The church almost from its very beginning set aside specific days on its calendar to remember its leaders, heroes, martyrs, and others whose faith and witness are worthy of imitating and learning from in our time and place.
In 835 AD, “All Saints Day” November 1st was officially set by the Roman Church. This was most likely a reaction to the Druid/Celtic Festival of celebrating the dead (“Samhain” pronounced “sow-in”) on October 31. A night that the Druids believed ghosts and the dead returned to the earth.
It was a night of providing comfort to the people as they faced the longer wintery nights that lay ahead. The priests would offer sacrifices from the recent harvests to the Celtic deities to ask for their help.
It was a night that predicted the future inspired by the spirits out and about on Oct 31. The wearing of costumes protected one from the less than hospitable souls that were out and about.
And so, it is not surprising to me that the Roman Church decided to draw the attention away from the pagan festival of Samhain (Sow-in) and turn it into something more positive. They did so by focusing on the contributions of faithful Christian men and women in the life of the church by creating “All Saints Day” on November 1st. October 31 then became all hallow eve or the night before “All Saints.”
This strategy of providing our world with a positive alternative to something we have a hard time with in our culture continues to be a wise strategy for us in our time as well.
Because today is the Sunday closest to “All Saints,” it is a great time for us as a church to think about and give thanks to God for our faith tradition and for those who passed on the faith to us. We are a church, which keeps testing itself on the basis of what the saints have believed and practiced before we got here.
While we acknowledge the contributions and creativity of the saints, we believe and uphold the idea that we always build upon the foundations of Jesus and those who have followed him. It was generally believed that true individuality was a gift of thinking with the saints, submitting ourselves to the experience of others. This was viewed as the only way to free ourselves of the enslavement to our own limited experience. This is one of old traditions we need to keep doing.
During this Pandemic when I was struggling with my prayer life one ancient traditions that I added to my prayer life was the Jesuit Prayer of Examen. This prayer is one where at the end of the day, one prayerfully reviews their day to help see and give thanks for the where God was active in your day. Here was a way of praying from the 1,500’s in the past that proving very helpful in the present.
The Apostle Paul was one who knew and taught the helpful traditions of the new Christian faith as well as the ancient helpful Jewish traditions to the church at Corinth. He recognized that had he not given them some original ideas of Christ nor the faith, but rather he declared “I handed on to you or passed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received” (1 Cor. 15:3).
Paul also does this with the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper in chapter 11, which were also handed on to him and then on the Corinthians .
Moses told the children of Israel before they passed over the Jordan River into the Promised Land to keep the words of the Law or the Tradition ever before them. They were to hand over the faith that was handed on to them to the next generations.
They were to do this in the course of everyday life. When you are at home or when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise up. They were to put the words of the tradition on their heads, write them on the doorposts of their houses and on their gates. Or to bring it up to 21st Century terms, write the Scripture or quotes from Christians of the past on your refrigerators, on your bedroom mirrors, or on anywhere you might see them.
Israel also had a strong tradition of remembering and reciting their history not simply by hearing it, but by singing their history in song. These Psalms were incorporated into the yearly celebrations and festivals which recounted the major salvation events of their past. They recalled the events of creation, the exodus, the David / Solomonic Kingdom and the tragedy of the Exile.
We carry on that tradition of singing our history and the large themes of faith every Sunday. All hymns, spiritual songs, chorus are in essence tools that help us remember, live and share our Christian faith.
The Rev. John Bell of the Iona Christian Community in Scotland told and reminded us in his presentation to General Assembly in 1998, that what we sing is what we tend to believe. Therefore, he warned us, to be careful what you sing. I have always been very purposeful in what we sing for that reason.
We live in a world that is guilty of a kind of intentional forgetfulness when it comes to the past. Our society values individuality and creativity higher than anything else. The individual reigns as kings and queens supreme. There is a prevailing arrogant attitude, which believes that we stand at the summit of human development, we know more than any generation ever before us.
While this is true, few in our age stop to give thanks for the ideas and contributions that have been handed on to the current generation so it can be the most knowledgeable of any generation.
