Rogue One, May The Force Be With You

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 15:9-17  and the movie was Rogue One.

Sports fans in Philadelphia are known to be particularly passionate about their teams, and their passion sometimes leads to downright hostility, and this is not just directed at visiting players and fans, but even to their own players. These are fans who might be best known for throwing snowballs at and booing Santa Clause. I mean, who boos Santa? People who want coal in their stockings is who. Now this hostility sort of stands in direct contrast for being known as the city of brotherly love, which of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the people who live there, and no offense to anyone here from Philly, I love your sandwiches. But their nickname comes from the meaning of the word Philadelphia, which literally means brotherly love in Greek. And some may remember that there are actually four words in Greek for love. One is the word eros, which is a passionate, physical love, and it never appears in the New Testament. Another, much rarer, is storge, which is the feeling that people in families have for each other, or we might familial love. Then there is Philia, which is brotherly love, with brother here being a much broader category linking with people not related by blood, and we could also certainly include sisters in this. Love for BFFs. Then there is agape, which is much more common. Iit is the word used to describe God’s love for us, but this is, again, not a feeling, but a doing a way of being. It’s also a sacrificial giving love, which is why this word is sometimes used to describe a parents love for a child. It’s giving of yourself for someone else, and so as we conclude our series on The Gospel in Star Wars by looking at the film Rogue One, I want you to keep those understandings of philia and agape in mind because they become important.

Rogue One was released in 2016 and was the first of the live action stand-alone Star Wars movies, also sometimes referred to as the unnumbered films. Rogue One takes place immediately before the original Star Wars film, by a few weeks, and thus brings us full circle back to where we started. The main story line tells us about Jyn Erso, the daughter of Galen Erso, the man who is forced to design the Death Star. As a young girl, Jyn watches her father get taken by the empire and her mother killed, and then she is rescued by Saw Gerrera, a militant rebel leader. Rather than resisting the empire and being killed, her father Galen, designs a flaw into the Death Star so that with one shot it might be destroyed, which explains the end of Star Wars. Galen gets an imperial shuttle pilot to defect with a message for Jyn, which he takes the city of Jedha, the home of a former Jedi temple and a mine for Kyber crystals which not only power lightsabers but is also what powers the death star’s weapon. Captured by the rebels to help them get the plans, Jyn travels with the rebel Cassian, who is shown to do whatever he thinks is necessary for the rebel cause, and K2SO a reprogrammed imperial droid. While on Jedha, they encounter the blind seer Chirrut Imwe, the coolest force user we’ve met in a while, whose personal mantra and breath prayer is “I am one with the force and the force is with me.” We are told that Chirrut is a guardian of the whills, which is an ode to Lucas’ original story idea before he came up with the force, and he is accompanied by Baze who helps protect Chirrut. Although Jyn thinks of herself as being totally independent, of not being able to trust anyone and making it on her own, we get an early indication of who she is when she and Cassian are caught in a street fight between the empire and Saw Gerrera’s followers. (Video)

Heart of Love

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was 1 Peter 1:17-23 and Luke 24:13-35:

They say that hindsight is always what? 20/20. And of course we say that, or we get accused of that, because it’s about wrong decisions we might have made, or if we had known all the information at the time we might have done something different. It’s one of those phrases that helps us remember that we gain wisdom because of bad decisions and we make bad decisions because we lack wisdom. And yet, what the phrase also reminds us, although used less often this way, is the way we only see things once we have looked back at them, the things we missed noticing along the way. Or it’s the way we change the story and reevaluate everything based on what something led to it. And so we have to understand that that is what the early disciples and the early church did. The gospels are not autobiographies of Jesus, and they were not written at the time, but are stories look backing through the cross, and more importantly through Easter. They look back to the things that had taken place, things they had missed all along, and saw it in a new light, the things that they didn’t realize, the things they had overlooked and didn’t understand and but do now, because of Easter. It reveals how God had been involved, but they didn’t know. Their hindsight made all the difference in understanding and telling the story of Christ.

We see the same thing is true in the story from Luke. Cleopas, who seems to be associated with the disciples in some way, although we don’t know how, because he is never mentioned before, and never mentioned again, and another unnamed man are walking to Emmaus. We’re told that Emmaus is about 7 miles away from Jerusalem, although it actually says its 60 stadia away, but I’m sure none of you know how long a stadia is, and I had to look it up; it’s 600 roman feet, although I have no idea how long a roman foot is. But that’s what our best manuscripts say, but other manuscripts read 160 stadia, which is about 19.5 miles. Now, since they walk both there and back in one day, most scholars are in agreement that the 7 miles is probably the better number, but they are still guessing, because we don’t actually know where Emmaus is, as there was no town of that name in 1st century Palestine. So, we have two ordinary men, going to an ordinary town, of which we know nothing about. My interpretation is that this vagueness for details is so that it is much easier to put ourselves into the story. We could be the unnamed traveler, and the unknown town we are going to could be our own home.