In my last two posts I’ve been talking about two things: 1) you’ve got to let go of old things to follow after Jesus, who has not come to reinforce established traditions but to do new things; and 2) there are times when God moves and it’s strange to us because our experiential default setting is “ordinary.”
Is all tradition bad? No. But I believe it is a great mistake, and a mark of “religion,” to think of Christianity as the keeper of static, ancient ways of doing things. Real Christianity is not an institution, it is a movement. Thus, when you’re on the move, you are ipso facto leaving a lot of things behind. Actual Christianity, in the New Testament, is often described as a war or a battle. When soldiers go to war, they leave the familiar surroundings of home. It’s this leaving of the familiar and the secure for the sake of following Jesus into spiritual battle to rescue persons that I think of when I read, e.g., Matthew/Mark/Luke/John.
I have met a lot of people who are fearful of new things when it comes to their Christianity. Surely it’s true that “new” does not mean “it’s from God.” But remember that Jesus did not declare, “Behold, I am doing an old thing!” I think this: when there’s not fresh water flowing and fresh bread baking and a fresh wind blowing then things are rotting. That’s stagnancy. Medieval Christians called it “accedia,” which can be translated as “spiritual stagnancy.”
If you are a Jesus-Follower, embrace the new things God is doing. It’s better to be weird and strange and with Jesus than “normal” and dying.
(The picture is of an old barn here in Monroe on N. Custer.)
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