Party On

I find it irritating, and at the same time, providential that our consumer culture jumps the gun on celebrating Christian holidays.  During the season of Advent, when the Church is doing it’s best to create a mood of meditative waiting, the rest of the world is doing the opposite; they’re in the midst of a manic buying-frenzy!  And more recently, during the season of Lent, when the Church is doing it’s best to create a somber mood of penitence and fasting, the rest of the world is already gorging on peeps and scattering plastic eggs for premature egg hunts.  Then, the day after the either holiday, when the Church is just beginning to celebrate, the rest of the world takes down their holiday decorations and puts all the stuff on clearance.  It’s like the Church is doomed to always arrive to the party too late!

But as I said, I also find it providential.  How so?  The Good News, my friends, is that we Christians get to buy our holiday candy, decorations, and gifts on clearance during our celebration!  Last year I had an Eastertide BBQ at my house for the young adults a week after Easter Sunday, and I gleefully cleared out Wal-Mart shelves of plastic eggs, bunny ears, and peeps.  We partied in style.  Maybe our culture’s hasty celebrating is Jesus’ way of blessing His Church with bargains?

At Central Congregational Church, we’re still celebrating Easter because the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ is something so HUGE that we prepare for it for 40 days and 40 nights of fasting and self-reflection, and then we celebrate it for 40 more days and nights once it’s here!  This calendar clearly clashes and inverts society’s calendar… but then again, that’s what Jesus was about!  He didn’t celebrate the Sabbath how people thought He should, and He didn’t minister according to other people’s schedule.  Our counter-cultural calendar reminds us that being a Christian means living in this world, yet not being completely in sync with it.

Eastertide challenges us to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus for 40 days and nights, all the way Pentecost on May 27^th!  God is ordering you to keep on partying!  That might sound frivolous and unspiritual, but celebrating what God has done in this world and in your life for 40 days is an enormous spiritual challenge!  To sustain our celebration, to continue singing praises to God, and to keep on partying can be even more challenging than any Lenten discipline we might have practiced.  So it may be counter-cultural to keep dancing and singing about Easter long after all the merchandise is gone our neighbors are already decorating for the 4^th of July, but this is our joy and our challenge as Christians in this world.