Sermon Cloud

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL

            One of the things that ministers who preach week-to-week train themselves to do is to constantly be on the lookout for sermon illustrations, and scriptural allusions from daily life.  Most of us carry notepads and pens so we can jot down what we see, and then we forget which notebook it’s in or where we put the notebook. 

             The movies are especially fertile ground for religious references.   One day I’d like to have a regular monthly movie night where we watch popular movies together and then develop our spiritual vision by taking them apart to discover their religious messages.  I’ll buy the popcorn if you’ll buy the projector…

             This week the movie that caught my attention was The Day the Earth Stood Still.  There was a remake of this science fiction classic in 2008 that starred Keanu Reeves, but I’m talking about the 1951 black and white picture with Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal.  You may remember the movie, but maybe not the particulars of the plot, so bear with me for a minute:

             The plot line has a lot of interesting twists and turns, but basically, a spaceship lands on the Washington mall and two individuals emerge:  a handsome man named Klaatu and a robot named Gort, who has a lot of sophisticated weapons.  We humans always think we’re in charge of machines, so I first assumed that Gort was in service to Klaatu, but by the end of the movie, we understand that Klaatu is in service to Gort.  Gort uses Klaatu to communicate to Earthlings the message that Gort intends to destroy the world because we are always at war.  Gort doesn’t want our violent ways to spill out into the cosmos, and infect other civilizations on other planets.

             Initially, everyone who comes to see the spaceship is just curious, but soon the army shows up and arrests Klaatu.  Klaatu escapes, assumes an alias of “Mr. Carpenter,” and begins a quest to convince the scientific community that Gort will eliminate the planet Earth unless humans believe his message.  The scientists ask him to prove that he is who he is with a sign of his power, so Klaatu neutralizes all electric power, bringing the whole world to a standstill for half an hour. 

             After this impressive sign, you’d think that the scientists would take him seriously, but instead, they get angry and mobs continue to hunt Klaatu down, intending to kill him.  Patricia Neal plays Helen, a woman who befriends Klaatu, and does believe he is who he is, and that he is as powerful as he claims, and she tries to help him escape.  At one point in their flight, Klaatu tells her that if anything happens to him, she should go to Gort and say, “Klaatu barada nikto,” but the movie never tells us what “Klaatu barada nikto” means. 

             The movie ends when Klaatu and his friend are spotted and Klaatu is shot dead.  After he dies, Helen runs to the spaceship and tells the robot Gort, “Klaatu barada nikto.”  After she says this, Gort gently carries her into the spaceship, retrieves Klaatu’s corpse, and revives him.  

             Klaatu then steps out of the spaceship and tells the assembled people that Gort has the absolute power to destroy the Earth if humanity fails to heed his message.  His last words before he departs in his spaceship are:  “The decision rests with you.”

            While I was telling you about it, did your spiritual radar power up?  Did you get it?  You should – because the movie story I just recited is the essence of the gospel. 

             Two weeks ago you heard how Jesus – Mr. Carpenter - fed 5,000 people as a miracle sign that he is who he said he was, and that he is as powerful as the Messiah the Jews expected; and how he suspended the laws of physics by walking on water.  Last week you heard how the crowd asked him for more signs to prove his claims.  Just a few minutes ago, in today’s gospel text, we read how Jesus told the assembled crowd that he has come down from heaven to do his Father’s will; that he is the key to eternal life, because he is the bread of heaven.   Verse 41 says that this claim caused the crowd to begin to grumble against him – his former fans turned on him.   And as we read farther along in John’s gospel, we will see that this is a turning point in Jesus’ ministry, because it is here that even the disciples begin to desert him[1] and the Pharisees begin to plot to kill him.[2] 

               You are hearing your third sermon on Jesus as the bread of life, because this is the third week that the lectionary repeats its focus on Jesus’ self-identification using the metaphor that he is the living bread, sent from heaven.

             A basic principal of Biblical interpretation is that if a word, phrase, or concept is repeated, it is because the writer is trying to emphasize a point.  Remember, when we read the Bible, we can’t hear the author’s voice getting louder like we can with television commercials; and the writers of the books of the Bible didn’t use emphatic printing marks like underlining, or italics, or a bigger or bolded font – all those things that we use today to draw attention to a word or a phrase.  So when Jesus calls himself the “bread of life,” the “bread of heaven,” and the “living bread” seven times in the sixth chapter of the gospel of John, we are to pay attention, because it is important to understand this, if we are to understand who Jesus is.

             That Jesus is the bread of heaven might just be another helpful metaphor, except that he also says that he came down from heaven, and there is a promise of eternal life to everyone who eats his flesh.  Here the crowd exhibits a wooden literalness in their understanding:   “He came down from heaven?  Who does he think he is?  We know who Jesus is!  He’s Mr. Carpenter!  We know his parents, Joseph and Maria Carpenter!  And he wants us to eat him?” 

             Over the centuries the people of God have suffered, and some have deserted the faith, because of those who would interpret every word of Scripture literally, without any sense of history and context, or of poetry, metaphor or other literary devices.  Whole denominations have split off from the body because of a literal interpretation of a single passage of scripture.  Just yesterday I read an article in Christianity Today that reported that 60% of the non-Catholic churches in Latin America are formed as a result of church splits because of disagreements over literal interpretations of God’s written Word.  And, as our text in John’s gospel shows, even the crowd who was in the physical presence of Jesus - the living Word – who were hearing the spoken Word from its source and in their own contemporary context, still misunderstood what Jesus was saying, disagreed among themselves, and some even deserted Jesus because of their insistence on a literal interpretation of what Jesus had said.  Even God fights in vain against stupidity.[3]

            The second thing that Jesus said to alienate the crowd was that everyone who comes to the Father comes to Jesus, but no one can come to Jesus unless God the Father draws him or her (vv. 37, 39).  This speaks of 1) the exclusivity of Christ and 2) the worth of the gift of grace and the worthlessness of our efforts to justify ourselves before God and 3) the sovereignty – the absolute rule – of the will of God the Father.

