HOMILETICS

No Doubt This is a Great Movie

Doubt is a great movie, or at least a good one. Hoffman and Streep and Amy Adams give strong performances and there's no doubt some nominations will come of it.

The movie is all John Patrick Shanley. He wrote the 2004 play of the same title, and he wrote the screenplay for this, and directed the movie as well. And in the movie as in the play, you can have reasonable doubt as to whether Father Flynn is guilty as accused.

From Miramax Films: "Set at a Catholic school in the Bronx, it centers on a nun who grows suspicious when a priest begins taking too much interest in the life of a young black student. Is she being overly protective or not protective enough? And can she work within the system to discover the truth? It's 1964, St. Nicholas in the Bronx. A charismatic priest, Father Flynn, is trying to upend the schools' strict customs, which have long been fiercely guarded by Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the iron-gloved Principal who believes in the power of fear and discipline. The winds of political change are sweeping through the community, and indeed, the school has just accepted its first black student, Donald Miller. But when Sister James, a hopeful innocent, shares with Sister Aloysius her guilt-inducing suspicion that Father Flynn is paying too much personal attention to Donald, Sister Aloysius sets off on a personal crusade to unearth the truth and to expunge Flynn from the school. Now, without a shard of proof besides her moral certainty, Sister Aloysius locks into a battle of wills with Father Flynn which threatens to tear apart the community with irrevocable consequence."

Sister James was inspired by Shanley's kindergarten teacher, Sr. Margaret James, and he dedicates the movie to her.

Some viewers have wondered why--if the movie is set in 1964--a kid has an MP3 player. Of course it's not an MP3 player but a tranistor radio with an ear piece. It's a nice touch.

This is a movie that preachers can mine for illustrations, stories, and clips. There's a powerful scene with Father Flynn preaching on gossip.

The last spoken words in the movie belong to Sister Aloysius: [crying]: I have doubts. I have such doubts.

Other memorable words and exchanges include:
Father Flynn: Where is your compassion?
Sister Aloysius: Nowhere you can get at it.

and ...

Father Brendan Flynn: You haven't the slightest proof of anything!
Sister Aloysius Beauvier: But I have my certainty!

I'm not crying. Really.

Just saw Seven Pounds.

If you're a guy and you see this movie, you're going to need some help when you're walking out of the movie.

You could say, "I'm not crying. I think it's raining."

"I'm not crying. A piece of popcorn lodged in my eye."

"I'm not crying, the sun's so bright it's causing me to tear up."

I'm not crying. I'm a Republican. Republicans don't cry" [or substitute some other descriptor]

You get the idea.

I saw Seven Pounds and I liked it.

[Spoiler alert. Don't read further if you want to see the movie but don't want to know some details]

This movie is a good one to use in the future for illustrative material about guilt and grace.

Here is a man (played by Will Smith) who cannot escape guilt. The movie doesn't even show that he's made any attempt to get help. His family and friends understand the situation, but there is no suggestion that the man got help for teh enormous burden of guilt he's carrying.

The other theme the movie introduces is grace. The Will Smith character wants to help people who are deserving. So he is not dispensing grace, he's dispensing charity. Remember the scene in the rest home? He rejects the administrator because he deems him not worthy of the charity and largesse he was about to dispose.

This is not how God deals with us. God does not give grace on the basis of merit. Grace, by definition, is the "unmerited favor of God."

See the movie.

And get ready to cry.

Merry Christmas!

From all of us at Homiletics, a blessed Christmas to you and yours; we wish you peace from the Prince of Peace, and a full measure of the joy of the Lord.

Has Anyone Seen Carol? Christmas Carol?

I read in the Sunday edition of a city newspaper about this former pastor who now has a little consulting business.

He is a phantom pew visitor. Churches will hire him to visit their church on the sly, and then provide a report.

If the church is a laid back, jeans and sweatshirt kind of crowd, he dresses in a blazer and slacks. And if the congregation suited and coiffed, he shows up in jeans and a T-shirt. This way, no one can say they didn’t spot him. There’s no excuse if no one stops to say hello and offer a word of welcome.

