Earth Day or Easter? Mother’s Day or Pentecost?
Imagine the following scenario. The year is 2068. The Western Church is preparing to celebrate Easter.
In this particular year, Easter Sunday happens to coincide with the April 22 celebration of Earth Day, a holiday that has been increasing in popularity since it was first observed a hundred years before. In order to best participate in the culture in which they have been placed, many evangelical churches choose to forego their Easter celebrations and to celebrate Earth Day instead.
Not surprisingly, other evangelicals take these churches to task for replacing Easter with Earth Day.
“Why shouldn’t we?” the churches answer back. “After all, we should be looking for points of contact with our neighbors. We would seem out of touch with society if we celebrated Easter and did nothing special for Earth Day.”
“Can’t you see how you have been co-opted by the culture?” other evangelicals ask. “You’re allowing the culture to dictate your church celebrations!”
“We are never commanded to celebrate Easter,” reply the church leaders. “Paul even says to avoid legalism when choosing to celebrate one day over another.”
Now let’s rewind back 60 years to 2008. Many evangelicals who follow the traditional church calendar are in a quandary. Pentecost and Mother’s Day fall on the same date this year (May 11). While most evangelicals in the West (though not the case worldwide) have long jettisoned the celebration of Pentecost, many evangelicals outside the U.S. embrace the history of celebrating the church’s major feast days.
So what to do on Mother’s Day?
For many in the U.S., this question will seem odd. After all, most evangelical churches do not follow a specifically Christian church calendar, except for perhaps Christmas and Easter. For my father-in-law (a Romanian Baptist pastor), the answer is clear. You celebrate Pentecost and make mention of Mother’s Day as well. Of course, he, like my other Romanian friends, is still wondering why in the world we do not celebrate Pentecost here.
A few thoughts…
Every church has a calendar. Whether the church chooses to follow the traditional calendar of the Church and preach according to the readings in a lectionary does not change the fact that every church has a way of ordering time.
The question is not, Will we follow a calendar? but Whose calendar will we follow? In other words, does our church’s ordering of time follow the wisdom of the ancient church or the whims of the consumerist American culture?
Many of our churches have a list of unofficial celebrations that order our congregational time.
- New Year’s Day.
- Valentine’s Day.
- Mother’s Day.
- Father’s Day.
- Fourth of July.
- Memorial Day.
- Halloween.
- Veteran’s Day.
By rejecting the traditional church calendar, we did not reduce the number of our celebrations; we merely replaced them with the celebrations of the culture at large.
Granted, churches do well to emphasize many of these celebrations. We can benefit from using the cultural opportunity to speak to the biblical vision of motherhood and fatherhood, etc.
But we should be willing to listen to the tough questions from those outside our culture about what our church calendars represent.
Why should the consumerist culture of the United States dictate what we celebrate as a church?
Why is it that so many American churches celebrate with great fanfare the birth of their nation (July 4) without even so much as mentioning the birth of the church (Pentecost)?
Does the way we order our time shape us as the unique, called-out people of God or merely reinforce our nationalist, consumer-shaped identity?
Listening to these tough questions may make us uncomfortable. (They make me uncomfortable too. My current solution is to celebrate Pentecost with our Sunday School class and then celebrate Mother’s Day with the rest of the church.)
As evangelicals, we do well at seeking points of contact with our culture. It would be foolish to celebrate Pentecost on Mother’s Day without ever mentioning our mothers. Our goal should not be to adopt a “we’re proud to be out of touch” mentality that harms our witness.
I am sure that evangelicals will come down on different sides of the issue of ordering time. We should refrain from dogmatism on this matter. After all, the Scriptures do give us freedom in ordering our time and celebrations.
But surely we should wrestle through these decisions. To blindly go forward without giving thought to how our time is ordered is to prepare the foundation for the imaginary scenario I described earlier, where Earth Day takes over Easter. I hope I never see that day.
Trevin,
Great thoughts, as usual. I’m wondering if you’ve considered the “Common Good” issues here, though, stemming from Jesus’ “whoever is not against us is with us” mentality, a la Mark 9:40 and Luke 9:50. When it comes to Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc., I hear you and I’m with you. But if we think about, say, the issue of Easter and Earth Day coinciding in 2068, I wonder if we shouldn’t resist the knee-jerk reaction and consider more deeply how we might embrace that convergence, not for celebrating one and forgetting the other, but for celebrating both in terms of one another. I mean, what better news for the Earth than “He is risen!,” “New Creation has begun!”
Grace and Peace,
Raffi
Comment by Raffi Shahinian — May 8, 2008 @ 9:47 am
I agree, Raffi, that we should be looking for convergence in some of these situations. But let’s make sure it’s convergence and not a complete capitulation to culture.
Comment by trevinwax — May 8, 2008 @ 10:37 am
Amen…
Comment by Raffi Shahinian — May 8, 2008 @ 12:43 pm
you sir think of great things to ponder
i have some questions to your assumptions.. why is it an either/or? I know this is simply a hypothetical situation where earthday takes over easter but i don’t really think it is a reasonable fear. I could equally envision the church celebrating both.
second.. why is care for the earth an issue of culture over gospel? seems pretty clearly to be part of God’s mandate, so I’m not sure it is at odds with a christian expression.
third.. if christianity becomes simply a way to maintain a certain calendar then it is a useless religion which we need to be prophetically called out of and back to god.
thanks for stimulating the conversation, trevin.
david
Comment by David — May 8, 2008 @ 3:36 pm
Hi David,
I wouldn’t make it an either/or necessarily. But I do believe that as Christians, we believe in the God of Time. We know from the Old Testament that there was a certain rhythm to the Jewish way of life. The early Christians also latched onto this.
I am not saying that care for the earth is not a biblical mandate. The hypothetical situation I proposed was simply a way of asking, “Who is ordering our time?” Are we taking our cues from the culture? Or should we think through the questions about how to best order our church life together?
I agree that Christianity should never be simply about maintaining a calendar. You are absolutely right. But at the same time, I think you will agree that what we celebrate, how we celebrate, and when we celebrate certain events are rhythms that do form us as people. For example, the juxtaposition of Thanksgiving a month before Christmas has given birth to “The Christmas Season” in the United States. Celebrating Thanksgiving in November kicks off a holiday season that influences how we spend our money, view our time, restore old friendships, etc.
In the same way, how the church orders its time will have an effect on the life and direction of the people. It’s unavoidable.
So I am not advocating that we maintain a calendar for its own sake. But I do think we need to think through how our ordering of time forms us as the people of God.
Again, the question is not IF we will have a church calendar, but WHOSE calendar we will adopt? And at this point, I think it’s safe to say in the United States, we have pretty much let the culture set the agenda and have dismissed the wisdom of the ancient church.
Comment by trevinwax — May 8, 2008 @ 4:12 pm
I’m fully with you that we can not and should not think of our spirituality as separated from the rhythms of our lives. Times and seasons matter because they are our reality. And they are a reality called Good. I think that since the spirit of our times sees Christians as being mostly anti-earth I just see this sort of warning as a bit unhelpful, although I fully resonate with it. Truly, if we ever neglect the call to remember what happened on that first easter we are poorer for it.
Comment by David — May 9, 2008 @ 12:37 pm
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