Well, there have certainly been some changes in our worship over the past two weeks, and I very much appreciated hearing your comments. At least one suggestion will be implemented next Sunday. The cafeteria table that becomes our altar will be placed in front of the congregation, with the chairs arranged in a semi-circle around it.

As I've processed the concerns I heard this morning, they seem to revolve around, 1) the tension between habit and tradition, and 2) the tension between intimacy and inclusion. In this posting, I'll deal with the first tension. Later this week, I'll discuss the second.

Habit and Tradition
When it comes to matters of the Church, habits are customary practices that become known by a community without their always having to be spelled out. Not all habits are bad. They make it possible for members of the community to function without having to ask at every moment, "What do we do now?" But habits are not tradition.

The word "tradition" comes from the Latin tradito, which means, "to deliver." As Episcopalians, we say that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation. It is one thing to say that you agree with Holy Scripture, another to live out with other followers of Jesus Christ. As Jesus's followers have lived out those truths, they have developed practices that embody those truths. In that way, we move from a purely intellectual agreement to a living faith in community.

"Tradition" is the delivering of those practices and understandings to the next generation of Christians. As each generation lives out their faith in changing circumstances, they adapt what was delivered to them while still seeking to remain faithful to the wisdom of their ancestors in faith.

This "delivering" is not the same as photocopying. But it seeks to ensure that the "Church" of today is essentially the Church of two millennia ago.

The question remains, what constitutes "tradition" in our worship, and what is habitual? The most authoritative guide I know of in understanding the Christian tradition of Worship is Dom Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy. What Dix says about Christian worship in its earliest days in the Roman Empire speaks powerfully to our own day.

Contrary to our assumption of worship "as essentially a public activity," the Church of the Apostles "regarded all Christian worship, and especially the Eucharist, as a highly private activity." After all, the first Eucharist took place in an "upper room" of a private house (Mark 14: 12-15).

The spacious rooms of Roman nobles who converted to Christianity provided the perfect place to continue this domestic tradition of the Christian family renewing their connections to each other, and to their Lord and Savior. Even after public places of worship were built in the 3rd century, "the model seems to have been furnished by the private house and not the pagan temple or the Jewish synagogue."

In fact, for at least the first two centuries, the word "church" did not refer to a building, but to the people assembled for worship, wherever that might be, and with whatever materials the home provided.

No object is more important than a people united in devotion to God and each other as "living members" of Christ's Body. That is a "Tradition" worth delivering to our children.

To speak of the Church in these domestic, even familial terms, paints a picture of the Church as a family. This calls each of us to an intimate relationship with each other. There are two risks in such intimacy: vulnerability and exclusion. I'll explain more later this week.