Luke 19 and the Wisdom of Reviewing Holy Days
Hallmark, Bunnies, and the Nature of Our Culture to Shape the Church's Practice
Howdy,I don’t ever get political in these Tuesday/Thursday devotionals and in case you were worried about it I am not going to start today. However, that does not mean I will not touch a third rail in this prayer and worship help given the time and the season we are in. Holidays and holy days (notice the connection in the words) are precious for reasons that often transcend the purposes for which they may have first been established. Church history is a series of ebbs and flows. Both in the growth and declension of the kingdom. There are moments when some things receive more attention than others. As I noted the explanation for that is often more complicated than we may want to admit. We live in evolving times and that goes for how we come to observe, or not observe, certain days more than others depending on a calendar.
Ever since the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there has been a concerted effort on behalf of marketers to take advantage of the natural order to push more product. For instance, many of the cultural identities that we associate with Christmas, a bearded, jolly, red-suited Santa Claus who looks like grandpa, were co-opted and reimagined by the Coca-Cola Company to sell more coke at the end of the year. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was created out of thin air by the department store Montgomery Ward. Who can think about February without candy and flowers? You can thank Richard Cadbury, a London-based confectioner, for that association.
Easter is no different. When you see a fluffy white hare this time of year you can give props to the Hallmark company. Did you know dyeing eggs as well as the activity of hiding and finding eggs was the conception of William Townley, the then CEO of the PAAS Dye Company? He used eggs (bunnies of course don’t lay eggs) because in traditional German Catholic towns eggs were banned from being eaten during Lent. There were plenty of them to go around. Townley went so far as to name his company PAAS to tie-in his invention with the German custom of Passen to attempt to show his customers that he wanted to help them celebrate their festival, while purchasing his product of course. Why do I mention all of this? Seems killjoyish.
