Tradition
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| With Grandma, at my childhood church |
9 yo: So what’s the thing about the holy water? (Remembering a recent conversation with a Catholic family member).
Me: Well, they believe that the water is holy, special, and you can use it for things like blessings and remembering your baptism.
9 yo: We don’t believe that?
Me: Not in the same way, we just use regular water for things like that. There are some traditions that aren’t in the Bible. The Bible doesn’t say that we have to bless water in a certain way to make it holy.
9 yo: Are there other traditions that people do that aren’t in the Bible?
Me: Well, the order of the church service isn’t specifically laid out in the Bible.
9 yo: Is there any church that just follows the Bible and not any traditions?
Me: I don’t think so.
The Lutheran traditions of my childhood grounded me in identity and community. There was infant baptism, summer Vacation Bible School, communion only after completing Confirmation classes, egg casseroles made by youth for Easter brunch and a Fourth of July chicken BBQ dinner with pies galore. Goodie bags with peanuts and candy were distributed every Christmas Eve, church ladies made lunch for every funeral reception and there was at least one JELLO salad at every church potluck. I could count on these traditions; they helped to shape my childhood faith.
But traditions can also be a fancy way of saying "that's the way we've always done it." Traditions can feel inflexible, irrelevant and imposing. My children all received their first (and ongoing) communion before any official instruction and I haven't eaten a JELLO salad in years. The congregation where my family and I now worship has their own set of traditions - some newer to me - and those are part of my children's early faith experience. We form a circle around the altar during communion, children serve as readers and ushers and communion assistants, and salmon dip is served at almost every potluck. There's still youth-made egg casserole at Easter brunch - I guess some traditions are eternal.
It's not necessarily comfortable to question a tradition - ask a pastor who tries to change the Easter Sunday hymns or flowers - but it's part of the Reformation history of Lutherans (you might say it's tradition to question tradition). The traditions of the 16th century Catholic church were serving the institution and not necessarily the common person. Luther advocated for eliminating the sale of indulgences (the get-into-heaven-for-free passes that were actually pretty expensive) and translated the Bible from Latin into German (against tradition) so more people could read it. Traditions are meant to help us serve God, not to serve the tradition.
My children join me in keeping many of our church traditions - chiefly by showing up to worship. But some of the traditions of my childhood they protest, and I struggle with this sometimes. They strongly dislike dressing up for church (which was a tradition in my childhood house) and they often prefer not to sing along with the hymns (also not a childhood option for me - a hymnal and glare would be sent my way). But I'm starting to see some of these things through the lens of another phrase by Martin Luther: adiapohora, or unessential. Luther said that some things in worship are necessary: Scripture, communion, prayer. But some things are adiaphora, things you don't have to do. This includes some of the dialogue at the start of the service, hymns and, surprisingly, the offering. Adiaphora can also be extended more broadly in the life of faith: it doesn't really matter how you pray, for instance, but loving your neighbor isn't optional for the Christian life.
I use the lens of adiaphora in raising these children in the faith. They need to show up at worship, most of the time, but many other things are adiaphora. Last week my kid came to worship in a Pokemon shirt and laid down across two chairs half the time (to my slight mortification) but in the end, he was there and he heard a good word and received God's grace and maybe that was enough.
While I've let some things go, when it comes to traditions, I've been more intentional about crafting family faith traditions. I've written about our family Epiphany traditions here, and we have traditions at Christmas and Easter (as many Christian families do) that feel more and more crucial as my children get older and begin to draw away from us. And traditions need not be religious to be part of the life of faith: we pick blueberries in the same place each fall and make a pie from scratch, which allows us to savor the beauty of God's creation in multiple ways. I hope these traditions will ground my children to this place and to their faith for this season with us. Then, I hope that they'll figure out what's adiaphora for them, and what's not, and someday create traditions of their own.
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