The Spirit of Tradition: The Role of Scripture in Our Lives

The Spirit of Tradition: The Role of Scripture in Our Lives - reflections on what the Rich Man's conversation with Abraham can tell us on KateRaeDavis.com

A rich man eats a feast while a poor man starves.

It’s a familiar story.

It was a familiar story when Jesus told it two millennia ago, and it’s still a familiar story now.

It’s what comes after that story that makes Jesus’s telling of it remarkable. Jesus uses that everyday story as a background to launch into the story about the conversation he imagines the rich man having with Abraham, the father of the Jewish faith, the one through whom “all the nations on the earth will be blessed.”

And Jesus imagines them having a conversation about the role of scripture in our lives.

The rich man cries out, “Father Abraham, send Lazarus with some water, I’m in agony.”

And Abraham reasons with him, “Remember that in your lifetime you received many good things,” and then goes on to point out, “there’s this chasm between us,like, I can’t really do anything for you here.

The rich man seems to accept that — he doesn’t argue.

But he does make another request (well, more like a demand) of Abraham, on behalf of his family. “Send Lazarus to my house so that he might warn them.”

And Abraham replies, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.”

“Moses and the prophets” is a longhand way of saying scripture, but it’s also more evocative than that.

According to rabbinic tradition, Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. To say “They have Moses” conjures the histories and laws contained in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

To say “They have Moses” would evoke the entirety of the laws, which covers many aspects of life — what you do and don’t do on a Sunday, the clothes you wear, how you grow your food, which food you eat, and who you eat with.

More deeply, more centrally than the law, to say “They have Moses” evokes the central narrative of Jewish identity found in the Exodus story.

The Exodus story is about Abraham’s descendents, a few generations on. They are enslaved, exploited, oppressed by the world superpower of the day. They had nothing. And God calls Moses to lead them to freedom, to search for a home, to restore them to their original purpose  as God’s people — to bless all the nations of the earth.

To say “Moses” encompasses both story and law, together, because of course they’re intimately connected. It’s been suggested that many of the laws found in Torah would have been for better health of a nomadic people at that time. The law came from and was designed to fit their circumstances. And when those laws first came, they were new ways of living.

Abraham says to the rich man, “They have Moses and the prophets.”

The books of the prophets make up much of the rest of Hebrew scripture.

Each prophet has different emphases, various points they want to highlight, but they all share the task of calling God’s people back to their identity as God’s people. They all call God’s people back to being a blessing to all nations of the earth.

The prophets called people to live into that identity in ways that matched their new context, even when that context was horrific, even when it felt unbearable.

Some prophets spoke when the Jewish people were oppressed or exiled, offering hope or reminding them to continue to be a blessing to others — even their oppressors.

Some prophets, like Amos (whose words the lectionary places alongside the story of the rich man and Lazarus), wrote at a time of relative peace and prosperity, but noted the neglect of God’s laws. Amos says, “Alas for those who lounge on their couches, and eat lambs and calves.” It seems that luxurious opulence and neglect go hand in hand.

Psalm 146 (again, chosen to go along with these texts from the lectionary), succinctly encompasses many of the themes from Moses and the prophets.

The psalm begins and ends with “Praise the Lord.”

The middle verses expand on what it looks like to praise the lord: “Do not put your trust in the political powers, in mortals, in whom there is no help; happy are those whose hope is in the Lord their God.”

The Spirit of Tradition: The Role of Scripture in Our Lives (a closer look at the story of the rich man and Lazarus) - read on KateRaeDavis.comIt goes on to describe the character of this God by listing the people that God shows concern for: the oppressed, the hungry, prisoners, the blind, those who are bowed down, the righteous, the strangers, the orphans, and the widow.

This is not Time Magazine’s list of the most influential people.

These are not the kind of people you want to aligning yourself with if you want wealth or political influence or military power.

Yet they’re the ones that God has chosen to be God’s people, to go and bless all the nations of the earth. People who are on the bottom of the power chain. People with massive amounts of debt. People who had broken laws or rebelled against the empire. People burdened by disability and disease. People without even the most fundamental markers of social status of family or nation: immigrants, refugees, foster kids.

Abraham tells the rich man, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.”

And the rich man — who quietly accepted his fate of flames without a drop of water — the rich man says, “No, father Abraham.”

The rich man says that this wealth of scripture isn’t enough.

And you know, he kind of has a point.

