“Tradition: More Than Dead White Guys!”
First Congregational Church -- Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
24th Sunday after Pentecost -- November 11, 2007
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17/Luke 20:27-38]

Tradition and traditions, how do we get them? Let me tell you a story, one I may have told before, but it bears repeating. There was a large extended family who relished their holiday get-togethers. Each year they would come together, prepare the holiday feast (be it Thanksgiving, Christmas or Easter) and then enjoy it. One day as preparations were underway, one of the children saw Mom neatly cutting the ends off the massive ham. Curious, he asked her, “Mom, why do you cut the ends off the ham like that? Does it make it cook better?” “No,” she replied, “I do it this way because your Grandmother did.” “Why did she do that?” “I don’t know. Go ask her.” So, off he went. Her response was, “I did it that way because that’s how my Mother, your Great-grandmother, did it. Go ask her.” And he did. The old lady’s chuckling response to the boy was, “Sweetie, I have no idea why those girls keep doing it that way. I did it that way because the pan your Great-grandfather and I had when we got married was too small!”

Tradition means something that is handed on, the literal meaning of the Latin word tradere. The custom of the ham was handed-on in that family, though the reason for it was completely lost. Tradition is an important concept for us because it is roughly analogous to self-identity or memory. Tradition helps us to understand who we are and helps to provide an orientation point, even when we sometimes lose some of the detail. Tradition helps to ground us and gives us a sense of who we are. That said tradition has become something of a problematic concept, at least in Western Christianity. We’re suspicious of it and especially so since it seems to have come to us from the musty and distant path – all of those “dead guys” I tend to like to bring up. Tradition isn’t just suspect in the religious world; it’s got its opponents across the board. The term “dead white males,” for example, has been most often used by critics of the so-called Western literary canon. This canon, or standard, includes people like Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, Paine, and so forth, most of whom are dead white males. I would argue, however, that tradition is more than just referencing a certain body of source material, though – I will also quickly add – there is nothing wrong with it. I will also say that there are many other sources which can be accessed and helpful to tradition. Both Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus and Jesus’ teaching in Luke’s gospel, I believe, give us a different perspective on the meaning of tradition.

Here’s another story I can’t resist telling you. It seems that a Roman Catholic bishop came to administer confirmation at one of his parishes. According to custom he began to

quiz the class. He asked one young lady, “What is matrimony?” She responded enthusiastically with this definition. “Matrimony is a state of terrible torment which those who enter it are compelled to undergo to prepare them for a better and brighter world.” The bishop was amused,

but before he could say anything the young priest who had prepared the class blurted out, “Oh, no, no, NO! That is purgatory, not matrimony. You KNOW that!” The bishop interrupted him, “Father, let the child alone. What do you or I know about it?”

I think what we have here with the Sadducees is a little bit of the student’s understanding of matrimony (or purgatory) and the bishop’s point, too. It’s an issue of understanding and knowing where a tradition originates. The Sadducees were a very conservative group. They wanted to confine their field of belief only to that which was written in the five books of Moses, the Torah. God’s revelation is thus a closed thing, captured in a book and there can be no new self-disclosure by God. Anything that had developed out of Israel’s ongoing experience of God, what we find in

the prophets and the wisdom literature, simply wasn’t valid. So they didn’t hold to a life after death or to the existence of angels, both of which were later developments in the Hebrew tradition.

The Sadducees’ understanding of the kingdom of God was politically structured. For them to have allegiance to God meant that there must be an allegiance to a Jewish king, or at the least one must be willing to enter into rebellion against the hated Roman occupation force -- no matter how symbolic. What this view does is to reduce all life before God to a this-worldly scenario. For the righteous to experience blessedness meant that it had to happen in the here and now and would

come in the form of prosperity, long life, and children to carry on the family name. The Messiah, in this view, is reduced to nothing more than a physical descendent of the king who ruled in Israel’s ‘golden age.’ And the Messiah’s mission is nothing more than to restore this ‘golden age’ with safe borders and a prosperous economy.

So we come, now, to the point of dispute. What’s being raised here is the issue of ‘Levirate’ marriage. That is, the teaching requiring a brother to “raise up seed” for a deceased brother by

marrying the deceased’s wife and having a child by her. If eternal life is only accomplished by keeping the name going, it certainly makes sense to do that. Though for someone like me, an only child with no offspring bearing my family name, it doesn’t hold out much hope. What’s happening

here is that the Sadducees want to show Jesus that the notion of a resurrection is absurd, so they turn to this example. A woman marries a brother who dies, and then another, and then another, until she’s married seven of them. None of whom produce a child. So, whose wife is she in the next life? Interestingly enough, there is a similar question found in the Babylonian Talmud where a rabbi is asked if corpses in the next life will need to be ritually sprinkled. The rabbi’s response? This

question is “sheer nonsense.”

