“Living Tradition”
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Patricia Dutcher-Walls
Sunday, March 25th, 2001
Text: Exodus XII: 17 - 27, Luke XXII: 7 - 20
A long time ago in a country far, far away, there was a group of insignificant slaves in Egypt who were forced to work on Pharaoh's building project. The Pharaoh took their labour, their children, their lives and held in utter contempt any power but his own. The slaves cried out their misery and pain, a plea for deliverance. But who cares about a bunch of nobodies, expendable people worth only the work they can do?
Yet one was present who stood on the side of these slaves. Yahweh, the God of their ancestors, heard the people's cry and remembered them. With mighty signs and wonders, God made mockery of Pharaoh's power. Moses, a hesitant but faithful servant of the Lord, declared an amazing word - God was with people. Commanded by God to mark their houses with a protective sign of blood, the people watched as the Lord passed over them but brought a final plague of death to Pharaoh's house.
The Hebrews ran for their lives and followed God's presence in fire and cloud. Thinking they faced death at the sea by Pharaoh's army, they found instead the Lord's power over seas and armies and a path to hope - a new life and a new land. In song and story they celebrated God's victory.
In the earliest tellings of the wonderful story, the people recounted God's mighty deeds. They related the events that described God's power and God's care for people who had been worthless slaves. God had put all Pharaoh's magic and power to shame in the plagues; this saving God had destroyed Pharaoh's strength in the victory over the Egyptian army. In the manner of story-tellers everywhere, they remembered details that kept the story vivid - the exact way to place the blood on the door posts, their hurried flight with bread in bowls still unleavened. The story witnessed to the new reality that had broken into their lives in the Lord's care for the outcast, a new reality that liberated them, gave their lives meaning and required commitment to the God who had saved them.
But the story does not stop there, for the salvation the people had experienced continued through many years and the need to keep the story alive grew. So the story was re-told, passed on, kept new for new generations. The actions of blood on the door and the eating of unleavened bread that had been the immediate events of the Exodus became the core of memory. Memory not of nostalgia for days long ago, but remembrance that keeps the past current in the present.
New voices were added to the story as the centuries passed, as the people settled in their land, established the institutions and habits that gave shape to their lives. In these new times, voices of faith told the story in new ways to keep it alive, as if to create a new Exodus each time the story was told. The language of these new voices emphasized actions that would remember the Exodus and enliven its significance in the people's present reality.
One faithful voice, the voice of teachers and scribes who preserved God's word in writing, put it this way: "Remember - remember by teaching your children the meaning of these events." The teacher's profound concern for passing on the story to new generations of the people is heard here. This voice was made an integral part of the story as it was told and re-told. In today's Old Testament lesson this voice is heard where we read: "And when your children ask you, What do you mean by this observance? you shall say, It is the passover sacrifice to the Lord, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses."
Another faithful voice, the voice of priests who ministered in God's house, put it this way: "Remember - remember by observing with care a festival throughout your generations." The priest's profound concern for the careful worship of God is heard here. Again this voice was woven into the telling of the story where we read: "You shall observe the festival of unleavened bread for on this very day I brought your companies out of the land of Egypt."
God's people heard and saw God's word of salvation made real for them in the Exodus event. Through many generations, they kept God's word alive in their hearts and made it ever new in their lives, remembering past events, emphasizing new meanings. By adding new voices to the story, by weaving them into the very fabric of the tradition, the people created and re-created the words of their heritage, the book we now call Exodus. And so they cherished the tradition that gave them life and hope.
But the story does not stop there. For God's people, their worship of God as much as their preserving of story, was a significant act that shaped their lives. Lest their worship become vain rituals of self-preservation or empty celebrations of idolatrous powers, the traditions of Exodus became part of the songs and poetry of worship to help the people remember who they were and to whom they belonged. And so a new voice was added to the tradition, keeping alive the faith of the people through words meant for worship and celebration. In hymns of praise in the Psalms, the poets and singers of Israel remembered the Exodus. So in Psalm 105, as the poets tell the history of God's saving grace, we read:
O give thanks to the Lord, sing praises to him, tell of all his wonderful works.
