In Defense of Goofy VBS Songs

I came home from Vacation Bible School and told my family that I wanted to become a Lutheran missionary.  This was met with some surprise considering my family was Methodist.  They may have wondered if sending me to Grace Lutheran’s VBS was a good idea.  After all, those Lutherans were beer-swilling Germans who danced the polka and Flying Dutchman like hussies and even played a card game called “Schaffskopf” (trans:  Sheepshead). Thus, the seeds were sown on my journey to Lutheranism, albeit without becoming a missionary.  Although, at times, a tour of duty in Papua New Guinea has seemed appealing.

Vacation Bible School has been special for me ever since. The rest of the year a kid wasn’t allowed to run in church because it is God’s house.  A kid could run during VBS.  The rest of the year we sang dorky songs.  During VBS we sang cool songs with a lot of jumping and bumping.  The rest of the year we had to be dressed up for Sunday school and church.  A kid could wear shorts and sneakers at VBS.

At Grace Lutheran, Oconto Falls, the 100 or so kids would gather in the sanctuary and Pastor Diemer would lead the opening exercises.  I remember how we would face the American flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance.  Then, we would turn and face the Christian flag and recite the Apostles’ Creed.  Golly, now I have 3^rd year confirmation students who cannot recite the Creed.  We would be dismissed to our classes to the strains of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”  There would be the day’s lesson, crafts, and then, go outside to play games.

Friday, the final day of class, was the picnic which was the highpoint.  Once again, more voices joined together calling me to Lutheranism, “come, have some more to eat!”  It was a bountiful fare—no silly tray of crudités, no righteous high-fiber, whole wheat hot dog buns, no obligatory serving of fruit.  We had hot dogs from the locker plant; beans with extra bacon fried that morning; cold potato salad and hot German potato salad that all the other kids killed for. I was still an interloper—I didn’t know about such things. A special table for dessert groaned from the weight of chocolate brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and chocolate peanut butter cookies (sense a theme here?).  This was real food of chocolate, sugar and saturated fats prepared by equally bountiful Hausfrauen with names like Erna and Irma, and Hilda.  If Grace Lutheran had not converted my soul during the week of VBS, they sure as hell converted my belly.

Fast forward to the advanced stages of the journey and I am a Lutheran pastor, though still not a missionary.  I can’t help but have fun with Vacation Bible School.  I get to be a kid again.  I love to sing the goofy songs that drive home the point and drive parents bonkers on the ride home.  I love doing melodramatic skits about Apostle Paul’s shipwreck.  I love making tempera paint foot prints on newsprint as we follow Jesus and then the kids laugh at Pastor Ken’s weird foot prints.  I love helping kids remember their baptism by dousing them with water balloons and water guns.  Unfortunately, the kitchen crews now serve ½ cup of broccoli lightly salted, ½ cup of fruit cocktail in light syrup, baked potato chips and ½ pint of skim milk.

Erna, Irma, and Hilda now are part of that great cloud of witnesses.  If only they could still be with us to show us how a VBS picnic should be done.  I’m good to go with the goofy songs.

On Watching the Packers and Feeding the Hungry

I had a great Father’s Day.  My wonderful son received tickets to attend the Donald Driver Foundation Packers softball game.  It was a fun afternoon at Appleton’s Fox Cities Stadium watching the Packers defense vs. the Packers offense.  Between innings there were the goofy games that amused the crowd. There were the occasional chants of “Go, Pack, Go!”  We saw a lot of flubs and we saw muscled brutes in green and gold whack the ball way beyond the fence.

In my research of the game I discovered one of the sponsors was Thrivent Financial for Lutherans directing proceeds to Ending Hunger in Eastern Wisconsin.  I shared that information with my young adult son who chuckled saying, “as if there’s hunger in Eastern Wisconsin.” 

I don’t fault my son.  Kids his age think of hunger as naked children in Africa with distended bellies, too weak to shoo away the flies.  Not just 21-year olds:  there are scads of people naïve to the issue of local hunger.  Hunger may be disguised but it is among us and in our communities.

