The Greatest Tradition
Scripture lessons:
Acts 11:1-18
But a second time the voice answered from heaven, “What God has made clean
you must not call profane.”
Acts 11:9 (New Revised Standard Version)
During the 1950’s a friend of mine traveled by train from New York State to a destination in the Deep South. When the train stopped in Virginia, she went to get a drink of water at a section of the platform where there was a water fountain. A station attendant politely suggested that she quench her thirst at another location. As she looked on the wall near the fountain, she saw a sign that read, “Colored Only.” She acknowledged the man’s comment, and took a full, long drink from the forbidden fountain.
Children of different races, cultures and religions can now drink freely from public water fountains. This is not to say that prejudice has disappeared, but there is clearly a greater spirit of inclusion than in that train station in Virginia fifty years ago. The changes leading to that spirit must have been difficult and awkward for everyone affected by racial segregation. What had previously been forbidden, eventually and unbelievably became achievable.
In the life of the early church, the followers of Jesus were inspired to transform cherished traditions for the purpose of making them more inclusive. Gradually they changed their diets, and ate and prayed with people of different backgrounds, so that Jews and Gentiles could join together in praising God.
Traditions can be sacred and life giving. But what matters most is our faithfulness to the God of peace and justice, who sometimes alters what is, in order to create space for what is yet to be. Thanks be to God, who can make all things new—including us.
Prayer: O God of resurrection power, when we begin to care more for a cherished tradition than the practice of your inclusive spirit, remind us. Help us to bear witness in our own lives to your radical hospitality that calls us to the greatest tradition of all: love for our neighbor in the spirit of Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
(The color scheme for this comment form is awful!)
I agree that what matters most is our faithfulness to God. But figuring out what that means in practical terms can be problematic. It’s easy to look back at examples of racism like this and see that it’s wrong. But it’s harder to find the path of faithfulness to God in areas that we are still struggling with today as a society and as churches.
Another blog I follow regularly (with LOTS of comments) is discussing Barack Obama’s speech to General Synod, saying the religious right had hijacked faith. One conservative (most of the regulars on the blog are) said that the liberal Christian derives his theology from his political commitments, while the conservative Christian derives his politics from his theology. It was in trying to decide how to respond that I cam first to Immamuel’s website then this blog. My first inclination was to disagree with the comment. Then I thought that perhaps he was right - but not because the liberal is more faithful to his political party than to his faith, but because he determines what is right to do based on experience, reason, and a “sense” of what God would want rather than always taking the Bible, as traditionally understood, as the starting point.
I grew up in Immanuel but left as a teenager to join a fundamentalist Baptist church (I later married a Presbyterian, and today we attend a Baptist church that has a pretty interdenominational background). So my impressions of Immanuel’s views (which I have always thought of as the epitome of a liberal church) are colored my distance in both time and having gone through a variety of churches in the years since.
So in a practical sense, just how do you go about figuring out which traditions are life giving and which impede our faithfulness to God?