He is the Lord our God. He is mindful of his covenant forever.
When Israel lived as an alien in the land of Egypt, he sent his servants Moses and Aaron;
They performed his signs among them, and miracles in that land.
He struck down all the firstborn of Egypt; he brought Israel out with silver and gold;
So he brought his people out with joy, his chosen ones with singing.
[Psalm CV: 1-2, 7-8, 26-27, 36-37, 43]
The words of the psalm not only recalled the Exodus events but also stressed the significance of the events for those singing and hearing the psalm. The psalm proclaims: "This God of the Exodus is our God, the one whom we now worship and praise." Through a new telling of an old story, such praise created a new Exodus - the people led forth from their sin and pain to a new encounter with God, a renewal of hope for their lives. In each service of worship, for all sharing the psalm of community thanksgiving and praise, God's action of deliverance in the past was made new in their lives and gave them hope to live by.
But the story does not stop there: Through the centuries in the Promised Land, God's people settled the land, lived their lives, raised children, worked and worshipped, defended their country against neighbouring nations and distant empires. But as the ongoing story tells us, they also went astray from the paths that God had shown them in the graciousness and promise of the Exodus. The people ignored God and God's ways and opted instead for the lures of wealth and power and arrogance and trade and other gods. The prophets called them back again and again to loyalty to their Lord in the face of such betrayals and sins, but the people turned their backs. In the agony of a just and deserved sentence, the same God who had power to save also showed power to uphold justice and chastise, even the ones who had once known grace. God gave God's own people and nation into the hands of Babylonian empire in 587 B.C.
So the people found themselves in a new place, a foreign place in exile in Babylon. They had nothing of all that had before filled their lives with hope and grace - they were without land, temple, king, and identity that had defined them for so long as God's people. They cried out their misery and pain in questions that seemed to have no answers: Who are we now? Where is God's power now? Where is God's redemption now?
When the people returned to God in their despair and desperation, Isaiah, prophet of the exile, declared an amazing word:
But now thus says the Lord, he who created you O Jacob, he who formed you O, Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine.
I am the Lord, your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your king.
Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior;
They lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick:
I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.
[Isaiah XLIII: 1, 14-17, 19]
In the place of pain and utter loss, in a time of hardship and exile - there came God's word of hope in a new use of the ancient Exodus tradition, a new voice that again kept the tradition alive as it announced redemption for the people. A new thing was being created by God, a renewed reality of God's salvation; but Isaiah used the ancient reality of salvation at the sea in the wilderness to proclaim the message: once again God's people would be led forth, once again God would redeem them through a new Exodus when they were led back to the land after the exile.
More than just a poetic image, this remembering of the past in the present was a re-enlivening of the old story, a re-living of the redemption promised by God, vivid persuasion for a people in despair that their God was still powerful, that God could and would save even those he had punished; that hope was again possible.
But the story does not stop there. Through the ensuing centuries, when the people were restored to the land, they still suffered the indignities and injustices of occupation by foreign armies, Persian, Greek, Roman. In their pain, they remembered the freedom of a people brought forth by God's power.
And when the time was ready, God again was revealed in actions and words that met the people and led them to new life. The Lord, the God of their ancestors, sent Jesus, God's self, made human, who declared an amazing word: God is present, here, now; God's kingdom is at hand. Turn back from forgetfulness, distraction and sin.
In actions and words of challenge and compassion, Jesus taught, prayed, healed and turned the world and its expectations upside-down A king who held no political office, God who became mere human, a saviour who died on a criminal's cross. But no power could claim the one who created all powers and was subject to none, one who freely accepted suffering, so death, the final power, gave up its own. Resurrected, going before the disciples, Jesus became new life for God's people, all who would claim him as their Lord.
