Celebrate Maintenance
by Jared Johnson
S’ – S > 0
What says “celebration” more than “S’ – S > 0” does?!
I’ll guess that most of you reading this have, like me, not done any appreciable algebra since high school. That opening line is a symbolled-up way to express the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics; “entropy early minus entropy now is greater than or equal to zero.”
Another way to summarize the 2nd Law is, more or less, “everything degrades with time.”
Grandpa Johnson made his living as a maintenance man at a factory. He had a tactile, mechanical aptitude that I can only wish I had. Having worked for a couple of contractors in my professional life, I can comprehend what might need to be done to fix an issue at someone’s house. That doesn’t mean I have the capability to do it (not by myself, at least). We all know and recognize how critical maintenance is in our lives, whether maintenance of our own bodies (“diet and exercise!”), maintenance of our cars, our homes and more, but we also engage in tangible activities to maintain what’s intangible.
We worship weekly (or maybe just once a month?), to maintain our spiritual health. We have “coffee dates” or go to a friend’s home to watch a game, and so on, to maintain friendships. We converse at supper with our teens/young adult kids. With younger ones, we tickle fight and wrestle to build and maintain parent-child relationships.
Celebration is maintenance as well – maintenance for our attitudes.
We fixate on what’s negative and struggle to remember what’s positive. Celebrations, by very nature focusing on good things, on reasons to be glad and at peace, deliberately bring our attention to what’s positive in our lives.
I went looking for biblical (Hebrew and Greek) words for celebrate; they’re hard to nail down. Here are the number of times that “celebrat*” appears in seven popular translations:
Version / # Ref. / Link
NLT / 177 / Bible Gateway list
NET / 93 / Bible Gateway list
NIV / 80 / Bible Gateway list
NASB / 76 / Bible Gateway list
HCSB / 60 / Bible Gateway list
ESV / 21 / Bible Gateway list
RSV / 10 / Bible Gateway list
Well, the Word is indeed our all-sufficient rule for faith and life, but seeing such a wide spread across these translations’ testimony regarding celebration, I’m not surprised it’s hard to “wrestle to the ground” and write about it. Though I’m no sociologist, I can’t help but think WASP culture struggles to celebrate well. Culturally, it seems we have basically two, strongly overlapping modes of celebrating: “let’s throw some burgers on the grill” (or its close cousin, “a turkey in the deep fryer”) and/or “something happened – let’s get drunk!”
Quite a few of those references above, especially in NLT, have “feast” in the verse. Eating, on its own, of course, doesn’t equal “celebration.” However, in a praying family, isn’t every prayer before a meal a small celebration? Aren’t we marking the occasion of a meal provided to us by our Good Father? It’s good and right to celebrate little things.
I just named in my mind two friends and several acquaintances who have struggled in the past 1-10 years with alcohol/drugs/sobriety. When an alcoholic has passed 24 hours sober, that’s a win to celebrate. Maybe they call their AA sponsor or spouse or a close friend, but that little detail won’t go unmarked, unacknowledged, in some way. That’s a small yet profound win to celebrate. They certainly do similarly at 48 hours, a week, a month, and so on.
On the other side of small, family-scale celebrations like birthdays, anniversaries, and so on, we also mark celebrations that are society-wide and sometimes last many days (i.e. Christmas/Advent and Passion/Easter/Lent, Thanksgiving, Independence/Labor/Memorial/New Year’s Day, etc.).
Whether a fleeting moment between a married couple or mass parties on a near-worldwide scale, celebration is important to remind ourselves what’s good, right, positive and worth perpetuating.
Merriam-Webster tells us that “celebration / to celebrate” is (in part), to mark an occasion by ceremony, refraining from ordinary business, [engaging in] festivities and/or other deviation from routine (link).
We do special things as biological and spiritual families to “mark the occasion” of Christmas, Easter, birthdays, etc. Someone fighting for sobriety “marks the occasion” of an amount of time sober by, perhaps, “refraining from business,” stopping whatever they’d been doing to make a phone call or drop a post on social media.
That’s all good and worth doing; “what gets celebrated gets repeated,” but an element of celebration can be, too often is, missing from those descriptions.
Last week, you read Dr Johnson’s “people look like they’ve been baptized in vinegar & weaned on a pickle” comment. I have been hearing that from him since, Idunno, I was 6? So many adults look like they were baptized in vinegar then weaned on a pickle, but it’s easy to get little kids excited! I volunteer in nursery every week. As long as a tot doesn’t come in exhausted, they’re usually playful and happy for the hour-ish that we have them. Kids are often excited. Adults are often grumpy. Bring it all the way back to our 2nd Law of Thermodynamics intro: everything degrades with time, including, too often, our attitudes.
That’s a great reason to build rhythms of celebration into life. We fixate on what’s negative. We struggle to remember what’s positive. Creating rhythms of celebration is one way to push back and fight against the degradation of our outlook, to do maintenance on our attitude.
Jesus complimented little ones, even chiding adults “who knew better” or whatever rationale they’d told themselves in the moment: “When Jesus saw what was happening, he was angry with his disciples. He said to them, ‘Let the children come to me. Don’t stop them! For the Kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children’” (Mark 10.14, NLT).
Jesus wants us to have child-like faith. I’ll let you go find someone else’s spilled ink on that topic if you want to know more. But the fact underlies all of our faith’s practice: God’s Kingdom belongs to the child-like.
All the believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, and to fellowship, and to sharing in meals (including the breaking of bread), and to prayer. A deep sense of awe came over them all, and the apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders. And all the believers met together in one place and shared everything they had. They sold their property and possessions and shared the money with those in need. They worshiped together at the Temple each day, met in homes for the Lord’s Supper, and shared their meals with great joy and generosity – all the while praising God and enjoying the goodwill of all the people. And each day the Lord added to their fellowship those who were being saved.
Acts 2.42-47, NLT
I don’t know exactly how that passage indicates the first Christians were “child-like,” but I’m sure Jesus saw it. What I know for a fact is this: their practices included celebration.
They “marked the occasion” of Jesus’s death and resurrection by taking communion often, with verse 46 inferring they did so daily. As they remembered our King, they did so in “joy and generosity” (NLT) / “with glad and sincere hearts” (NIV), also verse 46, telling us there was absolutely zero chance they could’ve been suspected of “baptized in vinegar / weaned on a pickle!”
Joyful, generous, gladly sincere hearts are what’s missing from many “occasion markings.” Not every celebration needs to involve David’s dancing at the Ark’s return to Jerusalem. The last thing I want to do is verse-shame you about lifting hands, dancing or anything else. However, “mark an occasion” shouldn’t, by default, mean a sedate ceremony with somber faces, a quiet room and slow-mo candle lighting. If anything, we could do with a dash more expressiveness.
Volunteering in nursery, it’s obvious how deeply and pervasively little tikes feel awe and wonder – you just have to stack blocks for them! The first Christians of Acts 2’s “epilogue” (and the people who knew/saw them?) were full of awe at how thoroughly Jesus had changed their lives, how completely His gracious truth was obvious among them. They were so ready for His Kingdom that, Acts 2.43, miracles were a regular thing! (Somehow, eagerness, belief and unbelief figure into Jesus’s ability to do miracles per Mark 6.1-6.)
Did you know “maintenance” was so invigorating?
Celebrate – and here I’m telling myself more than I’m telling you – as regular maintenance for your attitude. Honor God for what He’s done, celebrating in little ways and big ways.
Everything, even our attitude, degrades with time … maybe.
