I grew up with no religious heritage at all. As a lot of you know, my childhood was thoroughly secularized.
Although I was baptized as a baby, for the most part I lived in an entirely different universe than religion. My mom and adoptive dad believed that religion had a negative effect in people’s lives, so they did their best to shelter me from religion the way other parents might shelter their kids from violent movies. The only real exception was when my grandmother occasionally took me to church when I was a young child and when my parents attended a Unitarian church briefly when I was in fifth grade. Other than that our family avoided all contact with religion. Since my adoptive dad was an outspoken atheist, atheism became my religion of choice. By the time I’d graduated from high school I was religiously illiterate, had never really read the Bible and had no real idea what churches did. I came into a life changing relationship with Jesus Christ when I was 19 years old through my involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. So when I started attending this church shortly after that my church experience was like a blank slate. This church is really the only church I’ve ever known.
But a few years ago I started learning that I had a religious heritage on my adoptive father’s side of the family. I learned that my great uncle and great grandfather were Methodist preachers who followed the gold rush from Ohio to Southern California, mining and preaching as they went. Then last year I came across a book written by George Peck, who was a Methodist pastor for 57 years in the 1800s.
That kindled a hunger within me to discover my religious heritage, to know my life was part of a larger story. I wanted to know that followers of Jesus Christ generations before me had prayed for my generation. I wanted to know that my ministry was building on a foundation that had been laid by a previous generation.
But I’ve noticed that a lot of people feel very different about their religious heritage. For many people, their childhood recollections of going to church are filled with painful, difficult memories. Whether it’s an intensely controlling pastor who ruled the congregation with a rod of iron or the nuns in parochial school who used physical pain to keep students in line, many people have bad feelings about their religious heritage. Some were turned off by hypocrisy, others by man-made rules, and still others by rituals that didn’t seem to make sense. Some people remember being scolded for asking honest questions or judged for voicing doubts.
And yet still others have positive feelings about their religious heritage. Some people’s earliest memories are of their mom and dad praying with them or reading Bible stories to them. They look back on their involvement in the church with fondness. For these people, walking into a church is like coming home, a place of safety and security.
Our church was founded in 1971, during a time of cultural upheaval in America. Because of that, Life Bible Fellowship Church was in many ways a reaction against religious traditions. Whatever traditional churches embraced we had a tendency to shun. So while traditional churches met in chapels with stained glass, we met in a converted chicken coop, a condemned school house, and eventually here. While traditional churches worshiped to 18th and 19th century hymns led on an organ, we worshipped to 1970s praise choruses strummed on a guitar. While traditional churches put on their Sunday best to come to worship, we dressed casually, telling people to come as they are. While other churches passed an offering, we put out an offering box to receive people’s tithes.
Yet after almost 30 years our non-traditions have become traditions of their own. For those of you who’ve grown up in this church, our non-traditions have become your religious heritage. Time and time again I hear of people who grew up attending this church who move out of the area struggling to find another church just like us. When we pass the offering--as we do occasionally--many people feel uncomfortable because that’s simply not the way we do things around here. Some of us risk become just as ingrained in our new traditions as prior generations were in their old traditions.
Now there’s nothing wrong with having a religious heritage and traditions in our lives. But many of our religious traditions become like a story I once heard about a couple who had been recently married. To impress her new husband, this recent bride decided to bake her family recipe for ham. As she prepared the ham, she cut the ends off, baked it, and then served it to her new husband. Her husband said, "This is a great dinner. I only have one question: Why do you cut the ends of the ham?" The wife answered, "That’s just the way my mom always did it." So the next day she called her mom, and asked her, "Why did you always cut the ends of the ham?" Her mom replied, "Well that’s the way my mom always did it." Still not satisfied with the answer, she called her grandmother and asked her. Her grandmother said, "Well the pan I had was too small for a whole ham, so I had to cut the ends of so it would fit. "That practice that made total sense had become a meaningless family tradition, passed on from generation to generation. If we’re not careful, the traditions of a person’s religious heritage can do that.
So the question for us today is HOW DOES HAVING A RELIGIOUS HERITAGE HELP US IN THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY? Some of us had no spiritual heritage growing up, others have painful memories associated with our heritage, and still others have wonderful feelings toward it. Whichever of those describe you, today we’re going to ask how to sort through our religious heritage.
You see, the Jewish people who were alive when the New Testament was written were struggling to sort through their religious heritage. The apostle Paul who wrote the book of Romans had to figure out how his religious heritage fit with his life once he’d come to know Jesus Christ face to face. You see, before becoming a Christian Paul had been a very religious guy. Yet for all his religious rituals and rites, his theology and orthodoxy, when God’s messiah came Paul didn’t recognize Jesus for who he truly was. In fact, Paul’s religious heritage actually blinded him to spiritual truth, so much so that he actually opposed the Christian faith until Jesus himself appeared to Paul personally.
