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Pray with me. Restrain, O Lord, the human pride that seeks to thrust your truth aside, or with some man-made thoughts or things would dim the words your Spirit sings. In the holy name of Jesus, amen. Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, amen.
The text for this morning comes from the Gospel reading as well as the Old Testament. And so the story goes that the daughter asks her mother, “Mom, how did you make your pot roast? I can never seem to get it to turn out the way that grandma did. So how did she do it?” The mother tells the daughter, “Well, here’s what your grandmother always did. She took the roast and carved it in half and put one half in one pot and one half in another pot and then cooked them simultaneously. Then outside, mixed them together with all the other accouterments and so on.” The daughter does it, and it turns out beautifully.
But the daughter scratches her head and goes, “You know, why did Grandma always cut her roast in half? Why didn’t she just cook the whole thing at once?” The mother goes, “I don’t know, let’s ask grandma.” So they go and ask grandma, and grandma says, “I never had a pot big enough for one roast.”
Isn’t it easy how a practice turned into a habit, the habit then turned into a tradition, and the tradition gave rise to a law in the household? This is how you make a pot roast. Now it’s pretty silly and funny, but if you think about it, this is what has happened within the church.
When Luther wanted to pull the church back to the word of God, he was taking and attacking the very things that crept in as a practice—good intentioned and all—but turned into a tradition which turned into a law. And then the church viewed herself as being obedient to God’s word and God’s law by observing these laws that were man-made and not God-given.
Well, it wasn’t just the Roman Catholic Church that he had taken up the cause against man-made laws. For even after the Reformation, there were Lutherans among the Lutherans who said, “You Lutherans aren’t going strong enough,” so they wanted to go even more stringent and create new man-made laws. And Luther and others fought that as well. Though they were good intentioned, they did not stick to the word of God, which in essence says they did not seek the glory of God’s name in Christ Jesus, who gave his life for us. He sacrificed himself that they may not be concerned about obedience to laws, but about faith in him and him alone.
That’s why it’s fought against. And we still need to fight against it today. Because we bring habits into the church. Practices and traditions. And they can give rise to laws that we obey more faithfully than even God’s word. Amen. In Christ Jesus, we too must fight those same things. Because we want to find ourselves at judgment day, neither having added to the word of God nor having taken from the word of God, but letting the word of God do its work among us and hallowing it among us as well.
Now, as I said, typically most all of these man-made laws started out with good intentions, sincere motives, but went awry. Right? The gospel reading is about that very same thing. The Pharisees sincerely desired to hallow God’s name among themselves and to hallow God’s name among the people with whom they dwelt so that they could see and be seen as being different than the rest of the world. The problem? They began to look at those things that they did as why they stood right in God’s sight and not on what Christ would do for them.
When the Pharisees gathered to Jesus with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of Jesus’ disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands, holding to the tradition of the elders, the text says. And even when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.
So you can see their intent was to show themselves as hallowing the God that they follow. But they ended up hallowing their traditions, not their God. And they looked to their rightness and good standing in God’s sight, not because of what Christ would do for them, but because of what they did for God. So when they ask the question, that is, of Jesus, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” sadly, these men are not wanting to understand God’s intent in Christ Jesus. They only want to point out as judge and jury that he, Jesus, is teaching wrong.
They want to judge the Son of God because they’ve determined they understand God better than God himself understands himself. Jesus does not answer why. He knows why they are asking, because they’re asking because their hearts are hardened, and they only want to judge. They really don’t want to know and understand. So he doesn’t explain to them why. He points out to them what their problem is, why they see the world through the eyes that they see.
“Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites,” Jesus says. As it is written by Isaiah, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” Interesting. He adds, “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” What he condemns is not what they did. Notice that.
He never says what they did was wrong, to not wash hands or to wash hands. He says your motivation for doing the things that you do is wrong. It’s your heart that he’s concerned with, not the outer appearance. Yet think about how often we’re concerned with outer appearance so that we can look a certain way to ourselves and to others, yes, and not really be concerned about how we really look to God.
These men put so much emphasis on what they did that they completely clouded and covered the cross of Christ and Him crucified for them. And they only could look to what they did. Now that seems like a sincere desire to serve God, but it’s completely misplaced because their practice became habit, their habit became tradition, and their tradition became their own commandment and law. And they forsook God’s. That happens to us today, even among us in the church.
Is it the Word of God or is it traditions? To which of these two do we look for our own righteousness? We can quickly say, well, the Word of God. Sure, that’s the right answer. Where’s your heart look? For your righteousness in God’s sight. To know that you’re right in God’s sight, pleasing to God, acceptable to Him, loved by Him, because of what you do or because of what’s been done.
Now, you can look around and you know many people. You know people who have left this communion behind and what it proclaims here, to join themselves to a different communion and a different teaching. You’ve seen them. You’ve also seen many people join this communion and this teaching because of what’s being done here. That’s how the Word of God works, isn’t it?
But your participation in this communion ought not to be based on a tradition—family, lineage, heritage, the only thing I ever know, afraid of what my parents or family members would say. It ought not to be that why you are a part of this body of Christ, but because of what Christ did for you and what’s being proclaimed here. Your pastors left families; both of us left our families and their church to be a part of a communion that was faithful to the Word of God. Many of you have left families and churches as well to be faithful to the Word of God.
Now, we can’t pat ourselves on the back and say, “See how much better we are than they because we left them.” Can’t do that. Can’t go the other way. Well, we’ve been Lutherans since the 1800s, 1700s, all the way back to Germany or wherever—it doesn’t work there either. Word of God or tradition. Word of God or tradition.
If it’s based on the Word of God, then all of our evangelism efforts and all of our outreach has substance, eternal, spiritual meaning. If it’s all about something else, tradition, then all of our outreach and evangelism is only material and earthly. Looks good on paper. Check the blog. If it’s based on the Word of God, then our evangelism and outreach has spiritual and eternal consequences and meaning. And if it’s on tradition, it’s only for earthly matters only and temporal things.
Jesus has established His tradition, and He established His tradition on God’s Holy Word. He fulfilled the Old Testament, and He proclaims to the world now He has come, has died and risen again to give us comfort. We’re not going to be wrapped up on whether we did this right or wrong, but whether we were faithful to the Word of God or not. That has eternal consequences and spiritual meaning.
Listen to what Isaiah said in the Old Testament. “Who sees us? Who knows us?” cries out the unbeliever, completely denying God or completely saturated with self-righteousness. The Lord, through Isaiah, says, “You turn things upside down. Shall the potter be regarded as the clay potter? That the thing made should say of its maker, ‘He did not make me’? Or should the thing formed say of him who formed it, ‘You don’t have enough understanding’? You have no understanding, in fact. I am the enlightened one.”
Anytime we allow a practice to become a habit, to become a tradition, to become a law to us that’s not in the word of God, we basically are saying, “God, you have no understanding. You did not form me.” Jesus has established His tradition in you by baptizing you into His family, by feeding you His word, by saturating your parched soul with nourishment from heaven that has eternal and spiritual meaning that’s based on the word of God and not tradition. Because you won’t find comfort in tradition. You’ll find comfort in the word of God.
Our prayer is what we will sing as the closing hymn. “Lord, keep us steadfast in your word. Curb those who by deceit or sword would wrest the kingdom from your Son
