Pixar and preaching, part one

In explaining why Pixar’s movies are so much better than their competition, Kent Jones (nice name, huh?) in a recent issue of Film Comment* describes the prevailing temperament of the world of digital animation that Pixar works against: He says, “Few big-time filmmakers can muster up the incitement to suspend disbelief….Everyone wants the pleasure of storytelling, but they are loath to relinquish enough precious sophistication to fully surrender.”

Jones says, “Moviegoers have apparently become gripped by a fear of being exposed – as naïve, or stupid, or apt to believe in anything but their own skepticism. And few directors believe that they have the right, let alone the ability, to “manipulate” audiences…[D]istrust is an article of faith. How do you give yourself over to anything when you’re convinced that nothing is worthy of your credence?”

Can the same be said of the public purveyors of the gospel? Have we handed ourselves over to a skepticism about the task of preaching? Have we given up the call to incite a suspension of disbelief? Do we longer see ourselves as having the right to manipulate our hearers? Perhaps we just don’t really see the gospel as something radical and true enough to believe in.

The prevailing homiletical temperament refuses to relinquish the sophistication of our inherent perfectibility and assumed goodness. When “God is love” is the pulpit mantra with nary a mention of sin, death and the devil, the sermon becomes a series of recommendations for better living, deeper commitment and higher spiritual practices. The outcome of the sermon, then, rests on the hard-won wisdom or the individual charm and leadership of the preacher.

When your passel of pews is populated with people whose hyper-ironic sense of skepticism applies to everything but their own ability to believe, you’ve been delivered an audience (rather than a congregation) that is bent on playing church but not on the real death and resurrection of life as a disciple of Christ.

“Few big-time filmmakers can muster up the incitement to suspend disbelief,” Jones says, “Since the Eighties, we’ve seen countless narratives with a dispiriting, built-in self-awareness, tailored for people who know all the twists and turns, all the happy endings and the last-minute saves, who want to be in on the joke but have the story told anyway.”

This here Jones sighs at the tedium that is the sermon that meets my suburban expectations of nice. It’s good to have a shot of cleverness tossed in. And if the preacher has the down-to-earth charm of a dimple, a history of adolescent orthodontia and a cup of Starbucks in hand, so much the better. The ratings ratchet skyward, but my boredom with the old news of warmed-over law is stultifying. Such a sermon plays into the skeptical expectations of the spiritually enlightened, but to what end?

Pixar’s digital animators assume an intelligence, a manipulatability and a sense of wonder and awe on the part of those whose eyes and ears take in their product. What if the preacher were to take a page from the Pixar playbook, and maybe go a step further?

More to come...

*Kent Jones, “Beyond Disbelief,” Film Comment, July-August 2008, p. 24.

Independence Day

At one point in the movie Sophie’s Choice, Meryl Streep’s character says, “The truth? I don’t even know what is the truth anymore.” In the gospel assigned for Reformation Sunday, Jesus says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” What is the truth? Do we even know what it is anymore?

The truth of Jesus is what, earlier in John, the Pharisees and the eager stone-hurlers and their target, the woman caught screwing a fella she wasn’t married to, experienced first-hand.

The woman, of course, knew the bitter truth. Whatever concupiscence (where I come from in South Dakota we call it horniness) or brokenness got her into that situation, it was clear that her future held only death. There was no getting around it. It was her fault, her own fault, her own most grievous fault.

Jesus needed to bring no light to the woman’s guilt. The truth was clear. But what about the religious professionals and the morally upright preparing for her literal downfall? Jesus trained his judgment on them: “If there’s anyone of you who can step forward when the roll of sinless people is called, then I’ll put the stone in that person’s hand.”

Those folks couldn’t stand the light of this truth, but the adulterous woman remained there with Jesus. She not only knew the truth. She’d lived it and was about to die to it. Our Lord turned to her and gave her the freedom of his mercy: “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way and sin no more.”

Freedom without its opposite, bondage, has no meaning. The gospel of Jesus Christ always and only appears where the law and sin have done the enslaving deed. In John 8, Jesus’ followers said, “We ain’t never been slaves! We’re upright and free descendents of Abraham!” But the truth of the matter was standing in front of them.

