Traditions With More—Genesis 1: 1-5; Mark 1: 4-11
In the musical Fiddler on the Roof, one of the early songs sung in part by Tevye tells how the people have kept their balance for many, many years…”Traditions!” Then they repeat “traditions” over and over in chorus. Tevye goes on to explain, “Here…we have traditions for everything…how to eat, how to sleep, even, how to wear our clothes.” Traditions! Perhaps sometimes we feel the same way about church. We ask, “Well…why do we…” And we hear the chorus shouting, “Traditions! Traditions! Traditions!” just like in Fiddler on the Roof.
If you ask someone from the Baby Boomer generation about traditions, they will take you to the China cabinet and show you every important heirloom and how it fits in with every holiday and memory going back over many years. If you ask a millennial or Gen Z person about traditions, they shriek and hiss like a vampire exposed to sunlight. And this is one area where those groups shall never find an understanding unless they meet at the corner of an “they’re an old soul” and “still pretty hip for my age.”
This leaves the church in a rather precarious position. This is a place filled with traditions, rituals, and elements unique only to church and worship. There’s often a tension between a history of worship and faith going back thousands of years in communion, prayer, baptism, and so on versus the relevance of a modern-day society. Too often when we begin to ask questions in our faith and worship, we hear the frightening and often hated phrase, “But we’ve always done it that way.”
Yet maybe that’s not quite the evil it is made out to be. Today we read the work of John the Baptist in the Gospel of Mark. John is described as a pretty strange sight. He preached in the wilderness. He dressed roughly in camel hair and leather belts. He ate bugs and wild honey. Were you to encounter John the Baptist on the street, I daresay you might cross over to the other sidewalk. He preached this strange thing that people should repent of their sins and be baptized. Baptism was not exactly practiced in those days. There were some purification rituals that included immersion in water, but it wasn’t exactly a thing widely done. And truthfully repentance wasn’t all that common anymore either.
And yet, we see in this Gospel lesson that John baptizes Jesus. In some gospels, it is said that John recognized Jesus. In this one it seems there was no forewarning to the dove descending and the heavenly voice proclaiming Jesus as the Son of God and the dearly beloved who brings great joy. Ever since this encounter we have practiced this tradition of baptism in the Christian faith.
It is one of the most sacred traditions or sacraments of the church, right next to Communion. And I’m sure that if we were to ask, “Why?” we would hear the wise answer, “Because we’ve always done it that way.” Or we might hear the voice of Tevye and the chorus proclaiming, “Traditions!”
But there’s something more to the practice of baptism than just that. When we accept the faith and become baptized, we walk a similar path to Jesus. We proclaim this faith publicly. We celebrate a Savior who gave of himself, suffered, and has risen from the dead to give us hope and life. Baptism is not the dusty crystal that hides in the back of a cabinet. It’s the precious heirloom that a family cherishes generation after generation because of the importance it holds.
Church traditions and rituals are nothing to scoff at. If you are in a place of stained-glass windows, organ, hymns, and robed choir and preacher, you still do the same things as if you are in a dark-lit stage with untucked shirts and a fog machine. We sing, we pray, we proclaim, and we go forth to serve. Regardless of how it all gets dressed up, that is what the church has done for centuries.
What matters is that, regardless of whether there’s a pipe organ or electric guitar, we sing of our faith in Christ, we pray to God to stay close to our creator and redeemer, and we proclaim the love of Christ that transforms the struggles of society into a place of hope and grace.
Often we spend too much time debating our ritual and traditions to find something fruitful and inspiring in them. Part of that problem is we have a consumer-based society. Church and worship are not a consumer product. It is a practice, a discipline, and a place to find hope and renewal with God by our side. Faith is a participatory event where we come to live out, share, and participate in the traditions and rituals. Even Jesus came to the River Jordan to be baptized. Now, I highly doubt the Son of God needed to repent and be baptized all that much, but he participated and became a part of the work of faith.
It’s easy after the 4,500th time of taking Communion or joining with the congregation in the 1,500th baptism to find a staleness and boredom in the traditions we practice. But let’s take a step back. With every baptism we have someone proclaiming that they are covenanting to join our faith. They covenant that they will live, preach, encourage, and teach the unconditional love of Christ for all of us, everyone. Every time we take communion, we meditate on the fact that real love is sacrificing and giving to help and uplift another. It’s not just words that we remember Christ’s sacrifice. We live into that promise of hope and life and the call to give of ourselves in love for others.
So maybe it’s time to rehabilitate this idea of “traditions!” from boredom and sameness to finding comfort and hope. A friend and I were talking the other day while at the funeral of a mutual friend. She said to me about our deceased friend: he couldn’t stand the rituals the traditions, the same things over and over in church every week. It’s what he struggled with the most. I, on the other hand, love them, and that’s what draws me in the most. I can go anywhere in the world, walk into a church, and find a place that feels like home because we live, practice, and share the same faith and the same practice of faith.
Instead of being dulled to the power and holiness of our practice of faith, let Christ do a little work. Let him break and bend you just a bit so that the real power of these traditions of faith make a mark on you. In baptism you have given up following the selfishness of life, and you have committed and promised in a covenant to follow Christ in showing love, grace, and peace to the world. It is your testimony and promise now and forevermore.
The final line in “Traditions” from Fiddler on the Roof says, “Tradition. Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as…as a fiddler on the roof!” We come each week not to do the same thing over and over again, but to live out these practices that bring us closer to God. In this place, it is the hope that you will find something holy, something moving, and a place where you feel loved and welcomed even in the midst of the messiness of humanity. So, as we continue to live out our practice of faith, our “Traditions!” may they blend into the hopeful words of “Blessed Assurance,” which say, “This is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long.” Amen.
Worship Video: https://www.facebook.com/fccmacon/videos/3539344896380349