Sermon Notes
Wednesday, 9/6/06

Texts: Deut. 4:1-9
Gospel: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Paradox: on the one hand, Moses demanding that we be diligent to obey all the law that is 
set before us; on the other, Jesus saying we shouldn't be bound to tradition.  What's 
going on here?  

Moses: what is it that they are supposed to hang on to from their fathers' experience of 
God?  Is it the law itself for its own sake?  The law, yes, but not for its own sake.  
Rather, the law (and later, the prophets) are signs of something much more important, 
something that is, really, much more durable.  They are signs of the love and power of God 
experienced in our lives.  They are revelatory of God Himself - the Scriptures are the 
Word of God, pointing to Him, revealing His love for us so masterfully worked out in human 
history and, more importantly, in our own lives.  It was this revelation of God that was 
supposed to be passed down, in the Law, from one generation to another, forming a body of 
holy tradition that went hand-in-hand with the written revelation.

When Jesus accosts the Pharisees, it is for forgetting this spirit of the Law, and getting 
lost in the letter of the Law; they forgot the experience of God that their fathers had, 
and the lessons they learned -- not about the Law itself - but through living the Law, the 
lessons they learned about God.  This was the problem the Church faced in the early 
centuries after Christ.  The Apostles kept us rooted in the revelation of God that had 
come through the Law to the Jews, but there were a number of groups that wanted to mix 
Christian doctrine with various pagan religions.  But it was through the tradition of the 
Apostles that the Church defined what we today call orthodoxy; the tradition of the 
Apostles was their experience of God through the Law, their life with Christ during His 
ministry, and the Love and Power of God that continued to dominate their lives through the 
Holy Spirit.  The content of this experience -- the revelation of God that it contained, 
became what we call Sacred Tradtion (capital T).  And the written word of God walked hand 
in hand with Sacred Tradition.

We face this same problem in the church today: on the one hand, we have many Protestant 
groups who want to interpret the bible without any reference to Christian history or the 
Sacred Apostolic Tradition; this leads them into many difficulties and heresies that could 
be avoided by holding tight to the Revelation of God in Sacred Tradition.  On  the other 
hand, there are people who want the scripture to support contemporary cultural trends and 
values, and they forsake Sacred Apostolic Tradition in order to do that.  This, too, falls 
under Jesus' condemnation of "You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human 
tradition."  Both extremes endanger our souls.  Our salvation is in Christ, and we 
cannot find Him without the written word going hand in hand with Apostolic Tradition.

But there's another aspect of this that I'd like to highlight: notice what it is that 
Jesus and Moses tell us we ought to hold on to from our fathers: the revelatory tradition, 
their experiences of God's love and power and rule.  Too often the thing we hold on to 
from our ancestors is their grudges, their sins, their hatreds.  What are you holding on 
to from your ancestors?