Thirty-some years ago, a school secretary saw a need, so she and her neighbor started a local food pantry.  The secretary saw lethargic kids coming to school without breakfast.  She kept it in confidence but she knew how many students were on free and reduced lunches.  She observed first-hand that there was a hunger issue in the town.

The two women brought the need to the community.  They addressed service clubs and they spoke to the churches about their plan for a pantry.  One church basement lady patronized them saying that it was an honorable plan but she was certain there were no hungry people in the community.  The food pantry began.  In the first 12 months the food pantry had over 100 requests. The numbers increased every year after that.  Ha hah to you, Church Basement Lady!

Every community that I have been in has had some sort of food pantry.  None of them are perfect.  Some need better organization and choreography. They all notice a handful of abusers of the system. But, they all witness genuinely hungry people who are undernourished and under fed. It may be families with children and it might be that growing demographic of elderly who must decide if they will eat or take their medication.

The simple contributions and donations of common people make an impact on those who are in need.  So many people know that they are one paycheck away from being in the same boat.

Local pantries are indebted to the donors who supply food and money so that the shelves can be stocked.  Blessings be upon programs of the Boy Scouts and the USPS mail carriers who go door-to-door reminding the community and then pick up food donations.  In our part of the state, Second Harvest Foodbank of Southern Wisconsin is an incredible resource in the fight to end hunger.  In its 16-county service area, Second Harvest provided 11.5 million meals last year. 

Dear Readers:  there is never a bad time to write a check for local hunger programs.  Second Harvest is certainly worthy of your contribution.  St. John’s folks, a check for the Samaritan Fund would be appreciated in a time when kids are at home and there is no school lunch program.  Any organization getting food to hungry people could make use of food or cash donations. Volunteers are always needed, also.

As for the Green Bay Packers playing softball—I recommend that they keep their day jobs.

Here Comes the Bride

Ah, ‘tis nothing so rare as a day in June.  June traditionally has been the month associated with joyous weddings and the celebration of young love united in holy matrimony.  Weddings are surrounded with all sorts of customs, traditions, and old wives’ tales.  Allow me to shine some light upon these practices.

June became the time for weddings for a couple of reasons.  Formerly, churches would only be heated on Sunday mornings—and just barely.  Churches were not available for large Saturday weddings until the heating season was done.  One might look at family histories and see that Grandma and Grandpa or Aunt Ingebor and Uncle Torvold were married in the parsonage.  That was commonplace for weddings scheduled during the heating season.

We may tell the groom dressed in his finery, “You clean up pretty good, don’t ya’ know.”  June is a time for our ancestors in the north could finally get cleaned up.  After months of accumulating winter’s stink and chimney soot, the creeks and ponds were warm enough to thoroughly bathe.  Still, highly scented peonies and other fragrant garden flowers covered up what the creek and lye soap could not conquer.

The Interim Geezer and Mrs. Geezer, in fact, celebrate their wedding anniversary during the month of June.  We were not married for the reasons above but rather, my bride, a teacher, did want to be married during the school year. Understandably, she wanted a little time between the last day of school and her wedding day to take care of those details brides are fond of tending to.

There are marriage customs that go back much farther than the days of our pioneering kinfolk.  We must remember that marriages were a transaction between families or between the groom and the bride’s family.  Many moons ago, I played Lazar Wolf in “Fiddler on the Roof.”  He was the village butcher smitten by Tevye’s daughter and strikes a deal for her hand over which there is much consternation.  The dowry was an important factor in the connubial contract.

Thus, we have two people in the wedding party whose roles date back to those days of the marriage contract.  “Best Man” is a cleaned-up version of “best man with the sword.”  The groom would select from his family or the community the best man with the sword who would defend the honor of the groom in case the father of the bride would welch on the deal and try to pass off the ugly daughter instead.  History does not reveal if the best man with the sword was required to give a long and embarrassing toast at the wedding banquet.

