Before Easter there was Eostre . . .

(This essay is loose, rambling thoughts that Easter provokes. Proceed with caution if a literary critic or grayscale theologian : )

The Easter pamphlets literally litter sidewalks and mailboxes. Yard signs are posted. Billboards are purchased. Extravagant services are produced.

It doesn’t feel like a celebration anymore but a sales pitch to join a church; preferably “our church because it’s best and here’s why!!!! . . .” The money spent is insane to share a message about a God/person that doesn’t need us to do any of it from what I’ve been taught and read. But we persist with supposed pure and righteous intention. Hmmmmm . . .

I really do wish that it could all go away for a season. A complete re-boot of what church is. I’d love to go back to the time of house gatherings. I’d love to see how faith practice existed before big buildings, videos, sounds, programming, Steven Furtick and so on. Because that’s church now but that’s not even close to what church was. But somehow we’re here.

Is it bad? Everything changes right? Sure it does. Dress, cars, culture, speech . . . they all change over time. It’s inevitable. But what I want to see/feel is what this journey of faith is without all these products. How does it land without all the noise, agenda and celebrity? Who would lead when their face was only known by their small group of close knit community, not plastered on every social media platform or streaming device with possible celebrity attached? How would our heart discern/absorb/listen without the deluge of images and data?

I think ALL of it would be VERY different. How one practiced and understood would be so dramatically altered! Maybe even some of the “truths” would change. Maybe the pastor’s vocal inflection would too. They wouldn’t care about delivery, tone and mix. None of that would matter. They wouldn’t care about always having 3 points they had to touch on.

All that would matter is the Message. The hope. The peace. The love . . . maybe. (But who knows because we never were there!) What did it look like before Calvin stepped on the scene and shook everything up? What did it look like before the Catholic Church became the political and social giant that it was forever changing humanity as a whole in ways too numerous to count? What did it look like before Constantine adopted early Christianity for political reasons? What would it have looked like to practice then?

All that often wanders through my mind as we sit on the eve of . . . Easter or Resurrection Sunday. Let’s start with the obvious: even the use of Easter in churches makes me smile as it’s literally from a pagan practice centered around Eostre, a Saxon goddess that was offered sacrifices in the spring. (I can guarantee their ceremonies would leave all the old ladies aghast in ways they can’t imagine.) But we’ve adopted that so it’s cleansed. Funny how we do that with certain things but will knock down politicians doors to change others.

But names for holidays aside, what did it look like before this all began? Before Jewish traditions even? Because we frame it all as if Jesus walked the Earth for all time. But he didn’t. He is pretty new in the grand scheme in our faith practice story. So what did the Walk look like before? Fascinating to me as we were no less loved. No less special in the Creators eyes. But it was before we had become so certain about our faith, and in my opinion, so increasingly incongruent.

Thinking back to the Adam and Eve story (it doesn’t matter if you literally believe in it or if it’s just allegory), I often think about the part where God walked with them. What would it be like for us to experience a land that we worked, full of first generation nature and animals, and to have the Creator in it asking for us? Just think about that image! Wow! But maybe that’s the point. Maybe it still does happen but we have planes to catch, podcasts to listen to, careers to build trust in, pastors to direct us so we’ve forgotten what the Sound is without someone/thing amplifying their vision of It.

Sure, you may be saying that Easter is about Jesus defeating sin and death via the Cross. But God was long before and was after. We were before and were after. We were his beloved creation before and are after. Time does not apply to the One so this moment in time, the death of the God-man, Yeshua, that we say changed everything was a visual for us, an intersection of the human and divine; the application of ultimate Love, but the Creator was not changed in It’s infinite and inerrant attributes. He/She/They remained.

Or is there more to it? I don’t know. But what I do know is that the Great Mystery persists for me. I KNOW that even if all we see/experience/understand in our contemporary churches vanished, I am confident that I would know that I am loved, through the suffering and pain, by a Force that put it all into motion and somehow allowed me to exist against all odds (1 in 10²⁶⁸⁵⁰⁰⁰ actually. That’s a 10 with a couple of million zeros after it.) I believe the Creator would speak in ways that may be new to many of us . . . if only our ears could hear.