Festival Time
05 Jul 2023
Last weekend was the Glastonbury festival. You can’t have missed the fact it was on - it was all over the TV and radio. I watched some of it, as I have every year since I was a teenager. I enjoyed some of the music, but for me it’s now coupled with the kind of cynicism appropriate for a 45 year old. The envy I used to feel towards those who were there has been replaced by pity as I enjoy it from my sofa with easy access to my kitchen, bathroom and bed.
One of the appeals of the festival is that it is a kind of parallel universe. 3 or 4 days completely disconnected and shut off from the rest of life, to enjoy music and culture, and to be with a large amount of people all doing the same thing. I guess the camping is part of this - you are not even returning somewhere else at the end of the day. According to those who have been - and to the great annoyance of colleagues and friends of those who go - the “Glastonbury come down” is a real concern as folk adjust to real life again.
While we may mock, it is observable that sometimes Christians have their own versions of this. For young people Christian camps are a similar kind of thing - with the combination of fun, intense amounts of time with people away from home, and longer periods of singing and Christian teaching. And of course they have been used by the Lord to great effect. As adults we can feel a similar way about Christian conferences like Keswick and Spring Harvest. As we leave perhaps we wonder how we will adjust to both normal life, and normal church life for another year.
It is striking that the New Testament does not call us to set particular times of the year apart for festivals and intense periods of worship like there is in the Old Testament. We might wonder why, if the experience is so pleasurable, and that they seem to do so much good?
For all the value of camps and conferences, it is the very fact that they are a bit cut off from normal life which means they need to come with a slight spiritual health warning. Now the Lord Jesus has come, and he has died, risen and ascended, he is Lord over all the universe. He is Lord over all of our life. Yes - we are longing for his return and for the new heavens and new earth, and any gathering of believers gives us tiny glimpses of what that may be like. But we must be very careful about separating “real life” - where we work, and raise families, and have difficult relationships, and do the dishes from “spiritual life” - when we praise the Lord and hear from him.
As Christians we are “in Christ”, united to him. And this is true wherever we are. We have been seeing in Ephesians just how enormous the implications of this truth is. We have every spiritual blessing in him. We have been made alive to do good works. We are being built into a spiritual temple. And yet, we live that out in the ordinariness of our families and our work (see chapters 5 and 6).
The Lord does know we need to be sustained in this in between time as we are united to Christ in his rule and yet we do not see him face to face. But this is why we haven’t been given seasons of festivities. Instead, every week begins with a day to rest, and to worship him - to be served by him in the midst of our ordinary life as we as the church gather to worship together. This is the great gift he gives us (not conferences and celebrity speakers and bands, as great as they are). That’s the point of the start of Ephesians 4.
So let’s give thanks for all the different opportunities we have to praise and learn and be with other Christians in our modern world. But let’s not be spiritual thrill seekers, longing for those times the way festival junkies count down the days to the next Glastonbury. Let’s recognise that we are united to Jesus is our everyday life, and set apart his day weekly to gather, to worship and to be together with those the Lord has put us with.