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)

Giving All You've Got

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The scripture was John 15:12-17 and based on Star Wars: Rogue One.

When we think of the word love and when we talk about love, the most common reference is that of romantic love or the love we feel for our families. The love that’s expressed in Hallmark cards and Lifetime movies. It’s not necessarily physical love, but it does make us feel something different than what we feel for other people, and thus when we hear that we are to love everyone, or that, as the Beatles prophetically said, all we need is love, and we realize how difficult or impossible it is we begin to despair thinking that perhaps we aren’t worthy. That perhaps there are people who are capable of doing this, but we aren’t, and are thus failures. It’s as Father Zosima said in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.” Or worse, we begin to think that maybe Jesus wasn’t actually being serious about this, that it was hyperbole, just as he said that we should rip out our eye or cut off our hand if it causes us to sin. It’s there to help us to understand the seriousness of the command, but to understand that it’s not really what he is saying to do.

Now there are multiple different words in Greek that are translated as love. One of those words is eros, from which we get the word erotic, that touchy feely love, but that is not the word that is translated here that Jesus is using. Instead, the word here is agape, which when translated into Latin was caritas, from which we get words like charity. That is that this is not a feeling that we are supposed to have for one another, this is a doing, a way of being. So, while we can have eros for a few people, we can have agape for everyone. And I think it’s crucial to pay attention to the fact that Jesus does not say this is a recommendation, or even just come out and say love one another. Instead, what does he say? Let’s read it together. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. And no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” This is a commandment. The reason why the Thursday of Holy Week is called Maundy Thursday is because this passage is read, and Maundy comes from the Latin word Mandantum, meaning commandment. Jesus commands us to love one another, just as we have first been loved. And so, we are going to be looking at that idea as we conclude our all too brief sermon series on the gospel in Star Wars, although perhaps some think it’s been too long, by looking at the last of the Star Wars films to come out which was Rogue One.