Monthly Archives: June 2006

I have issues with tradition.

Take, for example, the last political event you watched on CNN or CSPAN…an inauguration, for example, or some other pomp and circumstance thing like that. Have you noticed how steeped in tradition that stuff is? That may be a huge reason I hate politics so much…well, that and the fact that it’s composed of people lying professionally, but I suppose that’s a different topic in and of itself.

Church ceremonies are just as bad…heavily liturgical ceremonies drive me insane, because it’s just repitition Sunday after Sunday. A lot of churches aren’t liturgical, but are trapped in an outdated way of functioning because “my parents did it this way, and now so do I.”

How about weddings (drawing from an argument I had with my fiance in the recent past)? Think about how much stuff goes on during a wedding ceremony that’s just…well, pointless? Or graduations. My fiance graduated with her master’s degree last month. I was enormously proud of her, but the ritual and ceremony of the whole thing left me willing to cut off my left arm to get out of there. What did it all mean????

That’s the crux of the problem, I think. A tradition is worthless as soon as it stops symbolizing something. If we can’t remember why we’re doing something a certain way, then we should stop doing it that way and try something new. We’re crippled as human beings, because we always find ourselves lulled into a comfort zone with tradition, with ritual…empty actions that make us feel as though we’re accomplishing something. This makes church tradition particularly dangerous. How horrible would it be to think that we were connecting with God through empty rituals, only to discover that we never connected with Him at all, that the entire time we thought we were moving we were, in fact, spiritually paralyzed.

I fear we may.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about symbolic elements. I took communion this week, but I knew what I was doing with it, what I was remembering, what it symbolized. That takes it out of the realm of tradition and into the active realm of the present. Baptism is similar, if you know what it’s symbolizing, and what you’re symbolizing by doing it. If you don’t, and you’re relying on it to have some miraculous effect when you don’t even know what it means, then it’s worthless. Save your energy.

We’ve incorporated things into our wedding ceremony (another word I hate…ceremony), but we know what those things mean, what they symbolize, what we’re (in effect) saying when we do them. If not, we would have cut them. We have cut a lot of things, because they were pointless. Pointless, but traditional, because people thrive on tradition. Tradition and ceremony fill us with a false sense of security and accomplishment.

We think we’ve accomplished something meaningful by sitting through a ridiculously long graduation ceremony, when in fact the piece of paper that is mailed to us is the real accomplishment…all we’ve done is waste a Saturday morning.

We think something meaningful has happened when a certain candle or set of words is repeated at a wedding, when in fact we have no idea why just lit the candles or said the phrase. We’ve wasted our time, but feel secure in the fact that it sounds or looks cool.

We think we’ve connected with God by repeating words or singing doxologies or kneeling and rising at certain times, when in fact we have no idea why we’ve just done what we’ve done. We’ve wasted our time. Worse, we’ve wasted His. He would much rather have us just be open and honest and talk to Him, instead of engaging in ceremonial mish-mash.

Our culture is a surface one. As long as it looks good, then we’ll look over the fact that there’s no substance. Hence tradition and ceremony. We want to feel like we’ve accomplished something, even though we haven’t. Then we rely on that feeling of accomplishment and security to fill a void in our lives that remains empty. And we just can’t figure out why. We desperately want to feel secure, and to accomplish something. Instead of actually doing it, though, we settle for looking like we’ve done it. We allow ourselves to be consoled by shifting shades of the past that have no content beyond an aesthetic value. We allow ourselves to be comforted.

Whoever said we should be?

Sometimes they come in groups, right?

I attended the opening reception tonight for a new art exhibit that is showing in town for a few weeks. We were moving from room to room, soaking in the aesthetics, when I turned around and was slapped in the face by a painting. It was a landscape, and oil on canvas…very different from the mixed media pieces surrounding us, and so I suppose it would have gotten my attention anyway. Normally, I’m not really a landscape guy. This one was very simple: bare branches in the foreground, silhouetted against a full moon in the background. It took me somewhere that I wasn’t expecting.

Tillich would have said that it opened up a new level of reality for me, and I think that’s true. God uses art to speak to us in this manner. I can get somethiing out of almost any work, but every now and then I stumble onto one that really speaks to me. This one caused a full blown epiphany.

It took me back home, to where I grew up, to the fall of the year, looking up into a cold night sky like I frequently used to do. I’ve contemplated, pondered, and prayed many times into such a sky. That painting was a portal to a time 20 years into my past. It caused me, however, to unpack a lot of thoughts in the present.