We’re in the midst of a series through Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians called GOOD NEWS FOR OUR TIMES. And today we’re going to see the Paul have an imaginary dialog with himself as he tries to sort through how his own religious heritage fits in with his commitment to Jesus Christ (Stott 95). We’re going to see that there are THREE CONDITIONS that must be met for a person’s religious heritage to help that person draw closer to Jesus Christ. If these three conditions aren’t met, then our heritage holds us back from a vibrant spiritual journey. But when these conditions are met, we’ll find that our religious heritage is a rich resource in helping us along on our spiritual journey.
1. Loving the Bible (Romans 3:1-2)
As Paul thinks about his religious heritage as a Jew, he wonders in Romans 3:1-2 what advantage there is to having a heritage at all. Now in the previous chapter Paul talked a lot about circumcision, and he told us that some people hide behind rituals like circumcision-or baptism, or worship style, or whatever-rather than deal with the spiritual condition of their hearts. And based on what he said in chapter 2, we almost expect Paul to answer his question here by saying, "There’s no real benefit to being Jewish and no advantage to circumcision." But Paul doesn’t say that; instead he says that having a religious heritage can be a great advantage.
Now Paul is foreshadowing what he’s going to talk about at great length in chapter 9 of Romans, but here Paul focuses on just one advantage: God entrusted the Jewish people with the very words of God. The original Greek text literally reads "the oracles of God" and this refers to the 39 books we have in the Old Testament of the Bible (Schreiner 148). This phrase "the oracles of God" emphasizes the fact that God continues to speak through these writings, that they’re not just dead, dusty documents of a bygone age, but God’s voice can still be heard today when people read these writings them for themselves.
God trusted the people of Israel with this incredible book. Whenever people took up this book, they encountered the voice of God in the words of the book. This book shaped and molded Israel. This is why the Jewish people were so careful about making precise copies of the Old Testament to pass from generation to generation, because these books contained the very words of God.
But the religious heritage enjoyed by Paul and many of the other Jewish people of his day no longer listened for the voice of God in the pages of this book. They were convinced that they already knew everything they needed to know about God. So they focused their attention on other things, things like circumcision, making sure they didn’t eat pork, and making sure they kept the Sabbath. Those things weren’t bad, but they were peripheral. So when Jesus came to Israel, they missed it, they thought Jesus was a dangerous revolutionary rather than the fulfillment of God’s promises. In fact Jesus confronted the religious leaders of his day by saying, "You study your Bible because you think that will make you right with God, yet your own Bible is telling you to trust in me" (John 8:39).
So here we find the first condition that has to be met for our religious heritage to help us in our spiritual life instead of hinder us. HAVING A RELIGIOUS HERITAGE HELPS US IF IT LEADS US TO LOVE THE BIBLE.
Now by loving the Bible I don’t mean worshipping the Bible or turning the Bible into an idol. I mean loving the Bible enough to treat it as the very words of God, believing that we can hear the voice of God when we read these pages. I mean appreciating the fact that God has spoken and still speaks through this incredible ancient book.
People who grow up in a religious heritage sometimes find themselves further away from loving the Bible. Many of our major Christian denominations simply don’t long to hear God’s voice in the Bible anymore. Yet virtually all the founders of these denominations were men and women who loved the Bible and who went again and again to the Bible to know what was real. A fourth century Roman catholic saint named Athenasius described the Bible as "fountains of salvation, that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain" (Letter XXXIX). John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church said, "We believe the written word of God to be the only and sufficient rule both of Christian faith and practice" ("What is a Methodist?").
A great example of how religious traditions can lead us to love the Bible is the example of stained glass windows. Today we often associate stained glass windows with churches, but for the first 1000 years of Christian history there were no stained glass windows. In about 1000 AD Christians started using stained glass windows to tell Bible stories to people who didn’t know how to read and didn’t have a Bible. Because the printing press to mass produce Bibles wasn’t invented yet and because the vast majority of people back then couldn’t read, stained glass windows were a kind of visual Bible for people. Every time we see a stained glass window it should make us grateful that we live in a time when we know how to read and when we have the Bible in print for us so we can read and study it ourselves. Yet for many stained glass windows has become the end in itself, like the woman who cut the ends of her ham.
Our religious heritage will only help us on the journey if it leads us back to loving the Bible, to embracing this book as the very words of God.
