Welcome back to Broadway on Liberty. Today, we turn to our second production: Fiddler on the Roof.

Fiddle holds a special place in my heart. When we had moved to Lancaster, PA we discovered the Fulton Theatre. The Fulton is the oldest operating theatre in the nation. That fall of 2007, they ran Kate’s favorite: West Side Story. Then Fiddler. Then an updated telling of Oklahoma. Then a new one called Doubt. It felt like the move was the right decision thanks in part to that line up.

Last week, with Hadestown, we talked about humanity’s habit of “choosing the wrong tree” meaning that we grasp for judgment and certainty instead of receiving life, trust, and communion with God. But in Christ, the old story receives a new ending: Jesus enters our exile, meets judgment with mercy, and opens the way back to life.

That sets up Fiddler on the Roof beautifully. Tevye’s world is held together by old songs, inherited stories, repeated customs, and the fragile hope that remembering who we are can help us survive change. Where Hadestown asks whether love can trust enough not to look back, Fiddler asks how people carry faith, family, and identity forward when the world beneath them begins to shift.

Tevye is a Jewish milkman in Czarist Russia trying to provide for his wife and five daughters. He says their customs are as precarious as the perch of a fiddler on a roof, but these customs are also what keeps their village balanced. Tradition!

And yet his daughters begin to break with tradition. Antisemitism rises. Their neighbors turn against them. A pogrom brings fear and violence to the village, and eventually Tevye’s family is forced from their home. Still, the fiddler walks with them: a sign that their tradition will travel wherever they go.

The tradition is not static. Tevye has to negotiate with it. Each choice forces Tevye to ask what can bend and what must not break. That makes me think about how easily we get tradition wrong. Over time, the very religion meant to draw us closer to God and neighbor can drift into something that does the opposite: we worship tradition instead of God, and condemn neighbors who do not practice it exactly as we do.

Tevye has to face that tension. There is a difference between traditionalism and tradition: traditionalism is the dead faith of the living; tradition is the living faith of the dead. Faithful tradition is not preserving ashes; it is tending the fire.

As Christians, we do not follow a dead God. We follow the risen Christ, and we have been given the fire of the Holy Spirit.

I often meet people who struggle with faith as if God were keeping score: “I didn’t pray enough, so this bad thing happened,” or, “I’d come back to church, but I might get struck by lightning.”

But that is not our tradition.

Our tradition is the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. We cannot earn that love through works. Grace is a brute fact. God does not hurl lightning bolts; that is Zeus, not Jesus. Our God is not retributive. When God came to us in Christ, he endured a sham trial and mob violence on a cross, and returned with grace, restoration, and forgiveness. God would rather die than be in the sin-accounting business.

That is our faith and our tradition. So we must give up anything that contradicts it, even if we think we are only being cute or funny. Our words reveal our hearts; they mirror what we actually believe.

Scripture is not naïve about this. The Bible lets faithful people argue across the centuries.

On one hand, Deuteronomy says: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone… Keep these words in your heart. Teach them diligently to your children. Talk about them at home and on the road, when you lie down and when you rise.”

The assumption is beautiful: faith can be handed on. Generation after generation, the story continues as parents tell children, neighbors teach neighbors, and ordinary people weave God into the rhythm of everyday life.

But then Ecclesiastes walks onto the stage like someone who has seen too much: “I hated all my toil… because I must leave it to those who come after me. And who knows whether they will be wise or foolish?”

Do you hear the tension?

Deuteronomy says, “Pass it on.” Ecclesiastes replies, “What if they waste it?”

Deuteronomy says, “Teach your children.” Ecclesiastes sighs, “You cannot control what they’ll do with what you’ve given them.”

That isn’t a contradiction. It’s real life. Every parent knows it. Every teacher knows it. Every congregation knows it. We pour ourselves into the next generation without any guarantee they will cherish what we have loved. That is Tevye’s ache.

He treasures the traditions that shaped his people. Yet each daughter receives that tradition differently. Some keep parts of it. Some reshape it. Some leave parts behind. Tevye discovers what every generation eventually learns: you can hand someone a story, but you cannot live it for them.

And yet Deuteronomy refuses to give up. Not because passing on faith guarantees success, but because faith has never depended on guarantees. It depends on love. So we tell the story anyway. We light the candle anyway. We sing the song anyway. We pray anyway.

Because tradition is not a museum exhibit protected behind glass. It is a fire carried from one heart to another.

But Ecclesiastes whispers another warning: sometimes we do not lose the tradition because someone rejects it. Sometimes we lose it because we forget what we were following in the first place.

The Jewish storyteller Noah ben Shea tells a parable in Jacob the Baker. A man had a vision and began walking toward it. Two others saw him and followed. Their children grew up watching their parents walk behind him. One day they asked, “What are you following?”

Their parents could only describe the coattails of the person in front of them. The children shrugged and said, “That is not worth giving my life to,” and walked away.

The tragedy wasn’t that the children rejected the vision. The tragedy was that no one had told them about the vision. They had inherited only the coattails.

That story haunts me, because every church is tempted to confuse the coattails with Christ.

“We’ve always done it this way.” That is coattail talk.

“We’ve always sung these hymns.” Coattail talk.

“We’ve always had this committee.” Coattail talk.

If we cannot answer why we do something with the words and life of Jesus, perhaps we have forgotten what we were following.

Christ is our vision.

Why do we worship? Because in Christ we encounter grace.

Why do we gather? Because we’re being formed into the beloved community of God.

Why do we serve? Because Jesus first served us.

The practices matter. The traditions matter. But they matter because they keep pointing us toward Christ.

Carmen Lansdowne, former Moderator of the United Church of Canada, has warned against “church exceptionalism”: the quiet assumption that because we have gotten some things right, we have graduated from being learners.

I’m proud that UCC was the church of so many firsts. But there’s another side to those firsts. We were the first to ordain women, but before that we had the Salem Witch Trials which hung many innocent women. We were the first to write an abolitionist tract on this soil, but we were also one of the first to bring slaves here. We were the first to repudiate the doctrine of discovery, yet we were the first to take native lands.

We become experts at teaching everyone else while forgetting that the Holy Spirit may still have something to teach us through Christians who do not look like us, worship like us, vote like us, or even read Scripture the way we do. More than that: we can learn from Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, people of great faiths and no faith.

When we trust our righteousness more than Christ’s mercy, defend our identity more than God’s kingdom, or stop asking, “Lord, what are you teaching us today?” we have started following the people in front of us instead of the One who calls us forward. That’s another kind of coattail. Jesus never invited people to preserve an institution. He invited them to follow him. That difference changes everything.

So we welcome, love, and serve because that is what Christ did, and because others have done it for us. May we do it in the imitation of Christ and for our neighbor. That is the tradition worth preserving and passing on: not the coattails, but Christ; not the ashes, but the fire.

Sometimes our faith begins where our tradition ends. Thanks be to God. Amen.