Finished: Philip Yancey - The Jesus I Never Knew
The author and preacher Tony Campolo delivers a stirring sermon adaopted from an elderly black pastor at his church in Philadelphia. "It's Friday, but Sunday's Comin" is the title of the sermon, and once you know the title you know the whole sermon. In a cadence that increases in tempo and in volume, Campolo contrasts how the world looked on Friday - when the forces of evil won over the forces of good, when every friend and disciple fled in fear, when the Son of God died on a cross - with how it looked on Easter Sunday. The disciples who lived through both days, Friday and Sunday, never doubted God again. They had learned that when God seems most absent He may be closest of all, when God looks most powerless He may be most powerful, when God looks most dead He may be coming back to life. They had learned never to count God out.
Campolo skipped one day in his sermon though. The other two days have earned names on the church calendar: Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Yet in a real sense we live on Saturday, the day with no name. What the disciples experienced in a small scale - 3 days in grief over one man who died on a cross - we now live through on cosmic scale. Human history grinds on, between the time of promise and fulfillment. Can we trust that God can make something holy and beautiful and good out of a world that includes Bosnia and Rwanda, and inner-city ghettos and jammed prisons in the richest nation of the earth? It's Saturday on planet earth, will Sunday ever come?
That dark, Golgothan Friday can only be called Good because of what happened on Easter Sunday, a day which gives a tantalizing clue to the riddle of the universe. Easter opened up a crack in a universe winding down toward entropy and decay, sealing the promise that someday God will enlarge the miracle of Easter to cosmic scale.
It is a good thing to remember that in the cosmic drama, we live out our days on Saturday, the in-between day with no name. I know a woman whose grandmother lies buried under 150-year-old live oak trees in the cemetery of an Episcopal church in rural Louisiana. In accordance with the grandmother's instructions, only one word was carved on the tombstone: "Waiting"
