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"Religion
Centered on Human Traditions" September
21, 2003 The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower This morning we're going to ask ourselves what it means to be a
Protestant Christian. Last week we
talked about Christianity per se. What
does it just mean to be a Christian? You
remember I said that there's a Christian world-view, and to be a Christian is to
look at the world in a particular way, with a Christian view of the world.
Now this morning we're going to ask ourselves, now what does it mean to
be a Protestant Christian?--because there are different branches within the
Christian faith as we know. The
Protestant branch may be our favorite, but is not the only way to be a
Christian. There's the Roman
Catholic branch of Christianity. Some
wonderful Christians are Roman Catholics. And
there is the Orthodox or Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity.
We're not quite as familiar with that one, but if you know of a Russian
Orthodox Church or a Greek Orthodox Church or something like that, that would be
the third branch. Now there's a
fourth category--Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity.
That probably doesn't count as a separate branch for a few different
reasons. One is there are lots of
charismatics in Presbyterian churches and Roman Catholic churches--sort of
within, located all along the other branches, is one reason.
And another reason is (and this is my favorite reason), as pentecostal
churches or as charismatic churches become larger and larger and more and more
successful, they begin to act more and more like Protestant churches, anyway.
There are Assembly of God churches so big, and so prosperous, and so
successful, you can't tell the difference between them and the Presbyterians!
But we're talking about the Protestant branch within that.
We're not saying this is the only way to be a Christian.
We're acknowledging that there is an awful lot of wonderful, faithful
service in Jesus' name that takes place in the other branches.
But we want to ask, "What does it mean to be a Protestant
Christian?" You remember last week I said that just as if you want to live in
the town of Minnetonka (this was so brilliant I'm going to tell it to you
again!) if you want to live in the town of Minnetonka, you have to live in the
state of Minnesota, don't you? And
you have to live in the United States of America.
In the same way, if you want to be a Presbyterian, then you have to be a
Protestant and you have to be a Christian, because Presbyterianism locates in
the middle of that. It's not the
only way to be a Protestant. It's
not the only way to be a Christian. But
just as you would think I was quite, quite, quite confused if I were to say to
you, "Well, you know, I love living right here in this part of the Twin
Cities. I just want to do it
without having to live in Minnesota."
You would think that would be kind of silly.
And if I further say, "and I also do not want to live in the United
States of America," you would say, "Well, I'm sorry.
The only way that you can live in Minnetonka is if you live in Minnesota
and if you live in the United States of America."
And in the same way, the only way you can be a Presbyterian is if you are
thereby a Protestant and thereby a Christian.
Now this is so wonderfully obvious as I'm saying it that you're
probably saying, "Why is he even telling us this?
This is too obvious to even talk about."
Well, no. No, because
there's a lot of confusion right in this area at the present time.
And the wonderful thing about being an Interim Pastor is that as you go
from church to church, as Nancy and I have gone from church to church, you do
run into marvelous examples of confusion at this very, very point.
A few churches ago, I was the brand new Interim.
And at this particular church . . .
(Now I'm not telling a story about this church, I want you to understand.
This was a few churches ago.) I
was a brand new Interim Pastor and at my first session meeting--and they had
explained to me that their custom was that the different elders would bring a
devotional reading to the session meeting for that particular month.
And the person whose turn it was would just read some devotional passage,
you know, to sort of have a nice, spiritual beginning to our business meeting.
Well, the Clerk of Session--it was her turn for that particular night.
I looked over and she had her book that she was about to read from and I
could see that the Dalai Lama's picture was on the back of this.
And I said, "I see you brought a book by his holiness the Dalai Lama
to read to us at the session meeting."
And she said, "Yes, I thought we should be ecumenical."
Now then, I'm not going to say bad things about his holiness the
Dalai Lama. I want you to
understand that. We're not
criticizing that figure. And I'm
also not even going to say--like you think I am--I'm not even going to say that
you can't ever bring something from the Dalai Lama to read at a session meeting.
I'm not saying that. What I
want to illustrate with that is that at that particular church, the confusion
was "if it's religious, then it's good."
"Anything that is religious is as good as everything else that is
religious." Now, if you're a
Protestant Christian and you understand Protestant Christianity, you cannot say
"if it's religious, it's good" and "everything religious is as
good as everything else." We're going to look specifically at "why" this morning.
We're going to look at, now why would it be that from a Protestant
perspective you cannot say that "if it's religious its good--it's all
good"? Why would that not ring
true to Protestant Christians--why should that not ring true?
There's another confusion: a
church I know very well out in Marin County, California--in northern
California--the hot tub capital of the world.
There is a Presbyterian Church that we won't give the name the name of.
