What skeletons are in your closet?

Perhaps that’s a poor choice of words for Easter Sunday. Easter is most definitely not about a skeleton, but rather about Jesus living and breathing once again. But in thinking about Easter this week, I remembered one of the skeletons in my own closet, and decided to bring it out in the open.

It’s really not all that dramatic; in fact, I already brought part of this story out in the open a few months ago right here. But today, you get the full story, my complete “coming clean” from more than half a lifetime ago in high school.

Here is my skeleton: I was named the “Most Spirited” boy of my graduating high school class.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The only good thing is this was the only time I looked so ridiculous, just a one-time stunt for a picture.

Or maybe not. (Somewhere there’s a good joke that would play on Sarah Baldwin’s comment about shaving legs, but I can’t quite come up with it…)

I was also co-president of the pep club.

I was known and envied for my school spirit, and I still fight with Jenny Huwe that my Clackamas Cavaliers leave her Oregon City Pioneers in the dust.

I’ll admit that it all started early in high school as a thinly veiled attempt to get to know cheerleaders. But it became something deeper, something more profound, something that touched what was truly important in life…that the mighty red and black could not be denied.

Ok, we could be denied in football. We only won 3 football games in my entire four years of high school. Even I, King of Spirit, had a hard time firing up the football crowds.

But basketball was another story all together.

We had a great basketball team, and I loved gathering a big group, loud and proud, right in front of our cheerleaders. We made the place rock. We got everyone hyped up and loud and behind the team.

Everyone, that is, except Janos Plesko.

I love talking about Janos, and I’ve done it before. He was a long-haired skater/rocker guy, a gifted artist who kicked a drug habit and became a leader in our church youth group.

He had this very dry sense of humor, and he loved to mock my school spirit. He’d come stand right by me at a game, and dead pan, “I am so fired up.”

He’d see me in the halls at school and get this impish look in his eyes and say, “Ooooh, Gregg, is it game day? I’m so excited.”

You just couldn’t make Janos excited for the Cavs.

We tried. But, I’m sad to say, you just can’t force school spirit. Some people just don’t get it. It’s truly one of the signs of living in a fallen world.

All right, all right, I’ll take my tongue out of my cheek. Of course I’m bringing this all up because in the great big scheme of things, school spirit doesn’t really matter all that much. All of my efforts to get Janos fired up about something he couldn’t have cared less about were not only useless, but not really all that important.

The reason I am bringing it all up is that I’ve been thinking a lot about emotions and joy this week. Easter is supposed to be the most joyful celebration followers of Jesus have. It really does matter! Jesus walking out of his tomb is the greatest event in the history of creation and can be life changing for us.

But 20 years post-high school, I’m really not sure I want to be president of the Jesus pep club!

Janos reminds me that even with something as real to me and as life changing as Easter, it’s a futile battle to try and manipulate myself or anyone else into being “fired up” about Easter. Nowhere in the bible do I read that God gives the gift of “spiritual cheerleader” to the church.

I suppose many of us have had experiences where it’s been tried, where we’ve felt that a worship experience was designed to make us feel a particular emotion. It’s a normal tendency, and I found it in myself this week, wanting to find ways to help us really celebrate today.

It’s lead to a sort of tension that I’m not able to completely resolve in my own mind.

If what we say about Easter is true, if the power of death and sin and suffering was completely broken when Jesus was brought back to life, that really is something to celebrate! Yet I don’t believe that our only purpose is to seek an emotional high.

How might those two things come together? How might we experience a true entering in to the joy and power and celebration of Jesus’ resurrection, but have it be unmanufactured and uncoerced? [PAUSE]

I’ve thought a lot about how wonderfully important it is to have Good Friday AND Easter, both of them, as the center of what we believe as Jesus’ followers.

If we only had Easter, the church and its leaders would be stuck with the one and only option of being pep club-type cheerleaders. We’d have to plaster on the smile, and the clapping, and the “head bob”, and yell encouraging cheers to each other no matter what life brought to us.

If we only had Easter, Christianity could become an other-worldly, pretend faith that just told everyone “smile, everything’s going to be great!”

Easter DOES give us the hope and the promise that everything will be made right. It does scream out to a broken world that God is not powerless, God is not silent, God is not impotent. God has the power and the desire to turn our worst experiences into redeemed hope.

