Today's Scripture Reading (August 31, 2023): Ezekiel 46
Today ends the month of August. This day has always
held a significant meaning for me. As a kid, the last day of August was also
the last day of summer. I know summer doesn't officially end until 12:49 A.M
(Mountain Daylight Time) on Saturday, September 23. (Did you know that we can
track the end of summer right down to the minute when it ends?) But for me,
August 31 is the date. By the time the calendar changed to September, the
temperatures were already dropping, baseball was in its final stretch, the
National Football League season was set to begin, and National Hockey League
Training and Preseason competitions were preparing to take the ice. But maybe
most importantly, the summer school break is officially over, and, at least as
a kid, the return to the classroom always happened in the early days of
September.
I just recently discovered that there is a
meteorological beginning to the season based on our standard twelve-month
calendar and the temperature cycles. And, according to the meteorological changing
of the seasons, they agree with me. Meteorologically, today is the last day of
summer, and tomorrow fall begins. And, according to that meteorological calendar,
winter starts on December 1 instead of the Astronomical beginning of Winter on
December 21 (at 8:27 P.M if you want to know the exact moment when winter
begins this year). I think December 1 makes more sense according to how we live
our lives.
Ancient cultures didn't have our modern calendars,
and often, they marked the passage of time and the seasons with the lunar
calendar. That meant that the month began with the birth of the New Moon, and
it grew during the early days of the month and shrank during the later days.
But what was critical was the moon.
Ezekiel lays out the dimensions of his Temple, and he
says there will be worship on the Sabbath and the New Moons. The New Moon had
significance for Jewish believers that it just doesn't hold for us. The mention
of the New Moons reminds us that this passage was not intended for us but for
the worshippers of Judaism before the birth of Christ.
I sometimes find it a little amusing that we have
people around us who can get very legalistic about returning to the original
Sabbath, Saturday. Still, I have never heard them advocate a return to the
Lunar Calendar. Maybe that is because changing worship experiences from Sunday
to Saturday is relatively easy; we still understand a seven-day week. But to go
to a lunar calendar would mean throwing away our thirty-one, thirty, and
twenty-eight day months to months that would last approximately twenty-nine and
half days, or somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty days, every month. Such
a change would be complicated. And maybe it is too much work to justify anyone
from our century to want to celebrate worship events tied to the New Moon and a
lunar Calendar that we simply don't use anymore.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 47
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