Veronica Mars: From Kickstarter To Taking Numbers (Movie Review)

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Seven years after the CW/UPN show of the same name wrapped, Veronica Mars hit the big screen last weekend, thanks to a multi-million-dollar Kickstarter campaign where fans paid to return Kristen Bell’s private investigator to Neptune High. When Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) stands accused of murdering his pop star girlfriend, Veronica leaves her NY law firm interviews, her plans for a future, and boyfriend Piz (Chris Lowell, Enlisted) to return to Neptune, CA. But Veronica left town for a reason, and a murder investigation may be the least of her worries.

Fans of the show will appreciate the way that each of the characters from the television show are worked back in. It helps that Veronica returns for her ten-year high school reunion, but we have our eyes out for Weevil (Francis Capra), Mac (Tina Majorino, Grey’s Anatomy), Wallace (Percy Daggs III), and, of course, Veronica’s dad, Keith (Enrico Colantoni). Before long, Veronica is mixing it up with the local police department (Jerry O’Connell), and fighting off the “mean girls” from high school who still have it out for her. (Sometimes, it’s tough being the smart, snarky kid in school.)

But if you don’t have a background with the television show, what are you really getting out of this? You’re mostly checking out Bell’s smart-aleck verbal attacks on high school, cliques, corruption in the police force, etc. And the James Franco cameo as a crucial hinge point in the case. And a murder mystery that actually requires some real detective work to clear Logan (does any fan of the show actually think that director/producer/creator Rob Thomas would really make him guilty?) and set straight the police department corruption that has endured since Keith Mars left the position.

Overall, it’s a pretty fun spin back through the world of Neptune. There’s not a lot of depth here, other than Veronica being the person she’s always been, a dogged pursuer of truth. We know she’s like the patron saint of lost causes (sorry, Saint Jude), but she’s up against one of those “guilty until proven innocent” situations that seems prevalent in run-of-the-mill cop shows… and real life. It’s why we’re back at this point, watching Veronica again, even as she messes up her interpersonal relationships, while setting the world straight when it comes to truth and justice.

One line review: If you’re a fan, this is a no-brainer; everyone else? It’s a 50/50 split on whether you’ll find yourself caring. 

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Sunday’s Sermon Today: Reach Out & Touch Someone (Mt. 9:18-26)

Posted on March 20, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

A few years ago, my son had been caught up in the Madagascar craze. Starring the voices of Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, and others, it told the story of these Central Park zoo animals who found themselves stranded in Madagascar. There have been several sequels but it also spawned a television show about the fuzzy black and white birds who were always up to some kind of mischief, The Penguins of Madagascar.

One particular episode of the show caught my attention, “Untouchable,” about Barry, the poison-dart frog, who was as mean as a snake. The Penguins spent the episode trying to figure out why he was so mean, only to realize that because of the poisonous nature of his skin, he had never been hugged as a child. So they built a safety suit, and the penguin named Private holds him… and his behavior and attitude changes almost immediately.

Too often, we fail to see the worth of personal touch, of interpersonal communication, of the power of being fully present.

In our Scripture today, Jesus is both fully present and willing to touch someone, and the impact is dramatic, life-changing, life-giving. What can we learn from the example of Jesus in the technologically-advanced, spread out world we live in?

A faithful father, a grieving parent, sets this story of three lives in motion. He’s a Jewish religious leader but he’s forced to recognize that his daughter has died and he has no other hope, no recourse, but to try a last ditch effort: he asks Jesus to come and touch his daughter so that she might live.

Not only is this government/religious official threatening his position, his authority in the town, his place in society, but he’s pitching his hope on the fact that the rumors he’s heard about Jesus are true and that Jesus might actually be able to heal her. Why not? He doesn’t have any other options.

But there’s something else here, too. He doesn’t ask Jesus to come pray over her or to come and say something deep and metaphysical: he just wants Jesus to give her the most casual of attentions, that is, the father wants Jesus to merely touch his daughter. So powerful is his belief in Jesus’ abilities, in his connection to God, that he just wants the slightest touch.

We don’t know what Jesus said back, just that he got up and went with his disciples toward the religious leader’s house. Somewhere on the way, the first miracle happens. Somewhere on his way to being part of one little girl’s solution, he becomes the answer to an older woman’s twelve-year questions and prayers and suffering.

It says that this woman, suffering from a blood disorder for twelve years touches the edge of his cloak. Not Jesus himself, but the faintest amount of his outer garment dragging on the ground. Here’s another person who doesn’t see any other options for how her life could improve, how she could go on living, how she could be healed, than to break a cultural taboo (and potentially threaten her own life) by touching a man in public who she was not married to.

She’s understood to have been bleeding badly enough that she was emaciated. She’s ritually unclean because signs of blood were not permitted in Jewish law: you had to be clean before you could go to worship in the temple. If she touched someone else, they would be unclean until they had a ritual washing as well! She’s ostracized, humiliated, and she can’t even publicly bring it up to Jesus.

“If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.”

There’s a lot of faith there.

The three Synoptic Gospels present what he said and what she said differently. In Luke and Mark, Jesus stops and asks who touched him, and the woman finally admits that it was her and shares her story publicly. It’s possible this was Jesus’ way of showing that this woman didn’t need to be ashamed of her condition, that others could see the hope in their private, hidden situation. That others might find hope in the midst of their shame.

What we have in all three is that Jesus turns, calls her daughter (bringing her into a familial place), and tells her that her faith has healed her.

One simple touch.

That in itself, giving life, healing, welcoming back into society, seems that it could be enough. And still, Jesus isn’t done.

