Tradition!

Sunday our church met at a park for its annual summer picnic, surrounded by hiking trails, waterfalls and giant shade trees. You could hardly call it a picnic. It was a feast of salads and hamburgers and sausages and cupcakes and pies…the food just kept coming! This is a tradition that’s been around probably since the church began, and an excellent one! During the worship, held in a barn, the visiting preacher offered a shofar for people to blow (a ram’s horn), a tradition in Jewish worship that his own church has adopted. I liked the way the horn’s rustic blare called to the band’s modern instruments. It reminded me of other rich church traditions: the Moravian brass bands playing together at dawn in God’s Acre (the cemetery) on Easter, for example. I remembered the Mixtecs, too, in bright Indian garb processing down to the river for baptism among singing and shouted hallelujahs and no instruments at all. All of us can think of church traditions that enrich our worship and our fellowship. God loves our creativity.

And yet, as I move among cultures, I remember that we hold these great treasures lightly. For the sake of others, we let them go. When Jesus became a man, he left all the glorious traditions of heaven, all its rich culture, and he took on the nature of a slave. We, too, leave behind beloved traditions when we cross cultural thresholds. I am not talking about leaving Jesus behind. I know that the ground of our unity as believers is that God has revealed himself once and for all through his Son Jesus, and that outside Him, there is no salvation. What we do leave behind is our own cultural responses to Jesus, the way we clothe our obedience to him with our own traditions. This way we make room for people in new places to find their own ways to worship God creatively, using their own art forms, their own celebrations, their own garb. We let them create their own traditions. The more we leave our culture behind, the more freedom we give to people coming to God in another culture to express themselves from the heart. We remember that the most precious things in life are fleeting.

When John saw the vast crowd worshiping in heaven, they were from every nation and tribe and people and language. How did he know? I think it was obvious. White robes or not, I think this crowd reflected the vast variety of human culture all being put to use to worship God. I think there were shofars and brass bands and electric guitars and banjos and lyres and sitars. I think they each brought such different traditions to the mix that no one but God could weave them together into one body. And yes there must have been a summer picnic, too. A feast. With waterfalls and hiking trails and giant shade trees. Right next to the Mexican fiesta: tamales, piñatas and all. I just know it!

The question is: how do we know what is human tradition and what is universal? What do we take and what do we leave behind when we move among cultures? This question is behind a good many church fights and splits. It’s what separates denominations and gives mission agencies the greatest headaches. This is what I want to tackle in my writing project, and so I hereby give notice. I don't know how much I'll be posting now while I write whatever it is that I'm writing. The daily blog posts have gotten me through chemo, and I'm grateful. Now I feel the same urgency to write this...whatever it is. Let's see how things go (nothing new in that!).