It seems that the Sadducees must have had the same sort of vision that Woody Allen claimed to have. He said his vision of eternal life revealed that it was “just like this life, only longer.” What the Sadducees are trying to pull is an argumentative trick called a reductio ad absurdum, “a reduction to the absurd.” While arguments and theological speculation are not bad in themselves, we have to know when an argument has ground and when it doesn’t. Such arguments can lead to greater faith or knowledge, but they can also lead to disillusionment or to missing the real point. Jesus saw what was coming a mile away and turned the argument on its head. His point is crystal clear, God’s logic isn’t ours. God is transcendent and infinite -- we are neither. We are

limited in our understanding and in our experience, where God is not. Thus, “God is the God of the living and not the dead.” What may appear dead to us can be alive to God. I find the comments of Luke Timothy Johnson on this passage quite inspiring:

God is, furthermore, infinitely rich in life, alive himself and giving life to all. God’s revelation does not stop with Moses but continues in the experience of humans. God raises the dead to life as easily as God gives life in the first place. And this resurrection life is radically different from the present one. The “children of the resurrection” are

“children of God” and share God’s own life. Not only lack of faith in God but an impoverished imagination insists on portraying such a hope in terms of earthly preoccupation about descent and property! [Luke vol. 3 in Sacra Pagina, p. 318]

This understanding of eternal life that Jesus presents simply doesn’t match the view of the Sadducees, or Woody Allen for that matter. We tend to project only based on what we know and have experienced. Thus, our vision is necessarily limited. It seems very much like the debate that went on for years in Physics concerning the nature of matter. What we’ve discovered is that what we thought for years was solid, isn’t. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen the little

particles that make up matter, but I ‘know’ they’re there. I know it because those who have worked with instruments and materials I don’t have access to have told me so and I hold them trustworthy. Perhaps that’s the manner in which we should approach this issue? That’s why Paul tells the Christians caught up in various controversies, especially over the Lord’s second coming, that they should “stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us.” It’s important for us to realize that we are not the first to believe and that we stand, as one author has said, “on the shoulders of giants.” What we have been taught over and over is the wonder of God’s love and

God’s will to constantly renew and support the life of God’s created world. Our faith, our teaching, should be consistent with what has been handed down to us.

Consequently tradition is more than just a series of texts and sayings, a canon, whether of scripture or of literature. Tradition, in its fullest sense, is understanding and acknowledging that the God of the living is alive and well and living in us. This God enters our experience through a variety of means. We come to know God through the Bible, the Word, which is the inspired record of the encounter with God over centuries. We know, too, that God’s self-disclosure, God’s revelation, is not limited to the pages of the Bible, though it holds normative authority. However, God also does self-disclosure through the sacraments, through prayer, and through our life together, that is, through the lived-experience of the Church. This means that we also have to take responsibility for handing on our faith. In fact, we all become living links in this great chain of understanding which encompasses from the beginning to the end of time – all because God’s life has touched and intersected ours. It’s not only a heady, but a heavy responsibility that we take on when we identify ourselves as a follower of Jesus Christ.

One of the hallmarks of our Congregational Way is that it seeks, and teaches, “more light and truth.” Look deep inside and see that God’s self-revelation is ongoing. God is showing us more and more and our response must be to enter into dialogue and come to it with a renewed attitude toward God and life itself. With renewal comes change and this, like tradition, is not always something easily embraced or understood. One of my favorite dead guys lived in the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman. He wrote in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect [i.e., mature] is to have changed often.” [Pelican, 1974, p. 100] The handing on enables us to grow, to come to new and deeper understanding and, in the process, become what God created and calls us to be. Thus showing the truth of the late Jaroslav Pelikan’s wonderful line, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” Around here we should be about tradition, not traditionalism!

The Sadducees were into traditionalism and they can still be with us when we allow our faith to become confined to a this-worldly view. Traditionalism can take many forms and when we look only at the benefit of our Christian faith and of our faith community for us; taking a consumerist “what do I get out of it” or the ever-popular “am I being fed” viewpoint can help us to fall into that trap. Jesus calls us to understand life and growth in God’s love that are transformative, that changes us and draws us more and more out of our selves and more and more into God. Authentic Christian faith, and the tradition that under girds it, then flies in the face of individualistic, consumer-driven approaches to being God’s people, to being the church. It draws us to be loyal to those with whom we have covenanted, even when we disagree, even when there are things with which we’re less than satisfied. And in that stick-to-itiveness we learn together, grow together and even bring about change together – positive, life-giving, God-honoring change; that begins with us and moves steadily outward. As family life is about learning and celebrating our rootedness, our life together, so, too, is being Church. As a result tradition in Christian faith calls us to a transformation leading us not just to know the story, but to share it – along with the ham!

The author Wendell Berry has put it this way:

. . .every day do something that won’t compute./Love the Lord./Love the world. . .

Ask the questions that have no answers./Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. . .

Expect the end of the world. Laugh./Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

Though you have considered all the facts. . ./Practice resurrection.

[excerpt from Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”]

Jesus’ offering of life didn’t compute with that of the Sadducees. So often we limit ourselves and limit God because “it doesn’t add up.” The wonder of the resurrection simply doesn’t fit our logic. And, what is more, we don’t have to wait until we’re dead to find out if it’s true or

not. The living God practices resurrection and it begins with each one of us when we open ourselves to the presence of God within us. We practice resurrection each time we pour water three times in Baptism and an individual symbolically goes into the tomb with Christ and rises a new person. We practice it, too, when we refuse to be limited by what we see, or by narrow preconceptions, but open our minds and hearts to grow, to change, to embrace “more light and truth.” We practice resurrection when we affirm and celebrate life all around us and within us. We practice resurrection when we hand on a living faith and make a difference in people’s lives and in the community in the process.

Tradition is more than dead white guys – though it does include them. Tradition is about hearing the story and then asking the questions which lead to its origin. Tradition is discovering why we cut the ends off the ham! Tradition isn’t about dead guys, because those guys are very much alive to the living God. No, tradition is more than that, tradition is living – living toward God and toward others.