There--I have it on very good authority--that everyone in the
Presbyterian Women's organization at this particular Presbyterian Church, no one
believes in the resurrection of Jesus, but everyone believes in the
reincarnation of Shirley MacLaine. Interesting! No
one believes in the resurrection of Jesus, but everyone believes in the
reincarnation of Shirley MacLaine. Now,
that's a situation where the rule of thumb would sort of be, "if it's
familiar to me, then it can't be true; but if it's new and interesting, if I've
never sort of encountered it before, then it's got to be true."
"The old, and the tried, and the true, and the familiar cannot be
true; the innovative--those are the things that are true."
So if that's your orientation, then if you were raised in a Christian
church and you heard about Jesus all your life, then that can't be true because
it's old. You grew up hearing it.
But if somebody has a really newfangled thing that may be as old as the
hills, but as far as you're concerned, you were not raised with it.
It's not familiar to you, then it's like, "Oh, OK.
It's got to be true!" Well, you see, this thing of "if it's old, it can't be true;
if it's new it must be true"--you cannot honestly embrace that if
you are a Protestant Christian and you understand Protestant Christianity.
So that's why we want to look at our text this morning, which is from
Mark, chapter 7. And we want to
remind ourselves what it even means to be a Protestant Christian in the face of
the fact that there are many people at the present time (certainly not in our
church!), but as I go around, and meet Christians in other churches, it's a
very, very common thing for someone to basically have the stance of, "Oh,
yes, I'm a Presbyterian, but, oh, no, the things that Protestants
emphasize--none of those are important to me.
And the things that Christians believe--no, none of those.
I don't believe any of them, but I'm a Presbyterian." Well, we want to look this morning at what it means to be a
Protestant Christian and we want to remind ourselves that at the time of Jesus,
Jesus and all of His followers were Jews. There
is a very, very interesting thing about the Jewish religion at the time of
Jesus: Although earlier, if we go
back to king David, and we go back to Moses, and we go back to Abraham, God had
been authentically communicating with the Jewish people over the centuries--and
in fact, over the millennia. God
had actually been having His Old Covenant dealings with the people.
Over time what happened is human additions were brought into the Jewish
religion so that in time, what was authentically from God was so burdened down
by, so camouflaged by, so hidden by, human tradition that you really couldn't
even see that any more. And all of
those new human add-ons were treated as sacred.
It's kind of like, you know there's "guilt by association." We're not talking about "guilt by association,"
we're talking about "holy by association."
You know, these human traditions that were associated with what was
authentically from God because of the association, those were now treated as
every bit as sacred as the things that really were from God.
And what is really important for us as Protestant Christians to
understand is if we now fast-forward a thousand five hundred years--to the time
of Martin Luther and John Calvin--what we had in the church is really exactly
the same thing. Because God's New
Covenant dealings with the Church began in the first century after Jesus and the
second. But before very long, the
church began to pile on human traditions and began to make exactly the same
mistake of treating these new additions as sacred simply because we associate
them in our minds with the things that are authentically from God.
And so what we're talking about now is the Middle Ages, which
Protestants used to refer to as the Dark Ages.
(Now we kind of don't call it the "Dark Ages" any more because
we want to be politer and it hurts Roman Catholics' feelings.)
But to remind ourselves of how dark the Dark Ages were . . .
And please understand, I'm not saying bad things right now about Roman
Catholics today. What I'm talking
about is the church that was the Church of Rome in the Middle Ages--there was so
much ignorance, there was so much superstition, and there was so much falsehood,
and some of those human traditions that covered up the gospel remain with us
today as in: "The pope cannot
be married." Am I right?
I think I'm right. The pope
cannot be married. Peter was the
first pope. Am I right?
I think I'm right. But we know from Mark chapter 1 (look at this at home this
afternoon--Mark chapter 1, verse 30) Peter had a mother-in-law.
If Peter had a mother-in-law . . . (Oh, some of you are looking right now because you want to
see if what Will is saying is true. This
is good! This is good!
We want to check out the minister and find out if what he's saying is
really true. Very good!
Mark chapter 1, verse 30.) If
Peter had a mother-in-law, chances are he was married!
Now, I don't know. Can you
have a mother-in-law without having a wife?
One would hope not . . . which is a different story.
What we're saying is, it's possible to add on human traditions.
It's possible for those human traditions to pile up so that whatever the
original religion had been at the start is now completely disguised by things
that have nothing to do with that. Let's
not go there, but just acknowledge the Roman Catholic Church is suffering today
because of the assumptions about a celibate priesthood that they have had for
centuries. But if you go back to
the earliest times, the early Church did not have a celibate priesthood and
there's nothing in the Bible talking about that.
