Friday, November 27, 2009

Black Friday

You might have noticed that I just posted my blog for Thursday.  That's because I cooked all day Thursday for our family feast and spent all night searching for Christmas presents on Black Friday.  My wife and I actually tried a new technique for our yearly jaunt into insanity.  We did Walmart and arrived before 11pm to pick up our goodies and wait until 5am to check out.  With this strategy we left Walmart by 5:07am and went to Best Buy.  By 6:04am we were in our car heading home.  Not a bad plan, but am I tired.

The number of people who showed up for the festivities was amazing.  We were the first two in our checkout aisle.  We got in line at 3:30am.  By the time 5am rolled around, the 32 checkouts had lines that stretched to the back of the store.  Hundreds and hundreds of people showed up for the big event.  It was amazing.

Do we have anything like that anymore in the church?  Do Christmas and Easter even come close?  Has materialism so taken over our society that our rituals of worship to that god have surpassed the worship of our God?

Perhaps I am making too much of this, but I did only get 3 hours of sleep today.

2 comments:

  1. I like your description of Black Friday as a "jaunt into insanity". To make your metaphor about church more equitable, maybe we should consider that Black Friday only happens once per year. If we only worshipped God once per year, I would guess that the festivities would be other-worldly. Do anything enough, and it will become "normal". Whether vice or virtue. If we want worship to be more of an event, we should do it less.

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  2. My thought was more about our annual celebrations like Christmas and Easter. Easter is supposed to be our big deal, but it really isn't that much of a big deal. It is a deal, but . . . Black Friday dominates the landscape. Easter is in the landscape. I get your less often analogy, but difficulty should not chase us away from good things. I should tell Paula "I love you" as often as I can. I should encourage Caleb as much as possible. The difficulty of the task should not determine the frequency of the act. Worship as a discipline is rarely practiced as one. We usually show up for worship. We rarely practice it.

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