernicious version of such teachings is “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

It’s pernicious because it uses the language of love to undermine the practices of love.

It claims that love looks like telling people they will only be acceptable to God if they conform to the speaker’s understanding of God’s righteousness.

It rejects the inviolability of God’s grace, just like teachings that exhort our effort, but it goes even farther by saying that God’s holiness actually requires “hate” of whatever falls under the category of “sin.”

And since this teaching is often wielded in contexts where the supposed “sin” is a matter of a person’s identity, it requires hatred of a part of themselves.

That’s not love.

When Jesus offers his list of the things from within that “defile” a person they all have something in common: they either harm others or they harm our relationship with others.

In other words, they violate the heart of God’s law, which is the law of love.

And that is our guidance for considering whether human traditions – whatever language they use – will support genuine faith.

Just ask, do they help us to love?

Thanks be to God.