48. Ensign: For We Nontraditional Students

All ye inhabitants of the world, and dwellers on the earth, see ye, when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains; and when he bloweth a trumpet, hear ye. Isaiah 18:3

AN ENSIGN ON THE MOUNTAINS 15 May 2014

Should that be, “For us nontraditional students”?

Twenty years ago today I graduated from Stetson University. Many of us are either graduating high school, college, or university within the next few days or weeks or know someone who is. For one reason or another, people choose to go back to school much, much later than they graduated high school and I remember such people – people who earn a degree in their thirties, forties, fifties, or even later as “nontraditional students”. Not sure if that's still the term now, hence the quotation marks.

Sometimes such students who are likely juggling a family and a career as well as a course load oftentimes have a better grasp of the world off-campus than their just-enrolled-out-of-high-school counterparts. And that's a good thing. While there are days I'd give just about anything to be going to college (no, I mean university; we use these terms interchangeably, but a university is often comprised of several colleges) again, I can't recall the past. I can't live in tradition.

Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees, which were of Jerusalem, saying,

Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they wash not their hands when they eat bread.

But [Jesus] answered and said unto them, Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?

Matthew 15:1-3 starts out strange sounding to us, I think. Jesus, YOUR disciples don't wash their hands before they eat? Almost nineteen hundred years before the germ theory of disease before popular, this referred to a ritual cleansing. Jesus goes further and gives an example where the Pharisees would give people an exemption from honoring their parents (verse 4, hearkening back to the fifth commandment, Exodus 20:12) if by doing so they dedicated that service or lack thereof to the Temple.

Over the centuries since Jerusalem had come back into Jewish hands, so much had gotten tacked on to the law God had given His people, so many addenda, that it was almost impossible to move without breaking a law. Especially when tradition began to carry the weight of law. Several times Jesus would point this out to the Pharisees, that they made keeping the Sabbath so important that if someone was injured and you had the power to heal them you couldn't do it for you'd be breaking the law.

It's not that keeping God's commandments for us is not important, by any means, it's that when we allow – and this is just as true of our own family traditions as well – changing circumstances to keep us mired in the traditions that our grandparents or great grandparents or their parents, etc. followed we open ourselves to losing out on the more abundant life Jesus has promised us. We need a better reason than but this is the way we've always done it.

Maybe my view is a bit jaundiced – and YES, I'll accept criticism of my style, but I won't stand for tampering – because I don't remember a lot of family traditions on my side and I married into a family with a number of them! At least, we didn't CALL them “traditions” … just as adding onto what we do just for the sake of being new and fitting in ultimately ruins us, so does adding onto God's Word for our lives, making even more rules for people to follow, miss the point.

Jesus makes our new tradition, David

P.S. I write this weekly devotional to keep in touch with all of you in my address book, and I hope to be an encourager to action too! If you find that I'm not or you want me to get lost, just let me know -- thank you!

Thank You, Lord, that we can come to you in prayer and that You provide for all our needs, even when we don't know what they are. We pray for the peace of Jerusalem on both sides of the fence there and around the world.

Thank You, Lord, for everyone in leadership and service, both here and abroad. Thank You for the opportunities we have and the promise of new life through You. I pray that we all seek and have a blessed week! Amen.