Christianity

An Easter Like One Other

April 10, 2020 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

Nobody’s ever had to live through an Easter like this.

That’s what I keep hearing. In some small but important ways, that’s true.

Everything feels like it’s shrinking. Our lives are now confined to only the necessary places — home, the store, work — and the necessary people — those we live with. All those other facets of our lives have been stripped away, and in their places are holes we can’t seem to fill.

I’ve noticed that time has shrunk as well. Before all of this happened, it was nothing for me to live my life a week or so in advance. Always planning things, always so focused on what was ahead that I often lost sight of what was right in front of me. But no more. Now there’s really no point in living a week in advance because weeks don’t feel like they exist anymore. Everything could change by next Friday, or maybe nothing will. We just don’t know. So what’s the point in planning anything?

Days, too — they’ve changed in a fundamental way. Sunday through Saturday doesn’t carry the same weight as it once did. There were once seven days, and those seven days made a week, and 52 of those weeks made a year, and that was the basis by which we all measured our progress through this life. But now those seven days have been whittled down to the only three that maybe have ever really counted:

Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.

Yesterday, back when the world was as normal as any of us could expect and we were living as though our lives were as solid as the mountains outside my window. Change would come, we all somehow knew that, but it would come slowly, gradually, and from a distance long enough that we could see it well in advance.

Tomorrow, which is so filled with uncertainty and fear right now that most of us try to avoid thinking much about it at all.

And today, this moment we’re all trying not to sink inside, where so much of what we think and do is spent just trying to keep safe without losing our hope.

So yes, it sounds right on the surface. Nobody’s ever had to live through an Easter like this.

But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that’s not true. Surely down through the ages there have been other Easters when so much went wrong in such a hurry. Moments in history when everything felt broken to the point that people wondered if it could all be put back together again. I could maybe dig out some of my wife’s old college history textbooks and find some examples, but I don’t need to. One Easter has stood out in my mind all week as the perfect parallel to what we’re all facing right now.

That first one.

Of the three days that make up the holiest weekend of the Christian calendar, two of them are given the due they deserve. Good Friday and Easter Sunday are so ingrained in our hearts and (believe it or not) our culture that it’s easy to miss what exactly they mean for all of us. But that day in between — that’s the day I’ve spent so much time thinking about lately, because that’s the one that describes exactly where we are at the moment.

Not Good Friday or Easter Sunday, but Holy Saturday.

I only know it’s called that because I looked it up, thinking that day had to have some sort of adjective attached to it. And it’s the perfect one, don’t you think? Holy.

“Venerated as or as if sacred; having a divine quality.”

Yes.

We know the story of Good Friday. We celebrate the events of Easter Sunday. But the Bible is strangely silent about the Saturday in between, leaving us to only imagine what that day was like for the disciples Christ left behind. Men and women who were suffering from the so much that went wrong in such a hurry. Who were facing their own shrunken world of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Yesterday their world lay drenched in beauty. They spent their days at the feet of their Lord, watching in wonder as the sick were healed the poor were given hope, astonished at every turn that God could be so loving, so gentle and kind.

Tomorrow was an unbearable thought. So much was made unknown now, their hopes dashed by the memory of the dead man hanging from a cross. What comfort could tomorrow bring? What meaning could the coming years provide when life itself felt so meaningless?

Which left them only with today, that first Holy Saturday. They woke from an uneasy sleep heartbroken by the feeling that life as they knew it had come to an end. Everything they had believed had come to nothing. Far from beautiful, their world had become a place of danger, leaving them to hide indoors for fear of the same death suffered by their savior.

Sounds familiar in a way, doesn’t it?

That’s where we are right now, you and I. We’re living out our own Holy Saturday, only ours will last months instead of hours. Caught between a yesterday that aches upon its recollection like pressing on a bruise, and a tomorrow that only offers more of the same.

Like every other Christian with any common sense, my family will spend this weekend at home. We’ve never had to go through an Easter like this. That’s why it will be so special.

Because we know what those men and women on that first Holy Saturday did not — there is a power beyond all sickness and death, a certainty that can tame any doubt, and a hope that transcends anything that threatens to befall us.

