A recent headline proclaimed, "Man claims he accidentally stabbed his father 50 times." Mark me as skeptical that it is possible to stab someone 50 times accidentally. 50 repetitions clearly speaks of intentionality, of purpose.
One can do a good thing accidentally and also a bad thing accidentally. However, some actions require specific intention. In my mind, worship is one of these. Worship requires a plan, a focus, a desire to offer honor to God. Jumping in a pool is not baptism nor is standing in the rain.

Also doing things that pagans do does not necessarily make one a pagan. As Yeshua (Jesus) said in Matthew 5,  when you greet only your brothers in the marketplace you are merely doing what pagans do. This doesn't mean that greeting your brothers in the marketplace is pagan but that God expects more from us.

In Gulliver's Travels, a book written by Jonathan Swift in 1726, talks of two Islands Lilliput and Blefuscu. These islands are inhabited by small people (1/12 the size of normal people) and are constantly at war with each other. Both islands are ruled by emperors and both subscribe to a prophet Lustrog whose teachings are detailed in their holy book the Blundecral.

In the teachings of the Blundecral it details that eggs should be broken on the convenient end. The Lilliputians believe that this means the smaller end as generations before a son of the emperor had cut his finger breaking an egg on the big end. He thus mandated that all eggs be broken on the small end. The Blefuscans, on the contrary, believe an egg must be broken on the big end.

I posted on FB a couple of weeks ago some observations about Passover and Easter. I notice that the misinformation doesn't seem to slow down. A quick review--neither the word Easter nor Passover appears in the original texts of the Bible. In the Hebrew Bible the word is Pesach and in the Greek New Testament the word is Pascha. Passover is the English word used to translate both Pesach and Pascha in most Bibles. In the original KJV in Acts 12:4 Pascha is translated "Easter." Remember that the word "Easter" is nearly 1000 years older than the word "Passover." I do think Tyndale came up with a great English word to translate the Hebrew Pesach but the English, Dutch and Germanic peoples were all using some variant of Easter as their term for the Resurrection long before he coined the word Passover.

Abba Eban reputedly said, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but everyone is not entitled to their own facts." This year the church will celebrate Easter (Resurrection Sunday) nearly a month before traditional Judaism celebrates Pesach (Passover) and the internet has already gone into overdrive on posts linking Easter to Ishtar and various other pagan entities.

First early Christianity does appear to have celebrated the Resurrection on the Passover week also observed by Judaism. Within less than a couple of hundred years a controversy developed over whether the Resurrection should be celebrated on the 14th day of Nisan (traditional night of the Passover Seder) or on the Sunday occurring during the week of Unleavened Bread. The famous martyr Polycarp was one of those pushing for the 14th of Nisan. This controversy never was really resolved but more and more Christians moved to the Sunday celebration.

Many times traditions spring up that become so much a part of common understanding that everyone accepts them as truth. I was listening to an excellent preacher this morning who gave a powerful and transformative message. However, he said something that we often hear that is problematic.

His statement was that "the church was born at Pentecost." The danger in this statement is that it may give us the idea that the church was a new thing, birthed after Yeshua's (Jesus) ascension, that burst unknown into the story of the world.