You see, I’m a city guy. I love the urban landscape. Take me into a rural area, and I’m very out of place, not to mention typically uncomfortable. That belies my background, though, because I grew up in the middle of Appalachian culture, far away from any metropolitan area. That’s not to say that my family members are rednecks, they’re certainly not. While not totally the artistic creative types, they’ve always endeavored to understand and support a son that is, and done an excellent job. There were many, many rednecks around during my childhood, however. I hated where I grew up. I loathed it. I detested it. I would insert a stronger word if I could think of one. From the time I was old enough to act independently, I rebelled against it, and everything that culture represented. I did it mentally and emotionally as a teenager, and acted by moving to the city to pursue my bachelor’s degree as soon as I was able. I became exactly the opposite of my environment. That wasn’t hard, because my personality is such that I would have been anyway, but the point is I made every effort to not fit in there. I’ve always been ashamed of where I grew up. I hated it. I’ve even lied and said I was from Pittsburgh, where I spent a great deal of time during my post-college years.

But tonight, for some reason, God tapped me on the shoulder and told me it was okay. Perhaps its the culmination of the journey He and I have been taking since Christmas. That painting was a window back to my childhood, and the memories of the most amazing family I could ever hope to have been blessed with. I experienced that culture, for better or worse, and I am a better and more capable person for it today. I hate that culture, and that’s okay too. But I experienced it, and there was a reason for that. God didn’t have me born there by accident.

More to the point, it will come out well in the future (Romans 8:28), so it’s okay. It’s okay that I’m from there, and I don’t have to be ashamed of it. I don’t have to hate it. I can dislike the culture, and intend to never return to it. Believe me, I hold that intention. But I am not a worse person because I experienced it, I am a better person.

Diversity is a beautiful thing.

The occasional ephiphany isn’t bad, either.

Have you ever read a passage of Scripture and had something hit you completely different than it has before? Sometimes I love that, and sometimes I hate it, and I haven’t decided which way I feel about this morning’s epiphany, but anyway here it is…

I was reading Luke 15 this morning. This is the chapter where Jesus is telling three parables: The lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal son. It was kind of ironic, because I didn’t expect to be reading that this morning, but yesterday I listened to Erwin McManus talk about this parable in his podcast from Mosaic. His point was, in the last parable, how the son realized how bad he had screwed up in leaving his father, and realizes that he would rather be a servant to his father than to continue in the sad life he was living. So he goes back to his father, who doesn’t make him a servant but accepts him as a son as though he had never left, and celebrates his return. The picture here, as I’m sure you’ve heard, is that God accepts us as family when we recognize the error of our straying away from Him, and return for forgiveness. That was huge to me, because I was at a point in my life a few years ago when that described me perfectly.

The other two parables really resonated with me this morning, though, especially the one about the lost sheep. The shepherd’s passion here is for the one sheep that is lost. He loves the 99 that he has, and really would do anything for them. But his energy is forever focused on bringing back the one that strayed away. A few years ago, I was that one. Every other time I’ve read this passage, I’ve stopped there. But this morning, I realized something else: now I’m part of the 99.

This debate has come up recently among some of my friends about a “seeker-sensitive” methodology in a church. Some friends I know are a little upset because they don’t feel that a church using this approach (i.e.: my church) is effective in teaching Believers the “deep stuff” (i.e.: theology…you already know how I feel about that…, and really “exegetical” teaching) in an effort to be more comfortable to seekers.

I have a huge issue with “exegetical” teaching to start with (every Seminary student reading this just gasped in horror) because it quickly and frequently becomes the speaker’s opinion instead of a real analysis of Scripture. Very few people do this right. Honestly, I would rather be given the big picture, and analyze and unpack it myself later. Some people, though, aren’t happy unless it’s being handed to them.

Ideally, I suppose a church should do both. But as I read this passage this morning, God impressed to me that, if we must choose to sacrifice one or the other, His preference is always in favor of the seeker. We’re the 99. He loves us, He would do anything for us, He wants us to grow. His Great Commandment to us, after loving Him, is to love each other, and certainly that involves helping each other to grow in our faith. However, His Great Commission is to reach those who are seeking Him with the Good News. That’s our priority.

I get so upset with churches that are so focused on bringing in new Believers and increasing membership rosters, building new buidlings, and placing such an exhaustive emphasis on teaching that they apparently forget that there are unbelievers out there, seekers who are looking for God and have come to church in an effort to find Him. Analytical teaching (which is basically what I mean by “exegetical”) may be okay, but reaching those seekers is the priority. It must be. Its not an option. Our heart should beat for them the way His does, our passion should be such that we are forever trying to bring back the one that has strayed. As Believers, we were that one that had strayed, perhaps not long ago. And now that we have found God, we have allowed ourselves to become a snobbish elite.

No wonder many who seek Him don’t like what they see. We’re giving them the wrong image, because we’re seeing them from the wrong perspective.