It’s a good argument that goes something like this:

“Easter is a Pagan Holiday, based on the lunar calendar and named after Pagan goddess. Christians are hypocritical for celebrating it.

There is another way of looking at it:

Christmas and Easter are two of the most successful missionary endeavors in history.

In 601 BC, Pope Gregory wrote a letter to missionaries in Brittain suggesting that they use existing Pagan holidays to celebrate the stories of Christian martyrs. I realize there are a lot of problems with this, and many un-Christ-like practices slipped through that may have caused more damage than good. But the idea itself is pure, incarnational theology at it’s best.

All hope in Christ is based on the idea that “God became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” The eternal and unknowable started wearing clothes, eating fish and walking down our streets. He used our language to teach us who he is. The church should look differently everywhere, use local customs and holidays to communicate the story of Jesus in a specific time and place.

What Pagan practices are all around you, waiting to be used to retell the story of Jesus?

The post In Defense of Churches Celebrating Pagan Holidays appeared first on Chris Morton.

The post It’s Easter Sunday! N.T. Wright Breaks it Down. appeared first on Chris Morton.

1.  We give things up for Lent because it leads us to Easter.  Rather than indulging in what me missed during our fast, we seek to find this small part of our life resurrected.  We give up what controls us through Lent so we can be free of it come Easter.

2.  I failed at Lent, in a deep fundamental way.  Posting on this site, Facebook and elsewhere what I had given up is a direct contradiction of Christ’s words on fasting.  This cheapened my fast and misled others.  My apologies.

The post Failing at Lent appeared first on Chris Morton.

“The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.”

— N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)

The post The Point of Resurrection appeared first on Chris Morton.

The post An Easter Song appeared first on Chris Morton.