The Tribune

By the Rev Canon B Sebastian Campbell, CM

THE Easter Season is the oldest in the Christian calendar. The season’s English name, Easter, is derived from Eostre, a teutonic goddess of spring, who gave her name to what corresponds to the month of April. The whole season of Easter is a festival season. It is the heart of our faith; we Christians are an Easter people. It is regrettable that sometimes, as we divide Lent and Holy Week and Good Friday from Easter, the essential unity of the crucifixion and the resurrection also tends to be broken. We must always remember that the latter completes the former.

The resurrection throws the magnificent light of understanding over Christ’s life and death. The resurrection is Christ’s victory over death and so accomplishes our salvation, which was begun with the Incarnation and sealed by the crucifixion. Without the resurrection none of the rest, not Christmas, not the Lord’s Supper, especially not the crucifixion - not any of these would have meaning. Without this event, and the mystery, it revealed, assumed so important a position in the life of the church. Little time elapsed before Christians habitually observed Sunday as the Lord’s Day, because a Sunday had been the first day of their new life – their new beginning. That is why they set it apart and made it an occasion for coming together to celebrate the mystery and to partake in Holy Communion by which Christ’s presence was made known. The early Christians also associated Baptism closely with Easter because they saw a parallel with the death and resurrection of Christ. The immersion under the water became a symbolic death and the re-emergence a symbolic resurrection. Preparation for baptism at Easter became the basis for the development of Lent. After all, it is our baptism which enables us to share in the results of our Lord’s victory. Through the waters of baptism, we become members of the church of God, Christ’s own body.

Significance – Eggs are connected with Easter because they represent new life and thus the resurrection. For Easter, to be of any significance to us, it must challenge us to a new life and the resurrection at both a personal and societal level.

The proverbial spit has gone in the wind and is being blown back in all our faces. The new life and resurrection must by necessity first be realised in our homes. The Bible has mandated we live in families; basic to any family is a husband and a wife who then become the procreators of children.

Therefore, in every family there should be a resident father and mother. Anything else is not the ideal family; we cannot continue to go up in the face of God, disobey His commands, and then expect His blessings when we have already misconstrued His teachings.

All of our leaders, both spiritual and political must campaign feverishly for the return of morality and, therefore, a new release of life in decency in our society. We must urge our government to enforce the moral code for those in public office.

Our hypocrisy cries out from the ground to us. It’s absolutely ridiculous to have leaders making multi-families, with a barrage of illegitimate children and think they have moral authority to lead. The approximately 1,000 babies born to teenagers last year can be directly blamed on our double standards; our children see the hypocrisy of their unmarried parents having children, and their unmarried teachers being pregnant, and they imitate them. We will not lower the number of babies until we address our hypocrisies without simultaneously creating new ones. A resurrection calls for sacrifice and death.

The national debate on the legal age for consent makes no sense unless and until we attack immoral living and with this invest in the reconstruction of warped lives. You can lower or increase the age of consent, and nothing will happen to improve anything, paedophiles will still rape and haunt, like the murder rate that keeps going up and yet we do not address the real reasons. This country needs resurrection, a radical moral and ethical turn around.

We have much work to do, before new life can come out of our graveyard of despair. For years, I’ve been advocating for youth centres to be set up in every district of our country.

Maybe in a combined effort between church, government, and other agencies. Our approach to this crisis must be intentional, to date, we are far from intentionality, the miniscule success we might see happens all by chance.

These centres ought to be operated by trained youth/community leaders. Further, they ought to be able to employ many of our older generation who can work with our children and pass on to them our Bahamian values and culture.

The many unfathered children in our midst along with the TV parenting and the absentee mothers, who are out trying to make ends meet on two and three menial jobs, mandate that we as our society must fill a gap. These centres will be extended home, doing on the most part that which was done for many of us in our homes in ages past. We are dragging our feet and not being relevant to the times. Now is the time.

On the most part we already have buildings in our communities that can probably be converted to such centres. However, dollars and cents can never be an issue in social redemption, for if we fail to spend money on the front side of life, we will spend it on the back side of this same life.

We have a choice. As an Easter people, we know there is always good news for we can change ourselves and society for the better. Easter gives us hope, hope for a better life. We live with assurance of forgiveness if we are honest with ourselves and our relationship with God, we can bring new life and hope out of our personal graveyards of despair and pass this alleluia of praise to society, for which we are responsible to Christianise.

Consider the following:

1. That society gives hope to approximately 1,000 teenage girls who annually become pregnant. We must not allow their indiscretion to short circuit their formal education. The church must lead in keeping hope alive.

2. The many young males who stumble into gangster living. Can we preempt this distraction? Question: “How many of us sacrifice in making intentional sustained programmes/ solutions available?” How are men’s groups sponsoring a meaningful outreach to our boys? Can we? How do we reach our young girls who are attracted to this subculture.

3. Our Men’s Ministry group invest time, teach a trade, sponsor a uniform organisation, and impart marketable skills in a coordinated system to our boys.

4. Broken families. Do we invest in fellowship and spiritual currency to keep them together? For whatever reason, the average home in The Bahamas has a single parent.

5. Divorce courts can be sidestepped or “hell-holes” of marriage circumvented if unevenly yoked persons are honest with this reality before marriage or can counselors fearlessly steer lustful affairs or infatuated desperadoes away from the altar. (Demand for pre-marriage counselling).

6. Those in squalor. Many, far too many Bahamians are living in conditions below human dignity, in the filth of slums. It’s even more tragic in knowing that the slum is being born into our children and therefore much of our social problems. People act the way they are treated. Do we need to divest more from the rich so as to rescue the poor?

7. The TV culture must be zapped. It’s the babysitter and the only spokesperson in many homes. We can breathe life by socialising and knowing one another if we talk, chat, relate stories, play games together, etc, while simultaneously giving the TV the occasional break.

8. Fatherless homes. Pray that more Bahamian mothers will give fathers, real fathers in residence, to their children. Bahamians confuse sperm donors with fatherhood all too often.

9. To lick illiteracy with an educational system that waits upon and pushes forward slow learners so as to guarantee every Bahamian is able to both read and write. Too many Bahamians are unemployable, they must be brought up to scratch.

10. The age of consent is not the issue. That’s the easy route that will make no difference either way the cookie crumbles. We have a whole lot of societal ills to address as we become honest with ourselves.