Feasts and Festivals

One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. – Romans. 14:5

Of the Worship of Saints they teach that the memory of saints may be set before us, that we may follow their faith and good works, according to our calling – Augsburg Confession Article 21

Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. – Colossians. 2:16-17

Christians have been arguing about calendars since Apostolic times. And those arguments never really stopped. Hence the two opening quotes. And when you argue about calendars you are arguing about piety, practice and remembrance. You are arguing about what people think is important. Many such arguments can simply be settled “you respect yours, I respect mine.” You can hear that argument in the Apostle Paul. But calendar arguments, because it is hard to keep your own calendar, often become group defining. “We are going to remember this date.”

The very first of those definitional dates would be over the Sabbath. The Apostles, being Jews, kept the Sabbath, on Saturday. They then met together on “the Lord’s Day” or Sunday, the day of resurrection. For example Paul is searching for the local Jewish gathering “on the Sabbath day” (Acts 16:13), but at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 there is no mention of telling the gentiles to keep the Sabbath. And by the time of John’s visions in Revelation, they come to him as “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day (Revelation 1:10).” You can hear those arguments in that third quote at the start. Paul telling his gentile audiences that Sabbaths are a shadow of the substance of Christ. Meeting on Sunday is good and proper.

I’m talking about Calendars for two reasons. The first is that this Sunday gets a special name – St. Michael and All Angels. The church calendar that we follow has a general structure – the large seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost. For half the year we follow the life of Christ, and for the other half we emphasize the life in the Spirit. We gather on the “the Lord’s Day”. We are the people of the resurrection. We remember that substance of Christ weekly. Within that general calendar there the “feasts and festivals.” The actual dates never change. All Saints is always November 1^st. But some of them, like All Saints, we move their observance to the nearest Sunday. We have deemed their witness and memory too important to skip, yet we do not feel compelled to gather on the odd Tuesday Nov 1^st. Most of those festivals we observe occasionally, which means when their day falls on a Sunday naturally, so due to leap years every 6-14 years. St. Michael and all Angels is one of those days. It is always September 29^th. When September 29^th is a Sunday, we remember the angels. There are also some feasts that honestly, we just don’t remember. When I served St. Mark’s in West Henrietta, I tried to observe April 25^th, the feast day of St. Mark. At Mt. Zion there is no such special connection.

And that gets into the second reason I’m talking about calendars. I tend to think that our everyday lives and most of what takes place in them is designed to flatten everything. The World does this in two ways. If anyone saw the original Pixar Incredibles movie, it has one of the most subversive lines I can remember. “And when everyone is super, no one is.” There is something about our age that reacts against “the memory of the saints being set before us.” Our world wants equality or even equity. The acknowledgement that someone – a saint – lived it better is subversive. So it levels all days, and days it can’t level it elevates everything to obscure the remembrance of the saint. But I just don’t think that is either reality or the needs of true humanity.

We need things to strive for. Every Olympic athlete ponders how can I break the world record. The memory of the saints is so that we may follow their faith and good works. We need feast days like we need fast days, and ordinary time (another name for the season of Pentecost). Because life is not flat. We need days to remember St. Michael and the angels, because we need to ponder that creation includes “things visible and invisible”. And that those invisible things do impact our existence. When the world wants to flatten everything, the Christian needs to hear the distant triumph song. There are things the world wants us to forget that we need to remember.

Ebbs and Flows

“One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. (Rom. 14:5 ESV)”

Paul in that extended passage of Romans puts things like how you mark time into the realm of Christian Freedom. God neither demands days to be observed of the Christian, nor does he scorn such piety. The church in most times and places found setting aside certain days to be a healthy piety. We live in the United States, which is largely the creation of the Reformed strains of Christianity (Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist, Baptist). And the Reformed strains were the highwater mark of Reformation iconoclasm, the destruction of the icons or any other representational form, like a church year. The Pilgrims would not have even marked Christmas. The best construction on that is their assertion that every Sunday is Easter Sunday. The week started on the LORD’s Day. When that week to week same framework hits industrial capitalism you get how we mark time. Monday starts the week. Monday to Friday are for work with Saturday and Sunday being the weekend for play.

The Christendom that inspired the Church Calendar marked time in a different way. It didn’t run in machine like precision. It ebbed and flowed, hurried and then waited. We move feasts – like All Saints – to the nearest Sunday after as a concession to the industrial-Reformed way. But we should recognize what this does. We are moving the things of God, at least those that we supposedly are convinced in our own minds are important to piety, to satisfy the things of man. We should not be surprised then when other things insert themselves between what we say we are convinced of and our personal piety. We neither have a Church calendar that affords us days of holy obligation which we take off from work to worship God, nor do we have the every Sunday is Easter piety of the Pilgrims. We have 5 days of work and 2 days of play. Worship doesn’t fit easily in that.

One of the religious effects of observing a Holy Day on the nearest Sunday is that the assigned texts for that Sunday get erased from ever being heard. The first letter that Paul ever wrote – 1 Thessalonians – is one of those that gets erased. The Sunday prior to Reformation Sunday we read the opening, but the next two weeks get erased for the fixed Reformation and All Saints texts. In Sunday Bible study we have continued with the Thessalonians reading. There are three short observations that I feel might be good to hear.

“So as always to fill up the measure of their sins…” (1 Thessalonians 2:16)

There are two other such mentions of filling up sins in the bible. Genesis 15:16 where Abraham is told of 400 years of slavery in Egypt so that the sin of the Canaanites would be full. Daniel 8:3, in reference to the final empire of this world. This world has two streams. The streams of the river of life which the children of God have washed themselves receiving forgiveness, and the stream of those sins collected until the day of the LORD. Part of Paul’s message to the Thessalonians is his thankfulness that “you received the Word of God.” This causes trouble in this world, but it is because you are being prepared for eternity.

“For you are our glory and joy.” (1 Thessalonians 2:20)

This is Paul’s expression toward the Thessalonians. Those people that he has instructed in the faith are both his glory and his joy. Jesus would tell the apostles that “they would sit on thrones judging the tribes of Israel (Matthew 19:28).” The glory and joy that Paul is talking about is that here is his tribe. On All Saints we see the 144,000 in their tribal ranks. This is in Paul’s mind. What is also in Paul’s mind is that these Thessalonians have imitated him in this. They have “become an example to all the believers of Macedonia and Achaia (1 Thessalonians 1:7).” The faith is received and spread by discipleship. It is rarely learned mystically like Paul, but it is taught.

“For this is the will of God, your sanctification…(1 Thessalonians 4:3)”

Paul’s metaphor for sanctification is walking. There is a way that we should walk. It is a walking in the footsteps of Jesus which he has laid out for us (Eph 2:10). It is a walking that is pleasing to God and which they learned from Paul (1Thess 4:1-2). You have heard and believed the Word of God and so have been justified in Christ. Now walk in His way. Walk toward your glory and joy.

Getting Caught Up – A Very Real Event

Sermon Text: Luke 2:21 and Church Calendar festival The Circumcision and Naming of Jesus
Full Text of Sermon

There were a bunch of things that were not functioning fully this past week. This post is for completeness.

If there is one thing that I wish as a preacher I could ensure that people get is that the life of Jesus is not some pious and sentimental myth. Its not just a well told story. If that is what you think, you either haven’t read it or them, or you just don’t want to, or you are satisfied with something much less than what is on offer. The foundation that the apostles proclaimed was this was truth. The core of that being that Jesus is Lord.

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