As I finished my junior year in high school, in some ways I was on top of the world:I was on the varsity debate team and we had managed a first place at State. I was in the acapella choir in school and we had just cut a Christmas album that even today gives me the shivers. I was blessed to be in a family that took care of all of my needs and more. Things were good! But in some other ways, things were really lousy in my life, really empty. I was really struggling with my faith, really wrestling with the incredible self-focus teen-agers often experience, and I was in that place where you know something is not right in your life, but you think if you say, “Things are good!” enough times, that maybe you’ll forget how off things are. But hey! I had the whole summer ahead of me …and then my dad told me there’s a week he wants me to go with him to the Colorado Rockies to a Christian youth conference with 2000 teens…and I say to myself, “Really? a conference where I don’t know anybody (except my Dad…)? I’m going to spend the whole week wandering around not knowing anybody.” It’s the curse of being a pastor’s child…they get these great ideas and you get dragged along. Dad says, “I have to check out the facility and see it in action…maybe it could be the site for our national youth conference in a couple years.” So fine. We get there and I’m kind of grumbling to myself about having to be there, and I look out through the crystal clean air across the valley to the snowy peaks of the Continental Divide. That view is shockingly beautiful, but I mumble a grudging, “It’s beautiful” that means I don’t want to start enjoying it…because then my Dad would be right.
We get to Wednesday night and I see in the program that the main speaker is Tony Campolo. “Tony who?” I ask myself. So we find a seat in the auditorium and it is packed to the rafters with youth groups from around the country. And Campolo starts telling about how he was a young pastor in a West Philadelphia church. He says, “We used to have ‘preach offs,’ preaching contests with one preacher after another. They don’t talk about it like that—it’s all for the glory of God!—but that’s what it is. So I stood up to preach, and in the African-American culture, they give you encouragement as you preach. The Deacons say, ‘Amen!’ and the men say, ‘Well!’ and someone says, ‘Preach it!’ and another says, ‘Keep it going!’ and I started to get into the rhythm of it and I got better and better. After thirty minutes I sat down. The older pastor next to me patted me on the knee. He said, ‘You did alright. You did alright.’ I said, ‘Do you think you can top that?’ ‘Son, just sit back.’ And over the next 30 minutes, he schooled me, and he did it with just a few words, ‘It’s Friday…but Sunday’s coming!’
As Paul is thinking about the Christians in Corinth, he realizes the root of all their problems is that for them Easter is not real, that they don’t live in light of the resurrection. For them it’s Friday and Sunday never comes. They have Jesus dying on the Cross on Good Friday and that’s it. That happens all the time in our day. We have people who are perfectly willing to suffer for God—they will work themselves to the bone for God, but if there’s no resurrection, then why bother? If there’s just Friday, then Paul’s sacrifices and all of ours, and all the sacrifices of those who have gone before us are pointless. Because if all we have is Friday then we may as well party like there’s no tomorrow, because if all we have is Friday, then for us there is no day after we die.
And if there’s just Friday, then death really does have the last word. The powers of darkness, the powers of this present age that seem so bound and determined to crush people’s freedom and stamp out the light of truth—these are the powers that win on Friday as Jesus is tried before the Council, whipped and beaten, mocked and tormented, led to the Roman Governor and nailed to a cross. If there’s only Friday, then Jesus is just another good teacher, just another guy who tried and failed to change the world, and he is worth a footnote in history. That’s Friday. But Sunday’s coming!
In that crowded auditorium in the Rockies, Tony Campolo then told how the preacher started out kind of quiet and slow, “’The disciples were afraid and didn’t know what to do as Jesus hung on the cross, because it’s Friday, even though they know Sunday’s coming.’ And then he started to ramp it up a bit. ‘Friday people are saying, “There’s nothing you can do. No one can change the world,” but I’m here to tell you the Good News…Sunday’s coming.’ And before long the pastor is building up steam, ‘Friday morning they said that a bunch of people sitting in a room will never have the energy to change their community, that good guys always finish last and evil will win the day… it’s only Friday…but Sunday’s coming!’”
I realized as I sat there in that auditorium with all those strangers, that I knew Sunday was coming, but I was living like there was only Friday—measuring my life by my achievements and how much fun I had. I had received the grace of God, experienced the love of Christ, but I was holding on to wanting things my way, refusing to enjoy the beauty of the moment. And I realized that if Sunday was really coming, if Jesus had really risen, then what I did and how I lived mattered, and that when I got to the end of what I knew, the resurrection power of Christ would come right on in and pick up where I left off. In fact, things would be better because God was doing the heavy lifting. It had been Friday in my life, but Sunday was coming!
So how is it in your life as we had towards Valentine’s Day tomorrow? Are you loving and living like it’s Friday, grinding away but unsatisfied? Or are you loving and living like Sunday’s coming, full of joy from God’s promises kept? Jesus sings a love song to each of us and it comes to us in our Fridays—it whispers, “Sunday’s coming!” You see the word we all need to hear, is that we are all going to have Fridays when it seems the world is against us, when our plans are failing and our hopes are dust in the wind. Indeed, we are all going to die, so how we live really matters. Will we hear the Good News and let it change us? For every Friday that happens in our life, God can sing out in our hearts, “But Sunday’s coming!” And when we see the problems of our world, we who seek Jesus do not despair or plug our ears, because that’s Friday-talk. No, we roll up our sleeves and open our hearts, because we know Sunday’s coming. The world will tell us we are fools, that coming together on a Sunday morning is a waste of time, and that we need to get real…because it’s just Friday for them…but Sunday’s coming! Are we willing to live beyond our Fridays? To listen less to the world and more to God, to not be conformed to the world’s ideas of what matters, but be transformed by the Holy Spirit and renewed from the inside out. Because as real as Friday is…Sunday’s coming! My friends, it’s Friday…but Sunday’s coming!