For those of us in liturgical traditions—the ones that follow the time-honored seasons of the church year—there can be another cause of annoyance. Christmas and Easter alike are prefaced by penitential seasons: the mild one of Advent for the four weeks preceding Christmas, and the deep one of Lent, which occupies the 40 days before Easter. In these seasons, our collective mood tends to be sober, providing plenty of opportunities to reflect on our sinfulness.
We have a strong tendency to believe that, as a result of our penitential exertions, we’ve earned our right to festivity. We feel we have earned our celebratory Christmas hymns and our great Easter anthems. We worked for this. We put in our time, our sweat, and our refraining from alcohol or chocolate, and we’re ready to reap our reward. Then, all these people show up who haven’t done any of it. Who do they think they are?
Well, who do they think they are? Maybe they think they are people who need—for reasons either known or unarticulated—to come and celebrate in the presence of others who are also celebrating. Maybe it’s not just a sense of guilt or a fear that their “Christian card” could be taken away; maybe it’s gratitude. G. K. Chesterton talks about a period in his life when “I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom.” Maybe some Christmas and Easter church attenders are making a pretty shrewd guess about where their gratitude belongs.
Maybe they aren’t doing it the “right way” or checking all the boxes. Maybe they haven’t earned the right to celebrate—but do we think we have? Do we think that denying ourselves chocolate has earned God’s favor or made us worthy to celebrate in ways that our less disciplined neighbors are not? Do we say, “I thank you, Lord, that I am not like that rare attender over there?”
I should at this point pause to admit that in this Lenten season I have been a stranger to my own parish church. Through travel, illness, and various forms of obligation I have been missing in action, and I would say that I have not had a holy Lent. When I show up on Easter Sunday—should I say if I show up?—I hope the faithful won’t look at me and say, “Who’s that guy?” But even if they do I’ll still be happy to be there.
In our church, during Lent we use the old language from the Book of Common Prayer, in which we confess ourselves to be “miserable offenders.” Many people, I have learned over the years, dislike that language because it sounds self-degrading or self-abnegating. But the word “miserable,” which comes from the Latin miserere, simply means “in need of mercy.” And an “offender” is just a person who has sometimes done what is wrong. Aren’t we all people who have done things wrong and are, therefore, in need of God’s mercy?
Does the success or failure of my Lenten discipline alter that situation in any respect whatsoever? No, it does not. I am sorry not to have done better this Lent, and regret my many absences from church, but perhaps if I had been super-disciplined in this season I’d be strutting into church on Easter Sunday and thinking, “Well, at least I’ve earned it.”
No, my comfort as a reliably bad Christian, an inconsistent and often hapless follower of Christ, is that nothing I do, no matter how bad, surprises or discourages God. As J.I. Packer wrote in his classic Knowing God:
There is unspeakable comfort — the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates — in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.
So, in the light of that Good News, let’s welcome the Christmas and Easter Christians with open arms. To those of you who are Christmas and Easter Christians: Come without guilt, without shame, and without hesitation. We are all people who have gone astray; we are all in need of God’s mercy. Christmas and Easter tell us that we’ve got it. In Christ God has dealt definitively with our offenses, and if that’s not something to celebrate, I don’t know what is. So here’s something each of us can say to our neighbors in the church: Greetings, fellow miserable offender!