Perhaps the rich man followed the law, did everything by the book. He wore the right clothes, he ate the right things, he didn’t work on the sabbath, he gave 10% of his income to his religious institution — perhaps he did everything “right.” He followed the law to the letter.

And then he ends up in the flames of Hades.

The laws of “Moses and the prophets” weren’t enough.

Perhaps what he was missing isn’t obedience to law. Perhaps his error wasn’t a failure to follow the law.

Perhaps what he was missing is the spirit of those laws.

His error was in misunderstanding the purpose of the law.

The law is not a checklist to get to heaven; it’s an aid to help guide us into loving God and neighbor.

Abraham, notably, didn’t have Moses and the prophets; he didn’t have law to follow at all.

All he had was a God who called him to unbelievable tasks. He followed God’s call in ways that were new for his time. For instance, God told Abraham to circumcise himself and all the men in his household. This was a new idea that Abraham followed — and it became a central marker of Jewish tradition.

And Abraham mentions his descendent Moses, who also had no law.

He, too, did his best to follow the demands of a foolish God — a God who sent him into the center of world power with nothing but a long stick. Moses didn’t have a law to follow. He wrote the law, wrote the best practices for living as they travelled through the desert. And those laws became central markers of Jewish tradition.

The Spirit of Tradition: The Role of Scripture in Our Lives - reflections on what the Rich Man's conversation with Abraham can tell us on KateRaeDavis.comAnd the prophets took those laws and applied them to new contexts, in new ways. The prophets followed the spirit, and utilized the law as a way to help a people follow the spirit.

Because, as C Wess Daniels writes, the point of a faith community, “the point of the church is not to be faithful to tradition at all costs. The point of the church is to be faithful to the eternal spirit within the tradition, which is also at work in the world.”

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In his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus confronts the idea that following the law is enough.

Jesus invites us to live into the spirit of the law.

He heals on the sabbath. He eats with the most despised people in town. He tells stories and performs miracles in ways that reframe the law as not just a set of rules to follow, but as a way of living that recognizes and loves the ones that the empire has forgotten, ignored, or oppressed.

And in doing so, he again changed the tradition.

Each Sunday, we share bread and cup at Jesus’s table. We do this not because Jesus commands it, not as a checklist on the way to Abraham’s side in heaven. We come to the table to be fed. We come to remember that Jesus feeds everyone. We come to remember that spirit is with us and spirit is for us.

May our traditions guide us in our understanding and experience of the eternal, and push us out into the world — where spirit can meet us, and transform us, yet again.


Originally preached at St Luke’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, WA, on Sept 25, 2016.


In the comments…

What rhythms or rituals do you observe out of habit that no longer have meaningful significance?

Where do you hear invitations to participate with the spirit in the world?

The Spirit of Symbols: Remixed Ritual

How Christian rituals began and how symbols became Christian rituals - on Literate Theology / Kate Rae Davis

The previous Foundations post covered the origin of symbol and ritual, using the example of water, up to the point of Jesus’s life.

In this post, more on symbols and rituals! Symbols that were remixed by Jesus; the way the Christian community ritualized that remixing; the way we understand those rituals today. In short: an overview on how Christian ritual began and how we got to where we are today. All of this is leading up to how Christians’ understanding of the use of elements and their symbolic meaning shapes our engagement with culture.

Shifting Symbols

Jesus was born in a particular place at a particular time, which means that he was born into a context. This might seem obvious, but I think we forget it when we talk about Jesus-in-the-present. We forget that the way Jesus is now is fundamentally different from the way Jesus was then, when he had a very specific body and face and voice in a culture that assigned meaning to all these things.

He was born into the Jewish tradition in the time of the Roman empire. Which means that there are two cultures at play here, each with their own nuanced understanding of symbolic objects. The culture of the Jewish people had well-established rituals and symbols using elements that were richly textured with history, story, and poetry. And the same was true of the Roman empire, with their own narratives and meanings.

Jesus seems to be quite familiar with both these cultures by the time he enters into adult ministry. He often remixes elements in order to give new symbolic meaning. Through remixing elements, Jesus shifts his audience’s understanding of the symbols, thus shifting their understanding of the world.

Shifting Symbolism with the Water Element

Water was a central part of the Jewish tradition. In the first lines of scripture, the Spirit of God dwells over water. In Exodus, water turns to blood to show God’s expansive power; the water of the Red Sea parts to liberate the people of Israel; water flows from a rock to sustain them. When Jesus is born, water is deeply meaningful and well-textured. And the multiplicity of these meanings — new life, liberation, sustenance — is ritualized through submersion into water called baptism.

