Special notice for those keeping score at home:  this post uses Blatant Christian Writing Formula #3 (the speck in the brother’s eye compared to the log in your own).  Thank you.
Mark

I have mentioned in these parts that I am a runner.  Some runners claim running can be a spiritual experience for them.  For me it’s usually not.  I just like to go outside and run around in a Forrest Gumpian manner.  But I do run enough that assuming I have at least a few spiritual thoughts a year, one of them is bound to happen while I’m running.

And running on Easter weekend probably increases those odds.

So last Saturday I went out for a morning run.  The Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday has always felt a little odd to me.  Good Friday feels like a day for somber reflection.  Easter feels like a day of celebration.  But that Saturday always leaves me feeling sort of cold inside.  No stone rolling away on Saturday.

I ran by a church near my house.  This church always interests me because it’s one of those with the old-fashioned marquees out front where they put pithy little sayings like the ones you sometime see forwarded around in an email loop.  Things like “Seven days without prayer makes one weak.”

They had one message on the sign months ago that I spent way too much time pondering.  The sign said:

CHURCH THE WAY IT USED TO BE

At first I didn’t think much about it, but something about it nagged at me even though I knew it simply indicated that they probably have a traditional worship style.  Then I saw it again a few days later and realized the nagging feeling was that maybe they weren’t just advertising their worship style, but perhaps they were criticizing mine.  Our church, while somewhat conservative and traditional, does sing modern praise songs and uses video screens for various purposes.  I suspected maybe they don’t approve of churches that don’t “do church” the way they do.  The way it “used to be” when it was done right.

And then my sarcastic side took over.  The next time I drove by I was ready for action.  I slowed just a little as I went past and hurled an Easter egg at the sign.  Just kidding.  What I really did was sneak a peek down the side of the church building.  Just as I expected, I spotted just what I was looking for:

Air conditioning units.

“Well, well,” I smiled to myself, “I guess they’re not going back too far to the way church used to be.”

And then I started having more fun.  Why, with two-thousand years of Christian church history, did this particular church decide that the way to do church peaked sometime after electricity and air conditioning but before the advent of praise music and women wearing slacks on Sunday?  I imagined a church service there in about 1965.  I saw a wise elder rising spontaneously to his feet and commanding everybody’s attention right in the middle of the service.

“Wait!” he would have shouted with steely resolve.  “Do you see?  Can’t you tell?  THIS is EXACTLY what a church service should be.  We shall not change anything about our church from this point forward, because to do so would only diminish it.  This very day, my friends, we have perfected church.”  And all the members would have applauded (or said “amen” or whatever constituted appropriate public affirmation in 1965).

And so it was and still is today.  Church the way it used to be.  In 1965, anyway.

The sign’s message has long since changed, but I still think about it every time I go by.  I thought about that sign a little bit longer than usual last weekend after I ran past.  But without humor or disdain.  Maybe I was more reflective because it was Saturday and Jesus still hadn’t gotten out of the tomb yet this year.

And that’s when it hit me.

Easter Saturday may feel weird to me every year because it’s stuck between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  But that’s just because of what happened a long time ago.  You see, when Jesus got up and out on that first Easter, He never went back in.

Stuck in a tomb is only where He used to be.

But not anymore.