A LESSON FROM SALTINE CRACKERS

"No man also seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment: else the new piece that filled it up taketh away from the old, and the rent is made worse.
And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles." (Mark 2:21-22)

Roughly three weeks ago, toward the end of a Saturday morning grocery shopping trip, I made my way down the crackers aisle. Premium Saltine Crackers was one of the final items on my list. I hadn't planned to buy the full-sized box of saltines; just one of thehalf-sized boxes. A quick scan of the shelves revealed that something was DIFFERENT. There were plenty of boxes of off-brand saltines, but I didn't want off-brand saltines. Such crackers are often SO flimsy, they regularly break into pieces when you press on them with a knife to add peanut butter or cheese spread. Now, I DID find boxes of Premium Saltine Crackers, but they were very different. They looked more like boxes of cereal. The boxes were mostly white, and the wording on them DID read "Premium Saltine Crackers". But there were pictures of ROUND saltine crackers on the boxes. It was almost as though they were some kind of hybrid of Ritz and Saltine crackers that had been created.

At home, it was DIFFERENT having crackers and Old English cheese using the new crackers. On the one hand, the round-sized crackers are thicker and stronger than the old square-sized ones. On the other hand, there was a feeling of familiarity and of everything being right with the world when you ate the old "normal" square crackers with cheese that's, well, gone. There's something about the loss of TRADITION. I didn't realize anyone else was experiencing this new adjustment to the rounded saltine crackers until I heard WBZ radio's late night host Steve LeVeille comment this week on, "What's happened to the saltines?" Steve wonders if this is some sort of a test marketing thing that's only happening in our geographic area. He said he's gone onto the Nabisco website and there's nothing there about the new saltine crackers.

Tradition.

Funny how a little thing like changing the saltine cracker can mess things up.

Tradition.

We evangelicals and Pentecostals are often guilty of criticizing the TRADITIONS of the Roman Catholic Church.

"They have the Bible PLUS TRADITION," we say, "and THAT'S wrong!"

Oh, we can make fun of the mass where, "they say the same thing over and over again," and don't even get me STARTED on The Rosary. Tradition.

Funny how we evangelicals and Pentecostals find it so easy to criticize the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church without realizing we have our own, and often
strangely defended traditions. I remember that on my first Sunday as pastor of the old First Assembly of God of Framingham in 1987, I conducted the Communion service differently from the way the congregation was expecting.

"But, this isn't how WE do Communion," I was told. Well, I was new, and I was bringing a different Communion tradition.

Back to the Catholic Church, when the changes from Vatican 2 took place in the early 1960s, it really shook my parents' generation. They had been told the Catholic Church never changes and never would change. The Latin mass, and the priest facing away from the people were just the way Catholics did mass. When the priest began facing the people and saying mass in English, my mother commented that her Church had, "turned Protestant". I used to get a kick out of that. She said it the way someone would say that the milk had turned sour!

Around twenty years ago, the Pentecostal Church world was also jolted by the abandonment of hymn books and most traditional Protestant hymns for singing modern folk and soft rock chourses with the words projected onto the church sanctuary wall. Older generations of Assemblies of God laypeople were probably more shaken by this than were the Roman Catholics of thirty years earlier. Such "music wars" are still not fully resolved in the evangelical, Pentecostal, and Charismatic church world.

A prominent northeastern Bible College announced the changing of the school's name. This school has been around for many decades, has many alumni, and also has, well, lots of tradition. From what I understand, the school was deluged with angry letters opposing the changing of the name. It kind of made me chuckle, because my own alma mater, Central Bible College, is being merged into Evangel University within the next year or so. Evangel is the dominant school in the merger, and C.B.C. will essentially lose its identity. I couldn't help but think, "THEY'RE so upset about a name change, but we're LOSING our school!" Yet, as much as I feel sad about the loss of Central Bible College, I know things change, life goes on, and we can't allow our love of traditions to cause divisions and factions which do damage to the Body of Christ.

I must confess that in a lot of ways, I DO miss the Assemblies of God that I joined in the 1970s. Pretty much, all the churches were alike. We all read the Pentecostal Evangel magazine. We all used Gospel Publishing House Sunday School materials. We all used Assemblies of God hymnals. The format of the services in each church were very similar. It's very different today. Assemblies of God churches differ as stars in the sky. Another new trend is that of our pastors "dressing down". I think that largely came in from the influence of Vineyard Christian Fellowship and of Calvary Chapel; and also Rick Warren and his Hawaiian shirts! I must admit, I really like it that my pastor, Gary Collette at Bread of Life Church still dresses up for the services. Yes, I like the pastors to dress up and in a lot of ways I'd love to go back to the 1970s.

Tradition.

But we DO have to be careful about being bound by our traditions, don't we. That's why SO many religious people in Jesus' day did NOT follow Him. He shook up their traditions and they didn't like it. What would Jesus think of Christians who won't go to church because the pastor dresses like Rick Warren and they sing soft rock worship songs?

Even worse, what would Jesus think about people who are genuinely upset about the new shape of their saltine crackers while thousands of people in this world are STARVING?