21 Then Moses called together all of Israel’s elders and said to them, “Go pick out one of the flock for your families, and slaughter the Passover lamb. 22 Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it into the blood that is in the bowl, and touch the beam above the door and the two doorposts with the blood in the bowl. None of you should go out the door of your house until morning. 23 When the Lord comes by to strike down the Egyptians and sees the blood on the beam above the door and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over that door. He won’t let the destroyer enter your houses to strike you down. 24 You should observe this ritual as a regulation for all time for you and your children. 25 When you enter the land that the Lord has promised to give you, be sure that you observe this ritual. 26 And when your children ask you, ‘What does this ritual mean to you?’ 27 you will say, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, for the Lord passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt. When he struck down the Egyptians, he spared our houses.’” The people then bowed down and worshipped. 28 The Israelites went and did exactly what the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron to do. (CEB)
“Behold a New Thing: The Tribal Church,”
Week Four
The
refrains coming out of this tiny, minority community sounded noble, even
courageous, when placed in a vacuum: “We feel that our culture is being
threatened and we want to protect it and we want to nurture it…and suddenly, we
don’t feel welcome anymore.”
Except
that the refrains were coming from an all-white community of Afrikaners—of Dutch
Reformed settlers—in South Africa. This
is the nation that the Dutch Afrikaners were responsible for decades for
constructing and maintaining the apartheid system of segregation that
systematically disenfranchised an entire nation’s indigenous peoples from their
own government, and I have to assume the plaintive cries of preserving one’s
culture were told without a trace of irony, despite the shameful past of this
community’s forefathers repressing and threatening the culture of native South
Africans for the better part of a century.
And
it is a tradition that continued on to today in worst of forms in this small,
cloistered community outside Pretoria. The
rules are clear and unyielding: no Jews. No blacks. No Catholics.
Even people of mixed-race backgrounds need not apply.
And
having served on a mission to South Africa seven years ago, I saw bits and
pieces of this lingering mentality, but not like this. I read about and hear about these stories
now, and all I can think of is, “What is it that you are fighting so hard to
preserve, really? Is it tradition? Is it culture? Or is it a way you have grown accustomed to
that should have gone extinct long ago?”
And in so many words, that describes the thought process of the church,
over, and over and over.
We
tell ourselves churches must look a certain way and beat ourselves up when they
don’t. But the church is what I imagine
a child must be like—as Tina Fey puts it in her memoir Bossypants, yes, you can teach a child manners and dress her up in
embarrassing little sailor outfits, but at some point, that child is going to
be whatever she is going to be (and, ironically or no, that very line reflects
the wonder and splendor of the divine name itself from Exodus 3: I Am Who I
Am).
And
that’s kind of what it is like for us, you know? Lots of people would say they know what we
should look like—they want to tell us which little sailor outfits to dress up
in—but at some point, this church is going to be whatever this church is. And after being here as your pastor for
nearly two years, I have found the closest thing possible to describing what
this church is, and what we can become: a so-called tribal church, ministering
to a missing generation of believers.
This
term comes from a 2007 book of the same name by Carol Howard Merritt, a
Generation X evangelically-raised Presbyterian pastor and author. And we will be basing this new six-week
sermon series on this book, as we look at what exactly a tribal church is, and
what it can truly do. We kicked off the
series by examining one of the initial tenets of the book: “fostering
intergenerational relationships,” followed by “encouraging economic
understanding.” This past week, we had
the theme of “cultivating unambiguous inclusion,” and this week, we arrive at
the theme (and chapter) of “discovering affirming traditions.” Carol writes in this chapter:
As new generations gather in a church,
vital congregations learn to adapt their customs while keeping their traditions…Church
members want new people to attend the church because they hope to lighten the
load in fundraising events, keep dwindling programs alive, and support the
diminishing budget. Sometimes it happens
that way, but more often, if the members become intentional about ministering
to younger generations, they will move away from assimilating the new people
into existing customs and begin a process of forming new communities. The body will become aware of the gifts and
needs of that particular group and respond to them by teaching the traditions
of belief and practice in a more fluid, not rigid, way…
In the midst of this spiritual renewal,
it’s difficult to point out the steps of the process. Instead, forming spiritual communities is
like painting: an artist sketches regularly, studies objects and figures,
learns from the great works of history, and shows up at the sketchbook or
canvas every day. Much of what she
produces may be inconsequential, but then suddenly something begins to move
within her. She picks up the brush,
after some time she feels stirred internally and externally, and creates a work
of great beauty.