Jesus is far from the first to use water as a symbolic element.

So when Jesus interacts with water, he’s often playing with the meaning of the symbol that already exists in order to re-connect those around him with the original potency of the element.

To take the first miracle in the gospel according to John: Jesus turns water into wine. Water, in the jars for ceremonial washing, is largely associated with purity. Not just physical cleanliness, but spiritual purity. Wine, like water, also has a rich symbolic history of joy, hospitality, and a foreshadowing of the banquet to which God invites us. So when Jesus puts wine into the jars for ceremonial washing, it’s a violation of religious custom that signals a deep connection between the place of the holy (ceremonial jars) and the substance of joyful hospitality (wine).

Jesus places the symbols in relationship to each other in a way that confronts the audience and points them to a deeper meaning that they may have been missing.

And that wedding where Jesus turned water into wine was in Cana, which is near the altar of the Roman god Dionysos. On his feast day, Dionysos would cause the streams to run with wine instead of water — Dionysus turned water into wine. So when Jesus does the same thing, in jars instead of flowing water, on a random weekend instead of a certain feast day, the Romans would have understood that Jesus is somehow more divine than their god.

In a single act with the same elements, Jesus confronts both Jewish and Roman symbols — which is to say, he messes with both their understandings of the world, in a way that draws them toward a new creation.

Ritualizing the Remix

As Jesus’s followers develop into a community, they do what all groups of humans do — they create rituals for their time together. For Christians, this means that they created rituals based on Jesus’s use of symbols. To early Christians (many of whom understood themselves as Jewish), much of the subversive use of these elements was intact; they understood the history that Jesus had been undermining, and are using the elements to now remind themselves that, in Jesus, creation is somehow made new.

Of course, for Christians today, much of that textural complexity of symbol has been lost. We didn’t grow up in Jewish homes under Roman rule. And while all that context is interesting for context and fuller understandings of the gospel (and I’ll even go so far as to say: it’s absolutely essential for anyone entrusted with scriptural interpretation through preaching), it isn’t essential for most people.

We don’t need to understand the Roman and Jewish contexts and symbolic understanding of the elements used in ritual in order to be impacted by these rituals. The element is still intuitively associated with its original functioning in the world, and we can rely on this for impact.

Let’s clarify with our water example.

A Water Ritual: Baptism

In the last Foundations post, we briefly touched on the ritualization of the water symbol into baptism.

By the time of Jesus’s birth, baptism was a solidified ritual in the Jewish community. Baptism was a required part of conversion, a repeated part of Jewish life, and a part of the ordination process. Baptism represented, at once, purification, restoration, and enculturation into the community.

When Jesus asks John to baptize him, he is both participating in this ritual and playing with it — the play has resulted in much debate over the centuries about what it means for the Holy One to participate in a ritual that signifies repentance and purification. But that’s a tangent I’ll resist for now.

Early Christians also practiced baptism. In New Testament texts, baptism is at once understood as a ritual of cleansing, adoption, identification with Christ, and death of the old self/rebirth of a new self.

Over time, Christian communities have moved between practices of infant and adult baptism, methods of immersion and sprinkling, baptism as a one-time deal or a repeated experience. There are communities today that represent each possible set of answers, and they are all in the wide stream of orthodoxy.

All of this is to say: Jesus stepped into a river once, remixing the way we understood baptism, and millions of people have since followed.

Perhaps it’s because of his example alone that we wade into the waters, but I doubt it.

Back to Elements

I think we follow Jesus into the baptismal waters because there’s something compelling going on in the symbol that water itself carries.

I was baptized in my early 20s. I was really excited and invited everyone, and many of my friends who are in the category of religious “nones” came. These are friends who weren’t familiar with the symbolic heritage of water in the Judeo-Christian tradition. They weren’t thinking about how the Spirit moved over the waters in creation. They weren’t remembering how God led Israel through water to freedom. They had no context of Jewish symbolic meaning for what it meant for Jesus to have been baptized (truthfully, at the time, neither did I).

And yet it was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. And when I came out of the waters, some of my “none” friends had tears in their eyes as they hugged me, the baptismal water transferring from my body to their sweaters.

What is it that makes this ritual so impactful, even for people who don’t have knowledge of the symbolic heritage?

