March 12, 2017 – Genesis 12:1-4a; John 3:1-17
Genesis 12:1-4a; John 3:1-17
Logan: Lent at the Movies II
Second Sunday in Lent – March 12, 2017
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
There is a scene in the latest Marvel X-Men film Logan where Charles Xavier and Logan –
or Wolverine – and Logan’s clone daughter Lauren
find themselves the guests of a loving family on a farm,
recipients of a home-made meal and gracious hospitality.
They are on the run.
Charles – Patrick Steward – is 90 and suffers from brain seizures that threaten all around him.
Logan – played by an amazing Hugh Jackman – is old, alcoholic, tired, and nearly worn out,
weary of all the suffering he has caused.
And Lauren is practically an orphan, only recently discovering that she shares
genetic material with Logan, the Wolverine mutant superhero.
All three are mutants, genetically different humans who have superhero powers –
and whose difference makes them the targets of those who would destroy them.
Now, they are on the run, and during a brief, quiet, beautiful interlude in the film,
they receive the hospitality of strangers.
And this somewhat odd and dysfunctional family of mutants witnesses a grounded,
loving family.
Old and wise Charles says to the ever aloof and distant Logan,
“See, this is what life looks like: people love each other.
You should take a moment and feel it.”
But Logan doesn’t, or he refuses to, or he can’t after all he has been through.
He is a man trying to make peace with the all the pain he has caused.
And not really succeeding.
Logan is a man who really doesn’t want anything to do with anyone.
He has left the world-saving business.
He drives a limo to make a few bucks, drinks too much, and cares for Charles.
Until, that is, the 11-year old Laura appears, on the run from those that would kill her.
And he reluctantly agrees to help her – and so they flee, of all places, to Canada,
that eternally tolerant place in the movies – thank you, Justin! –
where she is sure they will be safe.
Yes, Logan has retired from the world-saving business –
but as one critic notes, he himself is desperately in need of redemption.
And so they embark on their perilous journey.
Abraham too embarks on a perilous journey as God invites him and his wife and his family into
the world-saving business this morning.
Go, says God, be a blessing. I will bless you, and you take that blessing and
in you and your descendants, all the families of the earth will be blessed.
Like Logan, he is old.
And like Logan, the world he inhabits is an often dark place.
The journey toward being blessing and world-saving will be fraught with danger.
Before Abraham’s story is over, Abraham will almost lose his wife in Egypt,
there will be pain with the mother of his son Ishmael,
and when Abraham and Sarah finally have a son his life will be threatened
in one of darkest and strangest of all biblical stories.
In the biblical narrative, blessing is rarely arrived at, and not easily arrived at when it is.
Indeed the blessing of the world is not yet arrived at, its future delayed and frustrated.
Yet, God’s promise to Abraham that he and his descendants will be blessing means that
the Bible never lets go of the ideal notion that Jews – and later Christians –
have a responsibility toward their neighbours to be blessing.
Like Logan’s world, Abraham’s world is a pretty dark place.
By Abraham’s time in Genesis 12, it has quickly descended from the heights of Eden into
lying and chaos and violence and murder.
Abraham and his descendants are called by God to be God’s agents of blessing,
to help God redeem the world by blessing it and loving it.
But it’s a dark world that Abraham and his descendants are called to love.
And when later Jesus arrives on the scene as God’s special agent,
as God’s apprentice to love in the world,
the world has seemingly descended even further into darkness.
Imperialism, torture, violence, poverty, and death figure prominently in the landscape.
Into this landscape wanders Nicodemus who seeks Jesus out by night – for not only is Nicodemus a respected religious leader who shouldn’t be seen associating with Jesus;
not only is the world he inhabits a dark place;
but Nicodemus himself is “in the dark”: he is looking for answers to questions he has about Jesus and about the way forward in a dark world.
He comes to Jesus, apparently, because he is curious about Jesus.
Perhaps he sees some light in Jesus, perhaps he sees a way forward in Jesus’ way.
By the end of their mysterious conversation, Jesus has given about as much clarity as he can:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. . .
God sent the Son in order that the world might be saved through him.
The word that John uses here for “world” is kosmos, and in every other instance in John’s Gospel
it means a place that is hostile to God and to God’s intentions for blessing.
Which sounds pretty contemporary to me.
Jesus is saying God loves the whole world and wants to bring blessing to the whole world:
The good and the bad, the Romans and the Jews, the Pharisees and the tax collectors,
lepers and Gentiles: All of them.
Today, our world is even bigger, and God loves all of it.
Syrian refugees, Muslims, Christians, Africans, the incarcerated, Trump lovers, LGBTQ persons.
All of it.
God loves the good and the bad and everything inbetween.
Jesus tells Nicodemus that to have a place in this scheme, he must be born again, or anew.
