“Honoring God in Your Marriage Part I – To Wives”

1 Peter 3:1-7

That said, I have always felt a bit uneasy with how our church, along with countless other churches, recognize Moms on Mother’s Day- we have them stand.  Again, nothing wrong in the slightest with recognizing Moms and honoring their impact in our lives, but in the last few years I’ve been wondering asking Moms to stand.

Why?  Because having Moms stand on Mother’s Day can be a painful experience for a number of women in the congregation.  I think of the women my wife and I have come to know the last few years who struggle with infertility and desperately want to have children, but have none.  Jamy and I were blessed to have two biological children, but then we were unable to have more children even though we wanted more.  I have often wondered how difficult it would be for us if we never were able to have kids.

God, in turn, put us on the path of adoption, which has been an indescribable blessing.  But then again, we have become acquainted with people whose adoptions fell through.  That is an unbelievably painful experience. What about the woman in the congregation who is unable to have children and attempts at adoption have failed?  How does she feel when the mothers stand on Mother’s Day?

So, you may ask, why have you kept asking the mothers to stand on Mother’s Day if this is the way you feel?  I guess because of tradition.  We’ve always done it that way before (which is generally a terrible reason to do something).  Today I read a blog post that a number of women in our church have posted to their walls on Facebook which finally made me realize we need to do things differently this year in our church on Mother’s Day.  I will not be asking the Moms to stand.  We will celebrate motherhood and dedicate babies this Sunday.  But we will avoid placing women (and their husbands) in an awkward and even painful situation.  I never want people who are hurting to be hurt further at church.  I want church to be a place that brings comfort, support, empathy, and presence of the Lord and others that brings encouragement.

I encourage you to take a moment and read the blog post I mentioned.  Find it here: An Open Letter to Pastors from a Non-Mom

This Mother’s Day let’s be sensitive to those for whom Mother’s Day may be a very difficult day.

“The world takes its notions of God, most of all, from the people who say they belong to God’s family.  They read us a great deal more than they read the Bible.  They see us, they only hear about Jesus Christ.”

Peter reminds his readers that their conduct must be “excellent,” or honorable because the world is watching.  When the world observes our behavior that is rooted in love, grounded in truth, and marked by denying the “lusts of the flesh” it will make an impact on others.  In Peter’s words, the lost will “glorify God in the day of visitation.”  Whether this means the lost will come to Christ through the observance of a Christian’s behavior or acknowledge Christ is Lord on the Judgment Day and know at that time the behavior of Christians pointed to the truth is unsure.  Regardless, the behavior of genuine Christ followers will make an impact for the kingdom of God.

Some will be angered by the worldview Christians follow.  Some will merely want to scrutinize the behavior waiting for the Christian to make a mistake.  But others will observe the transformation Christ brings and the evidence of it in the way Christians live and ask, “Whatever it is you have, I want it!”

Thus, it is imperative that the conduct of Christians be anchored in the word of God and a genuine example of the transformation that comes about from following Christ.  All this means that Christians must live in a counter-cultural way.  They cannot live like the world.  Sadly, this is becoming less apparent in the church today.  David Wells notes,

“The church [must] form itself, by his grace and truth, into an outcropping of counter-cultural spirituality.  It must first recover the sense of antithesis between Christ and culture and then find ways to sustain that antithesis… It must give up self-cultivation for self-surrender, entertainment for worship, intuition for truth, slick marketing for authentic witness, success for faithfulness, power for humility, a God bought on cheap terms for the God who calls us to costly obedience.  It must, in short, be willing to do God’s business on God’s terms.”

Scot McKnight, in his commentary on 1 Peter 2:11-12, wrote that someone interviewed a well-known American preacher and contended that some of this preacher’s message was different than the message of the Bible, particularly about self-denial.  The preacher responded, “If I preached that, the people in my church would be mad as _____.”  The interviewer persisted and said the concept of denying yourself was still in the Bible.  The preacher’s response: “Just because it is in the Bible doesn’t mean I have to preach it.”  This is a classic example of the cultural-conditionedness of some churches and preaching today.  Little wonder so many that claim to be Christ followers do not live counter-culturally.

So, we must be diligent to live differently than the world.  We don’t need to be afraid of our culture, or hate it- we need to engage it with Christ’s love and truth through our actions, words, attitudes, etc.  We most likely have no idea who is watching us and the impact it is making in their lives.

Herb and Ruth Clingen and their young son were missionaries to Japan when WWII broke out.  The Clingens were sent to a POW camp in the Philippines where they were imprisoned for three years.  Herb’s diary told of how his family’s captors tortured, murdered, and starved to death many of the camp’s inmates.  The prisoners particularly hated and feared the camp commandant named Konishi.  Herb described one especially diabolical plan of Konishi forced on the Clingens and others near the end of the war:

“Konishi found an inventive way to abuse us even more.  He increased the food ration but gave us palay- unhusked rice.  Eating rice with its razor-sharp outer shell would cause intestinal bleeding that would kill us in hours.  We had no tools to remove the husks, and doing the job manually- by pounding the grain or rolling it with a heavy stick- consumed more calories than the rice would supply.  It was a death sentence for all internees.”