I would argue that it goes back to the element itself. Water is inherently renewing. Our bodies are mostly made up of water. Our very lives depend on our ingesting water at regular intervals. On some level, our bodies know this, even if our minds don’t think of it very often. Water is a sort of permanent symbol for sustaining and renewing life.

This symbolic texture of water connects to us not at a “Christian” level, not merely in the intellect or belief system. This connects on a human level. The Christian community has simply developed that meaning in a certain way and uses it in a certain context. We did not give water its meaning. Meaning does not belong to us. Meaning is the work of the Spirit. Meaning belongs to God.

How Christian ritual began and how symbolism functions in ritual - read on Literate Theology

Next Time

In the next Foundations post, we’ll FINALLY get to the meat of what this all means for a Christian understanding of symbolism in culture today, how the Spirit continues to work through symbols, and why Christ keeps showing up in “secular” culture.


For discussion: Do you remember your baptism, or have you witnessed another’s? What struck you as meaningful in that moment? If you have other, non-baptismal memories with water that impacted you, share those!

The Spirit of Symbols: Where Symbols Come From

Where Symbols Come from - Follow Literate Theology at KateRaeDavis.com

I was recently told that my work offends non-Christian artists. In books or movies, I see images of incarnation, baptism, eucharist, crucifixion. Or, I see parallels between this narrative and the narratives that are found in scripture. Or, I see parallels between this character or person and aspects of Christ’s identity. I see Christian symbols everywhere. A reader told me that it’s inappropriate to have these Christian understandings of secular art, that it may be offensive to the non-religious artists who create these narratives.

Which is hard to hear, because I see God speaking everywhere. The symbols and narratives from Christian scripture are still very much at play in our world. The human condition hasn’t changed; the scriptures are still very much relevant; it is only on the surface that our situation appears to have shifted.

To help clarify my understanding of Christian symbols in narratives, this post is the beginning of a series on symbol and metaphor in culture and Christianity. Since this is the work that lays bear the structure for my posts on culture, I’m calling them “Foundations” posts; you can click the Foundations category to see them all.

In this post, I’m going to cover the origin of symbol and ritual. Next time, I’ll dive into a particularly Christian understanding of how symbol and ritual function. Eventually, we’ll cover a variety of Christian symbols and how they are at work in cultural narratives.

It’s Elementary

Part of the reason similar symbols are found in both Christian narratives and “secular” narratives is because of the essential, elemental nature of symbols. The basic elements of human living are consistent across space and time. We all have more or less similar body structures, composed of similar substances, that act in similar movements. We each have breath and air, we each have a relationship with water (which comprises the majority of our bodies) and with fire (even if that fire is just in the sun). It is precisely because these things are so essential to our lives that they become the center for many symbols: body parts (eyes/sight, ears/hearing, feet/transportation, etc.), air, water, fire.

Landscapes and their flora are also commonly used symbols. Due to physical locatedness, landscapes may not seem to be immediately ready for broad use, but though we may not have experience with a landscape, we are able to imagine ourselves into it. For instance, I live in Seattle, the Emerald City, but when a friend says he’s going through a spiritual desert, there’s no need for explanation. Similarly, animals, for all their great global variety, are common symbols: it seems that humans don’t associate earthworms with peace and freedom, just as we’ve not looked at a lion and thought of death and decay.

The physical structures of human living are generally consistent across time, space, and culture. And so what we humans use for symbols are these same fundamental materials of our human lives. It is not coincidence; it is precisely why these objects become symbols.

Material Objects Hold Spiritual Truths

The essence of a symbol exists the way it does because it is the essence of that object’s function in the real world.

To begin: there is a real world Object, which has a certain type of Function. The Object becomes associated with the Function. That Function is external and real in the world, but people notice that it connects to an internal reality as well — the Function is in some way real and present in the internal experience. People begin to use the Object to represent the internal reality that feels similar to the Function — the Object has now become a Symbol.

If that use of the Object as that Symbol connects with other people, it becomes a community Ritual that externally conveys collective inner realities. The material and the spiritual are now held together in the Object-Symbol; just as the Ritual utilizes the Object’s original Function, the presence of the Object may conjure the experiences and meaning of the Ritual.

In various communities, the Object may represent various Symbols and/or become the center of various Rituals, though these various uses still point back to aspects of the original Function. The Object and the Function are always singular, no matter how plural the Symbols and Rituals derived from them are. The Symbols and Rituals always point back to the initial, natural way of things. But: the Rituals shift, and the Symbol may take on new meanings as a result.