             Probably nothing annoys the world more about Christianity than its claims that Jesus is the key to salvation – that there is no other way, no other name, no other prophet, no other path to God and no other representation of God to humanity.  Yes, that means if we get Jesus wrong, we miss God altogether.  It means that those who think it’s “Jesus and” Mohammed, as the Moslems do; or that Jesus is just one option among many as the Baha’is, Buddhists and Hindus do; or that Jesus is the Archangel Michael as the Jehovah’s Witnesses do, we miss the mark.  Jesus tells us himself in today’s gospel text that God in heaven is his Father, that he has been sent to us with instructions from his Father, and that it is the will of God the Father that all who come to the Father come through Jesus and only Jesus.   We humans – especially Americans - like to think that we are free to choose our own paths to God, to paste-up a god made up of a collage of images that appeal to us.  Yes, our God is the God of the Moslem, the Baha’i, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Jehovah’s Witness and the Wiccan, but only those who accept that Jesus is God receive mercy before God the Father.  The identity, characteristics and mission of the God of the universe is sourced in the person of Jesus Christ alone.

             And the concept of grace just adds insult to injury.[4]  Grace is the gift of faith that is freely given to us by God.  If you have faith in God it is because your faith to believe came directly from God as a gift.  Humans are a narcissistic bunch – we think a lot of ourselves and we think a lot about ourselves.  It’s always a surprise to us to be reminded that someone else’s desires might trump our own.  “What do you mean, no one comes to the Father except that the Father draws him?  What about the millions of Moslems and Buddhists and animists and Wiccans?  Why do only the Christians receive salvation?”  Because the Father draws them.   I wasn’t born a Christian, and neither were you.  Even if you’re eighty years old today and were baptized in this very church as a month-old infant, the day before you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you were as far from God the Father as any unbeliever living in a South American jungle or on a desert island.  In that sense, Christianity isn’t exclusive.  “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” [5] everyone who has ever drawn a breath, including those who call themselves Christian, and God’s grace is available to all, but not all are willing to accept it.

             Sometimes contemporary churches offer what they call “Seeker Services.”  They are supposed to be worship services designed for people who come “seeking” – seeking to learn who Jesus is, seeking to connect with a higher power, seeking to discover if religion is their bag.  The thing is, those services might be crowded, but one thing this passage makes clear:  they aren’t crowded with people who are seeking Jesus.  Paul tells us in Romans that no one seeks God.[6]  The crowd that followed Jesus did only that – they followed after him, but they weren’t seeking God, and they didn’t accept Jesus as their Messiah no matter how many miraculous signs he produced, and many dropped off.

             Finally, the sovereignty of God is too much for those whose goal in life is to be the master of their own fates and the captains of their own souls.[7]  Many are unwilling to accept the truth that, “according to Jesus, it is not [their] religious experience, [their] philosophical insight, the accident of [their] birth, [their] economic status – nor most of all, God help us, [their] choice that puts them within the realm of light that is the presence of Jesus within the community of faith.  [We are] saved by grace alone.”[8]  Not a work, not a choice, not walking an aisle, not a “decision for Christ,” just the will and grace of God, so that no one can boast.[9]

             The particularity of Jesus, the worthlessness of our efforts to justify ourselves before God and the sovereignty and grace of God the Father all fly in the face of today’s fashion of presenting all ideas, morals and ambitions as being of equal worth.   But John tells us that Jesus said it was so – that God has no other plan outside of Jesus.

           Continuing our comparison, in the end of the movie, our friend Klaatu told his friend that she should go to Gort and tell him, “Klaatu barada nikto” so that she would be taken in and not destroyed like the other humans.  Then, after Klaatu was killed, he was restored to life by Gort and then left in his spaceship with a warning to humans to change their ways, “or else.”  

            Those of us who know the end of the gospel story, know that the plot to kill Jesus succeeds, but he is restored to life by God the Father and then ascends into heaven.  But Jesus leaves us not with a warning of “or else,” because for those who stand clothed in the righteousness of Christ, there is no “or else,” there is only the promise of eternal life.  We are the ones who insert the unspoken “or else” into the sentence - we put words in the Savior’s mouth – because we know that we are more likely to reject the grace of God than to accept it as a gift with no strings attached.  The other side of our narcissism is the knowledge that our pride before God is just a put-on to cover up the truth about our sinful selves.  Because we know how rotten we really are, it will always be easier for us to believe in the “or else” of an alien from outer space than it is to believe that God would actually choose us.   

            Maybe the translation of “Klaatu barada nikto” is “Jesus is the bread of life.”

©2009 Deborah Hollifield

[1] John 6:60

[2] John 7:1

[3] Interpreter’s Bible, “John,” 571

[4] Benjamin Sparks, Feasting on the Word, Year B-II, 334

[5] Romans 3:23; 5:12

[6] Romans 3:11

[7] William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”

[8] Benjamin Sparks, Feasting on the Word, Year B-II, 334

[9] Ephesians 2:9