The truth (and the way and the life) is Jesus himself. He who knew no sin and became sin, is a bright light shining on our shadowed unwillingness to accord him our trust. “Who was it that crucified thee? It was I, Lord. It was I.” For we are in bondage to sin, enslaved to ourselves, captivated by our endless possibilities. Jesus’ very being judges us as wanting.

Yet he offers more. His resurrection and the little resurrections of healings, castings out of demons and granting forgiveness are all of a piece: God’s own will to work your rescue in this one person’s flesh-and-bone life and death. Those unwilling to recognize and confess the truth of bondage will see and yet not see the resurrection, will hear and yet not hear the gospel. And they will not know the freedom promised here.

The truth? I know what is the truth evermore. You and I and the whole blamed bunch of humanity is dead in sin. All that’s left of your vaunted life is your final role as the target of stoning or whatever else lays you in your grave.

The truth? We confess with Luther as we approach Reformation Day, “I cannot, by my own understanding or effort, believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him.” Yet the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens and sanctifies you, so that in your death you might see, know and live the dawning of something new.

When you trust that it comes in him, your freedom is caught up in Jesus. It’s a paradox: The more you are captivated and bound to him, the more free you become. The more free you become, the more bound up in and captivated by your neighbor you will be.

Reformation Day should have some meaning for more than a ragged bunch of Lutherans. It’s really Independence Day for sinners everywhere. You included.

(For a great image of Jesus with the adulterous woman go to http://www.heqiarts.com/gallery/gallery3/pages/7-WomanCaughtInAdultery.html.)

Render unto Caesar

Something came to mind a few Sundays ago as I was listening to a sermon on a passage from Matthew in which the Pharisees try to nail Jesus with the question of paying taxes. He says to them, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Render unto God what is God's.

Slow down if you think that's anything but the most difficult thing to do. When it comes down to it, who wants to render anything? It means letting go of those things I've held in my fist so tightly for, lo, these many years. "Give it up for God and the emperor? Do I have to?" Yes, you do.

The thing about rendering, though, is that it doesn't just mean "to give over to." It also means to clarify. Decades ago, when a farm animal died, the farmer would call the rendering man to come. He'd haul your dead horse off to a rendering plant to be turned into glue and dog food. Once, while tooling down the highway I passed a rendering truck that had horse legs and hooves sticking out of its box — not a pretty sight. The dead animals were headed to the plant where they'd be literally melted down to their essences.

To render unto Caesar and to God is melt it all down and understand exactly what's whose: what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God. Jesus' pushes the Pharisees into a clarity that angers them. What it becomes clear to you, you'll likely get angry too at first. But you might also breathe a sigh of relief and even rejoice.

Both you and they are sinners of whom the law demands everything. In this world, you belong to Caesar, top-to-bottom. You are of this world, and in this world Caesar rules. If you don't think it's so, wait a while and you'll finally come to see the world itself open its 6'x4' maw and swallow you whole. Even though we think this passage of God's word is about writing our tax checks, the demand is even greater. It won't be just a tax check you write. You'll be forced to render your entire self to the world and its ruler, whether you want to or not.

It's no easier when it comes to rendering unto God what belongs to him. From our first breath in the Garden, through to the at-last appearance of the New Jerusalem, God claims what is his. Adam and Eve refused to allow God what belongs solely to God and, instead, swallowed up the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Give up to God our control, our judgment, our future, our life and death, our salvation? Fuggedaboudit.

Our good and gracious Lord, however, has taken matters into his own hands. You don't want to give yourself to the world to serve your neighbor's needs and you'll never release your grip on matters that God would rather be in charge of. And if you never will, he'll do the rendering himself. He offers himself up, pours himself out as a libation for sin, jumps into the rendering truck with all the other dead creatures. You can see his nail-scarred feet sticking out.

This rendering is a clarifying business. It melts your illusions to truth. Whomever you're to render to, you can't and won't do it. (Stamp foot here.) To prove our seriousness, you and I and the rest of sinful humankind killed the one calling us. We decided to offer Jesus up both to Caesar and to God.

It's a role our Lord gladly plays. He doesn't stop the yammering demands of the law. He fulfills them for you. He doesn't just submit to your sacrificing him on the altar of righteousness, he makes his very cross the source of your salvation. And he renders you, too. For in your baptism are you not pocketed by God even as you're set apart to be spent on the world?