So that's the kind of thing that we're talking about.
A wonderful thing for a Protestant Christian is to realize that the
problem that Jesus reacted against in the Pharisees is the same problem that
Martin Luther and the early Reformers were reacting against at the time of the
Reformation. I want to show you
what that is. Let's look at Mark
chapter 7. Mark chapter 7, verse 1: Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes
who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his
disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them.
(For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly
wash their hands, thus observing [now, watch this:] the tradition of the elders;
and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it, and there are
many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze
kettles.) So the Pharisees and the
scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the
tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?"
He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as
it is written, This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines. You abandon the commandment of God and hold to your human
tradition." Now, first of all, we want to look at this and say this is a
wonderful example of the ministry of Jesus.
One that no one would dispute as authentic. If you believe that the Bible is the holy Word of God, then
of course you're going to accept this as an authentic report of the kinds of
interactions that Jesus really had with the authorities of His day.
But even if you're skeptical about the Bible, skeptics reading the Bible
would nevertheless say, "Yes. Even
if nothing else in the gospel of Mark is a trustworthy historical record, we
know that Jesus had run-ins just like this with the Jewish authorities."
So as skeptical as you want to be, this is nevertheless a thoroughly
trustworthy report of why Jesus got Himself in trouble with the Jewish
authorities. If He had simply been
one more Jewish rabbi like every other Jewish rabbi, going along with the things
of the day, we wouldn't remember Him today.
But we do remember Him because He stood out.
He stood out as Someone sent from God to remind them about God's original
intent with the Old Covenant, even as He instituted the New Covenant.
And so what do we see going on here?
We see the representatives of the religious establishment of the day
wanting to sort of monitor the behavior of all of the Jews around them and
wanting to find fault if anyone is upsetting the customs.
But those customs--many of them, and at the time of Jesus, most of
them--had nothing to do with what God really chose Abraham to reveal, and put
His hand on Moses to bring about, and inspired David to express--that what God
was doing throughout the history of Israel got supplemented by what is referred
to here as "the traditions of the elders," so much so that when Jesus
and His disciples were busy going about the ministries that they did--and we
know what those are: Jesus spent
time preaching to the crowds, largely in parables, and as He preached the
disciples were sitting there and they were listening.
And we know that they were because the book of Acts tells us that then
the disciples turned around, when it was their turn, and they went out and they
preached. Now the disciples were not only listening to Jesus preach.
They were also observing as Jesus would lay hands on people and would
heal. And we know that they were
paying attention because, again, in the rest of the New Testament what we know
was the case is the disciples went out. They
not only said what Jesus said, but as they spread the gospel, they did what
Jesus did. Now, it's in the middle of that busyness--preaching the
gospel of the forgiveness available to all through God's grace in Jesus
Christ--and then laying hands on people who had various afflictions and praying
that they would be healed by God. It's
in the middle of that that the religious authorities come along and say:
"Now, wait a minute. When
you guys take a break for a snack, you don't wash your hands.
And that really bothers me because, you know, you're supposed to wash
your hands." So what we're seeing is religious authorities who were not able to
recognize authentic work of the Kingdom as it is going on and who instead find
fault with it. If you understand
the big picture, I mean, we would call it nitpicking today.
You know, they find fault because the traditions of the elders are being
violated. Well, the traditions of the elders don't represent God's
original intent anyway, but notice what Jesus says--He quotes Isaiah who said,
"This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from
me." Now it's possible to be
very, very, very religious and yet have the entire thing be honoring God with
your lips so that your hearts are far from Him.
And, as a matter of fact, there's something very tempting about that,
because a life lived directly in front of God can be alarming to us
sometimes--God being kind of big like God is--and therefore there is something
in the human heart that wants us to substitute, you know, the traditions, the
paraphernalia, the routines, the rituals--substitute those for a life truly
lived being busy about the Kingdom. Do
you understand? It can be exhausting, in a way, to be overly religious.
And we want to say, "Why in the world would anybody sort of fall
into that trap?" Well, it's because there's something in the human heart that
wants to substitute religion for God, amen?
Do you understand? So what
He's saying is, "I know your hearts. And
I know that you can talk the talk, but you don't walk the walk." And then
He says (continuing to quote Isaiah), "In vain do they worship me, teaching
human precepts as doctrine." Now,
if it's not from God, don't say it's from God.
If it's not from God, don't say it's from God, and don't treat it like
it's sacred, and don't find fault with other people for being too busy to follow
the traditions of the elders at a particular time because the traditions of the
elders--they're not from God. You
gotta know the difference. You
gotta know the difference, which he sums up in verse 8:
"You abandon the commandments of God and hold to human
traditions." Now what is
fascinating is this was so, so, so clear in Jesus' ministry.
