I’ve been doing a few weddings lately. In the past few weeks, there have been two weddings here at St. Nicholas Church, of two young women from Adare, members of the church. And there’s another wedding on 2 October. I just met with the couple (by Zoom) on Friday. So I’ve been thinking lately about weddings, and I have had the delight of meeting with couples as they have been preparing to get married.
When I meet with couples, I often talk with them about the importance of traditions. You see, when people get married, they are bringing traditions with them, from their own families. Sometimes traditions clash. For example, if one person is used to having roast potatoes for Christmas dinner, and the other person is used to having mashed potatoes, there could be a bit of a problem when they have their first Christmas dinner themselves, or at the house of one of the in-laws, if Christmas dinner is not what they are used to. That’s just a small example.
So one reason for talking to wedding couples about traditions is to be aware of expectations each person might have. But the real reason for the topic is to encourage couples to develop their own traditions. Traditions serve as a glue. Traditions bind two people, or a family, together. Traditions provide continuity through the years. Traditions serve as an anchor for a couple or a family when life is going haywire. The traditions do not have to be big or connected to big occasions. They can even be simple. Kirk and I have all sorts of traditions we have developed, some of them quite simple — some would even say silly. But they mean something to us, and they bind us together and serve as an anchor in life.
Our first reading this morning tells of how a major tradition started. This is the story of God telling Moses and his brother Aaron how they will lead the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt: how they are going to escape. This is the story of the Passover. There are instructions of what the people should do, and what they will eat, and what will happen. And the passage and the instructions end with these words:
“This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”
And so it has happened. When Jesus gathered with his disciples for the Last Supper, they were eating a Passover meal, according to three of the Gospels. (In John’s Gospel, it was the night before the Passover.) For that reason, Passover happens near the holiday of Easter. And for thousands of years, Jews have gathered for a meal on the first night of the holy day of Passover. The meal is called a Seder, and it follows the instructions we heard in the passage from the Book of Exodus. The people eat roast lamb. They eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs — namely, horseradish. They eat certain other foods. And each of the foods symbolises some part of their ancestors’ experience of slavery and the escape from Egypt. Horseradish symbolises the bitterness of slavery. There are many traditions connected to a Seder meal to commemorate the Passover. I have been to several Seder meals, but the most moving one I ever attended was hosted by some Jewish residents of a psychiatric halfway house where I worked when I was in seminary. Commemorating an event in which people were set free from slavery had profound meaning among a group of people suffering from severe mental illness.
The importance of the Passover meal cannot be underestimated among the Jewish people. I’m not talking here about the State of Israel. I’m talking about a people, who are not very numerous, who have lasted thousands of years, through desperate persecutions, through being dispersed and spread throughout the world, in what is called the diaspora. And they have lasted in large part because of the tradition represented in this Exodus reading. The Passover reminds the people that God delivered them from slavery and led them to the Promised Land. The Passover, celebrated now, connects the people to a history that goes back thousands of years, and it connects them to something greater than themselves, and it connects them to God.
And what of us? We are not Jewish. We are Christian.
There are traditions central to what it means to be Christian. If the Passover is the central event of the Jewish faith, the central event of the Christian faith is the Resurrection of Jesus from death on the cross. The Passover meal helps the Jewish people recall how God led their ancestors out of slavery in Egypt into freedom. The traditions that connect us to Jesus’ Resurrection from death, so that the Resurrection becomes part of us, are Baptism and the Eucharist. They remind us that through Christ we always have new life, rebirth, God’s love and mercy, available to us.
In Baptism we die to a life without Christ and are reborn into a life in which Christ is central, in which he becomes part of who we are. In the Eucharist, we receive Christ’s power and grace into ourselves. Our spirits are nourished so that we have strength to continue in the Christian life. Baptism and Eucharist help us to do what Paul describes in our reading from Romans: to “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.”
There is a line from the Bible that sums up the traditions that are central to being Christian. It is from the Acts of the Apostles, and we repeat it in our baptismal promises. We say we will “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.” It is what the first followers of Jesus did. It is what made the church spread throughout the world. It is what we are called to do.
That means that we continue to gather together with one another in worship, including (or especially) the Eucharist. That’s the breaking of bread. We rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. We help one another as any are in need. That’s the fellowship. We teach, and we practice, the basics of the Christian faith. We teach the Christian faith to our children, and we let them know how important it is by practicing the faith in our own lives, so that our children see us do it. That’s the apostles’ teaching. And we pray together and we pray for one another when we are not together. We pray even when it seems silly or impossible. We pray for healing for one another. We pray even for those people we do not like.
All these things are what made those early apostles stand out from the world around them. These traditions are what made them unique. These traditions are what made people want to become part of the church, because they could see that it made a difference in the lives of those who practiced them. To other people, these traditions might have seemed silly. And I know these traditions and practices might seem silly to people today. They might seem to get in the way, take up someone’s time (or money), or be too difficult.
Back in the time of the apostles, in the early years of the Church, the Christian traditions that I have been describing might have seemed silly to those around them, silly to the powers and the authorities. But more likely, they seemed dangerous. They were dangerous. Because these traditions of Baptism, Eucharist, coming to worship with others, teaching and learning the faith, true Christian fellowship, and praying — these give life and sustain life. They awaken hope. They set us free from all that would enslave us. These traditions also have provided continuity to Christians through two thousand years. They have bound people together. They have been an anchor for individuals, for churches, for all who follow them, when life is going haywire, because they allow us to cast off the darkness around us and to live in, and be sustained by, the light and the love of God.