That is why even in these days we can yet laugh. That is why we can stand strong. And that is why if I could somehow find those few men and women hiding in fear on that first Holy Saturday nearly two thousand years ago, I would tell them the same as I tell you:

Hang on, because joy comes in the morning.

The Saturday in between

March 30, 2018 by Billy Coffey 4 Comments

If like me you are counted among the mass of Christians in this country, you consider these seven days among the holiest of the year.

I’ve always been a great fan of the Easter season. You slog through yet another seemingly endless winter of bare trees and gray skies thinking things will never get better, and then comes along a day upon which everything turns—your mood, the season, even history itself. Flowers begin to bloom. Trees bud. Daylight stretches a little farther. Life is called forth from death. That is Easter to me.

Church will play an important role in the Coffey home this week. On Friday evening we will gather at a building in town to sing songs of a Man who was more than a man, Whose words of love and forgiveness led to His sufferings upon a cross. It will be a somber service as far as church goes. That is by design. The point will be to put our focus on the sorrows felt by Christ on that long-ago day, as well as the sadness and fear in His followers. At the service’s end, our pastor will stand before the congregation and say,

“Go from this place, for Jesus is dead.”

The sanctuary lights will then dim nearly to dark, leaving us all to feel our way out in shadow.

It’s powerful stuff.

But what will make Friday night’s service even more powerful is the one which will follow on Sunday morning, when we will all gather once more. Gone will be the sadness and the fear, all the shadows. Then will be joy and the light of day. For He is no longer dead, this Jesus. He is risen, and by His wounds we are risen as well.

That is what we believe. What I believe.

You can hold to otherwise, and that’s fine. Plenty who visit this place do not consider themselves religious at all, and I won’t begrudge them one bit. We’re all trying to make sense of this world and our place in it. Christianity is simply the way I make sense of mine.

But that’s not really the point of this piece. What’s struck me this week is the entire range of emotions Easter offers, and how that fits into much of the time we spend in this world. Two days during the Easter holiday receive the bulk of our attention—Good Friday and Easter Sunday. One a time of utter hopelessness and faith dashed, the other a day of unending joy and a hope so real and undeniable that it came to change the world. The gospel accounts share much of those two separate days. Even if you’re not a believer, I encourage you to read them. Yet I’ve often thought something missing from the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. A hole in the narrative I sometimes wish would have been filled.

We know what happened on that first Good Friday. Know what happened that first Easter Sunday. But the Bible is silent on what Jesus’s followers felt and did on the day in between.

That Saturday—that’s what I want to know.

Because when you think about it, that’s where the majority of our lives are lived. We are not so despondent that we have come to know all we once believed as worthless. Our lives do not feel devoid of purpose. Our very foundations have not been shaken. But nor are our days filled with such hope and assuredness that we feel shot through with a love beyond any this world could ever provide.

We don’t spend most of our days in the sorrow of Good Friday or the joy of Easter Sunday. No, most often we find ourselves living in the Saturday in between. Trying to figure out what to do next, what to let go of and what to hold onto. Trying, sometimes, just to get through the day.

It would be nice to know how Mary got through that day. Or Peter or John. But we don’t.

Maybe that’s on purpose, though.

You would think something as important as that Saturday would have been included in scripture. That it isn’t would suggest that maybe it isn’t important at all.

Maybe the point here is that life isn’t supposed to make sense all the time. That all of our questions and pains are here for the purpose of helping us to grow more and better. To become. It is to embrace the mystery of our lives fully and to always be searching. Our days are so often like the end of our Good Friday service at church—just a bunch of bodies groping about in shadow, searching for a way out. That isn’t such a bad thing. You never know what you’ll find while groping about in dim light, whose hand yours will brush against or who’s smile you will meet. What cause you will find to laugh.

The point of that first Saturday is an important one, I think—hang on. Always hang on. Do your work and smile and laugh and hang on.

Because Sunday’s coming.

God’s name

May 11, 2017 by Billy Coffey 5 Comments

I was six when I learned God’s first name was Andy.