Jesus arrives at the religious leader’s house (we’ve almost forgotten about him!) and sees that a full funeral celebration is underway. He tells them to “go away”- how is that for kind, wimpy Jesus- and that she’s not really dead! And these people laugh at him, obviously not taken by the religious leader’s faith.

The people want the religious leader to be rational, to accept things the way they are. They want him to be realistic, to not chase something mysterious and miraculous because they expect that he will be disappointed, that his heart will just be broken again. They have no expectation that their lives, that the life of this little girl, could be different. 

But Jesus is undeterred (isn’t he always?) and takes the girl’s hand and she got up. There’s no big show, no dancing or shouting or calling out but simply, the touch.

I wonder what we could heal by simply touching. I wonder what happens when we hold the hand of someone who needs prayer or when we provide a hug to someone to show them that we love them. Too often, we get caught up in taboo or in stigma, and we fail to see that we are meant to be in community, that we are meant to love and respect and care.

We get it as kids, don’t we? You fall down and skin your knee, you run into the coffee table and a knot develops. You run to your mom, your dad, your grandparents. You know that there’s something about their touch, their hug, that makes you feel better, that reminds you that it’s going to be okay.

Somewhere along the way, we lose belief in the power of touch, in what it means to have someone be present with us in our struggle and pain.

When I was in seminary, I was in a hospital internship, where I was assigned a hall with a few dozen patients. Sometimes, my patients slept through my visit, but I prayed anyway. And whenever it wasn’t a detriment to their health, I tried to make contact, with a hand on their shoulder or by holding hands while I prayed.

My supervisor called it “the ministry of presence.” It seems so simple, but in the case of these two women, one very young and one very old, one touch from Jesus made all the difference.

What would happen if you reached out and touched someone today?

I think we have to deepen our faith to believe that touch matters, that prayer matters. I think we need to believe that our lives could actually be different. I think we need to come with an expectation that church matters, that faith matters, that loving God matters.

I think it starts with saying that we’ve done everything we can do and frankly, it’s not enough. I think it continues with coming to church and expecting that we’re going to meet God here. That God shows up. I think it means that we’re actually expecting that God will knit us together and make us the body of Christ so that when we, the church, touch something, that grace, and healing, and the miraculous happens.

What would happen if we reached out and touched someone today?

What would that look like?

These women met Jesus after everything else had been tried. Jesus was the last resort. I think that’s how we approach Jesus, too, most of the time. We pray after the diagnosis, or after the struggle really hurts, or after we’ve exhausted all of the other options.

What happens if we reach out and ask Jesus to touch us first?

I believe we are supposed to be the hands and feet of Jesus, going where he would go and serving where he would serve. I think we’re supposed to reach out and touch others in the name of Jesus, to heal their bodies, their hearts, their life situations, their lives. But we have to believe that Jesus loves us and has touched us for our lives to actually reflect that kind of healing. We have to be ready to be put to use as as the body of Christ!

Jesus made it an intimate thing when he told the parable of the sheep and the goats: he said that each of us would be ministering to him when we served someone else in Matthew 25. Dr. M. Scott Peck took the story a step further with his “Rabbi’s Gift” story:

“It concerns a group of monks living together in a French monastery that had fallen upon hard times. One day, they were visited a stranger who asked them for a place to sleep that night. The monks enjoyed his company at dinner, and sensed he was spiritual, even while annoyed at his appearance and smell. As he was leaving the next day, he whispered to the abbot, “I need to tell you a secret that God has given me: “The Messiah is among you.”

When he returned to the table, the other monks asked what the man had whispered. “He said the Messiah is among us!”

When the abbot returned to the monastery his fellow monks gathered around him to ask, “Well what did the rabbi say?” “He couldn’t help,” the abbot answered. “We just wept and read the Torah together. The only thing he did say, just as I was leaving –it was something cryptic– was that the Messiah is one of us. I don’t know what he meant.”

The monks began to inquire among themselves whether it could be this or that monk, but they discounted each other. As they examined the situation, they began to treat each other differently, their expectations changed, on the off chance that one might actually be the Messiah. 

The monastery began to change, as the monks focused more passionately on God, on worship, on reading the Scriptures. And they began to grow spiritually. Their prayer took on new life, as did their teaching and service. People began to notice, and pilgrims came to them to leaner wisdom. Soon, new monks joined their ranks to learn from them, and they became alive again. Alive to Christ.” 

What would it take to become more alive to Christ, more alive to the movement of God in our lives? Oh, how blessed to have been one who was there to meet Jesus!

I wonder as we’ve worked through the ministry of Jesus heading toward Easter what it must’ve been like to have been someone he spent time healing or preaching to. When they heard Jesus had died, did they recognize that this Messiah, this revolutionary leader, had stopped from what he was doing to heal them? Did they hear the stories about people who had seen him post-resurrection and marvel that the change in their lives was part of this greater mystery?

Do you ever ask those questions? Do you ever consider that you mattered so much that Jesus, Son of God, stopped what he was doing to heal you, to free you, to make you right with God? That your story is part of the bigger picture? And that when we’ve been made right we become part of God’s plan to make others right, too?

Healing can happen. Relationships can be restored. If we’d only believe.

Al Michaels said it best in Lake Placid in 1980: “Do you believe in miracles?!!”

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Brian Godawa On Noah: “Respect The Story” (Interview)

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Brian Godawa is the author of the Chronicles of the Nephilim series, screenwriter of To End All Wars and The Visitation, and blogger at Godawa.com. But who is Brian Godawa and why does he care so deeply about Noah? This week, the author/speaker/theologian sat down to discuss the upcoming Russell Crowe thriller and the intersection of faith and art. Portions of this interview initially ran at HollywoodJesus.com.

Give us the brief Godawa bio. What’s your theological background? How did you end up hooked on the intersection of faith and film?