I myself have been something of a phantom pew observer these past four Sundays of Advent. I have attended four services, three in evangelical churches (two services in same church, plus one other church) belonging to a certain association of churches, and a service at Trinity Congregation, a startup Episcopal church.

In the evangelical services, we sang “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” (First Sunday of Advent) and “O Come, All Ye Faithful” (today) and there was one other Christmas Carol on the Third Sunday of Advent I can’t remember. But that’s it. The rest of the singing on all three Sundays of Advent beside the ONE Christmas carol was the same old praise music, much of it with un-singable melodies, some of it unrecognizable to a casual visitor—I checked this—and all of it involved standing for interminable lengths of time to listen to others singing songs I didn’t know, and in any case songs I would have needed a month of Sundays to learn, and I’m thinking, “I want to sing ‘Joy to the World’! Why aren’t we singing about the Incarnation for pete’s sake? I mean, for God-in-Christ’s sake?”

The second Sunday of Advent we were in Trinity Congregation and we sang a number of Christmas carols, including “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “Away in a Manger,” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

Is this a trend in evangelical circles?—not singing Christmas carols, I mean? I imagine that on Christmas Eve some Christmas carols will be brought forth, but that’s only a wish and a prayer.

What theological or ecclesiastical or evangelistic rationale am I missing here? Why is the singing of Christmas carols disappearing? Or is my sample too small? Is my experience this year an aberration?

It’s the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Christmas Sunday, and I go to church seeking some joy or at the very least a quantum of solace and all we sing this morning in this hip, trendy blank blank association church was “O Come All Ye Faithful” and a lot of loud unpraiseworthy songs that were weak on theology and musical disasters to boot. This led me to hypothesize that the reason these evangelical worship band churches are NOT leading their congregations in the singing of Christmas carols is because they don’t know how to play carols and hymns.

Truth is, I’ve heard more Christmas carols this year while wandering in stores than while worshipping in the sanctuary. What’s wrong with this picture?

Today, there was no joy in the world.

The Incarnational Embrace

I’m not going to see mom this Christmas. She’s 90, almost 91. I last saw her in August, briefly, but hope to visit her in another month or so.

I call once a week. I write once a week. And she writes once a week.

I was think that perhaps I could arrange a video conference. I’ll there are places that will do this for a fee. I go in, sit down in front of a camera, and then my mom is taken likewise to a site where she can sit in front of a camera and screen and we could visit that way.

I know I could get a computer camera…but I would need someone on the other end to have a camera, get in to mom and – well, it sounds like a big headache.

And, what’s more, while a video conference would be good, it wouldn’t be great. What would be great would be a three-dimensional experience. A warm embrace. Can’t beat person-to-person, F2F.

I guess that’s the essence of the incarnation.

God and us—we’d had our share of video-conferences. Call them theophanies if you will. And there’d been plenty of letters—witness the Hebrew prophets. And plenty of phone calls, i.e. thunderous pronouncements and proclamations as well as whispered pleadings from God through the prophets.

So, at a point in place and space, time and history, God met us in the flesh, to embrace us, to allow us, if we so chose, to embrace him.

Now in flesh, the Godhead…

Thomas Merton Remembered

Last Wednesday, December 10, marked the fortieth anniversary of Merton’s untimely death. We offer some quick reminders of his insight, to wit:

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have-for their usefulness. 

Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God: for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his faith.

Prayer is the movement of trust, of gratitude, of adoration, or of sorrow, that places us before God, seeing both Him and ourselves in the light of His infinite truth, and moves us to ask Him for the mercy, the spiritual strength, the material help, that we all need. The man whose prayer is so pure that he never asks God for anything does not know who God is, and does not know who he is himself: for he does not know his own need of God. All true prayer somehow confesses our absolute dependence on the Lord of life and death. It is, therefore, a deep and vital contact with Him whom we know not only as Lord but as Father. It is when we pray truly that we really are. Our being is brought to a high perfection by this.

The most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is, the more he is convinced of his own infallibility.

Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart has turned to stone.