It boggles my mind that so many will listen to the opinions and advice of someone on the internet who has no or little experience or education in the subject in areas such as medicine, finance, or home repair.
We are society that is struggles with humility and too often fails to acknowledge that some folks in the past were actually smarter than we are.
I find this odd because in many fields such as psychology, engineering, medicine, carpentry, religion, and music for instance, only moves forward by the immersion in a tradition. Thorough immersion in tradition is the only source of true originality.
A distinguished professor of jazz at an American university found it difficult to talk about the craft of jazz, its complexity, and its dependence on individual originality. But when someone asked him, “Who are your models?” he immediately listed the names of famous pianists, saxophonists, and drummers. He spoke of his mentors with such reverence. He spoke of sitting for hours in a piano bar studying nothing but the fingers of a pianist’s left hand.
He says that a jazz artist must spend at least a couple of decades in rigorous imitation of others before that person can hope to be original.
Neil Postman, an American author, who wrote frequently on the topic of education, says that most education is history. Most professors are historians, no matter what their field is, passing on to another generation what previous generations figured out.
The only way for one generation to make advances is for it to be thoroughly educated with what past generations have known.
In other words, all thinking is a kind of apprenticeship, submitting oneself to the discipline of another’s thought before you have interesting thoughts of your own.
The great theologians of our Reformed/ Presbyterian church, like John Calvin (Switzerland), John Knox (Scotland), Karl Barth (Germany), and others have been church men and women who knew the biblical and historic traditions enough to have interesting thoughts of their own to add to them.
This process of handing on the faith to generation after generation has been a dynamic and growing process of knowing the traditions of our faith, of understanding and recapturing the passion of those who gone before us and who have paid the price for being faithful to Christ.
Every generation is asked and I believe required by God to take what is known or what has been handed on to them, that is the traditions of the past, and apply it the new. For each generation and each historical situation is different.
The world we live in is not the same world where Christianity was birthed and grew in first century Palestine. Even then, the church was built on the over 1,200 years of God’s faithfulness to Israel that developed a faith in One God with worshipping, governing, and spiritual traditions and practices.
We do not live in the same world of 16th Century Geneva where John Calvin studied and made his own contribution to the faith. His theology, which helped move the Protestant Reformation forward, was based on his understanding of the Biblical Traditions and the Early Church Fathers.
And today our world is different from even that of 50 years ago or even two years ago.
The questions that surfaces is how well do we know our biblical and historical traditions and practices? Do we know them enough to thank God for what has been handed on to us? Do we know them enough to follow and be shaped by the thinking and practice of the Christians faith that handed on to us to face the challenges of our day?
Do we thank God for those in the early church like Paul and Peter who fought long and hard for Gentiles like us to be equal partners in God’s people? We are here because they passed on a legacy of inclusion of outsiders into the church.
Do we thank God for John Wycliffe who fought the battle to have the Bible translated into English? He was declared a heretic for his translation and for arguing the Bible was the authoritative centre of the church. Being labeled a heretic did not stop his ideas of reform from influencing other reformers that followed him. Martin Luther would go on to translate the Bible into German for example. The authority of the Bible would become a central idea of the Reformation. There are now 704 complete translations of the Bibles along with 3,415 partial translations. Thanks be to God for John Wycliffe.
We are also indebted to John Calvin asked Church musician Loys (Louis) Bourgeois to come to Geneva to compose the music for a Psalter or Hymnbook based on the words of the Psalms for the congregation to use in their worship. Before this music was sung by choirs and not by worshippers. Bourgeois built on the foundation on those who wrote the Psalms and contemporaries who were writing new joyful, rhythmic and singable tunes for the congregation to sing by all worshippers.
The traditions of theology, worship, governance, spiritual practices, mission have all been handed to us and added to by every generation who knew, loved, practiced, wrestled with, and applied them to the situation and challenges they faced.
Like Moses and the Apostle Paul, we are given the great responsibility by God to learn, live out, and hand on what is of greatest importance to us in our time and place.
If we are wise, then w