Over time, the Object-Symbol has added texture and heritage from its use in these Rituals, which means that the Symbol can be used in ways that add to, remix, even violate those Rituals in order to create new Rituals that convey new layers of internal realities — new Symbols. So when the Object is referred to in a narrative, it is important to understand what the culture understands the meaning of that Object-Symbol and how that Object-Symbol interacts with other Object-Symbols in the story.

This is getting hard to handle. Let’s use an example.

An Example

Water Becomes Symbol

For this example, water will be our Object. It’s an easy symbol in that it’s all over the place, but also somewhat difficult for the same reason — there are many forms that water can come in (oceans, rivers, lakes, wells, bubbles, showers, baths, floods, tsunamis) and there’s an heritage associated with each form, giving the symbol a lot of texture. For the sake of this post, I’m discussing water in a rather general and benign way (we’ll deal with the variations of salt and destruction and temperature another time, as they tend to be remixes on the core Symbol).

Water has a certain type of Function in the world, and did before it became a symbol, before language was a human technology, before humans walked the earth. The Function is this: Water sustains life. That was true in the beginning, is true now, and will always be true.

At some early point in human history, people noticed that wherever there’s water, there are living things; where there’s much water, there’s an abundance of green and moving creatures. And the inverse is also true: where there is little water, there is little green and fewer creatures. People noticed that, in order to revive a plant, animal, or person, water was necessary. I imagine there were times when the fields were withering with brown plants, and then rain came and gave the field new life. I imagine there were times when a traveler had gotten lost in the desert and was hallucinatory and weak, but after being given water, he was revitalized (a word that literally means “to give life again”).

Notice: at this point, this language is not symbolic. It is simply describing reality. It is describing what literally happens when water is present.

It would have only been later, after these observations about life’s ability to renew, refresh, and revitalize, that someone would have thought, I know what that feels like. I have known in my soul what it feels like to be dry, and then something comes along and I feel like I have been given life againPerhaps people started saying to their friends, “Some part of my inner world has been in a desert, but has just found a well of fresh water.” Now, the Object (water) and its Function (revitalization) are being used to describe an internal reality – water has become a Symbol.

Water Becomes Ritual

We can say with some certainty that using water to describe an internal experience was a symbol that connected with others, because we know it became Ritual.

In parts of ancient Egypt, the dead were submerged into the cold water of the Nile to convey that, though their life as it had been known was gone, in some way they will experience a new life. Entrance into the ancient Egyptian cult of Isis required a ritual of submersion into water as an outward sign to symbolize that an internal new life was beginning. In these rituals, the material use of water became tied to the spiritual experience of revitalization.

For the Jewish people, water was used for the washing of bodies and clothes as a sign of purification (“purity” itself being an abstraction of concepts related to life and wellness). In a community where the scriptural texts were memorized, such use of water would likely conjure memories of the Jewish community’s heritage with the symbol. People might remember “the Spirit of God who hovers over the waters” before the creation of life (Genesis 1). They might remember Moses leading God’s people out of slavery in Egypt, through the parted waters of the Red Sea, and into new life as a free people (Exodus 14).

In the beginning of the Christian era, Jewish communities adopted the custom of submerging converts: seven days after circumcision, the convert would be submerged, naked, in a pool of flowing water and would rise as a “son of Israel” (the familial language of “son” ties the practice to “birth” and, thus,  to new life).

Notice that different groups utilized the water ritual with great variety. The submersions — called baptisms long before the holy dunking of Jesus — used various types or bodies of water, each with their own particular narrative. Some groups submerged the living, others the dead. Some groups submerged entire bodies, some only parts. Some groups baptized the clothed; for others, nudity was a requirement.

Yet despite the many differences in these rituals, the Symbol of water remains singular, and water’s Function as a provider of new life can be easily traced throughout the Rituals. The use of the Symbol in narrative and in Ritual varies, but it always points back to the original, pre-symbol Function.

Next Time

We’ve covered how an object becomes a symbol and looked at how this occurred with the example of water — but only up to before Jesus’s life. In the next Foundations post, we’ll look at how Jesus remixes the water symbol and how the Christian community ritualizes that remixing. Then we’ll look at a couple of instances of the water symbol’s use in contemporary culture and tie it all together to explain why Christians see baptism in the “secular.”