2. Embracing A Life of Faith (Romans 3:3-4)
Now let’s look at the second condition in verses 3 and 4. When Paul talks about some religious people who didn’t come to faith in Jesus, in a way he’s talking about himself. Remember that despite all of Paul’s religious devotion and zeal, he missed Jesus. Jesus had to appear to Paul physically and cause Paul to be blind for several days to persuade Paul that Jesus was truly who he said he was.
Paul’s point here is that if some religious people don’t trust in Jesus that doesn’t nullify God’s trustworthiness. Paul’s question is whether a lack human of faith somehow cancels out God’s faithfulness to keep his promises. To "nullify" is to put something to an end, to render it ineffective and invalidate it so it doesn’t function anymore (Louw and Nida 13.100, 13.163, 76.26). When religious people of Paul’s day (and religious people of our generation) refuse to believe in Jesus does that cancel out God’s faithfulness?
Paul’s answer is "not at all." He uses this phrase a lot in Romans, and it basically means "no way!" or "not on your life!" (Stott 96). Even if every human being is unreliable, God remains totally reliable. God’s faithfulness isn’t dependant on human faithfulness.
I thought about this earlier in the week when I got an email from someone who I had really let down. I’d told this person I’d do something and I’d forgotten to do it, and so this person was understandably hurt. As I typed my apology to this person, this verse came to me and I was suddenly filled with gratitude that God’s reliability to keep his promises isn’t dependant on our faithfulness.
In verse 4 Paul quotes a verse from the Old Testament book of Psalms here to prove his point. The psalm Paul quotes was written by the Jewish king David. Some of you might remember the story of David and Bathsheba. David was a powerful king who’d become intoxicated with his own power and dissatisfied with his life, so he had an affair with another man’s wife and covered it up. Eventually God broke through David’s cover up and excuses, leaving David broken before God in grief and repentance. In the midst of that brokenness David wrote Psalm 51 as a confession of his failure, and the verse Paul quotes in v. 4 is from that psalm. David knows that God is fully reliable in what he says and fully justified in the decisions he makes. And if you know the story, God forgave David of this failure, even though that failure almost destroyed David’s family. Paul quotes this verse to remind us that God still keeps his promises even when we fail.
Here we find the second condition. HAVING A RELIGIOUS HERITAGE HELPS US IF IT LEADS US TO EMBRACE A LIFE OF FAITH.
Paul’s religious heritage was no use to him as long as he refused to follow Jesus by faith. All the rites and rituals, all the traditions and practices Paul had grown up with were empty without faith in God’s promises. Only after Paul responded to God’s promises through faith in Jesus Christ did this heritage help him forward.
I love a painting called "Storm Pilot" by a Christian artist named Stephen Sawyer. The painting pictures a person navigating a ship through a violent storm with Jesus at his side. As gale winds blowing and waves crash, Jesus places his hand of reassurance on the person’s shoulder, pointing a way through the crashing waves with his other hand. What a wonderful picture of the adventure of faith. That’s why after fifteen years of marriage I purchased a print of this painting and put it above my fireplace. Underneath the print are the words, "Celebrating 15 years through the storms together."
The Christian life is an adventure of faith. Yet people treat their religious heritage like a museum. The goal in a museum is to keep everything frozen in time, so people can see artifacts from days gone by. Museums are dead places, places that venerate the past rather than look to the future. Paul’s religious heritage had become a museum of what God had done yesterday, and he almost missed out on what God was doing in his generation.
Instead of treating our heritage as a museum to preserve, God wants us to build on the foundation laid by those who’ve gone before us. We don’t get rid of the foundation, but we build something new, something fresh, something that will one day become another generation’s heritage for them to build on.
I thought about this as I attended a pastors conference in San Jose this last week. I arrived at the conference thinking we had pretty contemporary worship services, with hip music led, a modern facility, sermons in everyday language, and so forth. Yet as I met with pastors in their 20s and early 30s, I realized that a day will soon come when this will be our traditional worship service. God will raise up a new generation who aren’t content with merely preserving what we started. They’ll want to stand on our foundation and build something fresh and new for their generation, to live the adventure in their time. All I can say is God bless them in that journey because it’s been a wonderful journey for us.
You see, God’s goal for each of us is a life of faith. God’s not interested in museums; he’s interested in people on an adventure of following Jesus, of serving Jesus Christ in their generation. The church historian Jarislav Pelikan puts it this way: "Tradition is the living faith of those now dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of those still living." Good traditions invite us embrace this life of faith for ourselves, but mere traditionalism is content to celebrate the past without walking into the future.
3. Upholding God’s Integrity (Romans 3:5-8)
Now let’s look at verses 5 to 8. Here Paul is following the logic of what he’s said so far to where someone might be tempted to take it. Here we find the devious human mind at work:
"If my sin makes God look better, then God should really thank me for sinning, not condemn me. After all, the worse I look when I sin, the better God looks when he forgives me. So really, it’s a good thing to sin, because good ultimately comes from it."
