March 8, 2015 – I Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22
I Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22
The Unexpected Virtue of Foolishness – Birdman
Third Sunday in Lent – March 8, 2015
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Birdman Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) tells the story of Riggan Thomson,
a washed up actor who is looking for love.
Well, he’s looking to be loved – again.
He was the beloved darling of the movie industry twenty years before the film is set –
he was a comic book superhero movie star, starring in three films as the
iconic superhero Birdman.
Now in his sixties, he is forgotten – he doesn’t figure at all in the world of
Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
So: forgotten, and nearly broke, he is attempting to be beloved again,
this time by proving his critics wrong by becoming acclaimed as an true artist by
writing, directing, and starring in a serious Broadway play called,
What we Talk about When We Talk about Love.
Without going into details, as we see the play in previews and as we
watch the cast prepare for play, we are expecting a train wreck.
It’s messy. It’s conflict ridden.
Riggan himself is filled with self doubt.
He wants to be successful.
He wants to be admired.
He wants to be beloved.
But he confuses love with admiration.
At one point, Riggan’s sane ex-wife says to him,
“You know, just because I didn’t like that ridiculous comedy you did with Goldie Hawn didn’t mean I didn’t love you. That’s what you always do. You confuse love for admiration.”
Riggan is looking for love in the theatre – or thinks he is.
But really what he is looking for is simply more admiration.
What we Talk about When we Talk about Love is a play based on a short story by
the American writer Raymond Carver.
At the beginning of the film, there is a quotation from Carver that goes like this:
And did you get what you wanted from this life? Even so? I did. And what did you want? To know myself beloved, to feel beloved from the earth.
This is what Riggan thinks he wants: to feel beloved.
But really he wants to be admired again.
He puts a lot into that effort.
He works and works.
He worries and frets.
He sinks all of his savings into this play.
All to be admired and successful.
His greatest concern is that the most influential theatre critic in New York will pan his play,
and that will be the end of his career.
But everything seems to go wrong.
The greatest scene in the film occurs when he goes outside the theatre for a smoke during a
preview performance.
He has a few minutes before he’s supposed to be onstage again.
But the stage door closes and locks behind him, catching his robe in the door.
Failing to get back in, he realizes he has no alternative: leaving his robe behind,
and dressed in nothing but his tighty-whities, he runs through a packed
Times Square around to the front of the building, while onlookers
jeer and applaud and call out to him, all the while filming him and
uploading the video instantly to the internet.
He is humiliated, but returns to finish the performance.
Later, his daughter Sam shows him the video of his humiliation.
But while Riggan sits there with his head in his hands, she says to him,
“Believe it or not, this is power.”
And this public humiliation creates a high demand for tickets.
Paul writes similarly of foolishness and wisdom this morning.
Riggan wants to be admired and successful again, but the path to that is not so much in
artistic success in this world but rather in humiliation.
Paul writes that the wisdom of God is to be found in the cross,
in willingly suffering for the sake of the other, for the sake of the common good,
for the sake of the world.
In the Gospel, Jesus humiliates himself by his action in the temple,
driving out the sellers of animals and the money-changers.
By his own admission, Jesus knows where this will lead: Jesus is not stupid,
he knows this will lead to his death. Why?
Because his action undercuts a major source of revenue for the priests in the selling of
animals for the temple sacrifices and in the changing of money from
Roman coins to Temple coins, because of course the Roman coins had
the image of Caesar on them and you couldn’t use those in the temple.
There was a tidy profit on both, and much of it ended up in . . . Roman coffers.
Jesus’ action in the Temple is really a protest against injustice,
and he knows it will lead to his death, but he knows that that death will lead to life,
will lead to change, will lead to many coming to know that this is the
extent God will go to to save the world from the mess it is in,
a world that puts profit above the welfare of the neighbour.
The wisdom of the cross is just this: love is not about being admired,
but about loving.
Or rather, this: love is about receiving and giving love.
It is about receiving love for the sake of passing it on.
Jesus knew himself beloved in his baptism, for he was named so by God:
You are my beloved – with you I am well pleased.
Jesus didn’t need to fritter his life away in an attempt to become beloved.
Jesus knew himself beloved from the beginning of his ministry –
and he used that love and he used that security in orderto love, strongly and wisely.
Birdman shows us the folly of the artist who attempts to become beloved,
to feel beloved, through his or her work,
whether that work is done in Hollywood or on Broadway.
One of the ironies in the film is that Riggan becomes beloved through an accidental rampage
through the streets of New York in his tighty-whities.
In the end, Riggan shoots himself onstage at the end of the play’s premiere with a real gun.
We learn later that only his nose was shot off and that he survives.
But the critic he most feared gives a glowing review with the headline,
“The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.”
She notes: “Thomson has unwittingly given birth to a new form, which can only be described as super-realism. . . . the blood that has been missing from the veins of the American theatre.”
The critic implies that Riggan didn’t know what he was doing.
He became beloved unwittingly and ignorantly.
But really, he only became admired.
And he still hasn’t learned to love.
The film is a great meditation on the folly of the desperate need to be validated,
of the lengths people will go to in order to feel themselves beloved.
To which I can say: thank God for baptism.
So many Hollywood films are about redemption with a salvific ending.
But Christian life is just the other way round: in a way, our story begins with redemption,
begins with salvation in our baptisms where we are named Beloved
not at the end of our story, but at the very beginning, in our baptisms.
There is wisdom in this foolishness: God knows we are apt to spend most of our time looking for
love rather than giving it away.
God knows we are more likely to seek belovedness in the wrong places
rather than becoming loving.
God knows it’s hard to be loving when you are constantly looking to be loved and admired.
Jesus loves by being willing to shed his real blood for the sake of justice this morning –
Not as a kind of stunt in order to be admired.
He is able to do this because he knows himself to be beloved already.
He acts out of love for the sake of his neighbours when he sees they are being exploited.
His power is the power is not the power of being admired,
it is not the power of wealth, it is not the power of fame, it is not the power of power.
It is the power of giving his love away – because he knows himself to be beloved,
always and forever, as a handmade beloved creature of God –
and nothing can take that away from him: not the taunts, not the jeers,
not the bad reviews in the Nazareth times, not even death.
He knows himself to be beloved by the God of all grace – and he is secure in that.
And – unlike Riggan, who really only loves himself – that allows him to love in turn.
He knows himself to be beloved.
Beloved: that is what you are. And that is absolutely true.
We often say that rather glibly, I suppose, but when you look at the life of Jesus you can
see the power of knowing that to be true.
The power of not having to earn your belovedness in a million wasteful ways.
But rather the power of loving, of giving love away, in actions for justice,
in actions for mercy, in actions for peace, in actions for the love of neighbour,
in actions for the sake of the world – in actions that look like you’re
foolishly giving love away for nothing,
when really they are full of the wisdom of the self-giving God.
It is the unexpected virtue of foolishness.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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