I’ve always loved movies, because they have been so powerful at moving my soul through drama. Studying Francis Schaeffer and Hans Rookmaaker helped me to understand how art, such as storytelling, incarnates a worldview, not like a preached sermon, but like a lived incarnation.

I come from a Protestant Evangelical background, but have also come to realize the poverty of imagination that haunts that tradition, so I have had to listen and learn from those outside that tradition to understand imagination within my faith better.

My book Hollywood Worldviews was my attempt to help other religious people understand how movies and worldviews intersect. And my book Word Pictures is my attempt at opening the eyes of other Evangelicals to the importance of imagination in their faith.

Before Darren Aronofsky launched his efforts toward Noah, you’d already written and published the first of the Nephilim novels, Noah Primeval. Why is Noah so important to you?

Like Aronofsky, I have always loved Noah as a primeval sacred story. But unlike the atheist director who told us he reinterprets it with an environmentalist agenda, I have seen it as a statement about God’s image in mankind as ruler over nature. Humanity is so important to God that our evil done against each other is a violation of that image of God, such that he would destroy the entire environment to start over. A kind of re-creation.

But also, Genesis 6:1-4 had always been the strangest passage in the Bible to me. Sons of God coming from heaven to mate with women and the birthing of giants. That was so weird that I decided to study it more, and what I discovered was a storyline of a war between the “seed of the Serpent” and the “seed of Eve” that ran through the whole Bible. So I just had to write that story and share it with the world. It became the eight-novel series, Chronicles of the Nephilim. Six volumes are completed and all of them have been Amazon category best sellers.

You haven’t seen the Noah film but you were granted access to the script, right? How do scripts of films usually compare to the final product?

I got a hold of an early script over a year ago or so. I wrote a blog analyzing the script that went viral when Paramount’s test screenings started to go bad with religious people. I guess they were scouring the internet for negative statements about it and used mine without referencing my positive statements.

I was careful to note that often times the final movie can be very different from the script. It may not be as extreme or as negative as the script was. Plus I understand that there was some positive influence that some Christians had on the development of the story. But we will just have to see how much. But the process is all part of the conversation.

You’ve taken a true story, that of Ernest Gordon as a Japanese prisoner of war during World War II, which is not only one of my favorite films but also a testament to faith in the midst of struggle. How did you end up working with Gordon and that story?

Well, it was my first movie produced. I had been trying every way possible to get my scripts read in Hollywood. Cold calling, contests, agent queries, etc. But I happen to meet a pastor at my church who quoted Schaeffer and Nietzsche in a sermon and I realized we are worldview buddies! Turns out he had the rights to To End All Wars for twenty years and couldn’t get it made. I came on and wrote the script, and as soon as the director got involved, it really came together. I never met Ernest, but I was grateful to hear that when he saw the movie he said we got it right. Finally WWII POWs got their “real” story told like those at Normandy in Saving Private Ryan.

I appreciate films that are faithful without being preachy. I found TEAW to fall in that category. What was your writer’s intent in telling the story?

All storytellers have a point of view and are communicating their worldview. But good storytelling tries to be honest about other views within that context. Not propagandistic. It gives a fair voice to the opposition.

Good art adds ambiguity because life doesn’t provide all the answers. Good story gives even the enemy a human face. That is what I tried to do while capturing the theme that I saw in Ernest’s story about the progression of loving ourselves to loving our neighbors to loving our enemies.

And it was a testimony of that universal honesty that the Japanese decided to distribute the film in their country because they said we were fair in our portrayal of the Bushido warrior code In a very real sense the story is about East vs. West, but both sides are partly right and partly wrong, because there is a kingdom that is superior to both. A kingdom above both.

Based on your experience, what does a screenwriter or director do when forced to choose between real plot points and timelines? What should the average audience be looking for when discerning the difference between “a true story” and “based on a true story”?

All storytelling, involves creative license to make the story work. We choose some things and exclude others based on our particular take. We aren’t omniscient, we can’t tell everything. And we only have a couple hours or a few hundred pages. So we telescope time, combine characters, make changes we need to fit a proper plot structure.

Even the Bible does this. The story of Noah tells us almost nothing about Noah. It says more about the Flood than about him. And that is because the writer is focusing on his main points he wants to communicate.

Every story told is only from one or a couple points of view, whereas reality has so many other views to account for. So I think “based on” is a fairer description than simple “a true story.” But the rule is that the more your adjective pulls away from the basic “true story” the more creative license you are taking. Thus, “based on” is a little more loose with the “facts,” while “inspired by” can be so loose as to only have broad or general similarities to the original.

Why have some evangelical Christians felt the need to “defend” or “protect” the story of Noah, before ever seeing it, and instead of considering what they might learn from another’s perspective?

Well, I certainly understand the impulse to protect our sacred story. After all, our sacred stories are what give meaning to our lives. So if we feel someone is playing with that meaning, or changing it or subverting to reinterpret it through a hostile paradigm, then it makes sense that people would be upset.

After all, wouldn’t pro-gay marriage people be upset if people who supported Proposition 8 told their stories about Harvey Milk or Philomena or Dallas Buyers Club? Would Lord of the Rings fans have been upset if Peter Jackson had not stayed true to the original spirit of Tolkien’s saga? Of course they would. They don’t want their sacred narratives being altered by someone outside their camp. Just like everyone else.

But we must be careful not to assume we have the repository of absolute interpretation either. After all, Christians have been very wrong about some things in the Bible. Take the Galileo dilemma or all the End Times speculators who have been proven wrong for over 150 years in their prognostications.

Chances are, if an atheist like Aronofsky loves the Noah tale, even if he spins it differently, his respect for the story will no doubt create some helpful insights or challenges.