The logic here is similar to a married man who cheats on his wife. Suppose his wife finds out about his affair she faces the choice of either forgiving him or of ending the marriage. Now imagine that she decides to forgive him. Now imagine the husband saying something like this:
"My affair brought out my wife’s forgiveness ever more clearly. So why was she so upset about it? It made her look good after all. Maybe the more affairs I have, the more opportunities she’ll have to grow in her ability to forgive. So really I’m doing her a favor."
We’d tar and feather that guy for thinking like that, because regardless of the forgiveness and grace his wife shows, cheating on his wife is still wrong. In a similar way, just because our sin brings out God’s integrity even more clearly, that doesn’t let us off the hook for sinning.
Some people were afraid of Paul’s message, because they were afraid if God offers his forgiveness as a free gift, we’ll actually be encouraging people to sin. If I can’t earn God’s forgiveness, if my integrity is insufficient to make myself right with God no matter how hard I might try, then why try to be good? Why not just live like the devil and then cry out to God when we’re at the end of our rope? Paul’s point here is that if we think that we’ve failed to truly understand God’s integrity.
Many of the Jewish people of Paul’s generation thought that their membership in Israel protected them from judgment. The fact that they were circumcised, Sabbath keeping, kosher eating religious people was thought to be their ticket into heaven. But Paul wants us to realize that it’s not about our integrity but about God’s integrity, not about our half-hearted attempts at being good, but about God’s perfect righteousness.
So here we find the final condition. HAVING A RELIGIOUS HERITAGE HELPS US IF IT LEADS US TO UPHOLD GOD’S INTEGRITY.
Before he met Jesus, Paul thought that it was all about himself. This attitude permeated Israel, that it was about their goodness, their integrity, their holiness, their traditions, their godliness. They thought being the people of God was an end in itself, a holy huddle to hide from the world. So they built thick walls to maintain their purity.
But Paul wanted them to realize that it isn’t about them, it’s about God. God’s passion wasn’t to make sure life in the holy huddle was happy, but he wanted to use Israel to break out of the holy huddle to demonstrate God’s heart for the other nations. This is why Jesus refused to stay in the holy huddle; he boldly went to the outcasts and unclean as well as the socially acceptable and religious. It’s about God’s integrity, not us trying to look good and religious.
And for us we need to realize that it’s not about us, but it’s about God. It’s not about building a successful church, funding our budget, staffing our ministries, and so forth. God’s only interested in these things to the extent that we do them for the sake of other people, to bring God’s love and message to those outside the holy huddle.
God calls us to uphold his integrity in the world, not to hide behind his integrity as an excuse to dabble in sin.
Conclusion
A religious heritage can be a great thing or it can be a stumbling block. A religious heritage can help launch you on the spiritual journey or it can hold you back. Build on your religious heritage not by being religious, but by loving the Bible, by embracing a life of faith, and by upholding God’s integrity to those around you. You see, a heritage is a foundation to build on, not a museum to preserve.
The day will come when our innovations will be another person’s heritage, and our prayer for them today should be, "Please God, help them build on what we’ve done for their generation, not preserve it in honor of us."
Imagine going to your mailbox one day and you find an expensive looking envelope inside. As you open the envelope, your heart skips a beat as you read an invitation to a very special, very exclusive banquet hosted by your favorite celebrity. Your heart brims over with pride as you realize that you were picked, you’re special. Yet when you show up to the banquet you realize that there are lots of people at the banquet with no invitation at all. In fact these people aren’t even properly dressed for a banquet; they look like came straight from work, working out at the gym, and even living off the streets. They don’t have a gold embossed, formal invitation like you have, yet the host is letting them through the door. As you walk into the banquet hall, each table set with exquisite china and expensive silver, you start to wonder about the value of your invitation; was it just a sham? As you look around the room, you see people who look out of place, people who don’t seem to match the elegant setting. As you sit down at a table, the host walks over to you and tells you that he’s thrilled that you’ve come. You ask him why he’s letting in those other people, the people who didn’t have invitations. The host frowns slightly, and says, "Well I sent out a lot of those invitations, but only a few decided to come, so I went downtown and invited everybody I could find to come. After all, I want to have a banquet, and it wouldn’t be a banquet with out lots of guests." You feel a bit cheated, like your exclusive invitation wasn’t worth all that much after all. As you think about that, the host-Jesus Christ-smiles at you, and says, "The invitation got you to the banquet didn’t it?"
Sources
Moo, Douglas. 1996. The Epistle to the Romans. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Schreiner, Thomas. 1998. Romans. Baker Exegetical Commentary. Baker Book House.