In a meal with his disciples before his death, Jesus expressed and embodied the new thing that God was doing in him. Remembering the living past in the present moment as storytellers, teachers, priests and worshippers had done for so many centuries, Jesus observed the Passover. In keeping the tradition, he renewed it and yet filled it with new meaning. Through a new institution of the ancient meal, a memory of deliverance from death became a present reality of salvation in Christ himself. In Luke XXII we read: "He said to them: I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I tell you, I will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God."
In using the tradition of Passover which had shaped and given meaning for so long to God's people, Jesus re-interpreted the tradition in the light of his mission to save the lost and proclaim God's dominion. By commanding that his disciples keep this new Passover meal, now the supper of our Lord, he passed on a tradition that must be re-enlivened and made new by his disciples. Like so many centuries of faithful witnesses before, God's people were once again called to remember: Do this in remembrance of me. And do you know what I say next? But the story does not stop there.
The story does not stop there because the biblical story of faith is not an account of static, long ago events, but a living tradition that grew through reflection, remembrance and writing by faithful witnesses to God's love. Over the centuries, the tradition was always doubling back on itself, re-thinking and recasting the old into the new, while ever preserving the meaning of the old; always commenting on or taking off from a story or saying from the past to address the present. The biblical story is a testimony to the ongoing life of God's people with an ever-present God who will not abandon them and who says above all - Remember.
And this is where we enter that stream of living tradition, where we become part of the ongoing story. As Christians, we are as much a part of this tradition as our ancestors in the faith. The living tradition has shaped lives for two thousand years, yes, even three thousand years. And it can shape our lives when we keep its memory alive, making the past ever present in our lives, being open to God working in our current realities.
To be a biblical people is to dare to claim this tradition as our own, to take the risk of letting it give meaning to us, tell us who we are and to whom we belong. Tradition in this sense is open-ended, a past that impinges on the present and future, history that makes claims on our self-understandings, our allegiances and our commitments. To be a biblical people is to be a part of this living tradition, so that it is real in our present and shapes our future.
When I was first thinking through this sermon, I used the phrase, a living tradition to describe a thing, a noun if you will, the tradition we have inherited from the Bible, as I have just been describing it. But on reflection I have come to see that we can use that phrase in a slightly different way - as living tradition in which living is a verb, an action, which means that we live our tradition. Our actions and decisions and ongoing life together as the Christian community is the living of tradition. When we act as the heirs of the Bible, we live the tradition it has bequeathed to us.
This meaning implies a more active and involved sense of how we relate to tradition - it's not just a thing that we can either pay attention to or not as we see fit. Rather, when we live our tradition, when we are living tradition, we have taken it into our lives, into our selves so that we become the living out of what has been given to us. We become a part of the tradition.
We are a part of the living tradition, or better said, we are living tradition, every time we worship, when we gather as the community of faith that has endured for so long. We are living tradition every time we celebrate communion, sharing the meal that Christ shared with his disciples. We are part of the living tradition every time we realize that God is with us, healing our broken places, forgiving our sins, comforting us in trouble and sorrow as the broken-hearted have experienced throughout the ages. We are living tradition every time we teach our children the stories of faith as if we ourselves believed them and lived them as those who witness to their faith have done for generations.
We are a part of the living tradition every time we make our decisions according to the biblical values of compassion and justice, as God's people have done ever since our earliest biblical ancestors first knew God's compassion and justice. We are living tradition every time we stop long enough to be aware of how the world would shape us into consumers and success stories and self-centred individuals, and choose instead to be shaped into disciples and justice-seekers and the community of God's people which has lived out God's grace in the world for ages.
This living tradition is not an easy or insignificant matter, but it is above all a life of joyous remembrance, fellowship, hope and peace in the living presence of Christ within our lives and our community. It is no easy matter to claim this biblical and Christian tradition as our own, but one that requires faith, study, commitment, a willingness to grow, a readiness to hear God's word anew, made real for us in our time and place. But this is a way of meeting God afresh in each moment, of knowing God's enlivening Spirit, of living our faith as we understand it in God's living word of Scripture. We are all ultimately asked the same question by the living tradition, the living Word of God: whether we will live by faith in that moment between remembrance of the past and hope for the future.
May it be so. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.