Does our characterization of the Noah story matter to what Christians can get out of stories like Aronofsky’s Noah? Does it matter if we read the Noah story as myth or historical truth?

While I do take the Noah story to be basically historical, I don’t believe you have to believe it is literally true to learn the lesson the story teaches about God. I know many who think it is myth, but respect the story and believe it teaches the same truths about God that I think it teaches: Among other things, that mankind is created in God’s image and that God judges evil and that therefore we should be wary of our own lives as we live them before God.

What do you hope audiences will find when they go to see Noah? What are you hoping for as a fan of film yourself?

I am hopeful that the movie will cause many people to go back and “read the book,” to get acquainted with the original version that God himself has given us. God’s Word has a way of changing lives.

I am already excited by the fact that I now see everyone talking about something that NO ONE would ever usually talk about in polite secular company. I also believe that there is tremendous potential of this movie getting people to realize that there is a God who judges, and that we deserve it, but that he also is a God of mercy and new beginnings, of redemption.

What would it take to get you into the screenwriter’s chair again? The director’s? What’s next for you personally?

In fact, I have a script that some producers are trying to raise money for about Jezebel from the Bible. It’s like Cleopatra meets Scarface. I have a horror film I should be directing this year. I have a documentary on political correctness and academic freedom called School’s Out that we are trying to raise the funds to complete. It’s all done, just need to pay for some things. I have a low budget thriller about human trafficking called Hope Rises that is in post-production. And I am continuing the write my Chronicles of the Nephilim for a growing fanbase who are in love with “all things Nephilim.”

Thanks for taking the time to talk about film. We look forward to hearing your thoughts after you’ve seen the film.

I plan to blog on the movie immediately after I see it on opening day. Thanks for having me!

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Harlen Coben’s Missing You: Wrestling With The Past (Book Review)

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Two authors have dominated the “thriller” genre so significantly for me that I must buy their latest books. I’d even buy them if they suddenly dropped everything and became pulp romance authors! (Okay, maybe that’s a stretch.) But Lee Child and Harlan Coben are so engaging in their suspense and characterization that reading their books feels necessary: we may know how the books will wrap up their mystery du jour, but the way their characters move and grow appears even more important. Such is the case in Coben’s latest, Missing You.

To be straightforward: the first twenty to thirty pages of the novel had me asking, “Is this the end of Coben’s run?” The opening wasn’t the most gripping, and the subsequent chapters felt too disparate, too all over the place. But then Coben settles in, to tell the stories of Kat Donovan, NYPD detective, and those fragmented characters who unwind and shatter out from Donovan through this thriller about cat fishing, the lives we’ve lived and lost, and the power of truth to rise above everything else.

Coben’s main character is usually witty. No, that’s not strong enough. The lead is usually a wiseass, and Donovan is no different. She has a partner, Chaz, a womanizing drag on her job; she has a friend, Stacy, who is more beautiful and pushes her to date; she has a dead father, Henry, whose supposed murderer sits at death’s door; and she has an ex-fiance, Jeff, who she still pines after… and suddenly reconnects with at Stacy’s insistence. But none of this compares to the case of a missing mother that plops down at her desk one day in the person of the woman’s college-age son.

The book lets us into the mind and actions of Donovan, those of the villains, and, occasionally, other characters. But he never completely sells out to making it obvious. He’s always holding something back. Just a little. Still, when you have the mob, a twenty-year-old love affair, the stories of parents, a series of missing persons reports, and police procedure and subterfuge mixed up in the plot, it’s not all going to be straightforward!

Somewhere along the line, Coben stepped up his plots to include the exploration of family, of past, and of future. It’s entertaining, like a Robert Parker Spenser novel, but it’s also provocative as it asks questions like, how do we let go of the past? When should we let go of the past? How do the decisions of our parents impact the way that our pasts and our futures play out? What do our lives today reflect in terms of what we accept as true (versus what is really true) and what we’ll do to defend or explore that truth? How do our relationships survive a certain amount of untruth, and when do we get tired of the lies?

Coben wrestles with the relationships of his characters, as they struggle with their fantasies and expectations. He shows the brokenness of past relationships and the ways they impact the love and comfort we look for; he exposes the things we look for and the way that those things betray what we actually need. Internet dating plays a major role in the way that the story plays out, and it’s this artificial interaction that leads to much of the drama here. I can’t speak to it too closely, but I know it’s worked for some of my friends, and still see it ending up as the main component of the evening news with regularity.

I’m hooked again by Coben’s blend of real life, humor, and thrilling adventure. Now, I just have to wait another year for him to deliver another adventure.

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Frozen 2.0: Breaking Out Of The Box (Movie Review)

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

In December, I wrote that Frozen was one of the best movies I’d seen in 2013. I focused on the “act of true love” and what self-sacrificial love looked like. It was so easy to bubble over with enthusiasm about the “final movement” of the movie, amid the glow of Idina Menzel’s belting out “Let It Go” (now, Best Song at the Oscars circa 2014), the glorious animation, and Josh Gad one-lining it all the way to the funny farm. So, what would happen with a second take?

Obviously, one’s view of Prince Hans (Santino Fontana) changes, right? Somehow, “Love Is An Open Door” sounds a little bit different, as maybe “Love As An Open Window On The Fortieth Floor.” And somehow, slowed down and without worrying about how the plot worked out, Kristen Bell’s humor shines out like Veronica Mars showed up dressed up as a princess. But again, the story’s strengths shone through, with the multifaceted talking points for the audience, kid or adult!

-Denying Something Doesn’t Mean It’s Not True. The princesses’ parents want to act like Elsa (Menzel) doesn’t have the powers she does. Or, they think that hiding her will somehow cause her to be safer, better off, more prepared. Too often, we try to marginalize things and deny how important they are; whether the things we wish to deny are good or bad, full of opportunity or full of danger, they still exist and we need to deal, not avoid.

