Lent: Remember

Victor was a football star when he was in high school.

His skill on the field made him a celebrity off. Girls wanted to date him. Guys wanted to be seen with him. Teachers deferred to him when the grade was close and to his schedule if there were a conflict with assignments. Even ill behavior was excused or brushed aside. Boys will be boys, people said. After all, he was a hero!

When Victor graduated high school in 1968 and announced he had caught a football scholarship to college, heads nodded. Victor was good, one of the best players his school had ever seen. It made sense. He was going places.

And then he didn't. Scouts from one team after another looked at Victor and then moved on without offering him a position. Before Victor knew what had happened, the football train had pulled out of the station without him. All he had to show for the experience was a signed photo from a new friend who got picked up by the Eagles.

Now some people are big enough to bet everything on a single turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, then start all over again and never breathe another word about it. Their glory days become another memory, like a spectacular ride on a rollercoaster, a glorious time at the senior prom, or an Eagle Scout project that consumed the summer. Those memories become a source of pride that fuels further success and provides stories to entertain friends and strangers alike in the years to come.

Victor was not a big enough for that.

Life forced him to move on, but that was all it could do. He took up a job teaching middle school gym and made his office a shrine not to sports legends his students would recognize or draw inspiration from like Roberto Clemente, Yogi Berra or Jim Thorpe, but to his own high school career. His football jersey. News clippings of when he dominated the field. And of course that signed picture from his friend who did the majors, so the students could appreciate how big Victor was, that he was friends with an actual football star. 

Memory was a trap and Victor was caught. Rather than encouraging the next generation of athletes, he became bitter and angry, and took one opportunity after another to make students feel small. In the end he was caught stealing from the school and was fired, and then whispers of physical and sexual abuse left the edges and moved into the open.

But if memory can become a prison, it can also be release. You see this especially in the psalms of lament when David, or another writer, complains to God about how unjustly he is being made to suffer. 

"My enemies circle me like jackals, saying 'We've got him now,'" he writes. "My limbs are all out of joint, and you can count my bones." Then the coup-de-grace: "All this is because you abandoned me, O Lord. You sure suck,"

There's a pause, and in that pause so loud that you can hear it in translation 3,000 years later there comes the word "but."

In the midst of grief and suffering too great to express, the psalmist remembers times gone by when things looked bad, or even worse, but they still worked out all right. He recalls the stories of Moses leading the people to freedom from slavery in Egypt, how the army of Pharaoh was routed when the Red Sea closed on them after letting the Hebrews through. He recalls times things looked bad for him personally, like when the previous king led the entire army to hunt him like a dog and he had to hide in a cave, or the time his own son tried to kill him and an aging David was forced to flee his home while people spat at him and told him he was getting what he deserved.

His bones remain out of joint. His friends still want to kill him. There are still no yellow ZIngers in the snack machine. But the memory of what happened in the past for his people and for him lead David to hope in his season of Lent that good times remain.

"My accusers will be silenced, and I will make my offering in the House of the Lord," he wrote. "My days will be long once more  and I will join in the assembly in worshiping you."

Selah.