I remember being exhausted on many Easter Sundays. Not because I had to get up early for the Sunrise service (which, if I remember right, was really more like a “sun’s been up for hours now but we would like an excuse to have breakfast at church” service.)
No, it was the Ohio Teens for Christ Convention that did it. For many years, I’d spend two days at the Columbus Convention Center with the rest of my youth group. Exploring the food court, listening to concerts from Christian artists like Geoff Moore & The Distance, Rich Mullins, and DeGarmo & Key. The keynote speakers were electric. The breakout sessions felt urgent and relevant in the way that things do to teenagers who are looking for purpose and inspiration. Mike Warnke spoke one year. He was a Christian comedian whose whole act was built around his past as a Satanic high priest. I thought he was a genius. And so brave.
It came out later that he’d made most of it up. But I didn’t know that yet.
There were a lot of things I didn’t know yet.
Easter morning usually involved a basket filled with various candies, a giant chocolate bunny, some plastic eggs with money in them. And then church. A wild, loud tie around my neck. A pair of white dress shoes that I thought were ironic and fun. I’m pretty sure I sang “Via Dolorosa” one year, despite not really knowing what the lyrics meant.
Oh wait. “The way of suffering.” I remember. So dramatic. So haunting.
I remember going to an Easter pageant and watching Jesus be crucified and beaten in a sequence that seemed to go on forever. The loud hammering on the cross would pierce through the sanctuary and the visceral re-enactment of the torture of the King of Kings held my attention. And scared me to death.
I think I always found the darkness of Good Friday more interesting than the triumphant celebration of Sunday. The tomb-kicking, GI Joe resurrection energy never quite landed for me the way the somber suffering did.
I didn’t have language for why. But I think I do now.
The part of Jesus’s story I was drawn to — without knowing it — was the courage. He came to teach, to challenge, to speak truth to power. To protest the abuses of the government, the corruption in the temples. And he did it knowing it would cost him something.
He had to be terrified. But he told the truth anyway. That’s the part that resonates now. Not so much the miracle of Sunday morning, but the willingness of Friday.
There’s a church across the street from my apartment. Cars lined both sides of the streets this morning, and people in their good clothes walked quickly in the rain, trying to stay dry.
Sometimes I feel a little guilty that I’m not engaging in the rituals of my youth. It’s not that I’m longing for the theology that I now see differently. But I am nostalgic for that era of my life.
I googled the Ohio Teens for Christ Convention to see if there was a record of the speakers or bands that I heard play all those years. But I’m too old. No such archive exists. However, I did see that the convention still lives on. This year they have a poverty simulation on the schedule. Two hours, presumably, to experience what it’s like to be poor.
I don’t know that Jesus would support that kind of pity porn. But what do I know? I pre-date the internet.
There’s something about the hopefulness of Easter – and of spring — that arrives when the world starts coming back to life. After months of grey, new beginnings have always felt more available. New Year’s resolutions are made in the darkness of January, almost against your will, while you’re still full of Christmas cookies. But April has a warmer promise of possibility.
This morning I thought about the things in my life that need resurrection. Bringing back to life the commitments I made to myself about food, movement, time, money. But I like my lifestyle. I like to eat out and sit still and not be asked for too much. Change requires a willingness I don’t always have. It also requires courage.
Which is maybe why I’ve always eye-rolled at people who give up chocolate for Lent. As if the bravery it takes to abstain from a Cadbury egg for forty days is remotely close to the courage required to tell the truth, knowing you might get nailed to a two by four.
I keep thinking about Friday. The Via Dolorosa. The man who ate with the wrong people and said the wrong things to the wrong leaders and refused to stop. Two thousand years later, people are still doing that. Last week, crowds gathered across the country under the banner of No Kings — showing up in the rain, in the streets, adding their voices to a movement I never thought would be necessary.
I didn’t go.
I have my reasons. I’m out of shape and a little lazy. I’m also afraid of bad actors who would gleefully hurt those they disagree with. And I’m afraid of authority that prosecutes the people whose rights it’s supposed to protect. I’m not courageous. And I look awful in orange.
I remember Tony Campolo’s famous sermon. “Friday’s here… but Sunday’s coming.” Easter’s theology is focused on victory. But I’m marveling at the courage it took to face Friday. I should eat better, spend less, and speak my mind more.
We live in the “land of the free.” Why is it so hard for me to be brave?
Happy Easter.
Kirk Sheppard is a therapist, author, and theater blogger in Cincinnati. He turned 50 in March, and he’s writing about it all year. Go to kirksheppard.com for more.
I find it hard to be brave, too.