We must be willing to accept the bitter truth that, in the end, we may have to become a burden to those who love us. But it is necessary that we face this also. The full acceptance of our abjection and uselessness is the virtue that can make us and others rich in the grace of God. It takes heroic charity and humility to let others sustain us when we are absolutely incapable of sustaining ourselves. We cannot suffer well unless we see Christ everywhere, both in suffering and in the charity of those who come to the aid of our affliction.

Our knowledge of God is paradoxically not of him as the object of our scrutiny, but of ourselves as utterly dependent on his saving and merciful knowledge of us. It is in proportion, as we are known to him that we find our real being and identity in Christ. We know him in and through ourselves in so far as his truth is the source of our being and his merciful love is the very heart of our life and existence.
 
We must remember that our experience of union with God, our feeling of His presence, is altogether accidental and secondary. It is only a side effect of His actual presence in our souls, and gives no sure indication of that presence in any case. For God Himself is above all apprehensions and ideas and sensations, however spiritual, that can ever be experienced by the spirit of man in this life.

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more that you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.

President Bush and the Bible

When I heard that President Bush had pontificated about matters theological, I thought there’d be huge blowback in the press and blogosphere.

Wrong. It’s old news and the ABC News report has caused nary a stir. Bush say, to paraphrase, that he thought the created world demanded a Creator, but didn’t think that the Bible and science (evolutionary theory) were incompatible. He went on to say he wasn’t a literalist, and that was about it.

Perhaps the giant yawn we’re hearing is that 90% of Americans agree with him.

One thing we can learn from our Presidents is that a knowledge of Scripture or lack thereof is no indication of executive competency; witness Jimmy Carter—perhaps the best student of the Bible to ever occupy the White House, with the possible exception of Thomas Jefferson, who loved the Bible, especially his own Bible after he’d taken some scissors to it; and Reagan who scarcely darkened the door of a church, but who was perhaps, arguably, one of our most inspirational presidents, and of course, G.W. himself.

You have to wonder about Bush’s state of mind these days. At a star-studded, gala event in New York I think, Bush was present and on stage at the same time as Barbara Streisand, whose credentials as a expert on foreign and domestic policy are well-known, and Bush, perhaps in a moment of gallantry, bravery, or insanity, gave her a kiss on the cheek, and then shook hands with Morgan Freeman and others (the female observer at the ABC News desk called it an “awkward” moment; I don’t know what she saw that I didn’t—wasn’t awkward at all.). What was he thinking?

Anyway, Bush’s comments on Scripture are an occasion for us to revisit, if we’re inclined, what our own view of Scripture is, and to discuss with our flock.

I suspect that most Americans very much have a cafeteria approach to the Bible: we take a little of this and a little of that, and turn up our noses of the stuff we don’t like and wonder why it’s even being served up as something ostensibly palatable for our postmodern theological and cultural sensitivities. For most of us, it’s either, “Yum-yum,” or “Eeeww!”

"Waigouren! Foreigner!"

I was on the tail end of a two hour bike ride yesterday in Shanghai, China, when I saw a vegetable market and knowing that we needed some fresh veggies, I braked to stop, parked the bike and fished around for some RMB. Bought a couple of squash from an ethnic minority Chinese lady from western China who was roasting them over a charcoal fire, and then I walked into the market.

The vegetables looked wonderful. Fresh lettuce, cabbage and spinach piled high and tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, sugar cane, and ton of other items for which I didn’t have a name.

The market was crowded, with stalls on either side of the path I was walking, and clerks with scales behind each table and people milling about in the aisle.

As I walked through this scene, I suddenly became aware of a shrill little voice yelling out behind me. Had to be a little girl about 2 or 3 three years old, I thought.

“Waigouren! Waigouren!” Her voice rang out as shrilly as a Buddha bell across the marketplace.

I stopped in my tracks and whirled to face her. And when I did, the vegetable sellers realized that I had understood what the darling child had been shouting. They started to giggle in embarrassment. But when I smiled at the little girl, their giggles turned to laughter.

“Waigouren,” I mimicked back to her. She had been shouting to all who would listen that there was a foreigner in their midst.

“Wo bu shi waigouren,” I said. “Wo shi Zhonggouren!” The ladies laughed louder and the little girl scampered away. “I am not a foreigner. I am a chinaman!”

