Saturday, April 18, 2009
Greek Orthodox prepare for Easter
Click the button above to see all of our community coverage, or go straight to your community's homepage with the menu below.
More religion stories
- Answering each other's prayers
- Religion calendar
- Scholar to speak in Roanoke
- Religion calendar
- Rosalind Hills Baptist Church: Making a pitch for the pipe organ
Archive
In the wee hours of Sunday morning, a week after most of the country's pastel-colored eggs have been hunted, Orthodox Christians will celebrate Jesus Christ's resurrection.
And many of them from the Roanoke and New River valleys will convene at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church for a midnight service, dark red eggs and a hearty spread of roast lamb.
That's because on years such as this one, some Christians celebrate Easter on different dates.
"The answer is simple," the Rev. Dean Nastos, of Holy Trinity in Northeast Roanoke, wrote in an e-mail.
And in a way, it is simple. It happened after the Roman Catholic pope established a new calendar in the 1500s, Nastos wrote. After that, most churches in Western Europe and America celebrated Easter according to that calendar, while Eastern Orthodox Churches celebrated it in accordance with an older calendar.
But in a way, it's kind of complicated. Nastos wrote that 325 years after Jesus' birth, 318 bishops gathered in the city of Nicaea, which is in present-day Turkey. During the First Ecumenical Council, the bishops decided Easter would be celebrated in accordance with the calendar in use back then -- the Julian calendar.
They also decided Easter would be celebrated on a Sunday, after the first full moon of the vernal equinox, and after the Hebrew celebration of Passover, Nastos explained.
In 1582, five centuries after the eastern and western churches split, Pope Gregory XIII established the Gregorian calendar, and with it a new table for the celebration of Easter, Nastos wrote.
After the Gregorian calendar gained widespread use, the eastern and western churches have sometimes celebrated Easter on different dates.
"This is why there are two Easters," Nastos wrote.
After the midnight Resurrection Liturgy, Nastos will hand each member a red egg, symbolizing the blood of Jesus. Then, they are planning on having an Easter feast -- "Pascha" in Greek -- with roasted lamb, baked potatoes, bread, olives, cheese and wine.
In 2010 and 2011, the churches will celebrate Easter on the same dates -- April 4 and April 24, respectively.
n n n
The same way she has done for decades, Perneller Chubb-Wilson remembered earlier this month the death of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
She met with other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the top of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Bridge on April 4. Vice Mayor Sherman Lea and SCLC President Bishop Ed Mitchell shared stories, and children from the Dumas Center for Artistic & Cultural Development sang a song.
For the first time, Chubb-Wilson, who founded the Roanoke SCLC chapter, remembered King's death while there was a black president leading the country.
"I was invited to the inauguration ... sitting there and seeing ... it still wasn't real to me because I'm an old woman," said Chubb-Wilson, 75. "I never thought I would live to see that day."
n n n
Last week, the Focus on Faith column tackled the subject of why Christmas is a bigger commercial success than Easter, which is perhaps the holiest of holy days for Christians.
Several area experts, including Carter Turner, an assistant professor of religious studies at Radford University, offered comments on the matter. The column said that Christmas began to be celebrated in the 1800s, but that was not the whole story.
Here is more, directly from Turner: "The earliest celebrations of Christ's birth on December 25 began in the fourth century. However, because most Protestants believed that the pope arbitrarily chose December 25 as Christ's birthday, most refused to celebrate the holiday.
"It was only in the early to mid-19th century that Christmas became widely celebrated in the United States," he said, resulting in the popularity of ' 'Twas the Night Before Christmas' and 'A Christmas Carol.'
"Established as a United States federal holiday in 1870, Christmas has always been tied to secular myths and the tradition of gift-giving in this country," Turner said.