It fit in that special way you can’t put to words but only feel. On most days back then I would get home from school in time to make a peanut butter sandwich and watch a few reruns on the TV. My favorite was an old black and white about this sheriff and his deputy who lived in a town called Mayberry. That sheriff’s name was Andy just like God’s, and I thought it a fine thing because the Andy on TV was always so kind.

It was funny because I didn’t learn all of this at home. My mother and grandmother served as my spiritual guides growing up, as is common in the South. Most everything I learned about God came from them. But not God’s name. At the time, I could only conclude they never said because they never knew. To them, God was only that. God. Which must have made Him like Mister Howerton down the street or Mister Snyder next door, nice enough old men but never ones you’d feel comfortable spending some time with. Not a God fit to play some catch or gig some frogs or go exploring in the cornfields.

That was the sort of God I’d always wanted. Still do.

No, instead I learned God’s first name in the most unlikely of places—church. More specifically, the Mennonite place out on Route 608 where the tombstones were all old and haunted and where you went inside the sanctuary and didn’t say a word because that’s where God was, Him being so Big and Other and us being so Small and Plain. The church had no piano, no baptismal pool, no adornments of any kind except for the wooden cross hanging on the wall behind the pulpit. But you could always feel Something lingering along those plain white walls, and some part of you always felt that Thing was watching to see what you did.

We sang our hymns a capella. I mostly mouthed them and nothing more. But then one Sunday we sang a hymn I hadn’t heard before, and in those words was God’s first name—Andy. I still remember how that felt. The sudden realization, like two pieces of a puzzle you’ve never quite figured out suddenly fitting together with such perfection. Andy—yes. At that moment, God became someone I knew rather than feared. He’d always known my name and now I knew His, and that made us friends.

And it was all so plain. That’s what got me. All this time there was this profound bit of information just sitting there, right in the chorus of that song, and I could not for the life of me understand why no one else reacted the way I did. Everyone else merely kept on what they were doing, eyes down and voices straining and tired, wanting to just get on with things. It was as if they didn’t even know what they were singing. I remember nudging my mother and father, trying to make them see. They didn’t. If my memory is right, all Dad did was tell me to hold still for just one hour. I went away from church that Sunday thinking the only thing I could—I’d been given some secret meant for no one else.

For months I sprinkled my prayers with God’s real name. “Dear Andy” and “Thank you, Andy,” and “Hey Andy.” You wouldn’t believe the difference it made. There were times as a kid when I’d catch myself thinking all I did was talk to the ceiling. Now, it felt like there was actually somebody there. Someone listening just like the Andy on the TV, looking at your mouth and your eyes and nodding his head with a grin.

Of course, none of this was bound to last. At a certain point I learned to read a little better and pay attention a little more, at which point I stumbled upon the truth of that song.

Not: “Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me, Andy tells me I am His own.”

But: “And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own.”

He. God.

Not Andy.

It was a tough thing to figure out. Like a lot of things you discover as you grow up, knowing I’d been wrong didn’t make me feel nearly as stupid as it did sad. The God I learned about at church was someone so completely different, so utterly powerful and holy, that He scared me. But Andy? That was a God I knew loved me and a God I knew I loved.

You can take anything you want from this. I’m not going to try to get overly theological. I’ll only say that there have been many times over the years when the world goes gray and the burdens pile up and everything gets so tired and utterly lost that I feel much more as the boy I was rather than the man I am. Maybe that’s true for all of us. Could be our bodies and minds grow old but our souls never do, that deep down we’re all just scared little kids. But it’s in those times when I’ll go for a walk or stare up to a darkened ceiling, and I’ll say much the same at forty-four as I did at six.

I’ll say, “Dear Andy,” because that’s still God to me.

Fisher of men

May 18, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Next time I won’t order the fish. That’s what I thought after he left. If I would have ordered chicken or steak or shrimp I would have gotten my food earlier, which meant I would have prayed earlier, which meant he wouldn’t have seen me. But he did, and like they say, that is that.

Lunch time for me is a sort of take-it-when-you-can thing that depends on how busy I am and how far I want to drive. Most of the time that places me inside a small restaurant downtown, just a few blocks from my work. Nice place with nice food. Very friendly, very tasty, and very quick.

So. The fish.

