Month: April 2021

There’s a crowd game love to play called Lamentation or Taylor Swift Lyric. The premise is pretty simple. We put a verse on the screen and the players have to guess whether it’s a verse from the Book of Lamentations in the Bible, or if it’s a verse from a sad Taylor Swift song about somebody she broke up with. It’s great entertainment for this “Swiftie” and church staff member. It’s also surprisingly difficult. I played it in a room with about 30 United Methodist pastors at a retreat in Nags Head a few years ago. The pastors missed every. single. question. Although I had suspected we wouldn’t have a ton of T-Swift fans in the group, apparently we didn’t have a lot of causal readers of Lamentations either.

I don’t have a great track record of sticking with published devotionals. They tend to be cheerful, and when I’m not feeling cheerful, that tends to exacerbate, rather than alleviate my mood. But much as I love Taylor Swift, her songwriting is not always cheerful. And much as I love the Bible, it isn’t always either. Lamentations is a great example, but leaders from Jeremiah to David to Jesus himself expressed written and verbal frustrations to the Father about the state of their nations, their lives, and their relationships with God. But they did so with an honesty that displays faith in a God who looks beyond our temporary worries and who is also with us in the suffering. May we look to God even when we’re not cheerful, and may we know we’re in good company.

When my grandmother (Velma) and her sister (Shirley) were elementary students in the 1930’s, they had to memorize the 23^rd Psalm in Sunday School. After a few weeks of learning it, my grandmother told her Sunday School teacher she didn’t like the 23^rd Psalm, and the teacher was perplexed. How could anybody dislike such a peaceful, comforting series of verses? It turned out she just had a problem with one of them, verse 6: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,” which she mistakenly heard as “Shirley, goodness, and mercy shall follow me.” My grandmother told her teacher “Shirley follows me everywhere now, I don’t want her to do it all my life.”

This Sunday we celebrate Good Shepherd Sunday. We’ll read what David and Jesus each said about shepherds and sheep. We’ve been singing the Sheep Song in preschool chapel. I hope we all have goodness and mercy following us, not as a little sibling dragged along, but as the characteristics of Christ which we imitate and leave in our wake… all the days of our lives.

Ecuador has one Olympic gold medal. If you know anything about Ecuador, or other South American countries, particularly Andean countries, you might guess that medal is in the sport of soccer, or tennis, or golf, or even volleyball. It is, in fact, in the slightly less-followed sport of Speed Walking. Jefferson Pérez won gold in Atlanta in 1996. There is a legend that he won the gold, then walked home, which is partially true. He flew back to Quito and walked 285 miles back to his home city of Cuenca. And Ecuador loves him. There are things named after him everywhere, particularly in Cuenca, but even in Quito. My favorite one, though, is the Trole (trolley) station. If your’e riding the Trole, you’re obviously not walking, so it has always seemed to me an ironic choice of monuments. Jefferson Pérez kept going back to World Championships and Olympics through 2008 and placing and medaling to let everyone know this wasn’t just a fluke. But that Trole stop to me is almost like the whole country of Ecuador saying to this hero of an obscure sport, “we want to celebrate… but we’re just not quite sure what to do with you.” 

All throughout the Eastertide scriptures, Jesus keeps appearing to the disciples. And they’re never quite sure what to do with him. But he proves who he is, he tells them he’s not a ghost, and he comforts them with familiar imagery. I would guess that Jefferson Pérez looks at his namesake station and says “I’d rather walk.” But I know that Jesus looks at us and says “I’d rather walk with you.” May we walk with him.

One of my favorite stories to tell about my brother is how he made fun of me once after I referenced the 1980’s cartoon Gummi Bears. Somehow in our childhood, I loved this show but he’d totally missed it, and when I brought it up decades later, he was sure I’d imagined it. So I made the same reference that night at dinner with a bunch of his friends, and they all burst out singing the theme song: “Dashing and daring, courageous and caring, faithful and friendly with stories to share…” My brother’s face was priceless as he displayed just how stunned he was that this was a real thing. I didn’t let it show, but I was a little stunned myself that six people who hadn’t seen a show since preschool could dig all that out of their memories.

But my brother’s former Children’s Choir director tells a story about him too. He was just in second or third grade, sitting next to her in the worship service while my mom and I were doing something musical. The point in the service came when we said the Apostles’ Creed, and while the Children’s Choir director dutifully turned to page 881 in her hymnal, my brother just started reeling off all the words. She’d been in the church since long before he was born, but I suppose he had been in worship a higher percentage of his Sundays than she had, and some things had started to stick, the way the book of Proverbs says they will.

In some parts of the world, this Sunday is called Low Sunday, to differentiate it from the Feast Day of Easter the week before. I’ve heard pastors joke about the Low being a reference to attendance this particular week. I hope all of us, whether watching or showing up in person to worship, will continue to do so even on the “low” weeks, so what’s in there will continue to stick.