Cage Matches and Communion - The Masked Saint

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”

– Ephesians 6:2

As a teenager, more often than my father – the senior pastor—would probably care to know about, my friends and I used this passage from the book of Ephesians to justify having full-blown “professional” wrestling matches before youth group on Sunday nights.

And after youth group.

And during youth group.

My fellow aspiring grapplers and I were always one vocal cue or surreptitious look away from hitting our entrance music on a hidden stereo, magically producing championship belts and folding chairs, and completely hijacking the meeting to put on a show. Our youth pastor had the patience of Job, which was never more on display than when we decided to use the building of the new sanctuary across the hall as an opportunity to stage an epic “hardcore ladder match” among all of the construction. Ladders were tossed, old drywall was destroyed, and bodies were bruised. And we loved every minute of it. Although in hindsight, taking that suplex onto a giant pile of fiberglass insulation probably wasn’t the smartest idea. It’s been twenty years since that night and I’m still itching.

At first, I guess I thought that being the pastor’s son gave me special privileges, or shielded me from prosecution for my antics. I was very wrong… yet, still we persisted. As a way to mitigate the consequences we knew were coming, we would hastily shoehorn that evening’s Biblical lesson into our wrestling storylines. If the youth pastor was teaching on Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness, Wrestler #1 became Jesus and Wrestler #2 became Satan trying to tempt him.

Our Jesus didn’t take too kindly to temptation, especially not with the championship on the line.

Sometimes our “object lessons” were a stretch. But sometimes, like with Jesus and the money changers or Samson and the Philistines, the stories wrote themselves. We felt justified.

Looking back on it now, I see a group of mischievous Christian youth caught up in the wrestling craze of the late 90s. However, with a more mature adult’s perspective, I also think we might have been onto something without even realizing it.

Professional wrestling, as we know it, started in the late 1800s as a carnival sideshow. It was a genuine athletic competition, albeit one plagued by cheating and fixed outcomes in order to manipulate gambling payouts. As time went on, what was once a popular sport saw its popularity plunge as the public began to question its legitimacy. In order to maintain an audience and the sport’s exposure, promoters shifted the focus away from the actual competition and focused more on characters and storylines, the entertainment of it. Who cares if it isn’t real, as long as it’s entertaining, right?

What was sport became live theater. Colorful bad guys (or “heels”) cheated and back-stabbed in their greedy quests for championship gold. Virtuous good guys (babyfaces) fought to vanquish the heels and give the people the honorable champion they deserved. It became a classic good versus evil story played out between the ropes.

Wrestling always changes with the times. Storylines and characters find ways to reflect the ideas and attitudes of society. But that classic struggle is always represented. And although the “Attitude Era” of the late 90s found new ways to up the sex, violence, and profanity of professional wrestling – turning it into something less family-friendly than its earlier incarnations – at its heart wrestling still is that classic morality play. Good guys versus bad guys. Right versus wrong. Truth versus lies.

In its purest form, wrestling is fact told through fiction. I was paying enough attention in Sunday school and youth group to remember that Jesus did the same thing. He called them parables.

I think wrestling does have a place in the church, maybe just not in the way that I was doing it.

So do the creators of the upcoming film “The Masked Saint.” Starring the late wrestling icon “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in his final film, the movie follows the journey of former professional wrestler Chris Samuels, who retires from the ring to settle down as a small town pastor. When he witnesses rampant problems in the community, he decides to moonlight as a masked vigilante fighting the injustice. While facing crises at home and at the church, Samuels must evade the police and somehow reconcile his secret, violent identity with his calling as a pastor. Inspired by true events in the life of Pastor Chris Whaley, “The Masked Saint” is based on the highly popular book of the same name.

Right versus wrong. Good versus evil. Faith, family, and wrestling.

The fact that the film is based on a true story is more than enough for me to feel justified in staging all of those Youth Group Battle Royals. We were on the right track, whether we knew it or not. I just wish we had filmed them, or taken our act on the road. There’s where that hindsight comes into play again.

Maybe I should come out of retirement too…

Regardless of my future wrestling endeavors, do yourself a favor and visit www.themaskedsaint.com to learn more about the film. And be sure to see it when it hits theaters on January 8. Also stay for a few minutes and check out the trailer alone. Just from watching that, I can tell that they’ve already done a much better job telling the story our ragtag group was trying to.