Well … Easter’s Come and Gone for Another Year

I saw the season was coming to a close the other day when I went to Walmart. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me much. After all, isn’t Walmart a good indicator of the cultural climate?

But, aside from that, I noticed how the employees at the store were rearranging the aisles that had been set aside for items for Easter shopping You know – candy, Easter baskets, candy, plastic grass, candy, Easter themed toys, candy, etc. The shelves had become “picked over” and were becoming empty. Retailers try very hard to avoid empty shelves and as good a retailer, the Walmart employees were consolidating the remaining items to shelves closer to the main customer walkways for better visibility.

By now, the season is almost gone from view.

What Easter candy, baskets, etc are left in the stores are marked down to 50% and maybe even 75% off. Should we “stock-up” for next Easter.

And have our kids and grandkids begun to come down from the sugar high that accompanies the release of so much chocolate and candy in our homes? Probably so.

Stay with me for another moment or so.

I don’t mean this to be an entirely sarcastic rant on the heights of commercialism that has come to accompany this holiday.

Holiday? Or Holy Day? Or Both?

Maybe both?

I don’t remember when I first heard it but several years ago I heard a minister speak of “becoming an Easter people.” And just yesterday, I got an email that used that same phrase, “becoming an Easter people.”

Then there was my minister friend who said that growing up in the church he heard sin preached 51 Sundays a year and Easter/Resurrection preached one Sunday.

Is that the way we should expect it to be?

Maybe we can take a clue from not just the cultural trappings of the Easter season but pay some attention to the “Christian calendar.”

As that calendar takes us through the year it sets aside 50 days for Easter. Some have called it the “Great 50 Days of Easter.” The days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost are looked on as the season of Easter. A time to consider, explore and maybe even practice what Easter people might look like, might behave like and even what they might expect life to be life.

Is there life after Easter Sunday? Probably so.

If Lent has been so often for many a time to “give up” something, what can the Days of Easter be when we take up something to live into Easter Life?

Can I offer one example? “Red Letter Christians Wake Up.” This could come to you in email each day. It offers a Scripture, a brief thought, and a “Now Go and Do …” for your practice.

You can visit past offerings at https://us7.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=7bfda5ec6f398db1316a1543f&id=6be23fbaa7
And find a subscribe link on that same page.

Here is the “wake up” that came this past Monday –

“No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister.”

– 1 Juan 3:9-10

Oscar Romero, a martyr of the church’s struggle in El Salvador, wrote, “I do not tire of telling everyone, especially young people, who long for their people’s liberation, that I admire their social and political sensitivity, but it saddens me when they waste it by going on ways that are false. Let us, too, all take notice that the great leader of our liberation is the Lord’s Anointed One, who comes to announce good news to the poor, to give freedom to the captives, to give news of the missing, to give joy to so many homes in mourning, so that society may be renewed as in the sabbatical years of Israel.

Now Go and Do …
Today, recognize the ways of love of Jesus’ kingdom that you may participate as a faithful and devout resident in the space between a broken world and the coming kingdom of God.

charles
{ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est}


Comments

Well … Easter’s Come and Gone for Another Year — 1 Comment

  1. Charles, Easter has not come and gone. Easter is a season. While it might be over for Walmart (which I boycott), it is far from over for many of us.

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