20080720 Culture and its Value

20080720 Culture and its Value

Romans 10: 1-10

St. Matthew 8: 28-9:1

St. Paul wants the God-fearing men of his day to be saved, but he is worried. He says that they have “zeal for God” (which is a good thing), but not according to knowledge (which is a bad thing). He is not talking about people who skip prayers and services, but those have made religion the center of their lives. They have made religion the center of their lives, but, “being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God” (Romans 10: 3). To this point, the Jews had managed a remarkable feat: they had maintained their identity through the centuries under difficult circumstances, when the pressure for assimilation was very strong. The Old Testament describes this in some detail, about how the Jews would find themselves living under foreign rulers, and how the ordinary Jewish people and the Jewish leaders were being tempted to modify their beliefs to match those of their new neighbors and rulers; and how the prophets would come and call them back to their uniquely Jewish way of life. How many thousands of unique cultures have come and gone over human history? How have the Jewish people and Jew identity endured?

Part of the answer is lies in ritual: God had given them laws and rituals to teach them about Him and to help them endure against temptation. Rituals are vital for preserving identity. This is why God has ordered our lives in the Orthodox Church with rituals – because He knows that the individualistic intellectual or emotion-based faith found outside Orthodoxy is too subject to the pressures of assimilation. As I said last week, culture is the earthen vessel that contains the Living Water; now I am telling you that ritual makes that vessel strong and beautiful. Without a strong vessel, that is, without ritual, the Living Water cannot be held. A weak vessel breaks too easily, losing its content.

The Jews who obeyed the law had a strong vessel. They had the opposite problem that many Christians today have. Whereas most Christians (at least in America) have the Living Water but no real vessel, the Jews of St. Paul (and Christ’s) time had beautiful vessels but no Living Water! The culture that was created to hold the Faith had become the Faith itself. But one cannot drink from an empty cup, no matter how strong or well crafted it is. Beautiful vessels are made to carry water – but the Jews had turned their vessel into an idol and “righteousness” into worshiping it (i.e. culture and ritual) rather than the God who should fill it. Christ was warning them of their mistake when He said things like: “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in. … you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.” (Matthew 23: 13 & 15). [Note that Orthodoxy praises the righteousness of the publican without rejecting the ritual of the pharisee.]

In Orthodoxy, we love our cultural and religious rituals. And for good reason. We are the new Israel, and these rituals are the continuation of ones given to the Jews, but now perfected in Christ. God has even taken our secular culture and blessed it, for example, turning the symbol of a pagan God’s authority, the Trident, into a symbol of the Trinity and the authority of Christian government in Ukrainian. We have just finished celebrating and teaching Ukrainian culture to our next generation during our “Heritage Days”. But we celebrate and pass it down not because this culture has any intrinsic value, but because it has been made priceless by what it contains. We pass the cup of our culture to our children – and to all who enter these doors – not so that they might admire the craftsmanship of the cup, but so that they will drink deeply of the water it contains. And we keep our culture strong so that they can share it with others in this thirsty world long after we have gone on to our reward.

Let me end as St. Paul did, as he describes the content of the faith that moves through us and all of our rituals: “that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”

NOTE: Talk Show Host and Jewish Theologian Dennis Prager was the first person I heard/read about the role ritual plays in maintaining identity. He had a great show where Christians called in to talk about how they were rediscovering ritual. I thought it was kind of funny that they would turn to Judaism for rituals rather than their own Christian traditions (of which they were probably ignorant and/or dismissive for being too Catholic!).