Tradition

Propers: The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost, AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

So who’s ready for Christmas?

I know, I know, I’m getting ahead of myself. We have several months and holidays to get through before then. But I’m not the only one. I see the social media posts, the merchandise quietly appearing on the shelves, the trailers for Christmas movies. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. And the more crises that we live through, the earlier we seem to need a bit of yuletide cheer.

We are all about traditions in our household, a hodgepodge of English, German, Irish, and Norwegian institutions, all bound up around a 13-foot-tall tree—all of which make it hard for me to imagine that for centuries, Christians didn’t have a Christmas. Rome marked December 25th as Jesus’ birth pretty early on, but other dates were held in other churches. And honestly, birthdays weren’t much of a Jewish observance. The early Church had exactly two holidays: Sunday, and the Passover. Christmas came later.

So, yeah, it’s a human tradition—a really good one, one I wouldn’t want to go without—but something that Christians historically could either take or leave. St Paul, in writing to his congregations, remains notably ambivalent regarding such practices. Some Christians celebrate certain days as holidays, he says. Others practice dietary restrictions as a form of spiritual discipline. What matters for Paul isn’t so much the tradition in itself, but whether we observe it for the love of God and neighbor.

Or as a later Christian would put it: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. A tradition is not so important as the intention which underlies it. Hence, the myriad holiday films all entreating us to remember the Spirit of Christmas, beyond the crass materialism which so readily obscures it. “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” cries Charlie Brown. And Linus in response recites the Gospel. When the center holds, the whole is sound.

We’ve got a wonderful one-two punch in our readings for this morning, the combination of Jesus and James. Now, Jesus I hope that you know. The James in question here is James the Just, James of Jerusalem, whom Scripture calls “the brother of the Lord.” James is Jesus’ nearest blood relative, who takes over leadership of the Jerusalem church after Christ’s Ascension into heaven. We talk a lot about Peter and Paul, and rightly so, yet it’s James to whom Peter and Paul defer within the Book of Acts.

Catholic tradition holds James to have been Jesus’ cousin, and one of His Twelve Apostles. Orthodox tradition claims James to have been Jesus’ elder stepbrother, separate from both of the Apostles James. As a third option, some early Christians simply understood him to have been Jesus’ next youngest brother, a child of Joseph and Mary. We shan’t get into such a sticky wicket as all that. Suffice to say that James is Jesus’ brother, howsoever we may choose to parse the term, and that his teaching is very close in spirit to Jesus’ own within the Gospels.

We’re going to read from James’ Epistle for the next several weeks, so it’s best we get familiar with him now. Today the brothers certainly seem to speak with one accord. They are each dealing with fellow believers whose religiosity appears to have missed the point. They can’t see the forest for the trees. Or put another way, in more biblical language: people tend to observe the letter, without observing the spirit. And this isn’t a Jewish vs Christian thing. Jesus and James are both faithful, practicing Jews. No, this is a human tendency.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus enters into a religious debate. And if you know anything about Judaism, you know that truth is found, God is found, in debate, in faithful fruitful argumentation. The Pharisees here want to know why Jesus does not follow the traditions of the elders—which is to say, the Oral Law. Pharisees are meticulously religious. They aren’t the rich and powerful; that would be the Sadducees. But they are moral reformers, moral authorities, who seek authentic religious practice, available to anyone, in all walks of daily life.

The Oral Law functions as a hedge around the Torah. It’s a series of traditions to help people keep the Law. Perhaps the most famous example is a prohibition, found in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, against boiling a kid, a young goat, in its own mother’s milk. This had to have been a Canaanite practice of some sort, which Hebrews were to avoid. Anyway, the tradition arose that meat and dairy should never be mixed at mealtime, lest the prohibition inadvertently be broken. No meat with dairy is a tradition, an oral law.

The Pharisees see this as a good thing. It demonstrates their fealty to God, and ensures that Scripture is taken seriously, indeed scrupulously. So why wouldn’t a rabbi such as Jesus, who has accrued quite the following, adhere to the traditions of His elders? To which Jesus replies, that we’re getting things backward. The value lies not in the tradition, not in and of itself. The value lies in the Law, in the Word of God, which the tradition is meant to protect, which the tradition is meant to uplift.

We don’t need to put more hedges around the Law, He tells us. Rather, we must peel layers away in order to get to the heart of the Law, the point of the Law, the meaning of the Law. And what is that heart? Simply this: “To love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and so to love your neighbor as yourself.” Thus sayeth the Lord. That is the whole of the Prophets and the Law, just as many rabbis of His time had taught.

Again, it’s not a Jewish vs Christian thing. It’s an ongoing pitfall in every faith community whereby healthy traditions become heavy burdens. Good gifts of God mutate into idols. It isn’t about what we eat or what we drink, Jesus says. It isn’t about whether we wash our hands in a particular ritual manner. Traditions are good, whenever they draw us closer to God. But once they get in our way, we must discard them. Traditions are not Truth. The difference between an icon and an idol is that one points us to God and the other points us away.

Jesus says all this as a Jew to other Jews. He keeps the Law. He celebrates every holiday, even Hanukkah, which does not appear within the Hebrew Bible. But the point is always love of God and love of neighbor. Why worry about what to eat and how to wash if we’re not paying attention to our actions and our words: to wickedness, deceit, debauchery, pride, slander, folly, harm? Those are the things that defile. That’s what the Law means to heal. And for Jesus and James the Gospel is the Law now purified.

James deals with the same issues in his own context, in the early Jewish-Christian church. Like Jesus, James understands God as perfect goodness, perfect mercy, perfect love: the Father of Lights, in whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. God makes His rain to fall upon the just and the unjust alike. And we are to be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect. Not in that we have no sin; not in that we won’t fall short. But in that we are called to love others as our God loves us. That is the Spirit of Jesus.

Religion does us no damn good if we but mouthe the words, he says. James calls us all to be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; doers of the Word, not merely hearers. And this isn’t works-righteousness. This isn’t earning Jesus’ love. It’s living our salvation for the world; being the Body of Christ for others; loving God by loving our neighbor. That’s the Gospel. That’s religion. Get to the heart of the matter, the heart of holy love, and all else is adiaphora, extra glory, traditions freed to beautify the whole.

I love our traditions, their richness and their depth. I love our liturgy and our holidays and our saints. I love all the ways by which we seek to share the Word and the Sacraments. But we must never forget that the heart of the matter is Christ: the love that He pours into us, so that we pour it out unto others. Every story we tell here must have Jesus as its center, or it’s nothing: just play-acting, just noise. Without Him we are whitewashed tombs.

Yet with Him—with the love of Jesus, born in us for all the world—every day is Christmas. And we offer our traditions up as incense, gold, and myrrh: gifts to Him to celebrate our joy.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA
X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987
Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/
Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074108479275
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026