Sometimes I am embarrassed to be a Christian!
Various prominent Christian leaders have got upset about the National Trust and Cadbury’s who have ‘allegedly’ dropped the word Easter from their egg hunts.
Whilst it is true that this image doesn’t contain the word Easter, the webpage which it is from contains the word Easter 14 times. When you click from that page to find an egg hunt near you, the next page has an alternative version of the poster that does include the word Easter very prominently.
I’m really embarrassed that some Christians have chosen to be upset about this when the companies involved are using the word Easetr in their publicity.
Personally though, I feel that even if the companies had of dropped the word Easter that I still wouldn’t be that concerned.
Easter is such an important part of the year for me. It is a time when I especially remember the events leading up to Jesus’ death on the cross, when I remember why he died and that he also came back to life in the ultimate defeat of sin and death.
Whilst I am not against an Easter Egg hunt, I need to confess to you that my Easter will be complete without one (after all, why would you hunt for chocolate if you can eat the eggs without the hassle of having to try to find them first?)
I have no problem with people dropping the word Easter from egg hunts because Easter for me (and I would hope for all Christians???) shouldn’t be defined by chocolate eggs or having to hunt for them.
For me, the criticism of the National Trust and Cadbury’s indicates a more worrying attitude.
Has the Church become more worried about things not looking right than we have about people not being able to hear about Jesus?
We Christians may want to claim Easter as belonging exclusively to us (even if we did steal the festival from Pagan’s hundreds of years ago. Shhh, better not mention that!) In contrast, we seem to be unconcerned about speaking out so strongly about Jesus, why are we not asking the National Trust to include Christian content in their Easter activities, isn’t that a part of our historical heritage?
The real thing we should be upset about is that people can have Easter events where they don’t talk about Jesus.
We should be upset that many people over these next few weeks will eat hot cross buns without knowing that Jesus died on the cross as their saviour.
We should be upset that many people over these next few weeks will hunt for chocolate eggs without knowing that Jesus came back to life and that he literally broke out of the tomb!
We should be upset that many people over these next few weeks will thank a mythical bunny whilst ignoring the God who came to earth as a human being in order to win humanity back to himself.
Instead of being upset about these things, we are complaining that someone isn’t using the word Easter in all of their Egg Hunt publicity and this tells us a lot about our priorities.
We have such amazing good news that we can share and this is one of the times of the year when it is a bit easier to do so.
Please, please, please fellow Christians, let’s not waste this opportunity by whingeing and complaining!
Rather, lets’ be honest about our faith as we talk to people honestly and openly about what Easter means to us.
Jesus died to save the world and that is something worth talking about!
If you are interested in finding out more about what Easter means to Christians then you might find the posts I have written about the various parts of the Easter story helpful.
Honest about my faith 