Through divine providence the Clingens were spared and liberated from their camp in February 1945 by Allied forces.  That prevented the final plan Konishi had drawn up- shooting and killing all survivors.  Years later the Clingens learned that Konishi had been found working as a grounds keeper at a golf course in Manilla.  He was put on trial for war crimes and hanged.  Just before his execution, Konishi professed conversion to Christianity, saying he had been deeply affected by the testimony of the Christian missionaries he had persecuted.

May we careful to be an example of Christ to the Konishis in our lives.

Before I address that question, let me make it clear that the biblical accounts crucial to Christianity (e.g. the virgin birth, death on a cross, and resurrection of Jesus) in no way are metaphorical products from supposed earlier, pagan religions.  I recently read a piece in the British paper The Guardian that claims Christianity is nothing more than symbolic imagery borrowed from paganism.  The death of Jesus comes from a Sumerian goddess who hung naked on a stake and was raised from the underworld; the virgin birth relates to a belief in the ancient Cybele Cult, etc.  However, the evidence reveals such a perspective to be nothing more than presumptive conjecture.  To say that Christian holidays are actually pagan holidays in a way that means Christianity is actually an offshoot of paganism is not correct and furthermore is not even honest.  The death and resurrection of Jesus are documented by eyewitness accounts in ancient texts that withstand the scrutiny of credibility far better than any other ancient text of that time.

With that understood let me return to the question: Does Easter have roots in a pagan holiday?  Research the topic and you will find a wide divergence of opinion even in conservative, evangelical circles.  Many believe that the term “Easter” comes from the early Anglo-Saxon word “Eostre” which was used for both the name of a goddess who represented fertility and the arrival of spring as well the name for the month of April.  When the first Christian missionaries arrived on the British Isles they simply took the pre-existing pagan holidays and attempted to “Christianize” them (incidentally the same thing was done with Christmas and the holiday for the pagan god Saturnalia on Dec. 25).  Personally, I don’t find fault with the approach of these missionaries.  They arrived and saw everyone worshipping a pagan deity on a certain day and thought of a way to get people to worship the one, true God on that day instead.  This undermines the notion that Christian tenets arose form paganism.  No, early Christians wanted to supplant the worship of false gods with worship for the true God.  Over the centuries, this is exactly what happened.  The celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection overtook Eostre in popularity, although the name stuck as “Easter.”

However, there are many that believe the connection of Easter to the pagan goddess Eostre is overstated.  The Venerable Bede, a seventh century monk thought to be the first English church historian, connected the celebration of Easter with the holiday for Eostre.  However, some scholars argue that Bede’s findings were flawed, perhaps due to confusion of etymology of the terms, and no other ancient historians make the same connection of Easter to Eostre.  Rather, they argue that the term “Easter” is related to the name of the month of April, “Eastre” (West Saxon) or “Eostre” (Northumbrian), rather than directly connected to the pagan goddess (even though they concede that the name of the month probably, but not certainly, derived from the name of the goddess).  In addition, these scholars note that the term “Easter” is only used in English and other Germanic languages while the remainder of the world uses some derivative of the term “Pascha,” which derives from the Hebrew word for “Passover.”

So, what should Christians make of all this?   The most important thing is what has already been mentioned.  Even if the term “Easter” derives from pagan roots, that in no way implies Christianity is a highly evolved product of paganism.  If Christmas and Easter do in fact share the same dates/terms with pagan traditions, it is only due to early Christians trying to “redeem” these pagan observances to lead people to worship the one, true God of the Bible.  I find it interesting that many people want to cry foul that “Easter” is a pagan term and thus must have pagan inferences.  The reality is that we use terms that have their origins in paganism everyday and yet never make associations to occultic religions.  For example, Sunday in the Roman calendar was for the worship of the sun. January comes from the Roman god Janus, the god of beginnings and doorways.  The reality is that hundreds of millions of Christians use “Easter,” and have done so for centuries, with the meaning of “the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus” not to celebrate a pagan goddess of fertility.

Let me close this post by quoting Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll who addressed this issue in an article that appeared in the Washington Post.  “Some Christians, rather than celebrate the fact that a day that was once devoted to the celebration of a pagan god and is now devoted to Jesus, wish to be the conscience police and go around telling everyone how they should stop having fun and celebrating because of the day’s origins. If someone has a conscience issue with celebrating the holiday, they should abstain, but to rail against kids eating candy and having fun sounds more like the religious types who murdered Jesus than the kids who hung out with him…  When it comes to cultural issues like this, we as Christians should view them through a simple rubric: reject, receive, or redeem? In this case, the early missionaries to the British Isles sought to redeem Easter rather than reject it or simply receive it. As a result, it became one of the centers of Christianity for many centuries and Eostre the goddess was all but forgotten.”