In
the midst of centuries of enslavement in Egypt, followed by the brutality of
the ten plagues required to release the Israelites—and to prove the superiority
of YHWH to the Egyptian deities—we would be forgiven for thinking of our
religion in the same manner as the artist, for much of what was produced
probably fell short of great beauty, of profound expectation, or of, quite
simply, the warm-and-fuzzy love we might associate with God these days. The circumstances of the Israelites in Egypt were
not—and are not—a masterpiece in any way.
But
out of those circumstances of enslavement and bondage comes one of the most
immortal religious traditions ever to grace the globe, a tradition that lives
on not only in Jewish tradition, but in Christian tradition as well under the aegis
of the Passion story: the sacrificial lamb.
Part
of the Passover tradition—and the holiday gets its name from the most literal
sense of the term, for the Lord “passed over” the houses of the Israelites
during the tenth plague, the killing of the firstborn—included a meal, prepared
quickly to be consumed quickly: unleavened bread (possessing yeast that week was
punishable by exile!), bitter herbs, and the meat of a lamb.
But
whereas today, we might discard any part of the animal we did not want, God
instructs the Israelites to use every part of the animal, including its blood:
they are to use it to mark the lintel and posts of their doors, to protect them
from the destroying capability of God’s own power.
And
so a tradition was born. The Passover
became a part of Jewish religion, and then a part of Christian religion, for
the Passion story takes place during the celebration of the Passover.
But
notice how, in Exodus, when the first Passover is being prepared, it is not
enough for Moses to simply instruct his people on how to do it—he also tells
them why. Because this is a ritual that
will be adhered to for millennia, at some point our children, and our children’s
children, will ask, “Why on earth do we do this?” And we can say, “Because God
Himself calls us to do so.”
Imagine
saying that in church today! When
someone asks us, “Why do you do this,” or “Why do you do that,” how often do we
reply with, “Because God tells us it is right that we should do so?”
Or,
more to the point, how often do we really reply with, “God instructs us to,”
rather than, “Well, this is the way we have always done it?”
There
are a many great things in the church that were nearly sacrificed upon the
altar of “Well, this is how we have always done it,” like having Bibles
translated into our native languages, rather than remaining entirely in Latin,
or not renting out pews to families of the highest bidders. God called us to neither make Scripture or
the sanctuary inaccessible, yet for centuries, the church was in the business
of doing both. Why? Because that’s how they had always done it.
In
her book, Carol calls this sort of thing the difference between custom and
tradition. Traditions are the things
that must be kept because they what make a church community distinct:
traditions are what make us who we are today.
Just as the Passover led the Israelites—and, subsequently, the Jewish
faith—to who they were and are today, so too do traditions like Easter, like
Pentecost, like Epiphany all lead us to be the Christians whom we are today.
As
such, we could no sooner stop doing those things than we could stop being
Christians.
But
then there are customs that we keep, and often for the best of reasons—it isn’t
always that the reason is to nakedly raise money for the church at the expense
of shaming the poor, as was the case when churches would do things like auction
off pews. But those customs—like clinging
to the apartheid of old in South Africa—can at times segregate churches from
the outside world: the world they are called to make better, the world God
created for them, the world from which they receive new brothers and sisters
who come in the doors and say, “Teach me about Jesus.” It’s the sort of stuff that we won’t have a
good answer for when our children ask why we do it.
What
do we as a congregation do that maybe segregates us from the people we are
called to serve and to reach on behalf of Jesus? What do we do, that when our children or our
children’s children come to church and ask us why we do it, will we perhaps not
have a good answer for?
I
don’t really know the answers to those questions, because I have been in the
church my entire life. I am steeped in its ways. This is where we lifelong churchgoers can be
taught, as it were, by our newly-christened and baptized brethren: how do they
see us, versus how we see ourselves?
And
if it sounds like I am asking you to obey the dictates of others at the expense
of what we choose to do, know that it is in fact quite the opposite. The Passover—the entire story of Exodus, in
fact—is a tale ultimately of liberation from the chains of slavery. And I truly believe that one of the ways that
we can remain true to that story today is by seeing what we have chained
ourselves to—both inside and outside of church—and working anew towards cutting
ourselves free. For that is, I think,
what God wants, in end: a people made free, liberated from themselves and from
one another, because only when such liberation takes place can the authentic worship
of the maker of heaven and earth truly begin.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
June
23, 2013
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