Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Three times in the year you shall hold a festival for me.
You shall observe the festival of unleavened bread;
You shall observe the festival of harvest, of the first fruits of your labor, of what you sow in the field.
You shall observe the festival of ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labor.”
NL Daily Devotion for Wednesday, January 8, 2025
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Our God loves to party. I’m pretty sure there are way more festivals in the Jewish faith than just these three. I grew up in suburban New York, and my school district had off for all the Jewish holidays. And we got off school a lot. (So much so that our school year extended more than halfway through June, when in the Midwest, school was out by end of May).
Maybe we Christians don’t party enough. Easter is a blast, and then there’s Christmas, which was once a pretty humble affair that got commercialized and took over the last two months of the year. But that’s basically it as far as festivals go. (I mean, there are plenty of feast days for various saints, but as a Lutheran, I never observed them). We should have a big to-do on Pentecost. It’s the birthday of the church, after all. And honestly, there has got to be something we can do to make “Time After Pentecost” less tedious!
Yes, I’m being silly. But there’s a lot of joy in celebrations, and I think it’s important to remember that God does want us to be joyful, to celebrate all that God has made and done for us.
What new Christian holiday would I institute and why? What would the celebration of it be like?