But Easter comes after Good Friday. They are impossible to separate from each other.

I read an interesting editorial in USA Today last week.

I didn’t agree with Diane Cameron’s conclusion, but some of her words spoke to me. She wrote about a particularly hard time in her life, when her sister had died, her brothers were ill, and she was in deep depression. She went to an Easter service, and what the pastor said made an indelible impression on her life.

“…one sentence”, she wrote, “has stayed with me all these years. He said, ‘We live in a Good Friday world.’

That I understood. A Good Friday world is a world full of suffering, questioning, unfairness, trouble, mistakes, hurts, losses and grief. Good Friday in the Christian faith is the day Christians commemorate Christ's suffering and death on the cross. So that certainly made sense to me at that difficult time in my life.

We must remember this, for ourselves AND for those outside the church.

Easter does not stand on its own, but exists BECAUSE of Christ’s death on Good Friday. This is what keeps us from the fakery of spiritual cheerleading.

Jesus died because our broken world rejected him. The world we live in truly is a Good Friday world of pain, and we must not only realize that, we must shout it out loud. Our belief in Jesus is not afraid of the dark realities of our world…nor is it powerless in the face of evil and suffering!

Diane Cameron continued with the words of the pastor on Easter Sunday years ago:

"’But,’ he continued, ‘We are Easter people.’ Those words stopped me cold. I was stunned to be reminded that painful morning that there was something other than what I was feeling.

“My life was not instantly transformed; his words did not change the course of my brothers' illnesses nor give me answers to my questions. But the idea of being ‘Easter people’ gave me a pause in my grief and the teeniest hope that there really did exist something other than pain.

The “teeniest hope that there really did exist something other than pain.”

Oh, yes, this is more than true! Our hope and our joy and our celebration are REAL. They are based on the foundation of God’s power demonstrated in Jesus’ resurrection, and cemented by God’s unending love for the whole world. We ARE Easter People, and we do live in a Good Friday world.

When Mary arrived at the tomb on that first Easter, in the dark of the morning before dawn, her life had been a Good Friday life. She knew suffering, she knew rejection, she knew what it meant to be ostracized by an entire community. And the one person who had accepted her and welcomed her and loved her was now dead, stone cold dead… and she knew this was what life was like.

Life goes from bad to worse. That’s how life is, she thought, as she grieved on the way to the tomb. So when she saw the stone rolled away, when she couldn’t find the body of the one man who had seen her as a whole human being and not just a body herself, she didn’t explode with excitement, she groveled in grief.

The truth is, the best thing ever had happened, but she assumed the worst. The truth is, the Good Friday world she has always known had been turned on its head, but she couldn’t see it.

No amount of cheerleading would have brought her out of her Good Friday world.

Life had beaten the hope out of her. Watching Jesus’ body be wrapped and placed in a tomb had been bad enough; now his body had been stolen, along with Mary’s hope.

Each and every one of us will have times in our lives where we know Mary’s despair and lack of hope. Each and every one of us will have times where a Good Friday world punishes us and wounds us.

We don’t need a perky person to convince us that everything is ok. We don’t need to have our emotions manipulated to joy and celebration.

But, my friends, there truly can be hope and joy in a Good Friday world! In a very real way, we can experience Easter hope just as Mary finally did.

After she told Peter and the other disciple what she had seen, they ran to the tomb.

The other disciple believed. He understood, and he moved on to hope. But Mary’s hope didn’t come because the other disciple convinced her.

No, it is one word…one, simple spoken word that brought Easter into Mary’s Good Friday world. Jesus himself brought it to her, as she stood face-to-face but unseeing in front of him.

“Mary!” he said. Jesus called her by name, and for Mary, it was finally Easter.

Our hope can be helped and encouraged by “other disciples” who believe and tell us the truth about Jesus.

In fact, I see that as one of my roles as pastor, to believe and to tell the truth about Jesus.

But I’m no longer president of the pep club. It’s not within my power to convince or change you or move you out of cynicism and despair into hope.

I can’t do it.

But I know one who can!

I believe that Jesus still lives and the power of God has changed the cosmos forever. I believe that Jesus comes alongside you and me in our Good Friday world and he calls us by name.

And I believe because of that, there is great hope for you and me! That is how we can celebrate in truth, when we respond to the still-living Jesus who calls us by name. Will you find joy in responding to him, as he calls your name this morning?