Calvinist pastor pulls back the curtain on Easter morning, ruining childhoods everywhere
(Spoiler alert)
Besides Christmas, Easter Sunday is the one day that many people will take their families to church - their young children all shiny and happy, dressed up in their Sunday best - even if they don't go any other time all year.
It's the day that seekers might dare to show up, looking for truth and answers and hope, even if they're too scared or stubborn to set foot in a church any other day.
And it also happens to be the day that the Calvinist pastor at my ex-church decided to pull back the curtain on a beloved Easter tradition to a room full of visitors and seekers and their small children, taking it upon himself to ruin childhood innocence and Easter-morning-fun all over the place.
I mean, seriously, imagine that you're a non-believer, a seeker, who - after all the fun of watching your children hunt for their Easter baskets and Easter eggs, and everyone's happy and hopeful - decided that for the first time, you'd bring your kids to church on Easter morning to see if there's anything worth believing in, if there's any eternal hope, encouragement, or answers for your deepest questions, doubts, and fears... and then this is what you and your children hear:
"We are pitiful fools if [the resurrection of the dead] is not true... It'd be no different, and I mean it, it'd be no different than if your next-door neighbor or your friends or your relatives believed and devoted their entire lives to the reality of the Easter Bunny. Think about that, if you really met somebody who structured their whole life, their spending, their giving, their weekends, their recreation, their priorities, their relationships - everything - was built around their belief in the reality of the Easter Bunny. Or Tooth Fairy. I just mention the Easter Bunny because it's Easter. You'd look at them, and what would you say about them? You'd say, 'That's pathetic!' Right? You'd go to dinner [with them] and you'd drive home and you'd go 'That was weird!'
... That would be weird. And beyond that, you'd think 'I think they're candidates for the nut-house. I mean, they talked about the Easter Bunny like it really exists.'... You'd say 'That's nuts. That's pitiful. that's pathetic.'
... Some of you remember years ago [in the news], it's the same thing with the group that ate poisoned applesauce - remember this group? - and they laid down with their Nike tennis shoes on after eating the poisoned applesauce and believed - really believed - that once they died, they'd join up with comet in the sky - Hale Bopp, that they said was a comet/spaceship - and that once they ate the poisoned applesauce and laid down in their Nike tennis shoes that they were going to then join that spaceship. And several dozen people did it!
And you're reading it going, 'Seriously!?! That's just nuts!'
That's the argument coming directly back at us if the resurrection isn't true."
So... Happy Easter!?!
Not only did this pastor destroy the Easter Bunny and every future Easter morning for all the visiting families and those watching online and all the young children (we have so few years as it is for our children to be innocent, young, naive and carefree, and he ruined it all in one fell swoop), but he also ruined the children's views of their parents who told them about the Easter Bunny and he ruined the Tooth Fairy and Nike shoes and applesauce, traumatizing young kids with fears of poisoned applesauce (notice that he never clarified that the cult members deliberately poisoned the applesauce themselves) and thoughts of suicide!
I mean, seriously, what the heck?