You are become the new coin of the realm, serving your neighbor. The economy of salvation is established for you to loosen up the credit crunch of grace. You do it, not by lending yourself out to get yourself back with interest, but by being given, being doled out, by being rendered. You are evidence that the divine wallet is open for the world's snatching. You are not saved in order to be deposited in First Christian Bank and draw interest because you're worth it. You're rendered yourself in order to make the economy of the kingdom of heaven run — and run well.

Ain't no credit crunch here.

Dressing down for salvation

The passage from Matthew’s gospel assigned for this coming Sunday (Matt. 22:1-4) has a couple verses in it that can give us fits. It’s the parable of the wedding banquet in which Matthew adds the bit about the guy not wearing a wedding robe being kicked out of the festivities.

It was hardly fair. This guy, after all, had been dragged in from some alley by the king’s wedding guest procurement posse. How was he to know he was supposed to rent a tux for the nuptial shindig? He winds up hog-tied and tossed back in the alley where he has to spend the night forced to listen to the hootin’, hollerin’ and toast-raisin’ to the groom. Poor fella. Condemned because he wasn’t dressed in the right clothes.

In his letters, Paul loves to use the phrase “in Christ.” In Romans 9:1, for instance he says, “I am speaking the truth in Christ.” He sends greetings to fellow believers who are in Christ. To the Philippians he prays that God would keep hearts and minds in Christ. Paul says it most clearly in Galatians 3:27, “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” Could it be that the ill-attired wedding guest was not in Christ? If so, what would that look like? I think it was that he failed to get gussied up in Jesus’ cross.

As a kid, I spent many glorious days and weeks at my grandparents ranch in western South Dakota. In early Spring, when it was lambing season, my Grandma Luberta would let me help feed the bum lambs, which were her charge. The bum lambs were orphaned or the runt in a set of triplets. We’d take bottles of milk to the shed and the bums would go to town on their rubber nipples. Apart from that, they were pretty much goners.


Every once in a while I’d see the opposite situation. A ewe would give birth to a dead lamb or one that was so sickly that it died quickly. She’d nuzzle her lamb and try to get it to stand. It was a situation ready-made for the bums. A ewe with a dead lamb + a lamb with no mother? Brilliant! Bring a bum over for the ewe to adopt.

But no ewe with a nose at the tip of her shaggy snout would have anything to do with a lamb that wasn’t her own. It didn’t smell right. So my Grandpa Buster would pull out his jackknife and slit the dead lamb’s underside from chin to tail. He’d skin that dead little thing and toss the carcass across the fence line for to become a night-time coyote feast.

Grandpa would tie the dead lamb’s skin on the back of the bum lamb with a length of baling twine and bring it over to the mother of the dead lamb. She’d smell her own lamb righteous odor on that bum and stand still so it could get at her teats and drink up. The bum would live and grow because it was wrapped in the dead lamb’s skin, immersed in its death as the thing that gave it life.

The problem for the guy with the wrong clothes is just that. He was wrapped up in something that gave him no entrée to the festivities. He waltzed in and thought it was going to be a reception right out of Brides magazine: pretty gowns, pretty cakes, pretty much happy all the day long. But this is a zombie party, a can of whoop-de-doo for the living dead, for those who smell like the crucified and risen one who’s wrapped himself around their rotting sinful flesh. The life they have, they no live in Christ.

The excluded wedding guest remained outside of Christ, instead of being baptized into Christ’s death, wrapped up in his cross. God can smell the sin and glory of the self from a mile away and will have none of it. They smell too much like their own life and too little like Jesus’ death.

But you, dear sinners and friends, have been baptized into Christ Jesus. The robe is already yours, tied around your middle with the baling twine of God’s eternal word. The party began on the first day of the week when the women found themselves staring into an empty grave. It’s a real barn-burner and the guest of honor has decided that you simply must sit at the head table.

You see, it’s a surprise party, because you’re about to find out that Christ has made you the bride. As unlikely as it may be, you’ve walked into the arms of the one who promises never to let you go. When you say, “Do you really take a sinner like me as yours,” Jesus answers, “I do. I do. I do. This is my body and blood given and shed for you."