The Hunger for an Easter Coming

When I was a kid in a small Baptist church in an even smaller Midwestern town, I loved Easter. I think I mostly loved it because my dad loved it. There was so much about my dad that was inscrutable. He was not overly communicative, he worked incredibly long hours, and his talents and interests always seemed a million miles away from my own.

But we both loved church. My dad, I think if the opportunity existed, would have lived at church. But no time more so than at Easter. He was there during the week building the replica cross for the stage—there on Palm Sunday night with my mom practicing with the choir. There well before dawn on Easter Sunday to make sure all was prepared for the youth group’s brunch after Sunrise Service.

Thoughts of my dad always trickle into my heart in these last weeks of Lent. Not only because of his love for this season but because he died Easter week 11 years ago.

The Things We Say in the Face of Death

One of the great tortures for a family experiencing a loss is the receiving line at the viewing or wake. For hours, one-by-one, well-meaning people pass through with their remembrances of the person you’ve lost. My dad’s death so gobsmacked me that I had to put together scripts to say so I wouldn’t lock up in some kind of stunned silence. The most consistent one was well-meaning humor about how it made sense for Dad to go because he just couldn’t wait any longer to spend Easter with Jesus.

In many ways, it was just a thing to say. A way to sketch the complexities of my dad in a simpler form so we all could hold space in the swirl of unplanned loss. In other ways, it was the truest thing I could say about him. The hunger for a Jesus-like presence in the world, the starvation for gentleness and grace seemed to plague my dad. As a teenage convert, in Jesus, my dad had found a form of welcome and acceptance he struggled to see anywhere else in the world. Even as he lay in hospice, I could feel the last strands of hope in him that Resurrection Day would one day come.

Most of us reading this are not facing an impending death in our immediate circle (though some undoubtedly are). But the thing to understand is that our sensation of death’s nearness is not merely at the end of life. Every loss or threat of loss is a kind of death. And when it comes to those kinds of losses, our Age of Corona has them in spades.

For a culture built for self-sufficiency and confident productivity, the uncertain hollow of all that we are living right now has the threat of a critical diagnosis. Our inactivity feels like an illness—our unknown a pressure on the chest that simply will not go away.

The Hunger

As a result of my business, I have been talking to people about Corona a lot. Part of the cost of spending hours on calls and Zoom with people various states of trauma reaction is the steady stream of things was say to make the Time of Corona fade to black:

• Other big viruses weren’t like this, we’re making it worse than it is.
• We just need to have faith instead of fear.
• If we would just listen to expert X, this all would be better.
• Group Y is the problem.
• I’m an optimist; I think this will all blow over in a week.

We tell ourselves stories in the face of loss and uncertainty. We go to war with those whose stories disrupt our own. We gather evidence to validate our stories. And we hunker down in the threadbare blanket of a narrative. As for me, a simple script for this wake has been hard to find. 

Instead, rising each day is the hunger. A hunger for Resurrection Day. A hunger like my dad's. A hunger no well-crafted narrative can fill.

The Presence in the Absence

In many ways, the adult me is much like my father. I’ve spent my days with the same longing I always saw in his eyes on Easter morning. Jesus is the welcome I’ve sought out all my life. As a child who felt a deep sense of loneliness and anxiety, I learned to look for Jesus around every corner. Never to make the hard go away, but to hold my hand in the brutal storm.

We are 17 days away from Easter. It seems a long slow walk from here. I, like many, long for the simplicity of childhood pew listening to my dad sing the baritone line of Up From the Grave He Arose. But what I really miss is Jesus. It feels as is we are trapped in a weeks-long Holy Saturday where the absence of our Beloved is felt across every blade of grass on the planet. Most days, it feels to me as if the whole world is leaning forward, far out on its toes, ready to tip, in the anxious anticipation of God’s intervening grace. I feel that way nearly every day.

My favorite Easter song as a kid was Sandi Patty’s Was It a Morning Like This (if you didn’t spend the 1980s in white evangelical culture you surely missed out):

Was it a morning like this?
When the Son still hid from Jerusalem
And Mary rose from her bed
To tend to the Lord she thought was dead

Was it a morning like this?
When Mary walked down from Jerusalem
And two angels stood at the tomb
Bearers of news she would hear soon

Did the grass sing?
Did the earth rejoice to feel You again?

Mary, I feel you. I feel that long walk down to all the tombs of losses and fears of losses that we are tending. Jerusalem, I feel you. I feel the hidden Son and the long shadow of uncertain days.

But what I feel the most, like the hum of a violin string right before the bow strikes, is the Easter song waiting to breakthrough. I feel it in me and hear in the voice of nearly everyone I speak to, the ache for a morning we have to believe is coming. Many of us have seen our church life splinter and shred. Many of us feel the loss of innocent faith we knew as children. Many of us spend more days in doubt than in confidence that God’s grace will rise like the sun of a new morning.

We know the long walk to tombs better than we dare admit. We know the scripts we say to make well-meaning visitations pass. But if we listen deeply, what we know best is the hum of a song ready to be sung. An Easter song trapped in the grass, over and over like a trumpet sounding underground.

Today I’ll take a step out into my yard. I’ll let the firmament meet the weight of my step. And I’ll feel for it; I hope you will too: the hum of an Easter coming. And the promise of Jesus in every single step we take.

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