Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Debbie and I were watching TV this past weekend and we saw a movie on TV. The movie was “the War of the Roses”. It is a “comedy” about a couple Oliver and Barbara Rose who were once a happy couple but who grow apart over the years and gradually love dies. She wants a divorce and they then fight over their very sumptuous mansion of a house.
They have problems communicating. His primary value is making it up the corporate ladder. He is a lawyer and all his energy and attention is geared to making money and a successful practice. He wants money and power – these mark success.
His wife, a talented sensitive well-educated women, never questions his drive for success. But she notices over the years that they don’t communicate about what is really important.
When it comes time for the kids to go to college, they are in crises. She starts her own catering business to give her independence, and more importantly, an identity and fulfillment apart form him
This threatens him, he discounts her achievement and does not take her needs seriously. As a Pastor watching the film I could see that the main issue was communication as it inevitably is. She couldn’t articulate her needs and he was insensitive to her nonverbal signals.
The movie gets serious though when they begin to fight over the house. They take delight in trashing what the other one values. He accidentally runs over and kills her cat. She then makes a dish of liver pâté from the family dog which he loves. In a final climactic scene, they are both hanging from the chandelier in the hallway which she has loosened hoping to drop it on him and the two fall to their deaths.
The movie parodies the modern dilemma of divorce but like so many American movies it goes too far. The movie is cynical and it is typical of much of American art today. We have become in many ways and many instances a cynical people.
A cynic is a person who believes the worst about people. Cynical people question the sincerity and goodness of peoples’ motives and actions and find little purpose in trying to improve life. Worse than a pessimist who believes that the worst usually happens, cynics don’t really believe goodness is possible.
Bill Moyers once interviewed David Puttam, a British film maker who made the Academy award winning film “Chariots of Fire”. Sometimes foreigners see us more clearly than we see ourselves. David laments the passing of the American cinema that he knew and loved of the 1950’s. He talked in the interview about movies like “High Noon”, “Inherit the Wind” and “Mr. Smith goes to Washington”. He said he greatly admired America and the American way of life because he saw in these films an optimism and a hope that the world could be made a better place if people would stand up for the values of justice and decency.
He believes, and I couldn’t help but resonate with him, that the movies of the 50’s deeply affected the American psyche and the world’s. In the 1960’s and early 70’s the world had a harvest of righteousness and justice – the world saw the end of colonialism in Africa, and in our own land racial injustice and discrimination against the poor was made illegal.
David Puttam grew up on a very class conscious British culture. He admired American openness and what he believed was a society which upheld justice, fairness and opportunity for all people. Even though American society wasn’t perfect, the ethos of the cinema – the image it portrayed and the values it upheld were pushing for what could be.
That was 40 years ago, today it is a different story. Puttman an outsider, but with a discerning eye, sees an America exporting a very different image of itself to the world. There is almost a self-loathing quality to our films; they are filled with violence and profanity of the nastiest kind. Puttman has this to say. “America is a nation at odds with itself. Movies now have an underlying nastiness to them. Cynicism is becoming fashionable and the cynicism is desperately destructive.
We seem to have lost hold of the basic principle that stories are both a part of what we are and project an image of what we could be. Like so much of American industry today that is ruled by the tyranny of making the fast buck, the movie industry has rejected the notion that it has a vocation, a calling to make a lasting contribution to a better, saner, safer, more human, more life-supporting community.
David Puttam challenges the movie industry and calls us all into question by saying, “We all try to dump responsibility for achieving the type of world we want to live in. Yet we all live in the same world. You can’t make a film the net result of which is to create a very violent society or certainly a very irresponsible society – and then merely spend the money you make as a result of your movie to build an electric fence around your property to protect it from the violence you have contributed to. There is madness in that, We all have to start asking “If this is where we are now, where will we be in 20 years.?”
Today’s Old Testament lesson from Isaiah asks the Hebrew children to do something as part of their calling. They are to keep justice and do righteousness. Mishpat and Tzedek were both connected with another concept embedded in Hebrew thought. That concept is Shalom. Shalom is a state of peace but shalom means much more than just the absence of war. It means an active, dynamic, creative state where all the forces of nature and society are working in harmony for the good of all people. When people turn not to themselves but to God for fulfillment this state occurs.
All Hebrew children and all Christians are called to be devoted to doing righteousness and keeping justice
In several weeks it will be Labor Day weekend, and we will celebrate vocation in a unique way.
It is critical for us to remember that our vocation is both a gift from God and also a calling to serve Him. It matters very much how we see ourselves in relation to the rest of society, the future and God.
The Good News is that we have a model for him to live and how to be. Jesus, true God and true man, shows us that even though doing righteousness and keep justice is costly, it is also possible. he in his incarnation entered the fray with us and is and remains human just like us. Our failure to do righteousness and keep justice is forgiven in his cross and we are set free then, to try again.
In Jesus’ name. Amen
Who We Are