An extra ten minutes, the waitress said. “You sure you don’t mind waiting?”

No.

The man came in five minutes later and was shown to the table across from mine. We smiled and nodded like friendly folk do, and I was fairly certain that would be the extent of our interaction. It wasn’t. Because soon afterward my fish arrived and I offered a very silent and inconspicuous prayer.

He was staring at me when I opened my eyes.

“So you’re a churchgoer?” he asked.

“Yep,” I answered. “You?”

“Never,” he said in a tone that seemed rather proud.

I nodded and went back to eating.

“Don’t believe in God myself,” he said. “Just seems like a waste. I guess that means I’m going to hell, huh?”

I’d been around long enough to know when I was being baited into a conversation I really didn’t want to get into. This, I thought, was one of those conversations.

So I just said “Not my call” and raised another bite of fish.

“Not your call,” he repeated. “That’s typical.”

I chewed and thought about the last little bit of what he said. It was more bait, of course. And it was still a conversation I didn’t want to have. But maybe it was now one I should.

“Typical?” I asked.

“Yeah, typical. You people like to use those pat little answers for questions you just don’t know or are just too afraid to face.”

“Like whether you’re going to hell?” I asked.

“Sure. That just bugs me. Christians say that God is love, but if you don’t go along with the program then you get eternally punished. That doesn’t sound like love to me, that just sounds hypocritical.”

I shrugged. “Not really. I reckon God’s spent—what, fifty years or so?—trying to get you to pay attention to Him. He’s arranged circumstances, given you a glimpse of things you don’t normally see or think about, even spoke to you. There’s no telling how many chances you’ve gotten to say ‘Hello’ to God after He’d said the same to you. But you have a choice. That’s how He made you. You can choose to listen or not, choose to believe or not, choose to accept or not. I take it that so far, it’s been not. So if you spend your whole life telling God to stay as far away from you as possible, He’s gentleman enough to do just that when it’s all over. So yes, I suppose if you keeled over right here right now, you’d go to hell. But it’s not me who’s gonna send you there, and it’s not God either. It’s you.”

He looked at me. I looked back.

“Alright then,” he said.

We both continued our meals. Ten minutes later he squared his tab with the waitress and left, pausing at the door to offer me a smile and a tip of his hat.

The waitress focused on me then, asking if I’d like more coffee or just the check. I asked for a check and an answer.

“That fella come in here a lot?”

“Sure,” she said. “He’s the preacher at the church next door.”

“He’s the what?” I asked her.

“The preacher.” Then she smiled and added, “Was he havin’ a little fun with you?”

“Don’t know if I’d call it fun.”

“He likes that,” she said. “Likes finding people who call themselves Christians and tests them. Sees if they know their faith or just accept it. These days we have to be ready to defend it, don’t we?”

“We do,” I said.

And that’s the truth. It isn’t enough to just accept our faith nowadays. We have to stand for it. And this is the truth, too—next time I go there to eat, I’m ordering the fish. Maybe he’ll stop by.

Between despair and hope

April 6, 2015 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

It’s come and gone now, but Easter is still on my mind. That’s how it is when you get older. When I was a kid, Easter wasn’t even an entire day, really. It lasted only a couple of hours on those Sunday mornings, beginning with waking up to dive into all that candy stuffed into the basket left for me on the kitchen table and ending just a few hours later, when I walked out of church. When you’re just coming up in the world, Easter seems a little overblown.

After you’ve come up, though? Well, then things get different. You get to that age after you find out the Easter Bunny’s just a poor man’s Santa but before you start sneaking chocolate into your own kids’ baskets, and Easter maybe dims a little more. Maybe it’s the time of year that does it. It’s springtime when Easter rolls around, and everything is new and fresh and drowned in color, and what’s on your mind is more the rising temperature than a rising Lord. You take it for granted that the Miracle happened. The stone got rolled away and the angel said Look inside and inside was empty. You hear things like that too much, sometimes it doesn’t seem so special anymore.

But then something new happens, usually once you get some age and you find that you’re starting to attend more funerals than weddings. Life takes on a different look right about then. The shine starts to wear off. You start thinking less about where you’re at and more about what’s laying on ahead. You maybe discover what Easter means for the first time in your life.

