Or, why World Book Day doesn’t need to be celebrated in church.
To be fair, I’m not sure anyone was doing this. I did walk home from a friend’s house late the night before World Book Day and see a harassed looking mother earnestly spray painting a child’s white t-shirt, presumably for some part in her child’s costume. I couldn’t figure out who they were going as.
We love calendars. We love special days. The proof of this is easy to see, the calendar proliferates with them and suddenly everyone on the socials is celebrating something because someone somewhere decided that we should have a day to celebrate it. This brings out my most curmudgeonly side, I must admit.
I think our love for this is because we need the year to have markers, we need feasts days and structure. In my country most of us live so far from the land that the agrarian calendar has no real purchase on us, and the Christian calendar we used to run on has been hollowed out by a post-Christian secularism and is being worn by it as a macabre skin-suit. What else did you think the Easter Bunny was?
It is, admittedly, more complicated than that. I am sympathetic to Tom Holland’s thesis that many of the forms of secularism we’ve experienced in the last few decades are best described as Christian heresies. It’s certainly true that we live in a world that’s distinctively post-Christian rather than having returned to the paganisms that were rife across western Europe before our forebears brought the gospel to this windy island I live on at the edge of the world.
Against new-fangled calendars
Your church doesn’t need to celebrate, or even mention, International Women’s Day, for example. I’m not convinced ‘International Women’s Day’ is a societally useful thing either, but that’s another argument. We already have a number of ways of celebrating the inherent goodness of womanhood; it’s a motif that’s all across the scriptures. We should just preach them. It’s inevitable that in Advent you will talk about the protoevangelium of Genesis 3, with its implicit delight in the ‘woman’ who will birth the serpent-crusher. We have a rich theology of sex that doesn’t need us to take the world’s cues. Or, we should have, and if we don’t the resources are there in the wider tradition for us to appropriate.
Your church doesn’t need to celebrate Father’s Day or Mother’s Day for much the same reason. Mothering Sunday has some, very recent, Christian roots, but the mother in question is the church. Fatherhood and Motherhood are, again, deeply Christian concepts.
You don’t need to celebrate Remembrance Sunday, which—especially in the last couple of decades—has become more politically charged than it used to be. Your people may wish to join in a community act of Remembrance, you may even wish to yourself, but it isn’t something we need to do in church on a Sunday. I did once experience an act of remembrance on a Sunday while we took the Lord’s Supper and it really did seem like the bread and cup were about remembering dead British soldiers. Christian theology has richer and stronger ways to remember the dead, and the fallen, and salvific sacrifice. Those we do every Sunday.
Your church doesn’t need the accoutrements of a secular calendar. We have our own.
Inventing your own
Now, some churches love a calendar so much that we call everything we do SOMETHING SUNDAY so as to make it clear it’s an ‘event’ and special. Vision Sunday and Giving Sunday and Kids Sunday and a thousand others. I’m objecting to the nomenclature rather than to what’s done on these days, much of which is good Christian worship.
Inventing your own is like noticing that there’s a problem with the secular versions and thinking, ‘I know, we should put a Christian gloss on this weird thing we found that the culture does’ without realising that what we’re rejecting is a secular gloss on something that was ours in the first place. Time itself is Christian, that’s Genesis 1.
I don’t think uncritical use of the old Christian calendar is necessarily required. Plenty of Protestants object to Lent for good reasons, for example. I do think the calendar can be creatively retrieved within our own frameworks.
However, start with the ones that people in the culture celebrate. Not because they’ve got it right, but because we’re able to take them back to the roots of what they’re celebrating. Resist putting a Christian gloss on secular holidays, and instead try to take the secular gloss off Christian ones. Do Christmas and Easter in as big a way as you can. Advent is probably celebrated so try to bring the darkness back in. In the UK lots of people who aren’t religious keep Lent, so there are opportunities to stop giving up chocolate and start repenting of our sin.
My personal battle would be to add back in the other two big feasts: Ascension and Pentecost. Even if all you do is preach on them every year. These don’t have secular echoes (well, factory fortnight still exists in some places) but they’re an annual opportunity to celebrate specific aspects of Jesus work for us that we might otherwise miss. I don’t think I’ve ever heard preaching on the ascension of Jesus, or his ongoing session for us. That’s odd, right?
What’s the action here
When you feel like you need to trot out a post for such and such because its World Something Week on your socials, don’t. Post about God and his church instead.
More importantly, when you feel like you need to mention that on Sunday, nine times out of ten, don’t. If it’s in your preaching, relevant to the passage and let’s you de/reconstruct the ideas you’re talking about, then it could be worth it, but it’s probably gimmicky. Just preach the text in and out of season.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
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