12.2.07 The Power of the Calendar
WESTMINSTER PULPIT
The Rev. Dr. David Thompson
December 2, 2007 “The Calendar: Trap or Freedom?”
Have you ever thought what the world would be like without Christmas—no December 23rd, Christmas Eve and December the 25th? One member of a church I knew missed the Christmas Eve service because she got the time wrong. When she got to church the service was over. She said, “I felt so cheated. I was so looking forward to it. I went over to Starbucks for a hot chocolate, but I was really sad and I got mad at myself.”
I know some wives and husbands who get really upset when their spouse forgets their anniversary. Have you ever done that and then felt really bad? It’s too late and you can’t make it up! Perhaps you had a birthday and no one remembered.
Have you ever really thought about the power of the calendar? Early people on this planet did not have to have calendars. They did not celebrate birthdays or anniversaries. They could not remember exactly when people died or were born. Nobody kept an exact track of time. For them there was no Christmas, no Easter.
They did watch the birds migrate and disappear. They watched the great buffalo herds come northward in the summer and go south in the winter. People didn’t own property as such. They had winter camps that could be moved or summer camps that could be taken up at short notice if threatened. They too followed the sun. They were not into agriculture or into settling into one place.
But when people began to settle the land they began to create for themselves much more sophisticated methods for reckoning time. They shifted from the seasons, winter, summer, fall and spring and the coming of the birds to the sun as a means of reckoning time. The Egyptians, the Jews, the Aztecs and Mayans, all calculated remarkable calendars based on the sun’s movement. The Jewish calendar is still in use today as is the lunar calendar in Islam.
The Jewish people composed Psalms and used a passage from Deuteronomy for the Jewish Harvest Festival which occurred after the crops were taken in. They also combined it with Passover. Their New Year began much earlier than ours. We place ours just after the winter solstice at one of the lowest periods of light during the solar year.
It’s likely that the Jewish people picked up a consciousness of the calendar in Egypt and tied it to the memory of the flight from Egypt. Later in history they fixed the Passover date to be at the same time as the full moon. The Christians and Jews used to celebrate Easter at the same time as Passover. The Emperor Constantine decided to change all that.
He wrote: “It appears an unworthy thing that in the celebration of this most Holy feast we should follow the practice of the Jews… for we have it in our power, if we abandon their custom, to prolong the due observance of this ordinance to future ages.”
So he passed a law decreeing that, “Easter be celebrated on the Sunday following the full moon which coincides with or falls next after the vernal equinox.” He also decreed that, “Sunday is a day of rest for everyone in society, except farmers who have to tend their animals.”
Pope Gregory decided that Christmas should fall on the winter solstice because that is when the pagans celebrated their nature festivals. The Christian festival won out—the pagan festival only barely survives in some older memories of the Yule Log and the Boar’s Head which used to be buried in a field to produce fertility.
Now why were Constantine and Pope Gregory so anxious to influence the calendar? Because they knew its power. The calendar is how we remember and celebrate everything.
I believe that Christ’s birth and death would have fallen from the common memory of ordinary people long ago without the help of the calendar. Every year Christ’s story is told and retold at Christmas and Easter. The calendar is a source of great power over the world. It is, at the same time, a great trap or a great freedom.
How is it a trap? All our sad and tragic memories are locked in the past but we remember them by using the calendar.
“My husband died at Christmas!” says the widow bitterly. “My wife died on Mother’s day, can you believe it?” says the widower. So every time Christmas and Mother’s Day roll around they remember, along with the birthdays and the anniversaries… For many people these are dark days, even if the sun is shining with all its might!
On Monday many of us go to work and it’s a downer. It is the beginning of the drag. At the end of the week we say, “Thank God it’s Friday!” I sometimes wonder what would happen if we changed our attitude to Monday and thought of it as Friday, whether that would change our experience of the day?
For many students across the world Christmas means the end of part of the academic year and it’s all about exams, term papers, pressure!
For merchants Christmas time can be great. Black Friday opens the season and its Advent in the stores, the first and second coming of the Almighty SHOPPER! But the employees in these stores frequently get run ragged and customers rarely enjoy the Christmas rush and the cash register line ups.
For me the greatest trap of the calendar is that we use it to celebrate pain. I have come to believe that it can be rather unhealthy to remember the actual day when someone died. How does that help us, particularly if the memory is tragic? Perhaps you have seen the movie “Message in a bottle”. The widower is so caught up in his wife’s death that he can hardly go on. Everything reminds him of her and he can’t even allow her things to be moved. He is classically stuck.
I have watched people torture themselves. They remember every year, the day their spouse committed suicide, the day their daughter slammed into an abutment, the day their dad had a heart attack. This is a very natural thing to do. I did it myself for years because my father died on Mother’s day. For years I was sad on that day until I decided to return it to mothers. The early societies were free from all that. They had no means to remember an actual day and I believe that they were happier for it.
So let’s remember that the calendar is a game we play with ourselves, April does not return, the season does. And with climate change the season is moving on us. April is not known to the sun, or the birds or the animals. It’s a human creation. Each period of sunlight and darkness is due to the turning of the earth. The seasons are the changing of the path of the earth around the sun. But time moves ever forward. It is always new. The past never comes back so when we say that the 15th of August is the day when my son died that is not really true because time moves on and each day is new. The death was a onetime event.
Some of us dread our birthdays. We get all upset, just before, because we think that we are getting older. And we are so funny about revealing our age. After 39 many of us are reluctant to tell our age, but watch out for a sea change when we get over 80. We become special the older we get and so it should be! Here is the paradox. At first the calendar is a trap—then a freedom!