-Our Memory Matters. While the troll king’s magic causes Anna not to remember her childhood, except for the fun, she’s still subject to its pull, the force of her sub conscience. Similar to the previous point, that’s pretty dangerous, isn’t it? At the same time, it’s Anna’s memory that ultimately unlocks some of the pieces of the puzzle that resolve this and make it happily ever after.

-True Love Shines…But It Doesn’t Always Look Like A Prince. Whether we go looking for it desperately or not, love is not something that can be forced or named when it’s not really there. While Princess Anna has grown up sheltered, imprisoned, etc., what she wants so much isn’t necessarily what she finds. When we let ourselves get desperate for love or attention, we tend to go looking for it in all the wrong places or think we’ve found it in the arms or attention of someone who isn’t who we were intended to find. We buy into that “true love’s kiss” is the way to go, and we think that we’re either ‘in love’ or we’re not. Sometimes, love requires hard work and determination; sometimes, it’s fun and exciting. But when we expect it’s only going to be that fairy tale style, we miss the other parts of love and life we should enjoy, too.

And, one oldie but goodie for the road…

-You Can’t Judge A Book/Prince/Troll/Princess By Its Cover/Title/Lichen/Abilities. When the Duke of Weselton (Alan Tudyk) condemns Elsa as a monster early on, his labeling of her, and her unknown powers, cause an uproar and absolute ostracization. Some of that is Elsa’s decision and some for her own safety (it’s like the sharpening of pitchforks for The Beast) but it’s critical that we not do this to people in our lives who we don’t understand or assume things about. Seriously, this one seems so basic, but the world will keep on rolling toward infinity, and maybe, just maybe, we can catch up before then. Hopefully, sooner or later, we’ll start to explore all of creation as its meant to be, creative and individual and powerful in its own way, broken out of the box.

Whether for your first or millionth time, Frozen is worth the watch. No, I’ll take it a step further: you should buy this movie.

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Noah > Son Of God. Stop The Madness! (Mustard Seed Musing)

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Hollywood wants to cash in on the Christian market that was the big score a decade ago with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. This year, Mark Burnett and Roma Downey released Son of God, complete with the backing of evangelicals like Rick Warren of Saddleback Church. In less than two weeks, Noah with Russell Crowe will hit the multiplex. Christian Bale’s Exodus will arrive closer to Christmas, and Lionsgate has a Passion prequel in the works. (There’s a sense that I learned a long time ago from the YMCA: while the “C” stands for Christian, it stands for cash, too.) So, how might Christians really approach these films with Biblical connections?

I hope that they’ll approach them as parables, as a new lens to examine the Biblical text. Obviously, the movies aren’t the same thing as the canon of Biblical books, included by the Synod of Hippo in 393 A.D. But if we’re to believe Hebrews 4:12: ” the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” Some of these modern day interpretations might actually add to or deepen our understanding of the Bible. Would that be bad?

Personally, I’d much rather see Noah than Son of God. The latter is significantly taken from The Bible miniseries, which means that I already own the majority of the movie, having bought the Blu-ray collection when the History Channel original series hit home media. Of course, not everyone knew this or cared when they headed to the theater, but frankly, I didn’t go to the theater to see the re-released Star Wars movies: I own them already! But my affinity toward the ark-based Biblical thriller is more attractive to me for other reasons, too.

1. Noah is a different sort of movie from Son of God in that there’s less to go on Scripturally, and more of an opportunity to add to the backstory. I have four angles to look at the ministry and passion of Christ; five if you count Mel Gibson. Noah hasn’t gotten that kind of attention, even from the Biblical oral narrators/author-writers. There’s still plenty we can learn from unpacking the Noah narrative that we haven’t seen before, and while we know how it ends (like watching the Titanic crash), we still don’t quite know exactly how we got there.

2. I don’t read the Noah narrative as historical document, so interpreting it has much more room to move. Adam and Eve tell us something about where we come from; Noah tells us something about God’s holiness and grace. I don’t take either of them literally, but instead see some of our Judeo-Christian myth shining through a flood narrative that we share with other cultures. So, I’m not threatened by Darren Aronofsky taking a beloved children’s story tied to our faith heritage and butchering it. (It doesn’t really look like he cares either. FYI: Some rough language there.) I’m excited by what I might see about myself and how my understanding might grow. There’s no threat there because God, the Bible, and my faith aren’t things to be defended, but shared and nurtured.

3. The film looks flat-out awesome. I’m digging the trailer, and impressed by Aronofsky’s use of real sets and CGI. It looks worlds better than the special effects in The Bible/Son of God (which takes made-for-DVD and sells it for $10-14 a pop). But it also is significantly more grounded in its world by comparison to 300: Rise of the Empire which seems cartoonish (and not because it’s based on a graphic novel), a byproduct of being too in love with its own hype. It’s looks are helped along by the cast: besides Crowe, Anthony Hopkins, Emma Watson, and Ray Winstone head up a solid cast.

4. I’m already intrigued by aspects I hadn’t thought about. While I don’t take the Noah story literally, I do think there’s something to be gained by seeing it from various viewpoints. I had never considered how the people who weren’t included on the ark might’ve acted when it started to rain. I hadn’t considered Noah’s ancestors, what they might have taught him and how the ark-building would’ve affected them. I’ve used this same method when unpacking the Parable of the Prodigal Son, through the lens of Rembrandt’s painting, “The Return of the Prodigal Son,” using viewpoints not specifically spelled out. That’s how parables work, right?

Count me in for Crowe’s Noah. Maybe it will completely bomb. No matter what, it will probably provoke some God-directed thoughts.

