Tradition!

Sermon for 31 August/15th after Pentecost

Lessons

Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-9; Song of Solomon 2:8-13 (semicontinuous); Psalm 15; Psalm 45:1-2, 6-9 (semicontinuous); James 1:17-27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 (Green)

Key Verses

Deuteronomy 4:1  “… give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you to observe …”
Deuteronomy 4:2  “You must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the LORD your God with which I am charging you.”
James 1:22  “But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”
James 1:25  “But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.”
Mark 7:8  “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
Mark 7:21  “For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come:”
Mark 7:23  “All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”
Isaiah 29:13  “The Lord said: Because these people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote;”

Message

“Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”[1]

Let us pray.  “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and redeemer.”[2]  Amen.

 

As I begin, I wish to take you to a far off place, perhaps not scriptural, but indeed something that I am sure you may remember well (at least if you are an aficionado of modern theater and movies):

 

https://youtu.be/6nwj8nAYEM4?si=4fBuH4X6MGQfxE7z&t=4 [end at time-stop 1:50]

 

So, after hearing the first lesson, the psalm, the second lesson, and the gospel from scripture, you now have heard the gospel according to Tevya.  [chuckle]  To be clear, I am not a subscriber to Tevya’s gospel, but he gets at something very much at the core of the lessons we have today in this very famous monologue and opening song from the Fiddler on the Roof.  Tradition!

 

What are traditions?  Are they good?  Are they bad?  And, what is Christ saying about them?  We often refer to things like “the Lutheran tradition” in speaking about how we see scripture or understand our faith.  But, what do we mean by all that?

 

Whenever I encounter the need to define things clearly in our common language, I typically pick up a dictionary.  For convenience, I borrowed from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, this is how they render the definition:

 

“Tradition (noun)

1)  .

a.    : an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (such as a religious practice or a social custom)

b.    : a belief or story or a body of beliefs or stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical though not verifiable

“… the bulk of traditions attributed to the Prophet …

—J. L. Esposito”

2)  : the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction

3)  : cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions

4)  : characteristic manner, method, or style

“in the best liberal tradition”[3]

 

You can clearly get the sense that tradition is, first and foremost, something that is of the past we hold on to today.  And let me tell you, despite much of society continuing to secularize and supposedly “throwing off” tradition, traditions abound in our lives.  One such example is the ritual of “trick or treating” on Halloween.  We have long abandoned its original religious significance in American society, but we have firmly embraced its long-standing rhythms and requirements.  We buy candy, man our doors, bring our kids out in the often freezing cold with pillowcases all dressed up in costumes.  For certain, do not be the one that forgets, leaving your outer light on at your house, and have no treats for young visitors.  And don’t get me going on bobbing for apples, caramel apples, and all of the candy corn from here until eternity; well almost that far.  And this is merely one holiday.  Think on it, we have traditions for everyday life too, just like Tevya.  Who here doesn’t have their appointed morning beverage and routines?  How much of those are inherited from childhood or common cultural norms?  More than we like to admit, I’d say.

 

My point here is that traditions are alive and well, and we cannot avoid them.  We are hard wired to live by traditions, lots of traditions.  Some of these are encoded into laws and governing structures, but so many others are not.  We just take them for granted.  Akin to Tevya, we can’t tell you where half of them came from, but we hold to them like no tomorrow.  Why?  Tradition!

 

Our lessons today are all about this too.  In the Old Testament lesson, God makes clear he has a list of traditions that he expects us to “give heed to” and has “ordinances” that he is teaching us to “observe”.[4]  In other words God, in this lesson, is establishing his tradition for all humankind.  But this tradition is not one that we fall into.  No, it is one we must be taught.  The tradition is comprised of “commandments”[5] that we much “diligently observe”[6] from generation to generation[7] not for their own sake, but as a sign for all of humankind to follow in “wisdom and discernment.”[8]  In other words, it is through who they embody, how the faithful act, that matters in this tradition, a tradition of faith lived out for all to see.

 

This is picked up in the lesson from James where he makes clear that we are to “… be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”[9]  James goes on to stipulate that “… those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.”[10]  James is very much echoing what the Deuteronomist was speaking to.  That, we as people of God have not only a history and a culture, but more importantly a living tradition that helps us live in the best way possible, in accordance with God’s wishes for us and all of creation.

