For many Christians, it's Easter Sunday

For most Christians reading this, Easter 2005 is a distant memory. Let's see, that was March 27 - five full weeks ago.

But for the Eastern Orthodox - a significant slice of the world's Christian believers - today is set aside for the observance of the Resurrection. In the Roanoke Valley, the largest such congregation is at the Greek Orthodox Holy Trinity Church.

Believe me, there isn't room in this column to explain in any detail why there are different dates for Easter in some churches and how they are calculated. Suffice it to say, it has to do with the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, the liturgical vs. astronomical new moon after the spring equinox, and the question of whether Easter can ever fall on or before Passover.

What it means is that while the Orthodox Easter does sometimes fall on the same date as the rest of Christianity, it more frequently is one to five weeks distant.

Fitting in

For some Christians, that's a sign of failure - a symbol of a lack of harmony and unity that the Scriptures call on Christians to demonstrate.

Others, however, prefer to see it as a strength of Christianity, which has grown to be the world's dominant religious faith in large measure because of its adaptability.

Some might argue whether that adaptability has gone too far. That's when critics drop the word "adaptable" and replace it with "syncretic." The latter implies compromise of essential beliefs to merge them or make them compatible with others.

For Orthodox believers, their Easter practice is the older - adhering to a now largely out-of-use calendar and based on a set of rules first set up in the fourth century. For the rest of the church - by far its majority - it was OK six centuries later to adapt to a new calendar and to reconsider the calculation of its major feast day.

Neither group had to compromise a core doctrine or belief, but the changes mark one of the more noticeable variations in Christian practice.

How far to bend

There are, of course, legitimate debates about just how adaptable the church should be to the culture in which it works and lives. The most volatile and highest-profile at the moment is over sexuality, a realm in which solutions are sometimes inconsistent.

For an example we can look at the Anglican Communion, the international federation of churches tracing their origins to the Church of England, including the Episcopal Church.

In response to pleas from their African leaders, the Anglican bishops decided in 1988 that it was OK for polygamists to be baptized and confirmed into the church so long as they agreed not to marry again while any of their wives were alive and that they not be compelled "to put away any of their wives."

In 1998, again with African clerics leading the charge, the Anglican bishops pronounced homosexual marriages unacceptable.

The two examples are not strictly comparable, of course - in the sense that the bishops didn't address the question of whether homosexual couples who may be legally married where they live should be accepted for baptism. But they demonstrate that Christians sometimes adapt to cultural mores that are in conflict with accepted doctrine, and sometimes do not.

Over two millennia, the Christian church has splintered countless times into myriad denominations, each of which offers some unique approach to becoming a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth.

As painful as that sometimes is - even the 1,000-year-old split between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches can still be prickly occasionally - the result has been a growing Christian faith worldwide.

This is a day to celebrate those differences as we wish a "Happy Easter" to the Orthodox.