BLOG 4/14/14. THE SHAMELESS COMMODIFICATION OF EASTER

BLOG 4/14/14. THE SHAMELESS COMMODIFICATION OF EASTER

So many thought are swirling around in my head as I sit here in the midst of my fellow caffeine imbibers on the patio of Dancing Goats Coffee Shop. I am contemplating the whole of the Holy Week phenomenon, but my observation is that most of my fellows here on the patio have hardly given it a thought. If they are typical of most of their young generation they are engaged on their laptops searching out some information to assist them in their current project. Or, in Atlanta, maybe they are talking about the Dogwood Festival, or the Masters Golf Tournament, … but Holy Week is something ‘out there’ that some church people get all excited about, but it remains a non-factor in their lives.

Yet to get here to Dancing Goats, I had to drive down the road passing glitzy digital church signs, or large banners advertising all kinds of special activities, and inviting the passers-by to join them for Easter. I read advertisements for parades of animals, and people with palm branches on Palm Sunday, or special concerts calculated to attract folk into their meetings … and the suspicion comes into my mind that maybe these ‘churches’ are not so much passionate about the Cross and the Easter gospel …  as about recruiting new members to shore-up their diminishing and forgetful memberships.

Another thought goes through my mind: that immediately after the so-called ‘triumphal entry’ of Jesus into Jerusalem on that Sunday before the Jewish Passover, he went to the temple itself and proceed to overthrow the tables of the money-changers, and to invoke against those who had made his Father’s house of prayer into a place for dishonest money-changers, and the profanation of what is holy.

It makes me long again for the simplicity of my Reformation and Puritan forbearers, who, early on, steadfastly refused the co-opting of both the celebration of the incarnation (Christ’s birth), and of Christ’s passion and death by the pagan culture, which had its own holidays celebrating the winter solstice and the spring equinox, which then resulted in a ‘Christianized’ version of those pagan celebrations, which we now observe as Christmas and Easter. My forbearers were most passionate in holding that every Sabbath was a celebration of Christ’s incarnation, and of his passion, death, and resurrection. The implications of those two events speaks to the deepest longings of the human heart, … but it all gets lost in the ‘hoopla’ that they have taken on.Then, that reminded me again of Annie Dillard’s insightful comments about it all: “Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?… On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church. We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares, they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return” (from Teaching a Stone to Talk, pp. 40-41).

For my fellow connoisseurs of good coffee, I could wish for those authentic expressions of thrilling news of God’s New Creation in Christ, which would speaks to the deepest longings of their lives, of acceptance by God demonstrated on the Cross, of a radical and transformational hope turned loose in the world by the resurrection—where death is no longer the enemy. Where the transforming grace and love of God in Christ, and for whom every day is Christmas and every day is Easter. Hey! Maybe we could plant a vital church here at Dancing Goats! Now there’s an idea.

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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