 

But here is the thing that always gets us in trouble, even for poor Tevya, tradition for tradition’s sake.  Or worse yet, tradition as an excuse to not tend to the Word of God.  This is precisely where Jesus steps in to speak to us, both in his time and always.  In the gospel lesson, Jesus is confronting this problem head on.  He is making clear that the religious authorities of his day, the ones that were often the ones so close to understanding the ultimate realities, were still missing the point.  He states to them that they have abandoned “… the commandment of God” and, instead, have held “… to human tradition.”[11]  What they fell into, and we constantly fall into, is the trap of making our priorities, our traditions, our habits, our routines, into what is sacrosanct, instead of the things that God commands.  What is too often forgotten is that in addition to God establishing his tradition through the Deuteronomist, he also stipulated that we “… must neither add anything to what I command you nor take away anything from it, but keep the commandments of the LORD your God with which I am charging you.”[12]  What Christ was encountering was the baggage, not unique to his time, but pervasive throughout all time and all cultures of added, or modified, or scrambled, or even omitted parts of His truth made into human traditions.  And the core problem is that the origin of human traditions comes out of our brokenness, even as we do our best to the images of God in the world.

 

Jesus knows this, and that is why he is pushing back against the self-righteousness of human tradition.  He reiterates that he has seen this before, by quoting Isaiah, understanding that we as believers, are those people who “draw near with their mouths and honor [God] with their lips, while their hearts are far from [the Lord], and their worship of [God] is a human commandment learned by rote …”[13]  God doesn’t want us to be mindless drones, he doesn’t need us to say nice things to him and then not embody his commandments in our very being.  No, he wants us to love him with all our hearts, all our minds, and all our souls[14] evidencing this through loving one another as much as we love ourselves.[15]  And, we need him to help us with this, because, as Christ states, “[f]or it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come.”[16]  We succumb over and over again to this problem of being convinced that if we follow the ways of the world, of human traditions, that we will be saved and sanctified.

 

But, the truth is that is far from how it works.  We have seen throughout history how the path of good intentions, from a human understanding, is actually being paved as a road to hell.  This was precisely what Martin Luther was noting about the church in his day.  It had made human tradition above the living Word of God, and it had gone so far, so bad, that it required immediate prophetic teaching to ensure that God’s commandments were observed, not just as lip service, but in the very being of the church itself.  What the church, then and now, and certainly in the future, falls into, is worrying about what is coming in more than what is going out.  Jesus offers a litany of things that are “… evil things” that “come from within.”[17]  When we look inward, when we think we have it figured out, God reminds us that it is that focus that “defile a person.”[18]  But, when we turn out, when we give, when we show in ourselves and our action and in our doings, when we are focused on God and his commandments, we are made free.[19]  God’s traditions, his ordinances, his commandments are Good News, and we can be reflections of it in our lives every day.  We just need to be willing students of God’s teachings, learners of his traditions.

 

For those that have seen the movie or play, you know that Tevya in the Fiddler on the Roof, has many struggles, much pain, and contends with outright evil, brought on through, and often from, human traditions.  What redeems him?  What helps him come to terms with the fact that what he saw as sacrosanct, was actually fleeting?  Answer:  Faith.  Faith in God and his way in his life and that of everyone around him.  What he had to learn was to give up and give in to what God wants us all to have:  HIS TRADITION!

 

Amen.

[1] 2 Corinthians 1:2

[2] Psalm 19:14

[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tradition, accessed on 31 August 2024

[4] Cf. Deuteronomy 4:1

[5] Cf. Deuteronomy 4:2

[6] Cf. Deuteronomy 4:6

[7] Cf. Deuteronomy 4:9

[8] Cf. Deuteronomy 4:6-7

[9] James 1:22

[10] James 1:25

[11] Cf. Mark 7:8

[12] Deuteronomy 4:2

[13] Cf. Isaiah 29:13

[14] Deuteronomy 10:12, Matthew 22:37

[15] Cf. Matthew 22:39

[16] Cf. Mark 7:21

[17] Cf. Mark 7:23

[18] Cf. Mark 7:23

[19] Cf. John 8:32

Repentance and Forgiveness of Sins is to be Proclaimed

 Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter

13 April 2024

Key Verses:

 

Acts 3:19 - “Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, …”

 

1 John 3:4-7 - “Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.”

 

Luke 24: 46-48 - “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

 

Message

 

“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”[1]

 

He is Risen!

 

R:  He is Risen Indeed.

 

Let us pray.

 

“May the meditations of my heart and the words of my mouth be pleasing unto you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”[2]

 

Amen.

 

Good evening.  Today we continue our celebration of the Easter season as we carry along our way.  We encounter again in the gospel lesson this week, a scene of the risen Lord coming into the very presence of the disciples and apostles.  Last week it was about Thomas Didymus, this week is a collective meeting with instructions and confirmation, but also a core lesson to be brought out.  But before I get into more on the particulars of the lessons, let me get into the thread that I think weaves them together.