It was hilarious.

Riding my bike as I left the market, however, I saw a deeper reality emerge.

The little girl was right. I am a foreigner. I am a citizen of another country. I am a stranger here, a sojourner. I long with the longing only an expatriate can understand to be repatriated to my true home.

This is what Scripture reminds me: I am waigouren.

I then recalled that at this time of Advent, the Incarnation can be seen as the ultimate expatriation. God become flesh, the divine visitation of one who had taken on a new identity, embraced a new experience; who adopted new brothers and sisters, and “joint heirs” of his own relationship with his Father.

At Advent, let us embrace He who was himself, like us, in this world but not of this world. And let us remember that our passports bear the stamp of the divine presence, sealed not in tinsel and silver, but in the very blood of Jesus Christ.

Pigeon Power

I was mucking around on the Internet the other day, and ran across the phrase Pigeon thinking. I had seen the expression before and had spent some time pondering the perils of pigeon thinking.

PT is an approach to problem-solving that involves a lot of repetitive movement. You see it a lot in organizations which by their very nature must work in a collaborative environment.

A few pigeons are usually on every board.

They are the ones given to a lot of strutting, and bobbing and clucking—all over a single kernel of corn.

Of course some pigeons perform valuable service, and can carry a message for miles and return home and that’s basically all they do. Relay information. A valuable gift, and every board and organization needs people who can be entrusted with information, but that’s it.

Pigeon thinkers also believe that by doing the same thing over and over again, the same result will be achieved. Pigeons assume that they live in a closed system and universe, and that nothing will ever change or should be changed.

There are other problems with pigeons of course. They tend to reproduce in great numbers, and after a while, rather than searching for food, they’ll expect you to hold out your hand and feed them. You’ve become, at this point, a pigeon parent or a pastor of pigeons.

More specifically:

Pigeons perch. Many cities have installed pigeon spikes to keep them from perching on ledges and rooftops around their municipal buildings. They will congregate, perch, sit in their pew, unmoveable. Flap around a bit. But perch. Sometimes for like forty years.

Pigeons poop. Big problem—poop in the coop. Every pastor knows about this. You know what I’m talking about. You get tired of cleaning up after all the crap. Tell me I’m wrong.

Finally, pigeons peck. Pigeons are peckers. They jab, and poke and needle for even the slightest reward.

Pondering pigeons, I wondered if there is a biblical metaphor that speaks positively of any form of fowl. Don’t want a church full of pigeons. Or turkeys. The dove is a positive biblical image—a metaphor for peace. “Harmless as doves,” the saying goes. I guess a dove is a pigeon that got saved, got religion.

And the eagle is a biblical metaphor that’s treated positively.

But pigeons.

I think in the Bible, when pigeons are mentioned, they’re about have their necks wrung as a sacrifice in the temple.

Don’t even try to tell me you haven’t wanted to wring a few necks in your time.

Of Puppies and Prayers

How do you feel about pastoral prayers?

I’ve always been uneasy about offering them, to tell you the truth. Especially the kind where you’re expected to remember people in the congregation who are going through personal crises.

I’m not saying that God doesn’t hear these prayers, or doesn’t want to know that Harold’s hernia continues to afflict him or that Edith’s gone to the hospital to have her colon checked.

I’m sure God wants to know about all these things.

But is WORSHIP the place for these kinds of prayers? Should not a pastoral prayer focus on lifting up the people of God into an exalted comprehension of the ineffable God?

I raise the issue again, because last Sunday in church, the pastor offered the congregants an opportunity to take prayer requests. Several were forth-coming, most of a medical nature as these things usually are.

But one person wanted the pastor to pray for some puppies that had taken ill during the week.

Wouldn’t this sort of thing, and all the medical and hospital stuff, be better addressed in an intercessory prayer meeting elsewhere and at another time?

Should not the pastoral prayer be a few moment in which the pastor offers prayer on behalf of the people to acknowledge the greatness of God and our profound worship and adoration?

Instead, this prayer too often sounds more like a meeting at Massachusetts General Hospital, that it does a gathering of the saints of God for the worship of God.

Just wondering … what you think?