Ted Lasso, Fallout, and the power of TV
When I was an evangelical young adult, we used to play a game. The rules were simple—and I want to stress this is a real game that we actually played: one person would name something random or ridiculous, and the other person would have to immediately come up with a sermon illustration about it.
The game sounded something like this:
Player 1: Okay… um… a leaf blower.
Player 2: It’s fall, and you know what that means. Leaves. If you own a home, you have to keep going out there to the yard to take care of the leaves. It’s sort of like sin. It just keeps coming back, and the yard never stays fully clean of it. The Holy Spirit is like a leaf blower…
(My memory is hazy but I think this might have been a real round of the game from when I was in college. While the rest of y’all were out there partying and having fun. O the regret.)
While the game was ludicrous, it was ludicrous on purpose. It wasn’t meant to be a serious exercise to help train us as preachers. It was meant to be a silly way to sort of poke fun at our own subculture and its use of sermon illustrations.
My favorite sermon illustrations were the TV and movie clips. Now these were actually relatively rare in the churches and ministries I was part of. They were rare, I think, because (A) the tech was tricky to pull off, (B) the evangelical respectability norms (no cussing, no revealing clothes, etc.) ruled out 95% of shows and movies, and (C) many pastors didn’t want to come across as trying too hard to be hip or relevant.
But when it worked out, when the stars aligned and someone was able to show a scene of The Shawshank Redemption or The Matrix (whether or not they could cogently tie the scene to their sermon), I was delighted.
Why was I delighted? I think it boils down to two reasons:
Most sermons are boring AF, sorry to say, and that brief respite of high-quality entertainment was like a balm to my snoozing soul. (If anyone reading this hasn’t been to an evangelical church, we’re not talking about the 12-minute artful reflections of a mainline pastor; I am talking about a 25-to-45 minute exercise in circular reasoning and self-proclaimed authority.)
Stories matter. When we gather for church or something like it, one important goal is to make meaning together. We largely do this through storytelling, story-listening, story-pondering, story-interpreting, and story-mashups.
Which is a long way of saying why Harbor—even with no sermons and therefore no long boring speeches to interrupt—is looking at Ted Lasso together in our gatherings this season. The show tells captivating stories, stories about changing culture, building community, overcoming patriarchy, practicing inclusion, and a lot more.
These stories—alongside and in conversation with Bible stories and our own stories—can help us make meaning together.
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As it turns out, I’m currently watching the show Fallout, based on the video game series of the same name. I will now tack on a bonus tidbit from my reflections on that show. It presents a sometimes funny and sometimes tragic (and always gory) look at post-apocalyptic America, about 200 years after a nuclear war.
One of the things I love about the show is its exploration of morality and to what extent a person’s morality is shaped by their context. One character has been living in the wasteland, as a mutated “ghoul,” for 200 years. He is much more brutal and selfish than he was before the war, having been trying to survive in extremely harsh circumstances for centuries. Another character was raised in a safe, contained community and is just now thrust into the wasteland for the first time. She is moralistic (and perhaps virtuous) at first… but will her own adaptations for survival leave her just as depraved as the ghoul given enough time?
