God Unbound: On The Nontraditional Traditions

Steadfast Tradition? Or Nah?

Reading God Unbound through my rebel-tinged glasses made me start to wonder about the unfamiliar liturgies, these rituals that are unknown to me. Does my lack of a religious tradition warrant a tradition in and of itself? Or am I missing something really beautiful? I hate when people call me religious. “I’m faithful,” I’ll say. I’d rather identify as a sold out Jesus Freak than a Church lady any day. But I can’t help but wonder — do I have a huge liturgy-shaped hole in my Jesus-loving soul?

I think, too: what does all this mean in relation to God’s promise, the subversive nature of Jesus when it comes to all our human legalities, and the expansiveness of God?

Ultimately, the discussion in God Unbound finds its point on page 86, where author Elaine Heath says,

God is a missional God who calls forth a missional people in order to bring about the healing and salvation of the world. The story gives voice to the great and unchanging tradition that we are to hand on: God is always calling forth a people to participate in God’s work of making all things new.

                                                                                                               God Unbound, emphasis mine

I’ve only recently gotten comfortable with my place on the Christianity spectrum, and my seeming inability to be quiet about issues of social justice. Sure, I run and hide occasionally, but only for a season, to lick my wounds and re-train for battle. The business of love can be exhausting, especially for introverted empaths like me.

And it’s only as I have begun to get comfortable with my place that I have stopped raging against the traditionalists who seemed to want to squeeze me into a box in which they’d already tried to squeeze a gargantuan God. How could there possibly be room for me in there?

I walked cautiously through life, careful about who I offered my submission to, claiming my only real submission was to Christ. And this is still very true — I am still careful, and I am still only submitting to Christ. But sometimes submitting to Christ means submitting to the wisdom of others. And sometimes those others come in a package tied with a nice tight bow of tradition.

Damn it.

No Box Big Enough For God

Still, as I think through this I am reminded of the wide open spaces of grace (Romans 5:1-5 MSG) and the fact that God made the human race with plenty of time and space for living so we could seek after God…We live and move in him, can’t get away from him! (Acts 19:24-29 MSG). With God’s expansiveness — his actual, physical, infinite size — surely there is room for both new and old, progressiveness and traditionalist, in God’s Kingdom. Perhaps each of us have our place. Perhaps God can do a new thing in an old way, and old things in new expressions of faith, love, justice.

Perhaps God is calling me, with my ill-fitting coat, my empty hands, and all my annoying questions, out on a mission in Kingdom work, into the place where they mystics play, and there is space for me too.

Heath speaks of the “tradition behind the tradition” — this idea that from the beginning, back in the Garden, God began His redemption work. Before Abraham, before the Hebrew tradition, God started “calling forth and creating a people to bless the entire world.” (pg. 28-30)

God’s promise of salvation came before the covenant of law. Therefore, His promise of salvation, which also came before racial, religious, and ethnic divides, supersedes any law or tradition born from that law. That’s not to say that tradition is wrong, but when we hold it up as the only way to do things, we risk putting God in a box. We risk making God smaller in order to fit our understanding, rather expanding ourselves to seek out God’s never ending edges, where certainly our minds, and our comfortable boundaries, will surely be blown.

And it’s the boundaries of both the progressive and the traditionalist that need expanding. The progressive, the contemporary (I recognize these are not the same) might do well to sing an old hymn and light a candle or two, as they may find God there in the beauty of ritual, like God is in the ritual of the seasons, the regular comings and goings of sunlight and ocean breeze, fall foliage and life, death, resurrection.

Similarly the liturgist might do well to sit in a megachurch, to raise their hands in a type of worship that is not bound by rite and formality. The Evangelical might do well to loosen their clutch on the things they hold so dear, like the infallibility of their interpretation of scripture and that pesky apostle named Paul. They might do well to make room for the questioners, the pokers, the under-dog-sticker-uppers-fors.

Even when it comes to evangelism. Perhaps especially when it comes to evangelism. If we only love people because we want something from them — even if all we want is for them to give their heart to Jesus — that’s not really love.

That’s agenda.

And it’s not the way Jesus loved people. He acted lovingly and expected nothing. He hoped for, cried over, and was pained by — but expected nothing. Which is probably a pretty sad statement about humanity, but also a challenging way to love.

Because if Jesus is truly going to be the authority within Christian culture, then the reigning rule of order must be love. And if the reigning rule of order is love without expectation, the whole world might very well be changed.

And if we want to change the world, it’s very possible that we may have to disassemble the boxes we’ve created the way a little boy might make a box for a field mouse he caught in summer. We may have to rip open those boxes and let the God of the universe out to do his thing.

And maybe we have to realize that other people’s boxes, though they may look totally different from ours — maybe a little more tattered, some maybe with rainbow tape or perhaps a hashtag that gets a rise out of us, maybe a little more ritual than makes us comfortable or maybe a little less — maybe we need to realize that God is so big, he can fill up multiple boxes of all different sizes, and still have enough left over to throw a coat over us when we’re cold.

Read an excerpt from God Unbound at the Patheos Book Club HERE.