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Today’s Gospel story has a phrase that squeezed my heart and still hasn’t let go. It’s the phrase: “the tradition of the elders.” That’s what I’d like for us to talk about today.
Our lives are filled with “traditions of the elders.” I’m defining that as customs and beliefs that are passed down from generation to generation.
For example, family gatherings that commemorate a particular place or time that is meaningful; or maybe you go to the same church that your parents attended. And even this saying is a tradition of the elder: “Do as I say, not as I do.” Some of us remember hearing that when we were growing up. And if we questioned why we had to do something, we might have heard “We’ve always done it this way”, or “That’s just how it’s done.”
Not only do we see traditions of the elders at home, we see it at church. The wisdom of our Christian elders speaks to us from over two thousand years ago, through the Bible. Stories, told aloud, over and over, handed down, some first-hand, some not, like the author of Mark. Though the book is anonymous, many scholars believe the author was known as John Mark, a young Christian who may have known or been a companion to Peter and Paul, and was a part of the Christian church from its earliest days. John Mark hadn’t heard Jesus and didn’t know him personally, but he wrote this Gospel as Peter’s interpreter, so a lot of this Gospel is based on Peter’s eyewitness testimony. It’s thought that John Mark lived in Jerusalem, where his mother hosted meetings of the early church. I can imagine him, writing down what he heard Peter say, maybe not in chronological order, but what he remembered Peter saying about Jesus’s sayings and doings.
And how fitting is this: some scholars believe “the Gospel of Mark was produced at a transition point between first-generation Christianity and second-generation Christianity.” [Powell, 144] If John Mark is the author of the Gospel of Mark, then he was an elder who’s tradition truly bridged generations.
It’s not just the broader church where traditions of the elders live. The Episcopal church is all about tradition. It’s one of the values of the three-legged stool that the Episcopal Church is built on: Scripture, reason…and tradition.
Our spiritual ancestors have passed down prayers and collects and hymns that we say today. We kneel and stand and make the sign of the cross. If you’re familiar with all this, you might have had moments where you repeat these traditions so often, they become automatic. It might seem like we’re on autopilot. Maybe we don’t even question it.
But when we do that, there’s the potential to miss out on the deeper meaning behind the tradition. We might miss out on something new breaking through.
If you’re new to Epiphany or new to the Episcopal church, maybe you don’t know when to stand up or sit down. That’s why we have the weekly bulletin. We use it at every service. It’s tradition too.
Let’s say someone was criticized for taking communion in a different way than the bulletin explains, that’s when tradition can get a bit judge-y and separate us from community and relationship. The bulletin is not there so that we can follow the rules. The bulletin is there to be welcoming. So that every person who comes through those doors can be included in worship. That’s how tradition builds up community. God wants us all included.
Today’s story is about inclusion too – or more specifically, about what’s not included. Some of the Pharisees, scribes and other religious temple leaders tell Jesus that his disciples were not following “traditions of the elders.”
It’s key to have the context around this. I learned in EfM (the Education for Ministry course offered here at Epiphany) that some Pharisees believed that in order to properly keep the law that God gave to Moses, it was also important to keep hundreds of other more specific oral laws for specific situations that had been handed down from previous generations. [Powell, Introducing the New Testament, p144 and Collins, A Short introduction to the Hebrew Bible] These rules were known as “the tradition of the elders”, and they clarified the underlying Torah law.
One way to look at this is to try and understand what the religious leaders hoped for with these rules. Perhaps to try to please God, to do God’s will? As Jesus followers, we know there’s nothing wrong with that.
Still, in today’s story, the disciples are criticized by some Pharisees for not engaging in the ceremonial ritual of washing their hands before eating. Jesus responds by quoting spiritual ancestor and prophet Isaiah. Then he does a pretty bold thing. Which is not surprising because that’s Jesus’s tradition, that’s just what he does.
Jesus takes the old tradition and he transforms it into something new.
Now, Jesus is not ignoring tradition. Traditions can be good. They can point to what’s bigger than ourselves, they can foster social cohesion, and make us feel safe. Jesus is all about tradition. He quotes the Old Testament all the time.
