I've said it before:  I am a person who loves tradition.  And no time of year is so loaded with cultural and faith traditions than this holiday season at the end of the calendar year, traditions like the singing of Handel's Messiah and the lighting of the Advent wreath candles (although many of these "traditions" are not so timeless as the marketing geniuses would have us believe -- Thanksgiving dating from the Roosevelt administration and our current vision of Santa Clause coming from a Coca-Cola advertisement in the 1930's). You can read our passage for today in that mindset -- that of honoring tradition, honoring the "great cloud of witnesses".…