I wouldn’t say that’s where I am personally, but I’d say it’s near enough. To me, Easter is the holiest time of the year. It’s a period to be quiet and listen—days to both despair and hope. That last point is what’s been on my mind.

For a lot of the religiously minded, Easter is really just three days rather than one. It begins on Good Friday, when we pause in our otherwise busy and stressful lives to consider this person who was both God and man, dying such a horrible death, setting himself apart from God so we would never have to ourselves. It ends the following Sunday with that empty tomb full of promise—proof enough for any believer that death has lost its sting.

It’s that Saturday that I want to talk about, though—that Saturday between the first Good Friday and that first Easter. The day between all that despair and all that new hope. Nothing much gets said about that day, and so it’s all left to some imagination and hard thinking. I think about the Marys and the disciples, all shut up inside somewhere, hiding and grieving. I think about them all trying to hold onto a faith that maybe can’t help but be slipping away, searching for any reason at all to believe, and I think about how that seems an awful lot like what most of us feel everyday.

That first Saturday? That’s our lives. Those hours are our years, ones spent trying to hope and understand. Trying to find the reasons behind the horrible things that happen to us all. It’s a tough thing, this business of living, especially when you put a God whose ways are so far apart from our own at the center of it. We stand in the present now just as the disciples stood in it then, and the choice we have is the same as theirs. We can look back to despair, or we can look ahead and hope. It’s a daring hope, no doubt, one that seems near to impossible. And yet that is where we all must turn, and that is what we all must cling to—that stone rolled away. That empty tomb. Because we can do without a great many things in life and still call ourselves living, but we cannot go without hope.

The God of Mayberry

February 23, 2015 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to figure out God in one way or another. I don’t have a conversion story; I’ve always believed. It’s what I do with that belief that has at times become problematic. I’ve strayed (oh, friend, how I’ve strayed) but always come back, and with a deeper appreciation of the One whom I worship. Still, the truth remains inescapable after all these years—the One I worship is a mystery. One I will forever try to solve but will forever remain unsolvable. On this side of heaven, anyway.

Who He is and what, why He does the things He does. Ask me those things and I’ll give you an answer, though that answer may be more in the form of a question than anything else. Maybe that’s the point. God’s ways aren’t our ways, the Book says. His thoughts are not our thoughts.

There was a time though, the summer I turned six, when I very nearly had God figured out. That’s the year I discovered God was Andy Griffith.

You know Andy, right? Had a TV show back in the 60s. Played a sheriff in the town of Mayberry? Boy named Opie and an aunt named Bea. Deputy Barney Fife? Sure you do. You read this blog, you just about have to be an Andy Griffith kind of person.

That summer my dad and I had a standing appointment to watch Andy Griffith every weekday afternoon on channel 3. To my memory, we never missed a single one. I loved Andy, I truly did. If he would’ve chewed Red Man and cussed a lot more and kept a jar of moonshine in the freezer, he could’ve been just like my own father.

Round about July was when I learned Andy was God (or God was Andy, whichever you’d prefer). I was sitting in church and tugging at my collar one Sunday when hymn time came. I could read some of the words in the hymnal but not all, so I had to follow along with the singing. When the congregation reached the chorus, I had a revelation.

“Andy walks with me, Andy talks with me, Andy tells me I am His own.”

I can honestly say I’d never felt so happy.

Of course, that didn’t last very long. School started again a few months later. I learned to read and more and better. Didn’t take me long to realize ANDY was in face AND HE. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. That day, Andy turned back into all the things that had come before. Back to God, to He, to Yahweh and I AM. Back to all those names that sounded small in my head but too big for me to figure in my heart.

I’m forty-two now, a long way from six. But I’ll say there are still times when I think of God like Andy Griffith. Hard times, dark ones, those long stretches when life doesn’t seem to make much sense. I’ll think about all those times when Andy showed drunk Otis mercy and clumsy Barney grace. When Opie had problems and his dad was there with some words of advice and a lap to sit on and an “I love you, son.” In the end, that’s just about all I need.

Just about all any of us needs.