The Gift of ‘Re’-traditioning

Paul Walton
31 December 2002

Mary and Joseph take their baby boy to church, and the only people who talk to them are two old dears who goo and gush all over the baby. Things don’t change much, do they?

One thing has changed. Today, we are hardly likely to get excited about what two old people—one ready to die, the other eighty four—might say about a baby. We don’t take much notice of them at all; the centre of cultural gravity has shifted towards the young. They have the spending power, they welcome the fast pace of change, and those are the things that matter today.

Yet Simeon and Anna are worth hearing. They discern something deeper, something below the surface. They discern the salvation of God, they see a light for all peoples to walk by, they tell everyone who will hear all about it. Today, we’d shuffle them off for a cup of tea and make small talk to cover our embarrassment. And when the couple didn’t return to church, we’d blame the oldies.

I want to look at this incident as a process of re-traditioning. By ‘traditioning’, I mean the passing on of tradition. And this passing on of tradition becomes a re-traditioning, faithful firstly to the tradition but also attentive to the contemporary world. In turn, this re-traditioning is itself ‘traditioned’, passed on to future generations.

Mary and Joseph begin the process of traditioning by having Jesus circumcised on the eighth day, and then bringing him to the Temple. Luke seems to have two rites in mind here: (1) the purification of a mother after childbirth, and (2) the offering prescribed for a first-born son. The firstborn belonged to God, and had to be bought back (or ‘redeemed’) by the payment of five shekels. The mother was considered unclean after birth, and needed to make an offering so that ‘the priest shall make atonement on her behalf, and she shall be clean’. (Leviticus 12.1-8)

No one here would argue for either of these practices to be restored! No wonder ‘tradition’ has a bad name, and not only in the Uniting Church. Two days ago, the Brisbane newspaper the Sunday Mail quoted Phillip Aspinall, the Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane:

There is a feeling by some young people that anything traditional has no value in it.… people are looking for a spiritual experience outside the main-line churches and that’s because they see them as being on about religious forms, rituals, doctrine and dogma and not speaking to their need for spiritual experience.

Yet the Christian Church cannot and should not repress its whole basis in worship and belief.

Re-traditioning may offer a clue; in Luke, we find traces of a re-traditioning. For instance, Jesus is presented in the Temple, but there is no mention of his being redeemed. This first-born Son still belongs to God.

Furthermore, the ‘purification’ of women is re-traditioned in other scriptures. For an example, remember the scripture that we hear every week in the Song of Ascents:

All who are baptised into Christ
have put on Christ.
Now there is neither black nor white,
there is neither slave nor free,
there is neither male nor female.
For we are all one in Christ.
(cƒ. Galatians 3.27-28)

Those who receive the sign of baptism are ‘in Christ’; they need no further purification.

Re-traditioning is very dangerous. The words ‘tradition’ and ‘traitor’ come from the same Latin root, tradere, ‘to deliver or hand over’. In the case of tradition, things are handed over from generation to generation; and a traitor betrays by handing over, as Judas handed over Jesus at Gethsemane. It is so easy to become a traitor to tradition. How can we ‘re-tradition’? How can we be true to the tradition as we hand it on today?

Let’s go back to Simeon and Anna. What we don’t hear from their lips is, ‘Oh, how wonderful, dears! You’ve come for purification! And to redeem your first-born! Not many young couples do that these days, do they?’ They don’t talk this way because their hearts are set upon the heart of God. And their words—what they hand over to Mary and Joseph—are words which reflect the heart of God. They have discerned God’s heart as they poured through the scriptures. Their words reflect the universalism found in the later chapters of the prophet Isaiah:

… for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and for glory to your people Israel.

Today’s Old Testament reading is similar:

For as the earth brings forth its shoots,
and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up,
so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise
to spring up before all the nations.

Simeon and Anna knew God as a God of grace. They were looking for God’s salvation: Simeon for the ‘consolation of Israel’, and Anna for ‘the redemption of Jerusalem’. They found it in this small baby.

The heart of God is salvation. A heart set on God’s heart has a key to re-traditioning: God saves. Tomorrow is of course New Year’s Day. Interestingly, in the Christian Year it is the Naming of Jesus, the commemoration of the circumcision of Christ. And his name, Jesus, means ‘God saves’.

Re-traditioning is about finding the keys to discerning the heart of God, and declaring that heart in worship, witness and service. Re-traditioning is never false to the ‘capital-T’ Tradition. It may discard human traditions, but it stays close to God’s heart. Otherwise, it becomes traitorous, unwittingly betraying the core of faith.

I wonder if part of this Community’s mission is to recover aspects of the Tradition that our ‘small-t’ traditions have discarded, and be prepared to hand that over, to ‘re-tradition’ it for others. And I wonder whether I have made it sound too simple a thing to discern the heart of God, to find the Tradition amongst the traditions. It is only too easy to be a traitor in doing this; our desires can lead us along treacherous paths. If this is part of the mission we have been given, then we will need to be discerning and faithful, courageous and hopeful, patient and gentle, always seeking the heart of God together in the Tradition. Amen.