I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth. ~Reinhold Niebuhr

Happy Bunny Day! My brother attends a church that does not celebrate Easter, so my wife and I were discussing the origins of the holiday with him yesterday at Cracker Barrel. Then we got home and lo and behold, Daniel and Heather posted a great article about this very issue. You have to see the picture, it’s priceless. Anyways, I began writing a comment and decided to turn it into a post.

Getting into the historical origins of Easter would be tedious, and anyone with a little motivation can do this him or herself. Suffice it to say that for quite some time in history Christians were competing with pagans over the Spring Equinox, with the former celebrating Christ’s resurrection and the latter awaiting the annual rebirth of Attis (one of many names used for Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, etc.).

From a cultural standpoint, Christians won. But the origin of the holiday was for the most part pagan.

Easter falls close to Passover (which falls on the Christian holiday ‘Maundy Thursday’ this year), so the Judeo-Christian connection is seen more clearly – but in many cases the connection is blurred. Of course historically the Church has understood that the Last Supper was a Passover (Seder) meal, and thus Christ would have been crucified the following day and rose again three days later. Whether this was a Sunday is irrelevant and could be argued in several directions for hours.

Christmas and Easter remain the two most celebrated Christian holidays, yet it is clear that they are really just cultural fads. Slavoj Zizek in his book The Puppet and the Dwarf points out:

When it comes to religion … we no longer “really believe” today, we just follow (some) religious rituals and mores as part of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (nonbelieving Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition,” etc.). “I don’t really believe in it, it’s just part of my culture” effectively seems to be the most predominant mode of the disavowed/displaced belief characteristic of our times. What is a cultural lifestyle, if not the fact that, although we don’t believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house, and even in public places, every December? Perhaps, then, the “nonfundamentalist” notion of “culture” as distinguished from “real” religion, art, and so on, is in its very core the name for the field of disowned/impersonal beliefs – “culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without “taking them seriously.”

This holds true for a majority of Americans’ spirituality. They don’t really believe all of this Jesus stuff, they just go to church two days out of the year because it is a part of their culture. True beliefs alter our worldview, and worldview change results in new thinking patterns and behavioral modification. None of this occurs in most of the folks who attend a church service on Christmas and/or Easter.

Granted, some do genuinely celebrate Christ’s birth and resurrection on these days – but shouldn’t we thank God for His incarnation and resurrection daily? It seems to me that people are clinging to vain traditions of men and stubbornly attaching an ideal belief system to it. WAKE UP! This is a post-Christian culture and few really live out the reason for the seasons the other 363 days of the year!

My wife and I like Easter because it is fun watching kids get eggs, because we recognize that the pagan notions have been divorced from the cultural practices. We celebrate Christmas because it is a great time with family, and we try to avoid the true reasons for the season: materialism and greed. But to say we focus on the idealistic neo-Christian foci on these days would be lying. Maybe I’m a weak Christian, but it seems to me that this is a no-brainer: these holidays have hardly anything to do with Jesus Christ – just like they have hardly anything to do with fertility and pagan goddess worship. If you agree with the latter I cannot conceive how you can deny the former. Either way you celebrate it, you must divorce it from one of its main cultural contexts. It’s like drinking a strawberry-banana milkshake, but saying you are only focusing on the bananas so that’s all that you ingest. Of course you get both because they are blended, but naive folks for years have been trying to “have their cake and eat it too” when it comes to Easter and our post-Christian culture.

I have no problem celebrating it, but I do so for cultural reasons (and so do you if you’re honest). My wife and I won’t be trying to figure out how to reconcile bunnies with the cross – we can’t. We understand that the holiday is instituted by man and we enjoy it in the freedom we have in Christ. Of course we also celebrate Christ’s resurrection, but only because we try to do this EVERY day! So in conclusion, have a happy bunny day – and remember Christ’s miraculous incarnation and resurrection EVERY day of the year. And then, LIVE IN THOSE TRUTHS.

I’ve been interacting with @karyoberbrunner on Twitter, and he’s been telling me about his great new book entitled The Fine Line: Re-envisioning the Gap between Christ and Culture.

From the Back Cover:
What Does It Mean to Be in the World but Not of It?
The Answer May Surprise You.

Christ-followers are supposed to be the most liberated people ever to walk the face of the earth—with a message powerful enough to cause the dead to rise and the blind to see. We’re supposed to have God living inside of us. We’re supposed to know how to be in the world but not of it.

Does that describe your life?

Author Kary Oberbrunner suspects the answer is no, but not because you aren’t passionate about Christ. Rather, it’s because the church has been ripped apart and reassembled into two main camps that, at best, casually tolerate each other.

The first camp separates itself from people, society, and culture for the main purpose of remaining unstained by the world. While the second camp conforms itself to the ideals, philosophies, and goals of the world in an attempt to be all things to all people.

So what’s the alternative? A growing number of people believe in a different way and a different world. They are transformists. And they have the power to change the world.

Care to join them?

This short four-minute video does a great job communicating what the book is about, I recommend you watch it.

The Fine Line Extended Version (HD) from josh franer on Vimeo.

Click the link below to order your copy!

Questions to Ponder:

• Is it hard to walk the “fine line” between being a separatist or being immersed in the culture?
• Is it hard to be relevant if one is not somewhat immersed in the culture?
• How are we to be “in the world but not of it?” What does that mean to you?