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Catching Fire: What Does A Revolution Cost? (Movie Review)

Posted on March 14, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

In the second installment of the Hunger Games series (is that a trilogy or a quadrilogy?), Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) finds herself in a different predicament than in the first film when she entered the Games in place of her younger sister. Now, it’s a political battle she wages parallel to the blood-and-arrows one; she’s a hero, a role model, who others are looking to, and she finds herself neck deep in a revolution.

Representing malevolent evil, President Snow (Donald Sutherland) threatens Katniss if she won’t fake her relationship with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), deny her love for Gale (Liam Hemsworth), and help the Capitol put down the rebellions popping up in the Districts. He’s joined by the ambitious new Gamesmaker, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and they roll out a plan to squelch Katniss’ revolutionary fire once and for awhile, sending past victors back into the Hunger Games.

Having blown through Suzanne Collins’ trilogy in less than a week before The Hunger Games hit theaters, I’m not surprised by anything that plays out here. But that doesn’t mean it’s still not moving, powerful, and even disturbing. In 2012, I couldn’t help but see parallels in Katniss to Jesus Christ, who “stepped forward for me when my number was called,” and during Lent, that feeling is reinforced in Catching Fire.

From the very beginning, I couldn’t help but see President Snow and Heavensbee’s plotting like the Pharisees planning in the background to take Jesus down. “She should die but in the right way,” Heavensbee says, “at the right time… Katniss is a symbol, a Mockingjay. They think she’s one of them but we need to show that she’s one of us. We need to tear down the image, and let the people do the rest. Sell fear, more fear.”

Isn’t that how Jesus died? He went from being public hero, healer, teacher, and welcomed Messiah to being crucified on a Friday as the people chanted for his demise. Somehow, the Pharisees captured the people’s attention and let the people take down Jesus- they’re technically the ones who voted Jesus dead over the terrorist Barabbas (Matthew 27:11-20), not the Pharisees who plotted for years to have him die, a threat to their religious-political power.

A bigger stretch for some might be the indecision that Katniss shares with Gale, who reminds her that she is giving people hope. Even Snow recognizes that “fear doesn’t work as long as they have hope,” but there’s a Last Temptation of Christ moment where Katniss seems ready to run and save her family versus following through with her new found responsibility. Did Jesus really second guess the cross? We know he prayed that if it be God’s will that it would pass, but if he was really human, he must’ve wanted to avoid the painful death he experienced. And yet, maybe that’s the difference between Christ and a Christ figure: Jesus knew he could go to God in prayer, but we too often seem to think we have to ‘work things out’ on our own.

While Katniss doesn’t always ‘get the worst of it,’ in the way that Gale or Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) do, for their parts in the revolution, she still serves as the figurehead of the movement. Her deviation from the Christ story is that Jesus bore the brunt of it, taking our sins upon himself to the cross, and that he seems to understand that there is no other option. When the unnamed contestant dies for Peeta, he shakes his head, incredulous and grateful: “she sacrificed herself for me.” Katniss can’t believe it, because “it doesn’t make sense.” It’s just one more time that Collins’ story works in the truth about friendship and self-sacrifice.

Of course, the film isn’t all chit-chat, the action dominating after the slow burn of political machinations and the dance Katniss must experience with the other victors who see the whole predicament as her fault. It’s quite exciting, but it leaves us feeling a bit like Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, hanging on emotionally by a thread. We still don’t really see hope, because it seems that Katniss has risked too much, lost too much, and the Capitol still controls all.

We can sometimes feel like that, in Lent, stuck between the feelings of Good Friday and the jubilee of Easter morning. We’re supposed to evaluate ourselves, seek God more fully, and understand better what it means to follow God’s will in our lives. But we fight, more often than not, the tougher battle of Katniss’, the one against ideas, and systems, politics and manipulations. It’s in those moments that we can find God whispering support, showing grace, and providing healing. It’s then that we know we are not alone in the Games.

This cliffhanger will ultimately be nothing compared to watching them split out Mockingjay into two parts. But with Katniss and her growing revolution, it will be worth the wait.

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Resurrection: Do You Want To Believe? (TV Review)

Posted on March 14, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Midseason TV replacements are tricky. They often have a significant pilot but then often appear like a “flash in the pan,” disappearing before Johnny Q. Public has had a chance to even consider watching them. But Resurrection, ABC’s eight-episode series based on Jason Mott’s novel The Returned, has been rumored and publicized for over a year. On Sunday night, the hype proved to be backed up by the actual product, and 13.9 million people became believers.

Eight-year-old Jacob Langston (Landon Gimenez) appears in China, thirty-two years after he drowned in Arcadia, Missouri. Immigration and Customs officer J. Martin Bellamy (Omar Epps, House) transports Jacob to his former home in Arcadia, where he meets his parents, Henry (Kurtwood Smith, That ’70s Show) and Lucille (Frances Fisher, The Host, Eureka). Other Arcadia residents, like the pastor (Mark Hildreth) and the sheriff (Matt Craven), are just as surprised by Jacob’s return, and the ripple effects of his coming are abundant.

Several conversations in the course of the first episode captured my attention, and that of several of my parishioners and Facebook friends. Of course, a few of them revolved around the pastor, Tom Hale, who struggles with an actual resurrection from the perspective of a Biblical understanding. “This is what I say I believe!” he utters, incredulous, hopeful, doubtful, and faithfully, all at the same time. But he is reassured that he doesn’t “need to have all the answers,” because his job is to “comfort those who have questions.” It’s an interesting take on my occupation… and a valid one from some perspectives.

