Finding the Good Stuff: Discovering The Christian Year

Michael Spencer March 17th, 2008

I grew up in the 1960's in a small city in Western Kentucky among fundamentalist Baptists who were sure their kind were the only Christians on the planet. My ignorance of the broader Christian world was too abysmal to be described with normal adjectives.

When I became aware of other kinds of Christians- around 1972- I was frightened of them. Methodists actually scared me. My best friend was an Episcopalian. He came to my church all the time. I would have sooner asked for a root canal than go to church with him. The first time I attended a mass, I got so frightened I actually ran out the back door.

All that to say that it's a miracle I heard the phrase "Palm Sunday" and had some idea that those words related to Jesus. Good Friday was a day the Catholic kids got out of public school to go to mass. Easter was resurrection day, but its deeper meaning involved wearing new clothes and bunny rabbits.

Yes, Easter and Christmas were what was left over of the Christian year when my fundamentalist tradition got finished with it. Advent? Lent? Pentecost? Holy Week? Good Friday? Those were the property and invention of those not-to-be-trusted Catholics.

"But isn't it all about Jesus?" Who's asking that question? Bring me that kid so I can smack him.

We had our own calendar at our church: Revivals. More revivals. Fourth of July. Halloween. (Oh yeah. Back in the day.) Thanksgiving. Valentine's Day. And the biggies- Mother's and Father's Days.

My tradition couldn't comprehend arranging the days of the year around the life of the Lord. Easter and Christmas were supposed to be about Jesus, but they were examples of the secular world ruining our Christian celebrations with their rabbits and Santa Claus.

The truth was that we were ruining it all by ourselves, by believing the ever-present evangelical lie that everything starts and ends with my church, my pastor and my Bible. My tradition was constantly susceptible to anyone who said we were going "back to the Bible" or were practicing "simple" New Testament Christianity. We called ourselves "old fashioned" Baptists, but as far as the Christian tradition was concerned, we were a plague of tradition eating locusts.

The fact is we were functionally rootless and woefully ignorant of whatever roots we'd once had. We had cut ourselves off from the whole of Christian history and were convinced that inside our building, with our preacher and our Bibles, we were as right as we could be. There was us, our parents, our grandparents and Jesus, a KJV English speaking Baptist white man from the United States. With short hair.

In fact, we were celebrating the secular calendar and then bizarrely carping about what we were major contributors to- the secular invasion of our little world.

Years have passed, and God has led me to an appreciation of what Robert Webber called "The Majestic Tapestry," or The Great Tradition that Christians all hold in common. I've learned that the Christian year is mine because it is about my Lord. The roots of my faith go deeper than the reasons Christians are in 20,000 different denominations, to the times when blood and necessity held Christians together in a common faith. Our Christian history is yours, mine and ours. I don't have anything that I didn't receive, and that process goes back considerably farther than I ever knew.

I've taught my children a different version of the faith. I am still a Baptist, but my daughter is an Anglican, my son a Presbyterian and my wife is a frequent attender at mass. As we enter Holy Week, we're one in ways deeper and more meaningful than my family ever celebrated in the past. We're all part of a church that embraces many traditions and differences.

As a post-evangelical, I am committed to undertaking the journey of salvage and recovery in my own tradition. We have sold, abandoned and thrown away the precious belongings of our ancestors. These aren't just antiques for appreciation; these are the pieces of our own identity as evangelical Christians.

We will never undo the reformation, nor should we. But we can come to a place we lament its necessity and we see beyond it to the centuries when there were no labels or denominations. We can take up the year, the liturgy, the heritage of saints, the path of devotion and the love of the whole people of God that characterizes "the majestic tapestry" on earth.

Have a wonderful Passion and Easter season. Appreciate the gifts these days give to all of us, and love one another as brothers and sisters.

Michael Spencer is the popular blogger, podcaster, and self-described post-evangelical also known as, The Internet Monk.

Go to InternetMonk.com for regular posts and podcasts from Michael.

Michael has been blogging since 2000. He has a master's degree in Theology, is currently a campus minister living in a Christian community in southeastern Kentucky, and has been a teacher in churches and schools for more than 30 years.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Easter, Jesus, Liturgy, Michael Spencer, Post-Evangelical, The Christian Year, The Internet Monk, Unity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.