Traditions

On Sunday we watched a few videos - which don't come across well with the audio recording of the service. So you'll find them below.

I expect that most of us know what it is like to wear a mask - to be one thing on the outside whilst knowing that inside things are very different.



Last Sunday at CBC, as part of our series, 'Jesus is good news' we were looking at Mark 7:1-23. We have already seen that Jesus knows what people are thinking - he sees what's going on on the inside as well as what's going on on the outside.

One of the challenges of Jesus' teaching is that ultimately it’s not, what we do that matters, but why we do it. What people see on the outside is not as important as what God sees on the inside. So even if we're doing lots of good stuff, if our motives are wrong, it ultimately counts for nothing.

The things that we do need to come out of a heart that is responding to what God has already done. We've already seen in this series that God can deal with our sin problem - we can't fix that ourselves no matter how much good stuff we might do. We need to let God deal with our sin problem first, and then act in response to God's love for us.

For Jesus, everything stems from our total love for God and our love for those around us. Jesus was calling his disciples into a relationship - a relationship with God which would impact their relationship with others (Mark 12:29-31).

But how much of what we do is just tradition - and is that necessarily a bad thing?



Jaroslav Pelikan said, ‘Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.’

It can be very easy to read a passage like Mark 7 and be critical of the Pharisees; to conclude that tradition is bad; to be totally oblivious to our various traditions; to throw the baby out with the bath water.

There certainly seem to be fewer traditions telling us about how to behave on a Sunday than there were when I was growing up. All sorts of things that you could and (mainly) could not do on a Sunday.

But traditions can be good.

Some traditions act as a signpost - pointing us toward God and what God is like. The ceremonial washing reminds us that God is holy and that we're not and that you can't just waltz into God's presence. This points to a truth about God, but also points us towards Jesus - the one who will provide the way in which we can be made clean and therefore free to enter God's presence. The problem occurs when the signpost becomes more important than what it is pointing towards.

Other traditions act as a fence keeping us away from the edge of a dangerous cliff. They keep us from putting ourselves in a situation or a place where we are likely to sin, or where we put ourselves in a spiritually dangerous place.

Some traditions are important because they help us develop the disciplines that keep our relationship with God healthy.

Are there traditions that you stick to? Why? What are they helping you to do?

Are there traditions that you might need to pick up again or start for the first time - things that will help you in your walk with God?