Chocolate Crosses and Bunnies who lay eggs ...

I've been teaching a class for 20- and 30-somethings this March on our USAmerican culture's confusion over the celebration of Easter. It's been fun and informative for us, and we've come across some realizations together that I want to pass along.

We learned about early Christians and their weekly cycle of remembering Jesus' passion on Friday (which often led to fasting) and their celebration of his resurrection on Sundays.

We've learned about the creation of the church's calendar and how the church marks time according to the story of God. So while it may be March for most of the world, it's Lent for us. We live within God's story and not beyond it.

There's lots of pagan influences in Easter that we often confuse as being simply Christian. Instead, these pagan influences were baptized into popularity by a Church evangelizing new worlds. Easter gets its "name" from Eostre, a Teutonic goddess of Spring who was often depicted with a hare that symbolized fertility and gave hope for fertile crops in the new year. Hence, the origins of our easter bunnies. Eggs were also given in the middle ages to people who often dyed them and buried them on their property to further the blessing of good crops and health upon their households.

When Christianity moved into these lands, they didn't ban the festivals, but instead re-positioned them as Christian occurrences that coincided with the calendar created with God's story in mind. So the goddess of Spring is replaced with God the Creator of All Things, and eggs are dyed blood red and given to others in remembrance of Jesus' sacrifice.

The above was all well and good for us, but last week we came upon a bigger insight for us. While the culture tries to push easter egg hunts, candies of every color and creation, and largely looks to reinforce our roles as consumers (buy this, market that), it really doesn't understand the story of Easter because it is a story that involves death. In a culture that denies death (Botox, subdivisions with no plans for cemetaries, the dead being handled by professionals), the Christian witness is that we no longer fear death, we take up our own deaths, and follow Jesus into his, because we trust his Father to save us. By loading up on new dresses, candy, and hallmark cards, we conveniently forget that Easter is the story of how God deals with death through Jesus so that we might live (and get fat eating too many Peeps). And we revert back to where we were before, celebrating the un-named goddess of life who brings fertility and false hope. The cross becomes no longer an instrument of death, but something that's ooey-gooey and cuddly.

The sad part is that the church must own up in how it has reinforced this model of a behavior the produces chocolate crosses. In our desperation to seem relevant and fun to the culture, we've come up with chocolate crosses. Most of these things are produced by well-intentioned Christian-owned companies.

But there is hope. It's called paying attention to our story, getting the details right, and offering it to the world. A chocolate cross isn't much comfort when a loved one dies from a heart attack in her sleep, when a child is abused by parents, when nations favor corruption over the well-being of their citizens. Easter is the story of how the world can deal with all of this, here and now. We deal with it through God, who for the shame of the cross, endured it for our joy.