Easter is a big deal on the Northside, in the Jackson area as a whole and the entire state of Mississippi.
Mississippi is a religious state. According to the U. S. News and World Report, Mississippi is the most religious state in the United States.
Drive through any city or town in Mississippi. The biggest, nicest, best maintained buildings will be our churches.
Mississippi ranks at the bottom of a lot of rankings. All these rankings are based on the material aspects of life. But Mississippi ranks at the very top of the spiritual list.
Which begs the questions: What is more important in life? The material or the spiritual?
Jesus answered this question with the words: What good does it do a man to gain the entire world and lose his soul?
Decades ago I worked on Wall Street. I saw a lot of very rich, powerful, ambitious people who had zero spirituality. These were people who had gained the entire world but lost their souls. So I left New York and came back to Mississippi.
It wasn’t long until I married a southern belle with a deep beautiful thick accent. I was smitten and would do anything to win her. Ginny had one non-negotiable condition: that I go to church every Sunday.
I had no problem with this request. Intellectually, I was very pro religion, pro Christianity for practical reasons. Society needed religion. It was a key ingredient to the cultural fabric of a nation. It tempered man's base instincts to have accountability to a high power. A successful nation needed religious citizens.
So I started going to church every Sunday. Over time, I was transformed from a practical Christian to a true believer. A good church will do that to a man.
That’s why you have to go to church. I cringe when I hear people tell me they are believers but don’t like going to church. “I worship in my own way,” they say.
It simply doesn’t work like that. Church, Christ, faith doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You must surround yourself with others to realize that it is not all about you. You have to interact with people from all walks of life and realize that your journey, though precious in God’s eyes, is just one of millions, billions.
Sitting alone at home thinking you can do it yourself in isolation is egocentric, selfish, misguided and doomed for failure. You must go to church.
Being a Harvard grad, I had a pretty high opinion of myself. But my arrogance dissipated over the years as I interacted with little old blue-haired ladies in Sunday school class and realized they were far smarter and wiser than me. I was humbled. Thank God!
I did have a Road to Damascus moment in the most unlikely of places: On the golf course with my buddies Bob Crisler and Kemal Sanli 35 years ago.
I was in the woods and losing badly when, right in front of them, I got down on my knees and prayed. “God, I know it’s only golf, but this would be a great time to show me that you are real and present in my life.”
Bob and Kemal looked at me in disgust. Then I chipped in three holes in a row, including from 80 yards on hole 18. They looked like they had seen a ghost. I’ve never ever heard of any golfer chipping in three holes in a row.
I later did the math on the probability of this happening based on my golfing skill. It was something like one in a billion. And the probability of doing that after getting down on my knees and praying for divine intervention is one in a number the name of which I do not know. There was simply no other logical answer than the simple fact that God was real and present in my life. So I became a steadfast believer and have remained so to this day. Thank God!
It often puzzled me how this could have happened, after my audacious, impudent act.
It was decades later, sitting in my pew at the Covenant Presbyterian Church, when pastor Josh Cole supplied me with the answer. It was right there all along in the Bible. It is the parable of the Friend at Midnight, Luke 11:8.
In the parable, this guy’s neighbor starts banging on his door at midnight asking for bread. Turns out, some of the neighbor’s friends are in town and he ran out of bread. The parable goes on to say, in Jesus’ words, “I tell you, even though he will not get up and give bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.
“So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
In some versions, “shameless audacity” is referred to as “arrogant impudence.” It certainly describes what I did on the golf course that day. And it played out just like Jesus said it would 2,000 years ago. That is, to me, simply beyond amazing.
Years later Bob and Kemal and I were at lunch and I recalled the day on the golf course. “Did that really happen,” Kemal asked. “I thought maybe I had dreamed it.”
We all remember a fourth person there and spent a considerable amount of effort, to no avail, tracking down the fourth person. Then I realized, of course, it was Jesus!
If Christ did not rise from the dead then Jesus Christ is the greatest fraud in history. But he did rise. Hundreds of people were witnesses. His resurrection turned the apostles from life-protecting chickens to history-altering visionaries who all died in the service of their savior. That doesn’t happen by accident.
Nor could a simple carpenter turned preacher have two billion people claim him as their personal savior 2,000 years after his death without divine intervention. I do not have enough faith to be an atheist.
As scientific advances glimpse deeper into God’s creation, what we are seeing is mind blowing. Subatomic particles become waves then turn back into particles in a phantasmagoria of kaleidoscopic wonder. Yes, we live in a simulation. It’s called reality and God is the programmer. And God can make it do anything he wants it to do. He is not bound by earthly rules.
As I become officially a “senior citizen” at age 65, there is nothing more precious to me than my faith. I am so, so grateful to God for this faith. So I will definitely be in church this Easter Sunday. See you there.
