Today is Sunday, and we had 63 people in our morning worship service. What a wonderful morning we had.
It's a rainy, busy day, but a good one.

Why do we meet on Sunday anyway?

Sunday originally was celebrated by the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans as "the day of the sun." Christians transformed the day of the sun into a weekly celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God.

One New Testament account tells us that the Christians met to break bread "on the first day of the week" (Acts 20:7), which they called the "Lord's Day." For a time, it appears that Christians who were of Jewish origin marked both the Jewish Saturday and the Christian Sunday (maybe anticipating our own two-day weekend- ha!). The Sabbath (Saturday) being a day to rest before beginning the work-week, and the Lord's Day (Sunday) being the day of worship in the "liturgy," which means "the work of the people (for the Lord)."

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Sunday seems to have become the Christians' special day for two reasons. First, to make a distincion between their day of worship and the Jewish sabbath on Saturday. Second, Sunday was the day Jesus rose from the dead, so it was natural to celebrate the resurrection every week on the day when Jesus first came back to life. "It is Easter which returns week by week."

One early Christian writer, Justin Martyr, put the idea of the "sun's day" and the "Son's day" together: "Sunday... is the first day, on which God transforming darkness and matter made the universe, and Jesus Christ our Savior rose from the dead on the same day." Jesus, the Son of God, fills our lives with light, similar to the way the sun pushes back the darkness of night, which can symbolize sin.
These ideas seem to go together neatly, but it was hard for Christians in the first few centuries of the Church to share the Eucharist on Sunday. For about three centuries, Christianity was an illegal religion in the Roman Empire. To be a Christian was to be a criminal.

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Until the 300's when Christianity was tolerated and then made the official religion of the Roman Empire, Christians had to work on Sunday. They probably attended the Eucharist early in the morning or late at night. In the city of Rome itself, they crowded in the catacombs underground to avoid being caught. (And we think we have a tough time getting to our worship service!)
In the year 321, the emperor Constantine, who was a follower of Christianity, declared that the "venerable day of the sun," Sunday, would be a day off for everyone. But it wasn't until the year 506 that a Church council laid down a rule that Christians had to attend worship services every Sunday.

Adapted from The Sunday Zone:Keeping theLord's Day Holy
by Christopher M. Bellitto