 

To me this is two words:  Repentance and Forgiveness

 

We hear these words specifically in the reading from Acts and in the Gospel lesson, but it is also indirectly within the epistle from John and in the Psalm.  But do we understand these words?  I ask this because I too many times and in too many places see them misused or abused.  Perhaps we ought to know what these words actually mean before we presume to understand what the lessons are telling us this week.

 

Let’s start with the first word:  repentance.  For me I always like going back to the original language of the scripture to get a sense of the word being used.  Luke, being a Greco-Roman physician was most likely writing in Greek, and we have solid manuscripts in Greek for both his gospel and for his book on the Acts of the Apostles.[3]  So what is the actual word we render “repentance” or “repent”, in Greek?  Well in the gospel for “repentance” the Greek word is metanoian and in Acts, it is rendered as metanosoate.  The root of both, is simply metanoia, often simply stated as “changing one’s mind” or “to change one’s mind”.[4]  This is a word that is not entirely unfamiliar for us in English and is used occasionally in such publications as Rolling Stone or Forbes.[5]  According to dictionary.com this word means, “a profound, usually spiritual, transformation; conversion.”[6]  A common analogy used for the meaning of this concept is taken directly out of nature/creation in what happens when a caterpillar is transformed in to a butterfly or a moth, called in biology metamorphosis, which is drawn from the same root word.  So, when Christ in the gospel lesson, and Peter in the lesson from Acts, are speaking they are calling for a “changing of mind, that results in a fundamental transformation of our way of life”.  That is what repenting and repentance is about.

 

The other word here is forgiveness.  Again, let’s return to the Greek.  Here for the gospel lesson the Greek that is translated as “forgiveness of sins” is aphesin amartion.  Literally translated is “leave of sins”, but perhaps better verbs might be “remission” [7] or “release”.  So, forgiveness is at its core about a release, remission, a “leaving” of sins.  If you think a bit more on this, you will soon come to realize that “repentance” and “forgiveness” are a bit redundant.  Because, what are we to “repent” from?  What are we to be forgiven of?  Answer:  our sins.  Both of these concepts are all about how we deal with sin.  Thus, we now have third word we need to make sure we have a clear understanding of:  sin.

 

What, then, is sin?  Now this seems like I am going down a rabbit hole of things that you probably thought you had a good handle on, but please bear with me.  Again, let’s go to the Greek in all three of our New Testament lessons today.  We’ve already addressed it in the gospel lesson, but in John’s first epistle it is again amartion and in Acts it is amartias.  From the root of this, you might gather that this has something to do with being “marred” as in “damaged or spoiled to a certain extent; made less perfect, attractive, useful, etc.” or “disfigured or defaced, as by scratches, nicks, scars, or discoloration.”[8]  And to an extent that is getting at it.  But to get a true sense of this, we probably need to go back to our Psalm, which was written in Hebrew, and try to understand this concept that is “sin”.  Now while I can have a chance at navigating Greek, thanks to being an engineer that has seen a math equation with a few Phis or Omegas thrown in for good measure, Hebrew escapes me.  That said, a Methodist pastor that I met in DC, Jason Micheli, provides a detailed analysis of this concept drawing from the Hebrew as well as numerous preeminent theologians such as Karl Barth, Robert Jenson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others.  As he offers in a recent post, “As a seventeen-year-old convert to the faith, I was taught that sin is ‘missing the mark.’  It was not until much later I realized how problematic it is that such a definition leaves God invisibly assumed.”[9]  He goes on to say that, “[a]ccording to Karl Barth, the only possible definition of sin is that it is what God does not want done.”  “… but the scriptures attest quite thoroughly that there are a good many deeds God does not want done.”[10]  He boils it all down to the reality that “sin is idolatry.”[11]  It’s taking other things as more important than God, in direct violation of the first commandment.  As Jason puts it “[t]o say that to sin is to ‘miss the mark’, misses the mark.  All sin is unbelief and idolatry; it’s a turning away from what the true and living God wants, to whatever else might make us more than a mere creature over and against our fellow creatures.”[12]  He goes on to say that, “[j]ust as sin is not an ethical category [(it’s a theological category)], sin’s opposite is not morality but faith.”[13]

 

So, what does all this have to do with today’s lessons, or more importantly, the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ (aka the season of Easter)?  Well, it is smack dab in the center of things.  As stated in our gospel lesson today, “[t]hus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.  You are witnesses of these things.”[14]  Jesus himself makes it clear that sin, our repentance, and forgiveness are at the very essence of his big “G” gospel in the world.  This thing we call the Church, which is called to witness Christ, is not supposed to be a shiny city on a hill, nor a perfect court of kings and queens, emperors and empresses, or presidents or other civic leaders, nor is it a place of those that self-justify themselves as “saved” and “having a personal relationship with Jesus” as if that is a badge of honor.  No, the Church, is first and foremost a hospital, a place where we are laid out plainly, our wounds for all to see.  It’s a place where we first and always reckon with the fact we are idolaters and false, and rank with unbelief so that we can be the vessels ready to receive Christ and his grace and hope through faith.  The Church needs to be a place to enable metnoia to happen on God’s terms, not ours.  And where we are quicker to forgive before we are forgiven.  We are to follow Christ’s example so that we do “what is right ([forgiving ourselves and those around us]) … just as he is righteous.”[15]  We are people who lean into faith, not just mere morality, even as we must do both.  We know that we must “metanoia therefore, and turn to God so that [our] amartion may be wiped out.”[16]

