Day of the Lord (but come ON!)

Easter Sunday is a really fascinating holiday, when you think about it. Here we are, celebrating the life, death, and resurrection of a man from 2000 years ago who happened to feed some people and spread something we call the Gospel. And he got famous from it and now has the largest "cult" following in the world, myself included. But there is something fascinating about the way Protestants view church compared to other sects, such as Catholicism and Greek Orthodox.

We believe in time limits for church. As hypocritical as that sounds, we like for our services to be a small part of our Sunday and our thinking about God and Jesus to be a larger part of our life. I don't feel any better when I'm in church for three hours versus when I'm in church for one. As a matter of fact I usually feel worse, thinking about how much I would rather be outside appreciating what God is offering us. Especially Methodists and Presybeterians tend to feel the same way. We would rather be doing other things with our WEdnesday nights nad Friday afternoons. Not to say taht there aren't plenty of people who spend their time doing all sorts of church related activities all the time. I'm just saying that for me, I can find plenty of ways to share in Jesus' love without being all up in his place.

Sunday morning was no exception. Generally the Easter service is pretty predictable. There are the traditional Easter hymns, a sermon about Jesus rising from his tomb, the children get candy and you wear a pretty hat. But yesterday the preacher at my grandmother's church added in Holy Communion. I would hav ethought that in order ot do that you would cut something out in consideration of all the people working on a large meal for their families in the afternoon. Yes, we understand that Jesus broke bread with his disciples before his crucifixtion, but he did only have 12 and in that church we had about 200 people. So it added almost forty-five minutes to a long enough Easter service and we were out late, thus eating late, thus I didn't ge tto spend much time with the family because I had to fly back to NYC. And what more would you like to know?

So i'ts made me reconsider my feelings about religion. I'm very religious, of course a G.D. liberal kind of religious, but religious all the same. I try to do as many good th ings for other people as I can. I even gave up time during Lent to do something good out of my way good every day for someone and found it so rewarding I think I'm going to keep it up.