Hello fellow educators welcome to podcast #90. Last year I published a podcast entitled "Celebrating Christmas and Easter." It has been one of my most commented podcasts so in light of the season I would like to re-podcast it this week. With Christmas holidays coming up I also want to recommend two very good movies to see on one of your days off, both are true stories and both keep very close to the actual events. The first is called "Blind Side."  This is the Michael Oher story about a homeless young man who attends a Christian School. Through the help and inspiration of a well off family he emerges into a good student and an extremely talented football player and college prospect. This movie shows what is possible when we allow our heart to reach out to someone in dire need. The second movie is "Invictus." This movie is based on a book I read last year called "Playing with the Enemy." I had gotten a hold of this book after my trip to South Africa and found the story, the history and the politics intriguing.  The movie is about how Nelson Mandela won his way into the hearts of the South African white population through his embrace of their national pastime, Rugby.  It is an important story that teaches how forgiveness, tolerance and amazing leadership can change the hearts of a nation. Both movies have some great football and rugby action and you will walk out of both movies inspired. There are a few times that expletives find their way into "Invictus". Blind Side is relatively clean throughout. Enjoy the holiday season. Here is Celebrating Christmas and Easter:

Why am I stewing you ask? It’s because this festival or holiday, (which comes from the idea holy day), is so completely lost on our culture. The big holidays, Christmas and Easter, can be brilliant sign posts to the magnificent history of how our faith won the day in Western culture. And yet, even many Christian educators get side tracked with our cultural compromises, such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Am I against giving gifts at Christmas or egg hunts at Easter? Not really, but these practices side track the message from the people that gain the most from annual celebrations, our children.

This idea of annual celebrations was a key method God gave to the Israelites for transferring their faith on to their children. In Lev 23:2 He says to Moses:

Speak to the Israelites and say to them: "These are my appointed feasts, the appointed feasts of the LORD, which you are to proclaim as sacred assemblies."

There were seven specific celebrations, each were established to keep the Jewish nation in remembrance of what God had done for them or of what He promised to do for them. The seven feasts were: Passover; Feast of Unleavened Bread; First Fruits; Pentecost, also called the Feast of Weeks; Feast of Trumpets; The Day of Atonement; Feast of Tabernacles. These celebrations were intended for the entire family to celebrate together. They were to separate themselves from the day to day tasks and prepare for the unique traditions that God had established for the event. In one case they spent an entire week in celebration. In several of the feasts they had a unique way of preparing food. In every case the festivals brought a vital truth or set of truths that they were to remember and prayfully embrace in their lives.

I don’t want you to get the wrong idea here. I am not advocating that we go back and try and re-establish these Hebrew festivals. First of all four of the feasts were made irrelevant by Christ’s atonement. The Passover, which places the blood of the Lamb on the doorpost, the Day of Atonement which, obviously represented the coming Saviour, the Feast of Unleavened Bread which many scholars point out is a precursor to Christian communion and the Feast of Pentecost, which was the day God poured out His Holy Spirit and birthed the Church.

Our school has many families and friends who are trying to go back and celebrate the Hebrew feasts and by in large reject the Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter because they also have some pagan origins. I say more about this in minute. Arguably, they are emphasizing a much more succinct Biblical basis for these celebrations. But, a Biblical basis for who, Christians or Hebrews? I think they are missing the point of these culture wide celebrations. Everybody participated and this kept a semblance of faith in the entire nation and it kept the most important truths front and center before the Hebrew people as a whole. The day of Atonement was inescapable to all people because the holy day itself was part of everyone’s annual calendar. I think our Christian brothers and sisters seeking a more sanctified experience than our secularized Christmas and Easter is admirable but unfortunately it doesn’t have the impact upon our culture and children that these holidays could have if celebrated well. People in western society just don’t get the feast of trumpets or unleavened bread and as I have pointed out, the fulfillment of most of these feast was fond the coming of Jesus.

So I am back to celebrating Christmas and Easter well. What does that mean? Before we really get to that I think it is important that we check our own emotional attachment to these events at the door. Let me explain. Every holiday I watch parents try to reproduce their nostalgic experiences in their children. They remember the joy and experiences they had and don’t want to lose that for their own children. I see this most at Halloween. They remember how much fun they had dressing up and then trick or treating.  Of course they forget how scared they were when facing some of the houses, older kids and the glorification of death, black magic and gratuitous horror.  The very day becomes an excuse for the baser elements of our society to parade them in full view. In the spirit of the early church I want redeem this day and begin to celebrate it as Reformation Day. Many Christians aren’t aware that this was the day Martin Luther nailed the 95 thesis to the door at the church in Wickenburg in 1517. This marks the beginning of the Protestant reformation. I do think it would be a struggle to get our Catholic brothers and sisters to approve of this holiday but anything would be better than Halloween. For the last 20 years my wife has organized our Church’s alternative event called family fun night. Amazingly, our kids and the hundreds of children and families that attend every year have created a new tradition. We have hot chocolate, hay rides, carnival games, dramas, the kids dress up in Bible characters, excellent gospel presentations and we hand each child a packed full candy bag at the end of the event. It has become our church’s biggest formal outreach of the year and we have seen entire families come to Christ. Hallelujah, it’s reformation day!