 

How do we do this?  As Jason offers in his post, borrowing from Karl Barth, this is an “impossible possibility” that “does not lie in the possible possibility of the law, but in the impossible possibility of faith.”[17]  It relies on the thing that is given to us to thwart our sin, to enable us to repent and receive our leave from our sins:  faith.  And this is the heart of the paradox that we must come to in our journeys with God.  His call to us, his utter wooing of us, is for us to give up and give in to him and his love for us.  That is what faith is about.  It is about God and his righteousness over and against any self-righteousness we might pretend to have in this life, whether as a person or as a people or even as a nation.

 

This, then, brings me to a dialogue that I had this week as I prepared today’s sermon.  A bible study partner friend posited on a social media site, the following question:  “Isaiah 26:2 ‘Open the gates that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in.’  So, who is this righteous nation?”

 

Here was my response, which may require some after service reading/consideration on your part, but seems utterly relevant to both today’s lessons as well as the time and place we are living in:  “…, this set of verses from Romans comes to mind in response to your post: ‘For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.  He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.’[18]  The ‘righteous nation’ is the one which humbles itself through, with, and in Christ:  his life, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.  That ‘nation’ is what Jesus called ‘the kingdom of God.’  For those of us who abide by the two kingdoms principle, we are both citizens (here, now, and always) of our earthly dominion (in this case the USA, NYS, St. Lawrence County, etc.) as well as this heavenly kingdom.  It is this [latter, preeminent] kingdom, the one that is God, that we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’[19] 

 

We will not have, anywhere, a fully ‘righteous nation’ or much more of a shadow of one, until the work of his grace, as described in the latter two chapters of Revelation come to pass, here on earth, as a redemption and renewal of creation for all times and all places.[20]  Could we and should we do more in the meantime?  Certainly.  Do we in the US have particular and weighty sins to bear?  Absolutely.  Does that mean that all is lost, or that there are not also redemptive aspects of who we are as an earthly domain?  No, not at all.  There is much good we can and often do in the world, even as the headlines sell you on us at our worst.  It doesn’t mean we get off the hook for our worst, but we need to be careful to not go too far and forget who established things like the liberal international order in the first place, or the reality that we have a society that is so hyper-critical that makes it exceptionally hard to hide or screen us at our worst, or that while imperfect, we’ve aided in the development of numerous democratic, justice, and rule of law efforts in countries throughout the world.  We are lost, no question, but that being lost doesn’t mean we don’t do anything good.  But we can’t and shouldn’t get a messiah complex over our earthly goodness, to the degree we have it, because we cannot and will never be the ‘righteous nation’ of our own doing.”

 

To conclude, may we recognize and recompense with the realty that we need repentance, we need forgiveness and we need “leave from” our sins.  This is true no more or less for ourselves as individuals, ourselves as neighbors and communities, ourselves as states and nations, and ourselves as a species on Earth.  May we earnestly, as a result of a metanoia, do as Christ asks us to do today, through our mind, voices, and actions, to proclaim “repentance and forgiveness of our sins.”[21]

 

Amen.

 

---

[1] 1 Corinthians 1:3

[2] Psalm 19:14

[3] While we do not have originals, we have early papyri that are attributable to Luke in the second century AD/CE.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanoia_(theology), accessed on 12 April 2024

[5] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/metanoia, accessed on 12 April 2024; Cassady Rosenblum, Rolling Stone, 28 June 2022 and Elizabeth Edwards, Forbes, 12 October 2021

[6] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/metanoia, accessed on 12 April 2024

[7] https://biblicalprospector.blogspot.com/2010/04/remission-of-sins.html

[8] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/marred, accessed on 12 April 2024

[9] https://jasonmicheli.substack.com/p/christians-do-not-sin, accessed on 12 April 2024

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Luke 24: 46-48

[15] Cf. 1 John 3:7

[16] Cf. Acts 3:19

[17] https://jasonmicheli.substack.com/p/christians-do-not-sin, accessed on 12 April 2024

[18] Romans 3:22b-26

[19] Matthew 6:10

[20] Cf. Revelation 21:1-22:4

[21] Luke 24:47