Running from the past: Breakfast with Jesus II

An Easter sermon from John 21: part II
Our mistakes seem unable to be fixed. Isn’t it sometimes better to give up and move on, make a fresh start elsewhere? This relationship is going nowhere, we have both failed too many times. Mightn’t it be easier if we stopped seeing each other and started new lives with other people? My sister has hurt me so often that it’s better to steer clear of her. This church has become too difficult; too many bridges have been burned. Mightn’t it be easier to switch to one down the road?

Sometimes, even our memories can be too painful to face, and so we push mistakes out of our heads, as well as our lives. How many of us are running from a buried past, trying to make a new start?

Doesn’t Easter give us the story of just such a fresh start? We like the image of the slate wiped clean, turning over a new leaf, leaving our mistakes for dead and being given a new life. But while it works for a while, if we’re honest, the past has a habit of catching up with us.

In what is probably my all time-favourite film, Magnolia, there’s a great line that is repeated again and again by different characters: “we might be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” Is it really possible to escape our past?
Series: I; II: III; IV; V; VI; VII; VIII; IX.

One Movie Meme

1. One movie that made you laugh
Coffee and Cigarettes

2. One movie that made you cry
Dancer in the Dark

3. One movie you loved when you were a child
Mønti Pythøn ik den Høli Gräilen

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once
The Return of the King

5. One movie you hated
Transformers

6. One movie that scared you
The Birds

7. One movie that bored you
Inland Empire - the most fascinating and compelling three hours of tedium I've ever seen. I love/hate Lynch.

8. One movie that made you happy
3-Iron

9. One movie that made you miserable
Nobody Knows

10. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see
My Best Friend's Wedding

11. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with
Jim Curring (the cop) from Magnolia

12. A movie that surprised you
Devot

13. The last movie you saw
Black Sheep

14. The next movie you hope to see
Babette's Feast

15. Now tag five people:
Benjamin, Mark, Dave, Jason and anyone else who feels like it.

Them's fightin' words

I will keep saying it until I have no more reason to: Evangelicals are propagating more heresies today than in any other era of the church. These include a Pelagian doctrine of salvation, a unitarian doctrine of God, a docetic christology and Bible, a gnostic doctrine of eschatology, and a Constantinian doctrine of church-state relations—which, by the way, was what led the German church to support Hitler. Do I really need to unpack these in more detail? I am afraid that I will have to, since I doubt most realize how much the American evangelical sector has capitulated to these grave heresies and called it "a personal relationship with Jesus."

From The Fire and the Rose. We'll have to see how that series progresses and how specific it is to the American scene, since 'evangelical' can have a range of meanings in different cultural contexts.

This great blog has a series of fascinating film reviews, including two of my favourites: Magnolia and Me and You and Everyone We Know. I highly recommend both the films and the reviews.

Oh, and just added is a collection of links to many many posts on universalism in recent blogging.

Look Both Ways: seeing death everywhere

I recently saw a delightful little Aussie film called ‘Look Both Ways’: a weekend in a serious of intersecting lives, with a redemptive downpour towards the end. Sounds like Magnolia? Bingo – it is. Except, instead of exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of forgiveness and redeeming the past (as Magnolia did so beautifully and profoundly), this time it’s death. I’ve rarely seen a po/mo non-linear film so focussed on a single topic, and can think of few films at all that tackle death so relentlessly without become bogged in angst. Finally, an admission that for many people life means ‘seeing death everywhere’.