He is asking Nicodemus to be truly, fully, humanly alive by being born into the world where
the God of all love and all compassion reigns.
Be alive to God’s love for the whole world.
“For God so loved the world” is easy to say, but hard to live, says Nuryah Love Parish.
For “If God loves the world, then every drop of water matters – and every human soul.
If God loves the world, then we who love God are called to love the world as well.”
The thing that ties Abraham and Nicodemus and Logan all together this morning is just this:
It is really really hard to be blessing. And that ties them very closely to us.
Now the thing about Logan and his daughter in the film is that they are just like one another.
She is the mini-me of the X-Men film franchise.
She shares his genetic material.
Like him, she is a mutant and like him she is on the run from those who cannot tolerate her.
Like him, she has sharp bone blades that spring out from between her fingers.
Like him, her bones have been reinforced with the indestructible metal adamantium.
Like him, she has a tremendous temper and like him she has been trained to kill.
Like him, they are both looking for a place in a dark world.
Like him, she has been made into: a weapon to kill and destroy.
At one point she tells him, “I have nightmares. People hurt me.”
“I have nightmares too,” he tells her. “I hurt people.”
“I hurt people too,” she says. Then rushes to add, “Bad people.”
And Logan just sighs and says sadly, “All the same.”
Logan is for sure the killer weary of killing.
Later on, the Western film Shane is on television in a motel room they’re in.
We hear a character say, There’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from it.
Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand that sticks. There’s no going back.
And we certainly hope that that is not true: do our failings really brand us forever?
Do our mistakes really define who we are? Do our bad choices fate us forever?
And so the question the film poses is the same one that Jesus is posing to Nicodemus:
Can Logan be born again? Can he be born anew? Can he be redeemed?
He is in desperate need of redemption, notes one critic, yet has never felt further from it.
Nicodemus has been given a lot to think about by Jesus, and at the end of their conversation
he just kind of wanders off – presumably to think about what Jesus has said and
the value and purpose of his life.
But we do get to see him again! Twice!
The first time, it is a few chapters on, and he tepidly advises his colleagues that at the very least
they shouldn’t judge Jesus until they have heard him.
And then, finally, near the end of the Gospel, we see Nicodemus in the light of a new day,
a new day for him, a new day for the world, as in the sight of everyone he brings
a hundred pounds – a hundred pounds! – of spices and ointment with which
to anoint Jesus’ dead body.
It is his declaration of allegiance, a sign of his new birth into God’s reign of love,
where even dead bodies are loved by God – and so they should be by us too.
Because if God loves the whole world, notes Parish, then every drop of water matters,
every human soul, and every human body.
Nicodemus’s journey leads him into a new birth, a new life as Jesus’s agent of love.
Before the end of his journey, Logan again inflicts a lot of pain and a lot of suffering.
Killing is indeed a brand that he seems incapable of shaking off.
He has tried to numb himself from the pain he has inflicted and his redemption does indeed
seem far off.
The metal that has been infused into his bones by a government intent on
making him into weapon is literally killing him and he has
seemingly, inescapably become what he has been made into: a killing machine.
And film is a long mournful elegy on the sadness of that fate.
The death and violence he has inflicted weigh heavily on his conscience.
He has lost most of his friends and pretty much all of his purpose.
It seems as if to make things right by protecting Laura he has to inflict
that much more violence and death – and his time is almost over.
At the end of the film, having successfully protected Laura and making it safe for her and
her mutant friends to cross the border into Canada, he tells her before dying,
Don’t be what they’ve made you.
Like Logan, she has been turned into a killing machine.
Taking her hand, looking into her eyes, he finally finds his redemption and says,
so this is what it feels like.
He finally finds his love for his daughter – and he finds some peace.
It turns out it was almost – but not quite – too late for Logan to be re-born.
In his plea to her not to become what they’ve made her, we wonder: will it be too late for her?
The X-Men films are all about what to do about intolerance of those who are different,
and that is what gives them their contemporary feel.
Surely there is no better time to reflect on such a theme as we live into a seemingly more and
more divided and intolerant world.
The characters in the films are often constrained by limits that have been imposed on them,
and in Logan you can feel how reluctantly he is pulled back into violence.
And he only finds redemption as he is about to die – and can no longer be a weapon.
You sense his prayer for Laura is that she doesn’t have to wait for death
before she can stop being a killing machine.
You hope she doesn’t have to wait till just before death
before she can allow herself to feel what it’s like to love.
There is hope for Laura.
There is hope for Nicodemus.
And there is hope for us:
That we can be born anew.
That despite the darkness of the world, we can love, and love, and love.
And not create more trouble by the difficult choices we make.
But that we can be born into a new life of loving this whole world and every person in it.
That we can claim and reclaim the legacy we have through Abraham:
that, blessed by God, we might be blessing to the world.
So together, let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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