Tradition!

"Tradition! Tradition!" sing Tevye and the villagers of Anatevka in Tsarist Russia of the early 1900s as the famous musical "Fiddler On the Roof" begins. This week my wife Janie and I celebrated her birthday by attending the play, starring Chaim Topol, at the historic Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis. It was a beautiful performance, funny in the way that human nature is funny, bitterly sad in a way that, really, only the Jewish community can fully understand.

We, too, are in times of seismic cultural change. So-called "traditional values" shift beneath our feet. With the digital age has come an unprecedented global connectivity, and that is just one of countless changes that have swept society in my lifetime. Our churches have changed, too, though often the changes seem too little, too late. There are tensions between the need to maintain that which is most precious of our faith tradition and the need to address a contemporary world. Sometimes it feels as if the gospel itself gets stuck in the "old wineskins" of our traditions, and as a result, there are lots of leaks!

I relate to Tevye's fear of the changes that seem, as he sang, "unthinkable." I also know that there is a difference between tradition and traditionalism. A disciple of Jesus follows One who was not content to observe tradition for its own sake. Instead, he lived out God's mission through and beyond the traditions handed down. For him, the standard was not tradition, but the law of divine love.