April 7, 2019 (Lent at the Movies 5)- Isaiah 43:16-21
Isaiah 43:16-21
A New Script – Lent at the Movies 5 – Captain Marvel
5th Sunday in Lent – April 7, 2019
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
We heard from the poet we call 2nd Isaiah a couple of weeks ago – and this week he’s back.
We don’t know his name – he was active during the time the people of Israel had been
carted off into exile by the Bablyonians 600 years before Jesus.
He is the poet of newness – he is the prophet of comfort,
who announces to the people that God, after 70 years, is going to lead them home.
He is the voice of hope.
He announces that God is going to renew the promise that God had made long ago to
bring the people to a land where they could be free to be
the blessing to all the families of the earth they were long called to be.
This week, God speaks again of bringing the people home.
Now: for generations they had told one another the story of the Exodus –
of how God liberated them from slavery in Egypt 600 years before.
The people clung to that story – as Jewish people still do today at Passover.
The people cling to that time in the past when God had acted and when God had freed them.
That time when God led them through the waters of the Red Sea –
when God had made dry land appear in the middle of deep waters.
Today, God’s own self reminds them of that story:
Thus says the LORD, who makes a way through the sea and a path through the mighty waters…
And then immediately – and very unexpectedly – God tells them to forget about that!
As if to say: Remember that amazing thing I did for you 600 years ago?
Remember that story that completely formed your character and your conception of
who I am and who you are what I can do? Well . . . fuggeddaboudit!!!!
God continues in Isaiah’s words:
Remember not the former things! Do not consider the things of old!
For I am about to do a new thing! Can’t you see it?
I will make a way in the wilderness – I will make rivers in the desert.
In essence, God says:
The past is the past!
Good and bad: the past is the past – I’m gonna do a totally new thing!
In fact, I am going to do the complete opposite of what I did last time!
Remember how before I turned the sea into dry land?
Well this time I am going to turn dry land into rivers!
I am going to lead you home through 900 miles of inhospitable desert,
and make sure you have plenty of water along the way.
Don’t expect me to act in the same old ways.
Don’t expect me to adhere to the old script you’ve written for me.
I am going to write a new script.
God is not limited to acting in the same old ways that we think God should.
In the new Marvel film Captain Marvel,
Carol Danvers wakes up and can’t remember who she is.
She is told she is one thing by her male superiors on a planet called Hala.
She is told she is a Kree warrior whose purpose is to fight their enemies, the Scrulls.
And yet, and yet – she has flashbacks.
Of a childhood and an upbringing on the planet Earth.
Where . . . men also told her she was one thing and not another.
She has memories of being a scrappy child belittled by her father,
of being told not to ride her bike so fast, of being told not to play baseball,
of being told she shouldn’t aspire to being a fighter pilot in the airforce.
Through the course of the film, she pieces together who she is and
what she’s truly capable of.
She comes to know what makes her her – and discovers in the process that she is probably
the most powerful being in the universe: Captain Marvel.
Director Anna Boden has said of her character: As she gets to know herself and embrace what makes her her, she really achieves her true power. Part of that means rejecting the voices of those who tell her she’s not strong enough and doesn’t belong.
At one point we hear her telling her male superior,
“I’m kind of done with you telling me what I can’t do.”
Carol Danvers writes a new script – and tosses the old one away.
And she thereby unlocks her true potential.
And as everyone on our very own Planet Earth now knows,
that potential is what is going to save the entire universe in
Avengers: Endgame coming out later this month.
For everyone’s benefit, she can’t adhere to the old script.
Or conform to what she’s been told she is.
She has to write a new script – because the old one limited what she could truly do.
The old scripts are comforting, right? They are what we know.
The old scripts feature male superheroes and they sell tickets at the box office.
That is why it took 21 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to finally make one
featuring a female protagonist: Captain Marvel.
But, in the #metoo era, it seems like it is finally time to write a new script.
The old script – the one where women didn’t speak out about verbal, domestic and sexual abuse –
or the one where they weren’t believed – will no longer do,
and will no longer be tolerated.
It’s dehumanizing, and limits both women and men in achieving and realizing what could be.
We all need a new script.
It is precisely what God is telling the people of Israel this morning.
Don’t limit me to the old script – I am the God of newness.
I am creative – I delight in the new.
When I raised Jesus from the dead on Easter Sunday, I wrote a totally new script.
If you continually expect me to act in the same old ways, you will miss what I am doing now.
And you will miss the opportunity to join me in bringing blessing in a new way,
in a way you may not have expected: do you not perceive it?
Carol Danvers was told one story about who she is
as a way of controlling her and limiting her powers.
The film is about her writing a new script and unlocking her true potential.
Just so, I get the sense in the reading from Isaiah that God does not wish to be
limited to the old script.
If we expect God to act in the same old ways, the ways we remember and honour,
there is a chance we will miss what God is doing right now, in the present.
This is a perennial problem in the church, right?
For years, churches in North America have expected God
to do the 1950s and 60s all over again.
The idea was that if we cling to the good old days and keep doing the same old things over and
over and just hang around long enough our pews and Sunday Schools will be full again.
Well – the churches clinging to that script have mostly closed.
Time moves on and God is simply not limited to what God has done in the past.
For everyone’s benefit, the church can no longer adhere to the old script: we need a new script.
And at First Lutheran we have been in the process of writing one.
You yourselves began writing the new script before I was called here.
You made a conscious decision that this church was not only an “Icelandic” church,
but is a church where everyone is welcome –
and today you have the most diverse congregation in the synod.
You saw the new thing God is doing, the inclusive thing, the hospitality thing –
and you wrote a new script to reflect that.
You wrote a new script of how you could be blessing right here at Sargent and Victor.
You saw God at work in the West End and you started a food bank – part of the new script.
You started Community Meals – part of the new script.
You saw the need for a safe space for children during the summer months and
started the Kids Club and then saw the potential for partnership with Emmanuel Mission,
where God was clearly at work – and that is a partnership that is thriving.
God, clearly, is a God of newness, a God who is not limited to the same old script.
But a God who delights in doing a new thing – and who invites us to join in.
Like God, like the Israelites, like Carol Danvers and like First Lutheran Church,
each of us is not limited to what we have been in the past.
Each of us is not limited to what others have told us we are.
Each of us is not limited to what we have sometimes told ourselves we are.
God calls us above all to be blessing –
and calls us above all to be our most authentic selves in fulfilling that call to be blessing.
God loves us just as we are, just as God fashioned us.
And who we are is wondrous and full of potential to be blessing, right here, right now.
In our homes and workplaces, in our schools and in our communities.
And above all right here at Sargent and Victor.
God is not only relevant to the past – to think that is a grave mistake. So: forget about it.
God is relevant right here, right now.
God is working right here, and right now.
New mercies, new ventures, new just relationships, new things in our lives right now.
So together, let us keep our eyes open to the new thing, let us say “yes” to it when we see it,
and together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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