Pastor Hale preaches on John, and says that John was given the tools to ask questions, not know all of the answers. He asks his parishioners, “isn’t that what it means to have faith?” Again, that’s a valid question in the context of church: we have Scripture, but none of us currently living are eye-witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. We have to live in faith because empirical data isn’t forthcoming.

Except in Arcadia, where biological testing proves Jacob to be who he says he is.

So where does that leave a person of faith in the context of Resurrection? The question asked by Bellamy of the elder Langston, “do you want to believe,” is the relevant one for us all. What data would “prove” our faith to be true? Would the dead being raised do it? Would we have to see and touch someone who we also had known and touched while dead? It’s what worked for Doubting Thomas (he just asked what I would have!) in John 20:24-29. But Resurrection pushes past that and says that there are still choices which must be made.

One of my favorite choices so far is Mr. Langston’s decision to tell the truth about something that happened decades ago. It’s the reemergence of his son that takes him there, the way that the resurrection of Jacob pushes him to be who he wants to be/should have been in the present. It’s interesting to see how Jacob’s re-existence changes things, and it’ll be interesting to see where the show takes it from there. Stay tuned.

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True Detective Ep. 8: Brothers In Arms (TV Review)

Posted on March 14, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Matthew McConaughey should win another Oscar. It’s too bad he’ll have to settle for an Emmy, as long as folks don’t forget about True Detective by then. In the vein of other gritty cable shows like The Wire, Banshee, The Bridge, and The Killing, True Detective takes us deep into the psyche of those who pursue evil to its hole in the ground and work to stop it. For this first season of Detective, McConaughey plays Detective Rusty Cohle and Woody Harrelson plays his partner Marty Hart, and the darkness they’ve pursued for eight episodes over fifteen years is dark, dark stuff.

Honestly, this won’t be for everyone, just like Game of Thrones takes knights and dragons well past grade school yard stuff. True Detective shows us the evils of corruption, in the church, in the police force, in politics, in the community, and the way that our society isn’t safe until children are free to grow up without fear. It grimly highlights the pain of those who pursue the malevolent forces at work in some people’s souls, fed by their deviant lust and often the nurture they received growing up.

As much as the show’s enjoyment level comes from the pursuit of justice (and I will say that this doesn’t disappoint), the show’s strength is in the development of character for Cohle and Hart. It’s in their banter, their conversations (which develop over the eight episodes), and in their progression toward embracing their lives in fullness, not in the half-baked confusion we find them in at the beginning. These Nic Pizzolatto characters have punch, and Cary Fukunaga’s direction sets them up perfecto where they need to be. Like this…

Cohle and Hart discuss the stars in the night sky in one clip, comparing it to the epic battle between the dark and the light. Hart thinks that the dark is winning given the opaqueness of the night sky, but Cohle replies, “In the beginning, there was only darkness. Seems to me that the light is catching up.” This is the beauty of the show in a nutshell: while the darkness may be overwhelming and suffocating (and intensely hard to watch at times), the hope we have in the pursuit of truth and justice is a burning wick that refuses to go out.

True Detective’s first season was epic, and I can only hope that the second season, with new actors, will be equally as sensational.

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Sunday’s Sermon Today: What Kind Of Friend Are You? 2.0 (Luke 5:17-26)

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Jacob Sahms

Last month, I preached on this particular passage to a group of District clergy gathered together for our monthly meeting. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was more there than I had gotten to unpack, and as it worked its way around in my heart, it grew into this sermon with a foundation in that musing from a month ago.

The story of the paralytic let down through the roof is one of my favorite Jesus miracles. There’s something mind-blowing, maybe several mind-blowing things that happen in the midst of this story. I shared the story of the man with our preschool kids during our bimonthly chapel, and they were completely locked in on the mystery of the miraculous.

“Why couldn’t he move?”

“Why didn’t his legs work?”

“Jesus made him walk again?!”

It’s a powerful story, isn’t it?

Here, Jesus is preaching, and people have gathered from all over, everywhere, to come and hear what he had to say. “The Man” has shown up to evaluate him; the poor in pocket and spirit have come to be uplifted; the sick have come to be healed and made whole.

Jesus looks down at the man and tells him that his sins are forgiven. Snap! Like that. This is so upsetting to the Pharisees and teachers of the Law that they muttered to each other, calling Jesus a heretic for healing a man’s sins because God alone could do that! They have no framework to believe that Jesus could be God. It’s too unexpected. But Jesus knows what they’re thinking (is it his Spidey sense?) and confronts them for thinking that he shouldn’t have forgiven the sins of this man. They valued the process more than they valued someone being made right with God! So, Jesus goes ahead and heals the man, too. No big deal.

Because of the healing, many turn to faith and recognize that God is moving in and through Jesus.

Those points are the ones that every sermon I’ve ever heard have focused on. Jesus versus the Pharisees. Healing with forgiveness of sins. The power of the miracle to change lives. But today, I want us to focus on something else.

I want us to consider what friendship looks like.

Let’s read Luke 5:18-20 again, from the Message translation: “Some men arrived carrying a paraplegic on a stretcher. They were looking for a way to get into the house and set him before Jesus. When they couldn’t find a way in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof, removed some tiles, and let him down in the middle of everyone, right in front of Jesus. Impressed by their bold belief, he said, ‘Friend, I forgive your sins.'”

Now, popularly, we end up with four men. It’s even in the kids version I use! (Can you imagine if we edited out all of the things we’ve embellished to fill the stories out or make sense? ‘Sorry, kings four through six, you don’t fit into our We Three Kings musical montage.’) Maybe we think four corners or four ropes to lower him down because that would be an even number or bedspreads have corners or that’s how we’d do it, but we don’t know how many men were there any more than we know how many wise men visited Jesus as a three-year-old! Because they didn’t show up in Bethlehem…

We do know that these fabulous friends rolled up on the house where Jesus was preaching with intent. They were focused on bringing their incapacitated friend, who could not walk or use crutches to Jesus. They hadn’t come for themselves, they hadn’t taken the day off from work to just come and ‘check Jesus out.’ It doesn’t say why they brought him, but can’t we surmise? Can’t we see that these men, who would carry a man for miles would want what they thought was best for him, couldn’t they see that if this man had a chance, any chance at all, that it was through Jesus?

