Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 21, 2015

“Sometimes I think God is teasing me. Just like he teased Moses in the desert.”

Nab. I lived in the southeast for a while. A lot of those “house churches” sprung up in response to an application to sell alcoholic beverages in the area. There were laws against selling within set distances from a church.

I heard a commentator on TV yesterday ask, “Which seems longer to you, Winter or Lent?”

When I first read this I thought it said, “…the depraved…”

religion and its crazy rules. and, so many loopholes.

@ Nabuquduriuzhur – What denominations “abandoned the Bible”? Just curious. Agree with house churches. Some really great ministries occur in small gatherings without the trappings of “organized church”. Far to many churches are dancing with the dinosaurs running programs that exist because"We’ve always done it." VBS is a prime example. In some churches it only brings in grand children and cousins of members who never come back yet is hailed a a “Great Outreach program.” Small churches don’t have the resources to devote to things that don’t work and tend to focus on things that work.

I thought it was supposed to be a spiritual experience not just some way to get cranky.

My HS band director used to give up cigarettes for Lent every year. Especially after the summer his lung collapsed and he was forced of cigs for six or eight weeks while he was in an iron lung, when he came back saying he felt better at that time than he had in years, and given the way he complained about his habit, I asked him why he didn’t just stay off them once Easter came. He shot back, “Because you don’t have to live with me after I’ve been off cigarettes for seven weeks!” I let it go after that.

Not only is Easter not fixed, but it’s BROKEN and inconstant. Everything else is a date – all of the saints’ days, Christmas, they’re all supposed to be anniversaries (including a birthday). With Easter, first someone figured it should move to match with the Last Supper – which was a Passover Seder – which, by the way, always happens on the same day if you count by the LUNAR calendar. It’s always the 15th of the month. Then, having messed up the normal calendar connection, someone decided that people were too stupid to do a countdown and keep track of what happened 5,4,3,2,1, 0 days before The Big Day, so it got moved to the nearest Sunday so that the story could be simplified in terms of Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So now it’s not a normal calendar anniversary, and not even a lunar calendar anniversary . . . it’s floating in disconnected nothingness. I think they call that “limbo”.

My former pastor pointed out something not too long ago—the days in Lent do not count Sundays. Sundays are considered a “mini Easter”, so to speak, and therefore it is acceptable to do what you’ve given up for Lent on those days.