This illustrates an important reason why we need to fight for Christmas and Easter. Historically our Christian ancestors fought long and hard for these holidays and in both cases there were pagan celebrations that competed for the attention western culture. The early church immediately began celebrating Easter as an alternative to Jewish Passover. Because the church emerged from Hebrew culture there was an easy transition and the Christians used the holiday time to focus on Jesus as the fulfillment to Passover. But, as the church became more and more Gentile the early fathers found it necessary to distance themselves from the Jewish traditions. In the fourth century, Western culture reached a “tipping point” and Christianity become the dominate worldview. At the famous council of Nicaea, the council that hammered out the Churches position on the deity of Christ also dwelt with when Easter should be celebrated. The eastern and western churches used different calendars and had huge contentions about the right day to celebrate the resurrection. The church fathers agreed to compromise and celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (this is why Easter can move all over the calendar from year to year). There was another cultural problem the early church had to overcome. Many of the pagan religions in the Roman empire celebrated the coming of Spring as a time of fertility. The historian Bede ("The Venerable"), a late-seventh-century historian and scholar from Anglo-Saxon England, says Easter's name comes from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, associated with spring and fertility, and celebrated around the spring equinox. Somewhere, the early church adopted the same name to refer to the celebration of the resurrection. Thus, believers who are opposed to us celebrating Easter make the argument that the church compromised and blended the pagan with the Christian celebration. I partly agree that Easter, in particular does not have the cultural impact that early church intended. You don’t see as many images in our local mall of crosses and tombs than you do of bunnies and eggs. With the rise of neo-paganism through religions such as Wicca there is a new cultural imperative to go back to the pre-Christian ideas of this festival time. Last night we went to our Easter dinner hosted by a member of our extended family that has fully embraced the Wicca religion. When it came time to give thanks for the food, she insisted upon saying the prayer as she was the host of the dinner. She gave thanks first to a generic something out there (she was being polite and politically correct as possible, something I was thankful for because we would have had an issue giving thanks to the goddess she worships) then to the pig who gave his life, and finally to the salad that gave its leaves to us. I must admit it was the first time in my life I gave thanks to a salad. This illustrates the problem that the early church had, and thus, why it is hard for me to fault our ancestors for their compromise with the pagan celebration and calling it Easter.

Christmas also competes with Jewish Hanukkah and the pagan celebration of the Winter Solstice. The church compromised with the dates of Christmas in order to ensure that it fell close to the pagan observance and conveniently kept the same celebration time. Fortunately though, our culture can’t seem to shake the babe in the manger at Christmas. Maybe part of the reason is in the name itself; Christ-mas.

So as Educators what should we do? I say that we celebrate Christmas and Easter well! I say we do all we can to promote the Christian aspect of these events and use it as a time to teach our culture and our children why these events are so crucial to our lives and society.

In order to do this we have to lay aside our own nostalgic approach to these holidays in our classrooms and our homes.  Yes, I am anti-Santa Claus and anti-Easter Bunny. Yes, I will ruin these childhood myths if I have the chance. We should warn parents before we do this but we all need to do this. Our kids grew up calling Santa Claus the Christmas clown. We never subjected our children to Santa’s knee and we tried to be careful with the expectation of Christmas presents. The idea of Santa leaving all kinds of gifts for our children under the tree on Christmas eve has perpetrated a mythology that has to be undermined in our children’s belief system. It is a sad day when the child must be told, on the play ground or with his friends, that his parents have been perpetrating a lie, that Santa isn’t real and mom and dad have been playing a Christmas trick every year. Something very subtle happens to the child. They learn not to trust mom and dad when it comes to unseen realities. Usually, on Christmas day, they are told another story about an unseen reality, God becomes a man and is born as a baby in a manger. If mom and dad would lie to me about Santa and cause me horrible embarrassment in front of my peers why should I believe them about this other Christmas myth?

In my opinion the Easter bunny is less harmful than Santa, but I ask, why should we fill our children’s minds with such silliness only to be debunked by the smarter kids. Am, I against giving gifts or going on Easter egg hunts? I have no issue with giving gifts during Christmas time or kids hunting around the back yard for hidden chocolate or painted eggs, although, I fail to make the connection between a piece of chocolate shaped like a mini egg and the resurrection of Jesus. By over indulging our own nostalgic experiences we can do harm to our kids beliefs. We saw this in our own kids with the Christmas gift giving. It was becoming more about the gifts than about the giving and the giver.  So for the three years in a row we took our kids on Christmas mission’s trips. We had been supporting a ministry in Northern Mexico so we drove down during the Christmas break and worked with an outreach team distributing gifts and candy and doing gospel presentations in the out of the way villages. This had such an impact on our kids that we kept going back. In year three I asked them if they would rather go to Disneyland and all four looked at me like I was crazy. Since then we only give one gift a person selected out of hat and set a very modest amount upon how much they can spend. We still have the extended family meals and look forward to preaching Jesus at these celebrations.

For Easter, in the past I have organized sun rise services and we’ve done outdoor dramas of the crucifixion and resurrection. One year we carried a cross throughout our downtown area and prayed for our city. We have helped in local outreaches to reach kids and families with their social and spiritual needs. It is a time to remind our community that our country and culture still has a strong Christian foundation.

As educators we have to tactfully expose the myths of Santa and the Easter Bunny and for our older kids we need good answers to questions like, “why its called Easter?” and “why the dates of these holidays are disputed?”

Most importantly, we have to teach the truths that these holidays remind us about. Christmas is the incarnation, God becoming a man, entering our world because of His transcendent love. Easter is the resurrection.  The resurrection proves that Jesus was whom he claimed to be, God in the flesh, who came to take away our sins. It proves that he was successful in doing just that as the scripture in Romans 4:25 declares: “He who was delivered over because of our transgressions, and was raised because of our justification.”

And finally, that we are now the redeemed sons and daughters of the risen Lord for we have been risen with Christ and are seated with Him in the heavenly places.

Let’s declare, teach and celebrate these important cultural sign-posts to our faith with all of the creativity, joy, godly tradition we can muster. In the words of Charles Dickens spoken through the converted Scrooge: “…and it was always said of him, that he know how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”

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