Here, and for us, Jesus pushes back when he sees a tradition lose focus on God’s word and God’s law of love.
Because Jesus does not want anything to get in the way of our relationship with God.
He moves the tradition from the external to the internal. He does this by focusing not on the hands, but on the heart.
Jesus is putting the heart into tradition.
Here at Epiphany, we learn that the heart is our will, our decisions, motivations, actions, how we treat one another, our thoughts and emotions. It’s the thing where we have agency.
I think Jesus is inviting us to consider how do the traditions of the elders bring your heart in alignment with God’s heart. For example, it’s not about saying the perfect prayer; it’s about being prayerful and bringing your whole self to your quiet time with God.
Jesus is inviting us to look at our hearts, then to tend to them.
Yes, the shadowy pockets come from within and so do the good things. Jesus is here for all of it. He invites you to face your heart, then consider how to tend to it.
When we face our hearts, what do we see? That when it comes to tradition, sometimes we get so lulled by repetition that we go on automatic pilot, and miss the deeper connection that God might want us to have? Or do we see an awareness, an openness in our intentions, so that a good something new can break through the tradition.
This summer I had a traditions of the elders experience to illustrate that.
A little context – when I was growing up, every summer my parents would drive my sister and me from our home in Detroit to all the way to Montgomery, Alabama, to spend the summer with our grandparents. Every single summer, and some Thanksgivings, we took that long drive. Kimmi and I would go kicking and screaming. We didn’t want to drive, we wanted to fly! We’d grumble about not spending the summer in Detroit with our friends. We’d sigh and kind of zone out when my parents put their favorite songs on repeat. We’d eventually have a good time in the car, but that was our tradition throughout my childhood.
Two months ago in July, we recreated that tradition. My mother, sister and I drove from Detroit to Montgomery for a family reunion. This time, the tradition was different. First, I was so aware that we had the chance to spend this time together. That awareness filled me with gratitude and playfulness. Next, we sang every word of those songs by Lou Rawls and the Stylistics and Al Jarreau and Anita Baker and Quincy Jones’ The Dude album, Kimmi would go high, I’d go low, then we’d switch. Kimmi and I knew every single word. And we marveled at the looseness and complexity of the music.
And then, it was the end of one of the days of the reunion. It was dusk, warm, and the air felt thick. It was beautiful. In the gloaming, on a patch of land amidst thousands and thousands of acres of land right outside Montgomery that used to have plantations and was now a part of the Alabama Conservation Preserve, I stood at a gravesite. There were many the headstones, most of them my family. There was one in particular. Malenda Daniel. I approached her and stood there. She was my great-great grandmother, who had been born into slavery. Her mother was sold on the Eastern shore of Maryland and trafficked to an Alabama plantation. We had never been able to trace back that far until this trip. At that moment, standing before my great-great-grandmother Malenda, I felt the confluence of the slight wind, the wide open sky, the thick air and earth that held blood and bones and her love of the Lord…I experienced a connection to the land and to my lineage with a depth I had never known. I don’t know Malenda’s traditions, but I know she loved the Lord. And how do I know that. Because the church that stood alongside the graves, the church with the weathered frame and a new addition, was founded by her. Malenda Daniel was one of the founders of that church. Her story was passed down generations and at every family reunion, we continue to tell her story.
It was like God had deposited me back to my elders. That reverse great Migration, going down south like so many of us do, Jesus was showing me her, and showing her me. Montgomery was no longer just about our family and the Civil Rights Movement, it was about being in the fullness of a long line of elders that survived, endured and thrived throughout the ages. I felt like I was in the tradition of the elders, and their eyes were watching God.
I think all of us are invited to tend to our hearts in these moments of tradition — by being aware and present, and open to new meaning.
It’s like how it says in today’s reading from Deuteronomy, “But take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children’s children.” Maybe you are that elder for a family member, for a friend, or for a newcomer who forgot to grab a bulletin, and so when you faced your heart and saw that God’s kindness and generosity were there; you chose to practice love, and so you gave the newcomer your bulletin.
Jesus invites us to keep the tradition, not to just go through the motions, not to do something because it’s the rule. Jesus invites us to stay open to something new. You never know how God will break through.