When we moved into our new home in Florida last year, I noticed something that looked like a doorbell on two of our door frames. Later when my girls were watching the musical Fiddler On The Roof with me, I suddenly realized what they were.
“Do you see those little rectangular boxes on the top of their door frames?” I quickly paused the video so they could both look closer. “Those are called ‘mezuzahs’!”
“Me-what-zahs?”
“Mezuzahs! They were little boxes the Jewish people put on their doors as a blessing to the house. Inside each box was a tiny scroll of paper on which they inscribed Deuteronomy 6:4-8 and 11:13-21 in Hebrew.”
This is the kind of lecture you’re treated to when your father is a pastor.
“But here’s the best part – we have two mezuzahs on the doors of our new house! Bet you can’t find them!”
That did it. We were now off on a treasure hunt!
I finally led the way as we ran to the front door of our home. “See, there it is”, I said pointing up to it. The girls had never noticed it.
“But there’s another one too!” We now ran to the door leading to our garage. “Would you like to see if the Scripture is still inside of it?” Considering their level of excitement, that question was a no brainer.
I tugged the little plastic box off the side of the garage door and started prying it open with a screwdriver. Suddenly, it popped open. There inside was a rolled-up piece of laminated paper. On it was inscribed a passage, written from right to left in Hebrew:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.
Therefore you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land of which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, like the days of the heavens above the earth.”
Deuteronomy 6:4-7, 11:18-21
By the time our evening was through, my girls were actually sleeping with the mezuzah I took down and opened for them. Talk about your teachable moments! But mezuzahs are magical talismans with power to protect our home. But they are reminders to put God first and to live for him within a culture that too easily forgets Him.
Traditions are like mezuzahs – they are things we hold onto that remind us of what matters. Sure, sometimes churches forget what the traditions are pointing to. We go through the motions of communion without really reflecting on what the bread and the cup symbolize. Or we pray before a meal or bedtime, just saying words we’ve overheard and not praying from our hearts. So our traditions are only as good as our willingness to remember the deeper things they point to. That’s why I want my kids to know hymns. Not because they are nostalgic blasts from my past (which is the case for many people in the church), but because they point to great truths I want them to cherish too.
But some unbiblical traditions point to things we’d be better off forgetting. As a southerner, many of the racially hurtful traditions of the past are finally dying away. And I’ve seen how some people worship their “southern church culture” more than God Himself. You’d think that along with the cross hanging in the baptistry, they’d put a casserole dish as well! Some love our traditions so much that we often don’t hear when God Himself is telling us to leave some of them behind. When the Spirit of God is leading us to change, we hold onto “the way we’ve always done it” instead of following the Lord out of our cultural wilderness.
When we hold to traditions more than to the One they point to, we get desperately lost and our churches die. A healthy church is meant to be a hospital for those still alive. But churches make lousy museums.
However, the traditions Tevye sang about in that film are mostly smirked at today. People seem to think thousands of years of civilization got everything wrong until their generation happened along. Now it’s their job to straighten everyone else out!
This is the zeitgeist of our culture now, tearing down much of Western Civilization in the name of current cultural whims. Some are saying our nation’s founders weren’t quite perfect enough, so they demonize anyone from the past as soon as they discover they were human and flawed. Certainly, horrible injustices occurred in the past…just as they continue to occur worldwide today. But just because an epoch in history got some things wrong doesn’t mean the “baby” of should be thrown out with the bathwater.
Within the dirty bathwater of our imperfect history are found Shakespeare and Dickens, Bach and Beethoven, the Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta. And within the history of Christ’s Church are the actions of very imperfect people, many of whom only claimed the name of Christ with no intention of ever taking up His cross. The fact that incredibly flawed people make up much of our history does not make their ideas wrong. To exclude them only shows our immaturity and ignorance of human nature itself.
I believe we should hold fast to the things from our past which are precious, while exposing the things that were evil. We desperately need Godly traditions because they help remind us of what really matters. Just as December the 25th and Easter Sunday pull our focus away from our temporary trials and give us a divine perspective, good traditions give our lives depth and meaning.
With the hindsight of history now, some might argue that many of our traditions should be discarded. And in some cases where the tradition was not based on eternal Truth, they are correct. We can easily see today how the traditions of some who follow Islam are disrespectful and destructive of the basic human rights of women. However, Godly traditions based on God’s Word are the glue that holds families and communities together. Without them, families would crumble and nations would fall.
Like Tevye, some of the traditions I was taught growing up were merely products of the time. The prohibition against dancing my parents were taught during the Great Depression kept them out of the bars and nightclubs where alcoholism flourished. But like many traditions, people forgot why the rule was there. They stopped dancing, while still abusing alcohol in their own homes. They followed the tradition, while completely missing its point.
While some traditions are temporal and belong to a certain time and place, some are eternal and based on the character of God Himself. While it’s ok that my wife and I happily dance at wedding receptions now, there are other traditions we still hold firmly and will teach our children to honor. We don’t hold to these out of fear or a closed mind. We hold to them because they produce the values we cherish most: faith, kindness, respect, purity, and integrity.
As Tevye said, “Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as …a fiddler on the roof”. Godly traditions are there to point us to virtue and ultimately to God. Wise people have positioned those traditions strategically in their lives, just as God’s People nailed them to their doorposts. Like their mezuzahs, reminders of God’s Truth are already written on the walls around us,
So be careful what you tear down when you’re redecorating your life, or your society. Like a bad game of Jenga, that peg you pull from the bottom of the stack may just be the thing holding everything else together.