The difference between that stance that wants to be totally religious
(and, in fact, overly religious, but use it as a way of escaping from God.
And Jesus rejected it in whole and in part.
It's so clear, and yet the birth of the Protestant branch of the
Christian Church came about because this whole mistake of substituting religion
for God had crept back into the church so that so much of what was going on in
the churches during the High Middle Ages was so erroneous that for a long time,
as I said, Christians called that period, the "Dark Ages."
And one reminder of why that would be: You know the word magicians use, "hocus pocus"?
You know that phrase, "hocus pocus"?
Do you know where that phrase comes from?
Some of us know this. In the
Latin Mass, when the priest would lift up the host, which is representing (and
they would believe, would be transformed actually into) the body of Jesus, the
priest would say, "Hoc est corpus mium," (please forgive me, Latin
majors), but "Hoc est corpus mium" and the belief was that when the
priest said that, the little bread turned into the real body of Jesus.
That was the belief. And the
problem was they had priests that would recite the mass in Latin that did not
understand Latin and did not know what the words that they were saying meant.
And of course, the people listening did not know what the words meant.
And so it all sounded like "hocus pocus."
Do you understand? I mean,
literally, that's where we get that phrase.
I'm not even kidding. You
can look it up. We say "hocus
pocus" to just refer to, you know, a magic show with nothing to it.
And that's how people came to view the religious ritual of the High
Middle Ages. It was all show, and
it was all human, there was nothing of God in it, and it was just hocus pocus. Well, Protestantism was born as a rediscovery of what Christianity
originally was. So let's see if we
can just make a couple of quick points on this.
Why would it be that a Protestant should never say, "if it's
religious, it's good"? Well,
because we know that Christianity was born at a time where there was a rejection
of an awful lot of religious tradition that had gotten added on.
We know that the Protestant branch at a later point was similarly born,
at a time where there was a rejection of a lot of the religious rigamorole. Now, if we know that about our own tradition, is there any reason
to think that Jews are capable of making a religious mistake, that Christians in
the Middle Ages were capable of making a mistake, but no other religion ever
does? No other religion is ever
capable of making a mistake? Well,
no. If you are a Protestant you
know that the reason that the Jews in Jesus' day, the reason that the priests in
the Middle Ages, the reason that some of us still struggle with it today, is
because there's something in the human heart that always wants to substitute
religion for a life lived before God. And
Christian faith is not religion. It
is a life lived before God. So we should never say--as Protestant Christians,
anyway--"Oh, if it's religion, it's all good."
Similarly, we should never say, "Oh, if it's new, it's got to be
wonderful." Because that's how
we get these traditions added in there that then camouflage, and cover up, and
obscure what is authentically from God. People
make up these human traditions and add them in there.
So the fact that it is new and unfamiliar should not be taken by us, if
we understand who we are as Protestant Christians, the fact that it's new should
not be taken as, "Oh, if it's new, it's got to be true."
But by the same token, let's just go ahead and say neither should we say
"If it's old, it's got to be true."
Neither one of those ought to be an expression of how we make our
decisions as Presbyterians who all ought to be Protestant Christians.
Neither "if it's new, it's got to be true" nor "if it's
old, it's got to be true" and definitely not "if it's religious, it's
got to be good." Instead, the Protestant stance is, "If it's from God, it's
good." And, "If it's from
God, it's true." Whether it
seems new to us or old to us, whether it seems religious to us or not, if it's
from God, it's good. If it's from
God, it's true. We want to hang on
to as true and as good those things that we know come to us from God and we
don't want them to be obscured by long ago traditions or brand new things that
we might make up today. In neither
case do we want to run our life together according to whether it's new or old,
whether it seems wonderfully religious or not.
If you're a Protestant Christian, then your orientation is: There's the commands of God and there's human traditions, and
we want the commands of God. Now,
how do you know what the commands of God are?
That's what we're going to talk about next week. Let's pray. Dear
Heavenly Father, we thank you for your Word which is our light in darkness.
Lord, we ask that as Presbyterians we would be Protestant Christians.
As Christians looking at the world with the Christian world-view, as
Protestants understanding that there is that perennial
temptation to hide what is truly from you underneath and obscure
underneath so many human add-ons. Lord,
we ask that you would keep us by your grace, free. Free from tradition and free to honor you.
And it's in the strong name of Jesus that we pray. Amen. The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower Interim Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church Minnetonka, Minnesota [Transcribed from an audiotape of the
worship service on September 21, 2003.] |
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