At Christmas time many Christians decry that Christmas has lost its religious identity either by retailers who do not wish customers “Merry Christmas,” or by the lack of a Christmas tree on a town hall lawn, or by the presence of Santa Claus and reindeer, or by the consumerism which surrounds a holiday dedicated to One who calls us to give not to the point of debt, but to the point of death. It’s a familiar, if wearying, annual tradition.
At Easter time we don’t hear a similar cry, even though Easter is the more important holiday on the Christian calendar (without the cross and the empty grave, the birth of Jesus means nothing). Easter Bunnies will hop at shopping malls, and our shopping goes on with hardly a protest. On Maundy Thursday my daughter has an orientation at the high school for rising 9th graders, and on Good Friday evening my other daughter has soccer practice. And each of my children will be at school on Good Friday, even as Wall Street pauses for the day that Christian societies had for centuries marked with prayer and fasting.
And this is fine with me. Christianity, and in particular the historic forms of Christianity that shaped the calendar of western society for more than a millennium, no longer holds sway over our society as it used to. However incrementally, our society is moving into post-Christendom. And we who live the Christian faith do so with marginally fewer “helps” from culture. School, youth sports, and other extra-curricular activities heap increasingly high expectations and expenses on children and families. Work hours extend into times and places that used to be considered personal. Sundays are “fun days” in the cultural vernacular.
Christians can certainly continue practicing the faith even if the broader society no longer helps us out by setting aside time on Sundays and holidays where other activities are prohibited. It is hardly oppression for my family to wrestle with the schedule conflict of school events and worship services. It is what millions of religious people who practice non-majority faiths do every day.
In fact, this cultural shift moves Christian believers, however modestly, toward the experience of Christians in the first few centuries of the faith, who practiced their faith not in societies where they held power and wide influence, but instead in societies that variously ignored them, benignly acknowledged them, looked askance at them, or even persecuted them.
As we turn to the cross and the empty grave of this Great and Holy Week, may we be renewed to live our own death and resurrection every day, trusting in God’s promises that sin and death do not have ultimate power over us. And may we find support for our lives of faith from the Body of Christ itself, the church and its richest traditions, that recall for us the mystery and power of our Lord’s Passover from death to life.
For our Lord did not come into the world to condemn it, but instead that the world might be renewed through him.
The Lutheran Zephyr 