Our family custom is to fetch our Christmas tree from a local tree farm. It makes me feel hearty and daring, a modern-day Paul Bunyan, even though my role is confined to watching a man with a chain saw lop it down, and then vacuuming spruce needles out of the van’s carpet afterward.
Since my three children are at an age where my primary value to them is my car and my wallet, I asked them last December, “Still want to go to the tree farm, or should we switch to a tree lot?”
All three were appalled.
“Father,” Sarah said reproachful, “please don’t be ridiculous. We must maintain our tradition.”
I thought of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. He loved tradition. I do too.
A world without tradition, a world of endless novelty and innovation, would be bereft of meaning. We make sense of our lives by ritualizing them, establishing fixed patterns, touchstones. Life is thick with change, and traditions are a kind of bedrock, storerooms for memory, streams that return us to our spawning ground.
Yet a tradition mindlessly repeated becomes meaningless. I heard a story about a sentry in czarist Russia who stood guard in an empty field. No one knew why. Years before, the Czarina had spotted the first crocus blooming in the snowy emptiness and appointed a guard to protect it. And never rescinded the order. A meaningful practice became a dead duty.
I struggle with this balance, personally and vocationally: what traditions are worth keeping? Which ones protect fragile and precious things—crocuses, sacred memories, ancient truths—and which ones are merely habits petrified, no longer serving the purposes that birthed them?
At our church we seek balance. We stand to hear the word of the Lord read, and then I preach without pulpit or notes. We weave tunes by Redman and Tomlin with hymns by Cowper and Wesley, and free dance with responsive readings. We incorporate old prayers—from Scripture, desert fathers, Celtic Christians, monks, reformers, revivalists—with ones we make up on our feet. We plan our services but remain open to surprises, interruptions, Holy Spirit nudges.
Jesus said, “Every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old” (). Teachers of the law instructed about the kingdom. Sounds like a pastor to me.
So I pay close attention to Jesus’ application: act like an owner—someone with vested interest, someone who works harder when things get hard rather than bailing—and use whatever helps, old or new. Too much old gets old. Too much new gets old, too. But old and new artfully blended, treasure matched to treasure, tradition fused to innovation, grounds people in ancient truth and awakens them to present mystery.
In my last column, I told the story of Wanda, a woman with a messy past who got saved, and two weeks later came up, on a misunderstanding, to help me serve communion. I flinched, recovered, and together we served communion—and the church saw her, and loved her.
What I didn’t say was Wanda did well for about eight months—got into Alpha and a 12-step group, got her kids back. Then she didn’t do well, in and out—mostly out—of rehab. Then she vanished.
Then one day she called again, sober, after a year in rehab in Vancouver. She was getting out the next week.
Could she come home?
Her first Sunday back, I initially didn’t recognize her. She looked healthy. Dressed and in her right mind.
I was preaching on the ten lepers Jesus healed, and the one, a Samaritan, who returned to give thanks. I said that anyone who has been cleansed by Jesus, who wants to be made whole by him, worships at his feet in deep thankfulness, in utmost desperation. They have nowhere else they want to go. And then, to close, I reminded people we have a tradition at our church: anyone can come up to the front and pray with one of our prayer ministers.
Wanda came forward. But she didn’t go to a prayer minister. She walked onto the platform, between the guitarist and the drummer, and stretched her hands heavenward. She worshiped like One Leper Returning.
A woman who didn’t know her, and who isn’t on the prayer team, walked up, put her arm around her, and worshiped, too.
Then—you could hear it—all of us worshiped with deeper thankfulness, out of greater desperation. Out of the storeroom had come new treasures as well as old, and the Kingdom hovered very close.
Mark Buchanan is pastor of New Life Community Church in Duncan, British Columbia, and a contributing editor of Leadership.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