There were no hospitals, no MRIs, no primary care physician-to-referred specialist processes to go through. For a paralyzed man, his one and only hope was a miracle. (This begs the question: have you ever needed a miracle to solve something? Have you ever experienced a miracle? Somehow, it seems like we better get the story of this man if we see it the way that the kids at chapel did: this. is. amazing.)

These friends are hot and sweaty from having carried a grown man from wherever they came from. They are tired, and they have finally reached their destination, only to find… no room. Imagine their desperation upon arriving and finding no room. If there were as many people as is implied by the numbers and locations that these people came from to see Jesus, then they couldn’t even see Jesus through a door or window. They couldn’t even push their way in!

This is actually the second story of “no room” in the Gospels, isn’t it? “And there was no room in the inn…” Jesus was denied room… and here’s a man denied room to see Jesus. But this man has friends.

Imagine with me the conversation.

“There’s no way in. Too many people.”

“Can we wait them out?”

“What are we going to do, go home?”

“We can’t give up, we’ve come so far.”

“He needs this. We’ve got to get in there to see Jesus.”

“What other options do we have?”

“Hey, guys, you know the ‘Bear Hunt’ song?”

“Hunh?”

“Can’t go over it. Can’t go under it. Gotta go through it!”

And so, the friends carry their incapacitated friend up on the roof. And by the roof, we’ll assume that they went up onto another roof through someone else’s house, and carried their friend across several rooftops to get to the house where Jesus was. They tear the roof open to provide a way for the man to get to Jesus, breaking several laws– isn’t it breaking, entering, destruction of property, stealing… to get through the roof, and that’s when Jesus sees their faith and forgives their friend’s sins.

That’s my favorite part.

Jesus forgives a helpless man, who is “stuck,” who literally cannot move, because he has faithful friends.

Do you have faithful friends? Are you a faithful friend?

I wonder sometimes if I am. I wonder if I am the kind of faithful person and pastor who Jesus looks at and forgives someone because of my faith.

Let that sink in for a minute. Jesus heals this man because of his friends’ faith. We spend a lot of time talking about having a personal relationship with Jesus, about confessing our sins, about repenting. There is none of that here. This man is forgiven, made right, put back together, reunited with God because of his friends’ faith.

He might’ve been a class A jerk. An idol worshipper. A murderer.

But Jesus healed him because of the faith of his friends.

In his book, 11, Leonard Sweet lays out twelve “indispensable relationships you can’t live without.” Some of the highlights: Editor, Butt-Kicker, protege, Yoda, and Back Coverer. All of the characteristics serve some role in our lives, Sweet says. But I’d take it a step further and say that our faithful friends are ones who recognize what’s needed at what time.

Do we need to be encouraged or challenged?

Do we need to be comforted or condemned?

Do we need advice or an ear that is open with a mouth that is closed?

Do we need someone who needs our advice and experience so that we can learn as we teach?

Do we need faithful friends? Are we faithful friends?

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak with Kyle Idleman, megachurch pastor at Southeast Christian Church and author of Not A Fan. We talked about his new book, AHA, about the Prodigal Son, and how each of us has a series of ‘aha’ moments that we may or may not miss. But Idleman shared with me that he meets with a friend once a week and they ask each other, “what am I missing?” They don’t solve each others problems but they help each other ask the right questions. They work together to be faithful friends.

Over time, I have come to understand who my faithful friends are. The people who pray for me when they say they will. The people who will look me in the eye and really ask, “how is it with your soul?”

In our scripture today, the question was, “how do we get our friend to Jesus?”

I’m sure we could apply the story of these friends to our church: how we need to not let the structures in place in architecture or tradition or apathy or excuses to get in the way of people meeting Jesus, how we need to be willing to ‘go big or go home’ when it comes to our boldness in introducing Jesus to people.

But what about our circle of friends? Are we the kinds of friends who are willing to go the extra mile? Do we have the kinds of friends who see us “stuck” and are willing to do the same?

If you were stuck, who would you call outside of your family? Are any of those people sitting here in church today?

I want to say this definitively today: they should be.

I know how lonely the church can be for people who wander in knowing they’re missing something, feeling like they don’t belong. And sometimes, that’s me, the pastor.

I’ve counseled people who needed to talk about their broken marriage or their fractured relationship with a parent or child, who didn’t know where else to turn.

I’ve seen people struggle with their faith, thinking they’re the only ones dealing with work, family, church, God, and the thoughts in their head.

And I wonder, what would our church and community look like, if we were “faithful friends?” What difference would that make? How might our ministry change? How might our lives be bettered? How might we understand Jesus better?

Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). That’s Jesus. That’s what he preached and that’s what he did.

Jesus saw a kindred spirit in those friends, who carried their paralyzed buddy in. He understood putting yourself aside (the hard work of getting him there, the threat of arrest for breaking the law) to show love, to be a friend. That resonated with him. And it’s what he wants from us.

Are you ready to rip the roof off? Are you ready to boldly put your friends, family, and neighbors before Jesus so that they might be forgiven? Are you ready to be forgiven yourselves?

I pray today that God would look down at us and find us faithful friends. I pray that he would look at those around us, and heal their bodies and souls because of our faith.

That would be a serious “wow” moment, wouldn’t it?

 

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