Giovanni Orseolo, a prince of Venice in the early 11th century, married Maria Argyropoulina, a Byzantine princess who brought with her a fascinating little piece of technology that the Venetians had never seen: a two-pronged golden fork.  She shocked everyone by using it to eat her meals.  Peter Damian, a fiery monk, denounced the fork as a sinful luxury.  As the story is told by some, Damian insisted that God gave us “forks”—our fingers—so using the fork was an affront to divine design.  Princess Maria died of the plague, but supposedly Damian declared it was a divine judgment for her use of the fork.

Despite that divine judgment, forks are now commonplace in the Western world.  Even at church dinners.

This strange anecdote illustrates an important truth: nearly everything that becomes tradition was once a radical and unwelcome change.  All truths seem to pass through three stages—first, they are ridiculed, then they are violently opposed, and finally, they are accepted as self-evident.  Changes become new traditions which eventually yield to further change.  Despite the regular repetition of this cycle, many people struggle to accept it as the way the world works.

From infancy we learn to navigate the world.  We take that learned navigation as “the way things are—and have always been”.  Changes require that we re-learn a new way of seeing, thinking, and doing, and most of us aren’t fond of that exercise.

Back in the mid-1980’s our church wanted to add contemporary Christian guitar-led choruses to our singing of hymns (accompanied by piano).  The choruses weren’t in the hymnal; lyrics would have to be projected with an overhead projector.  When I proposed the change, one old saint protested, “JESUS NEVER USED AN OVERHEAD PROJECTOR!”  It never dawned on the dear soul that Jesus never used a hymnal or a piano either!

Some people objected that a guitar didn’t belong in church.  They insisted that the piano was the appropriate instrument for church music—not realizing that just a century before church-goers protested the piano, an instrument from the saloon, replacing the pipe organ.  A century before that the Puritans dismantled pipe organs in English churches, complaining that they were worldly instruments.

Many have complained about modern music replacing the “ancient” hymns.  But I analyzed our hymnal and found that…
            …almost half of the hymns were from the 20th century;  
            …40% were from the 1800’s;
            …10% from 1700’s
            …2% from the 1600’s
            …1% from the 1500’s
We have very few truly “ancient” hymns.  Some of the oldest still known hymns are those of Isaac Watts (1674-1748)—Alas and Did My Savior Bleed; When I Survey the Wondrous Cross; O God Our Help in Ages Past, and the Christmas favorite, Joy to the World.  Ironically, Watts was fiercely opposed by his contemporaries for the audacity of composing his own lyrics (rather than using the biblical Psalms).

Church music provides many examples of the cycle, but there are others.  When Sunday School was introduced in the 1780’s much of the clergy opposed it.  Within 25 years it had spread to nearly every Protestant denomination.

In the 1940’s many people condemned the new trend of church social halls as worldly.  Churches were for worship, not socializing.  Today, providing a social hall for funeral luncheons, wedding receptions, and other large gatherings is a given of church architecture.

Changing times and changing perceptions led to changes in traditions.  Ridiculed and opposed at the outset, the changes ended up becoming the new traditions.

If everything we call ‘tradition’ was once radical change, what exactly are we defending when we defend tradition?  And what are we attacking when we attack it?