Let’s look at how the calendar might free us. The Christian calendar can be used to celebrate positive memories! Why did the ancient Jews remember Passover? Because that is when they were freed from slavery. They celebrate Purim in the same way when Esther freed her people from Haman. In the feast of Purim in the synagogue the congregation applauds when certain parts are read. Why did the ancient Jews celebrate the Harvest Festival? Because that is when they wanted to thank God because they were so grateful! Gratitude always heals us to our core. The ancient Jews knew that.
The pagans celebrated the winter solstice because it that was the darkest shortest day of the year and so they made a conscious decision to put their troubles behind them and celebrate the returning sun with a great twelve day feast!
In the modern day when it was discovered that the greatest number of suicides took place in March, governments and schools decided to create a March break to permit families to get away together. Now that is using the calendar positively!
Under the old Christian calendar the church laid aside from work, 52 Sundays, ninety rest days and thirty eight holidays. It would have been very interesting to live in those days. They remembered the Saints on those days. They were joyful days. Even lent was a slow build up of joy. Sure there was denial, fasting, giving things up, but it was a great reenactment of the Divine drama of Christ. Good Friday and Maundy Thursday were to allow us to plumb the depths of the love that died to rescue us from ourselves. Then came glorious Easter, with enormous excitement. Here Russia led the way.
At midnight Holy Saturday the greatest bell in all Russia sounded in the Tower of Ivan. All across Russia bell ringers were stationed listening. As Ivan was rung, the next closest church rang its bells until finally all the bells of Russia were ringing in Easter. People were up all night celebrating, feasting, and dancing having the greatest time. You can read about it all in Susan Massey’s book on old Russia.
One of the great things about the calendar feast days is that it is a form of institutionalized rebellion against continuous working. Nobody has to work on Christmas Day except emergency workers, because it’s Christmas!
Our bodies all have natural clocks within them that reflect the sun and stars and moon rhythms. The full moon affects people. Ask any policeperson or mental health worker. The menstrual cycle is the same time period as the moon. Is that a coincidence? All of nature follows this rhythm which is why global climate change is so alarming…
All the old calendars followed these natural rhythms. Have you ever asked yourself why the Jewish people have remained so distinct as a people over the centuries? Joshua Monoach writes: “The soul of Israel, its religion and its customs is anchored in its time. Replacing its natural religious time by the time of others is suicidal for a distinct and independent people.”
We Christians are also distinct and independent as people. Sunday is our day. As a rest day it is largely lost to us because so many of us have to work on that day. The twelve days of Christmas are ours. The forty days of Lent are ours. Advent is ours and today is the first Sunday of Advent. Ash Wednesday is ours. Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are ours. Easter is ours and properly remembered with its ancient roots it can be seen as the renewal time of spring as well as the Spring of Souls. I love the old Hymn, “Tis the Spring of Souls today!” referring to Easter with its origins in Eostre. Ascension Day is ours. Pentecost is ours. Harvest festival Thanksgiving is part of the Judaic Christian tradition and also reaches back to the time when we become agriculturalists. It is a time for gratitude and I am so glad that in these United States we celebrate Thanksgiving as a nation in every home. This is the power of the calendar and it is immense!
The Christian calendar reminds us that God is for us, that no matter what we do God forgives and pardons us and frees us and that we have every reason to celebrate those truths on special days. I believe that despite our problems the Christian calendar reminds us as humans that God is glad that God made us in God’s image. God believes that the human experiment is worthwhile or God would not have brought us into being. God acts in human history and the calendar can celebrate those mighty acts—the deliverance from Egypt, the coming of the Messiah Emmanuel, “God with us” on whose shoulders the government will one day rest according to Isaiah.
The great days of the Christian year remind us not to despair when we get sick, not to worry when we get old, for there is a plan which supports us—underneath us all are the Everlasting Arms. There is purpose in everything.
Westminster is an outpost of faith of a much Greater Reality. But as an outpost of that Divine Kingdom for which we pray every week in our Lord’s Prayer we are to pray that the divine will, be done on earth as it is in Heaven. That is here in Westminster. We are to enact the Kingdom of Grace and acceptance and celebration right here. No other church is more important than Westminster. All are faithful churches who ask “what would Jesus do in this situation?” and then do it! We are all outposts who are to living out the Kingdom of peace forgiveness and Grace.
So I believe that God want us to use the calendar well. We as Christians live in joyful hope, not negative tracking of days of sorrow in the year. I am so glad I gave Mother’s Day back to mothers. Now I can get into it with them and celebrate the day and mothers everywhere. I believe that the church calendar is part of God’s plan to protect us from the negative forces that can crush the heart out of us. And that its calendar is part of the mission of the church—ENCOURAGEMENT!
Easter is a great roar of joy as C. S. Lewis picks up in his Lion Aslan who is symbolic of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah who has prevailed over death bringing hope on the other side of despair. What a great story to celebrate in the calendar! Advent is the story of the first coming of the man of Nazareth and a reminder that one day he will come again. It’s a promise. Jesus said of this day, “No man knows the day nor the hour when the Son of man shall come, not the Son only the Father.”
Advent leads naturally into the birthing of the Historical Jesus, a man who as a man changed the world forever for the better. What this world would have been like without him I shudder to think. But like yeast in a lump of dough he leavens the world with hope and grace and a deep incomparable joy. It is the joy of the One who made all things whom to know is life eternal. “For the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof and all they who dwell therein.”
Should we not celebrate that in the calendar and let it free us to come into the kindness and joy of who created us all? Happy Advent!
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