Sunrise Devotion

Our congregation is having a sunrise service tomorrow – an invigorating half hour of worship and a short devotion at 7:00am. We decided that a sermon (typical running time: 35 minutes) was a bit much for that hour of the morning, so I'm keeping it short and sweet.

Here's a rough draft outline for those of you who don't get up at that hour:

Several ancient pagan traditions involve meeting at sunrise on the vernal equinox, the first day of spring. It the day on which the hours of sunlight surpasses the hours of darkness and many ancient cultures celebrated this with festivals and worship to various gods. They celebrated the victory of the sun over the darkness and the cold death of winter.

In modern times, the newspapers, magazines, and the internet are all flooded with naysayers. Skeptics of Christianity gleefully write the same old articles exclaiming, "Look, Christians are unwittingly practicing pagan traditions. Christianity is nothing new and nothing distinct!"

Not so much. First of all, you'll notice that today is not the first day of spring. It's the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Second, Christians aren't up at dawn today to celebrate the cyclical victory of the sun over darkness, which will only last for the next six months. Instead, Christianity is celebrating the historical victory of the SON over death, which will last forever.

This isn't borrowed pieces of hodgepodge, but a complete and fulfilled system which was predicted thousands of years before it came to pass. Cheap imitations and knockoffs have come and gone, both before and after Christ, but all were mere shadows compared to the real thing.

To see the sunrise is merely a reminder of the most important historical event to happen in human history, the Resurrection of the Savior who paid the ransom for our sins.

We're following the service with breakfast, so we'll see how focused everyone is with the smell of food wafting through the room!