Day 36 - Easter semantics

The National Trust Easter egg hunt has apparently been demoted to an egg hunt this year.  ( If you get the chance to go to one you should - we went a couple of years ago and the kids came home with bucket loads of chocolate 😋 )   There has been the usual furore - even down to the Prime Minister appearing on the news to say that Easter should remain Easter and that it is ridiculous to try to remove that word from this time of year.    And every year at Christmas we get the same old social media posts and news items trotted out about Winterval and Happy Holidays instead of Christ being associated with the season.

I suppose there are two arguments to be made.   One is that there is a sure and steady erosion of anything Christian in our western societies.  We bend over backwards to accommodate other religions and to be politically correct and yet we dont fight too hard for our own corner and allow secularism to push us out of the picture.   The second is that Easter and Christmas are both festivals which have been hijacked by the world anyway - getting upset about the ' branding' is missing the point.  We should be far more concerned with preaching the gospel and reaching the lost than we are about stressing that Coca Cola are wishing us Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas.   I confess I have some sympathy with both sides.  I have no wish to see Easter and Christmas vanish from our culture as national holidays and opportunities for the christian church to have a platform.   Equally I am not particularly minded to jump up and down and shout about the National Trust or Cadbury when they hit the news like they have this week.

It is sad that Lent has become about dieting,  Easter has become a chocolate-fest and Christmas is a debt fuelled spending marathon  - except that it hasnt.  Not in our house.   In our house we don't really talk about Lent.  We will go to church on Good Friday and Easter Sunday and will probably attend the baptisms on Easter Sunday evening.  We shall give the boys Easter eggs , but they will understand that we are celebrating the greatest event in the history of the world and that a bit of chocolate is a good way to do that.  At Christmas time we talk alot as a family about the giving of gifts and not just the getting of them.  We try to think about those less fortunate than ourselves and to remember that we are celebrating Jesus's birthday.   I like to think that we pick some of the nice things out of the ' culture' of the Christian festivals we celebrate.   But we take it deeper..... as Im sure most of you do too.   

Every time a person is introduced to Jesus and comes to the amazing realisation that He took the punishment that was due to them and has swapped it for His eternal life, then Easter and Christmas suddenly move from being about chocolate and presents to being so much more.   We dont need to worry about corporations and marketing executives using or not using certain words to sell their products.  We just need to get out there and show people who Jesus is.   So that they can celebrate His birth and His victory over death first and foremost in their own lives  - the real Christmas and Easter happen every time someone receives Him as Lord.