By Donald Schell

For the healthy future of our church we’ve got to stop thinking and talking as if ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ were opposites. This hackneyed dichotomy reduces us to a lose/lose battle between caricatured factions – do we want to be a backward-looking ‘traditional’ church bound by nostalgic practices of the last two hundred years or a ‘trendy,’ ‘relevant’ church whoring in uncritical embrace of ‘contemporary’ culture.

Only a church that’s deeply traditional and truly contemporary can live fearlessly into creativity and mission. To find our way to deep traditional roots and a lively present, we’ll need to relearn that the words ‘tradition’ and ‘traditional’ live in a creative process, an inspired engagement with our Christian past and discernment of the God-given opportunities and challenges of each present moment.

Hear Vladimir Lossky, a bold 20th Century Russian Orthodox theologian described tradition,

“…to be within the Tradition, is to keep the living truth in the Light of the Holy Spirit, or rather – it is to be kept in the Truth by the vivifying power of Tradition. But this power preserves by a ceaseless renewing, like all that comes from the Spirit.” [Tradition and Traditions, Lossky’s introduction to The Meaning of Icons, (Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, 1952 and 1969]

When other rabbis scolded Jesus’ disciples for skipping the ritual hand washing that began the meal, those teachers’ concern wasn’t hygiene but sacrilegious violation of ritual purity. They understood a prophetic sign. Jesus was defying religious purity laws to show people the impatient welcome of his all-merciful Father. Hand washing was ritualized preparation for the sacred.

Jesus’ deep faithfulness to the tradition he received had provoked him to break the rubrics (official rules) of the ritual meal of a rabbi with his close disciples.

Jesus teaching God’s mercy on the Sabbath was good rabbinic practice. But to some his healing and feeding people to embody that mercy was more sacrilege. The Sabbath was the center of rabbinic Judaism’s liturgy. Once again traditionally-grounded rule-breaking led Jesus to liturgical innovation and a new vision for works of mercy in community. Liturgy and his mission of compassionate love were inseparable.

Making his ritual choices to reshape the ritual of a rabbi’s holy meal with close disciples, Jesus showed the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promised feast, on the mountaintop, God’s messianic banquet for all people. And he was using one tradition to reshape another. Isaiah and Israel’s prophetic tradition taught Jesus to trust God’s power to make us all holy. He wasn’t willing to do the meal ritual without showing that power at work.

Jesus’ own religious contemporaries were so scandalized at his welcoming unprepared sinners to feast with him that they called him a ‘jerk’ who ate with sinners and accused him of being a drunkard and a glutton. Scholars like Norman Perrin believe it was precisely Jesus’ prophet-inspired defiance of the established ritual of his time that finally drove the religious leaders of his community to conspire with Roman military power to kill him.

Even as established power worked for Jesus’ destruction, at his Last Supper with his disciples Jesus renewed tradition again, offering his disciples traditionally blessed bread with new words identifying it as his own living body, and then after supper, giving them the traditionally blessed final cup of wine, saying the cup held his blood shed for the reconciliation of the whole world. His ‘Do this and remember me,’ declared his intention that they follow him in this changed and renewed tradition around the ancient practices of blessing and sharing bread and wine.
John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus altered another traditional ritual when he substituted washing all his disciples feet for the fingerbowl-like hand washing that ended the meal. Again, he commanded them to continue doing what he’d done.

St. Paul and our four Gospel writers present Jesus’ ministry as a conscious re-traditioning. What he did was deeply rooted in his tradition but also represents the paradoxical character of all tradition making and sharing. Jesus read God’s Law and measured official religious practice in light of the prophetic tradition’s insistence that God desired mercy not sacrifice. By recasting traditional images and actions, Jesus patterned his brief ministry and interpreted his coming death as an icon of God’s self-giving love.

Tradition always offers choices, and if we don’t make choices, we reduce ‘tradition’ to a desperate clinging to our parents’ and grandparents’ interpretations of what they knew and received. Anglicanism’s genius lives in this tradition of embracing the riches of Christian history and making conscious choices. Though it hasn’t been without conflict, Anglicanism has always borrowed practices from the whole of Christian history and the worldwide church to make a highly participatory and strongly embodied liturgy for evangelism and Christian formation. At our best we’re imitating the householder in Jesus’ parable, “…who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” (Matthew 13.52).

Recently our Episcopal church’s schismatics began claiming ‘tradition’ (along with ‘orthodox ‘ and ‘Bible-believing’) as their words, an accusation of faithlessness to their supposed opposite - ‘revisionist Episcopalians.’ I’m glad to claim this holy title and the work of re-visioning. But re-visioning is the Spirit’s work that grows directly out of tradition, orthodoxy and the Bible.
Our Christian faith comes to us from more than a hundred generations of faithful re-visioning, of rooted tradition-making. Uncritical repetition of ‘how it’s always been done’ or even ‘what we’ve always taught’ isn’t faithful or even honest, but tree of faith cannot flower without deep roots. The prophets promised God’s Spirit poured out on all humanity would make our old people dream dreams and our young one ones see visions. That has been the church’s history. It is our living tradition.

The Spirit has always been at work. Sometimes good things have been lost, and startlingly (and wonderfully) they may be rediscovered. Sometimes it’s an inspired hearing of something new in a present moment. And sometimes the work is saying no to something false and holding fast an old way. We can make these choices because as St. Paul says, ‘We have the mind of Christ.’ Like the church gathered in Acts, we weigh scripture, tradition, and our present circumstance and challenges and dare new things, renewing tradition as we say, ‘It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us.’

Partisan, rigid use of the word ‘tradition’ hides what artists working in a tradition knows in their bones. Tradition flowers in responsive creativity.

Not only our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, but every previous Christian generation may have treasures for us. We must listen, feel, imagine, think, and discern what the Spirit calls us to preserve, what the Spirit challenges us to discard, and what the Spirit asks us to make new. And we can find new treasure in our own questions and the questions of our children. Living tradition must embody the living choices of a living community. The Holy Spirit and our tradition-breaking and tradition-making Lord Jesus goad and guide us forward. Which practices make us more alive to one another and to God?

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.