Likewise, the maid of honor was not the bride’s BFF and sorority sister.  Rather the maid of honor was from the groom’s family.  She did not flounce and puff the bride’s train.  Her task before the wedding was to examine the bride to attest to her virginity.  (Things that make you want to go, “yeewh!”)  So, too, history does not tell us if she was required to buy an over-priced, ugly dress that she would never wear again.

But, by marriage the bride was also given authority.  As a sign of such authority, the groom gave the bride a ring.  It was not a band of gold encrusted with diamonds and shimmering gems.  Those came later in history.  The groom gave the bride a signet ring of the family crest.  While he was off slaying dragons or on religious crusades or conventions in Reno, the bride had authority to use the ring to seal business and family documents making them legal and binding.

I’m sure Wikipedia might tell us about oodles more customs and traditions. Don’t get me wrong.  I love to do weddings.  I am just uncomfortable, however, when traditions stand in the way of reality of life and the profession of love before God and the community.  Let us hear the Word of God, recite vows of our earthly love and fidelity, put a ring on the finger, a kiss on the chops and I am good to go.  We can fill in the blanks from there.

'Went to a garden party just to see who was there

If I were to undergo DNA testing I wonder if geneticists would discover a gardening gene within my make-up.  If so, the gardening gene would be two recessive genes that have been made manifest within me.  Let me explain.  I enjoy gardening and growing things in the soil.  The growing warmth of May triggered something within me that calls me to dig in the dirt.  But, I am fussy—the weather has to be warm.

Both my grandmothers were avid gardeners.  They raised families when it was necessary to have a garden to feed the family.  My Grandma Mary had seven children within thirteen years.  Her feeding that many children required her having a large garden to be in charge of  The boys were working in the field and the girls would be hoeing the garden. (I almost forgot, Uncle Dave had to practice the piano.) Not surprisingly, none of my aunts were gardeners in their mother’s footsteps.

 My Grandma Lindsay also was from that era when they canned everything that would fit in a jar. But even when she was all alone, Grandma Bessie would stand upside-down in the blazing sun pulling the errant weeds that were so foolish as to rise above the soil. She had the benefit of a garden made up of sandy loam, a gardener’s dream.  The soil was enriched with magical, composted manure brought to town each spring from the farm produced by proud, registered Holsteins.  What I inherited from Grandma Lindsay was the joy of growing flowers.

The gene skipped a generation.  Gardening, according to my father, involved a John Deere pulling a moldboard plow, the larger the better.  For my mother, she had “done her time” as a young girl and had no plans of going down that path of purgatory again.  A few petunias in a planter were satisfactory.  It appeared to be a pact to which she and her sisters all subscribed.

Then, I married a woman with a dominant gene for gardening.  Together, we discovered our mutual admiration for perennials, those deep rooted plants that return year after year.  Each house that we have lived in has been left with the posterity of our gardening presence. The purchaser of one house subsequently sprayed Round-up on the perennial bed we had cultivated eradicating all those noxious plantings.

During my tenure at Home Depot during a furlough from interim ministry, I would often be the cashier in the garden area.  I dispensed a lot of free gardening information to customers for which I was not compensated.  Should I have submitted a statement for consultation fees?

As I write this, I am returning from a week’s vacation.  Much of the time was spent with duties such as spreading back dirt into the newly edged beds, planting annuals as borders, potting planters, perpetually mowing grass, and waging war against quack grass (quack, it is suspected, is a communist plot).  My muscles ached.  I missed applying sunscreen to some spots.  My fingernails were embedded with dirt and, as the saying goes, I was happier than a toad in hell.

There are no plans to go “pro” when and if we retire, but we will surely continue to putter as long as we are upright.  I may need a crane to get me up but let me dig.  We will unapologetically beg for divisions of perennials.  We will play with combinations of colors and textures.  We will keep amending our soil.

Then, someday all that soil will be shoveled on top of me and I can be at one with the soil I have tilled, the soil I have hoed, and the soil I have cussed.