A Place to Call Home...

Where do you belong?

Where do you call home?

It’s a straightforward enough question, but a profound one.   It’s answer says quite a lot.  An inability to easily answer it also suggests quite a problem.

It’s one of the biggest questions in our world today... 

In Calais we hear of state-less people, risking their lives to try and cross the Channel to find a new and different ‘home’.

In Gaza, Palestinian Arabs are fighting for a greater sense of recognition of a piece of land they feel a real affinity to.

In Eastern Europe, the Crimea region has just recently switched from being a part of the Ukraine to becoming a part of Russia, and who knows where that will end.

In the Middle East a group of people have declared an Islamic caliphate over large parts of Syria & Iraq.

In our own country, next week, Scotland will be voting whether or not to become an independent state.   

This can all get very difficult and complicated.  ‘Pointless’ aficionados may well be satisfied by understanding 'Countries' as ‘sovereign states recognised by the United Nations in their own right’, political philosophers though would want to say more. Pointing out the difference between a ‘Nation’, a shared sense of history, ethnicity or culture and a ‘State’  a centralised, powerful political organisation. The later is about security, the former Identity.  For a ‘home’ we need both.

The New Testament was written at a time of political turmoil.  The new Community of Christian believers had no home, they’d become convinced of the truth of the then extraordinary idea that God was God always, for all people everywhere.  He wasn’t tribal or local or particular in any way. 

The Roman Empire, the super-power of the day, threatened them, on pain of death, at every turn.  To be a Roman Citizen was to have status, security and identity wherever you were and, by and large, they didn’t have it.  The dominant religion, from which they had grown, Judaism, also was increasingly at loggerheads with them in the battle of ideas.   

In the middle of all this the Apostle Paul said, when writing to the Christians in Philippi ‘your citizenship is in Heaven’.  He didn’t mean Christian people ought to live in some vague other-worldly denial of life as it is, rather he was reminding all of us that, whatever our circumstances, amidst all the uncertainty, an identity, a security a ‘home’ is on offer, as a part of the very family of God.   

Noah.... Broken but Never Alone

On the way to the cinema, to get us in the mood, my son read the familiar story from the opening chapters of Genesis.  What struck me, as I listened, being careful not to miss the junction, was its sparseness, and its oddness.  It seemed to raise more questions than it answered: What was so evil about the world that meant it had to be destroyed? In what ways was Noah so distinctive, so good?  Why was God so concerned with the ‘creeping, crawling things’?  Who were these ‘Nephilim’?  What was all that business at the end, with the naked binge drinking in the cave? (The favourite Bible verse of a former member of a youth group of mine!)

Having successfully arrived, and watched the film, I can report that Darren Aronofsky, the director and chief creative force behind it, seems to have been exercised by many of the same thoughts. This blockbusting, roller-coaster, perhaps the ultimate apocalyptic disaster movie, is characterised not so much by its epic scale as it thoughtfulness.  

Any adaptation of Biblical material faces familiarproblems.  Daring to deviate from the text, to any extent, runs the risk of criticism and controversy, yet submitting to the traditional conventions potentially means engaging only a few and challenging even fewer.  These are stories which we all know, don’t we?

Well, maybe not.  Aronofsky’s Jewish roots give him insight to explore some of the wealth of rabbinic material that has grown up around this story, and to explore the gaps in the received narrative whilst, largely, keeping the basic pegs that have been provided.  For me, this approach provides a rich resource for hearing the story afresh, not uncritically, but in a powerfully distinctive way that so often the over sanitised fuzzy-felt, nursery rhyming Noah of contemporary Christian faith has failed to do.

So, how was this story told?  Essentially as a conflict, between good and evil, inevitably, but also between God and a humanity that had come to struggle to hear him aright, even the best of them. A creation torn, a family divided, a judgement, or a rescue, in the balance.

This Noah is a very flawed hero, indeed it’s his self-awareness of this which provides so much of the tension.  The textual truth of his being ‘righteous, within his own generation’ is revealed as, perhaps, damning with faint praise.  The key character conflict between Noah and Ray Winstone’s, Tubal Cain, at times appears to offer the two men as flip sides of the same coin; tyranny driven by humanist self-serving on the one hand (‘We are men!’) and the potential of blind religious fundamentalism on the other.  The inserting of an obvious Abrahamic motif here only presses the question harder; ‘How far might God require me to go?’ Naturally, from a Christian perspective, this is somewhat uncomfortable, it’s meant to be. The depiction of Noah shutting down his critical and questioning faculties in the face of unimaginable suffering remains tempting but, to my mind, is rarely what faith requires. 

God, it has been noted, is not mentioned by name in the film. ‘The Creator’ is all pervasive though.  He is hard to hear, many feel abandoned by him, yet he is still sought. His history, at one point beautifully portrayed in a segment destined to be clipped and shared in many a worship service I’m sure, remains inspiring, his future calling compelling.  He defines what is good and yet calls on other to demonstrate it.

Ultimately, in this telling, Noah’s bitter disillusion, suggested by the aforementioned cave drinking incident, is relieved by a reminder from an adoptive daughter of his responsibility, before this God, to choose good over evil, love over death, and to be, a father, a grand-father, a good man.  The business of effective choosing and being remains the task of faith today.

12 Years a Slave – A Hermeneutic of Privilege

       

‘That’s Scripture.’ ... It is perhaps an odd thing that in such a visceral and disturbing film the most shocking and provocative thing, for me, was such a simple, even throw-away remark.  But it’s true.  A straightforward declaration at the end of one of his regular Lord’s Day homilies, to his assembled family and slaves, plantation owner Edwin Epps calmly affirms not only the justification of slavery itself but also legitimises the brutalisation of disobedience, as God’s will.

12 Years a Salve is full of scripture, whether it be those regular garden party services, grave-side Psalmic despair or slave sung spirituals, God’s word is employed, or implored, with astonishing, and disturbing, variety. But who to believe, and why?

In other, related, news, Steve Chalke has recently called for a ‘global discussion’ on what exactly scripture is and means, as if anyone who is remotely interested has not been troubled by such things before. (I’m inclined to agree with Steve Holmes’ puzzlement that such a debate might be thought ‘new’)  Certainly in my 20 years of pastoral ministry I’ve become increasingly convinced that there is now, perhaps more than ever, no more pressing need for anyone who wants the claims of God’s kingdom to be taken seriously, whether in the hospital ward, the School Assembly or in the pulpit, than that Scripture is understood aright.

So what contribution to this crucial hermeneutical task does this particular piece of cinema make?  Most obviously, it reinforces the age old truth that history is written by the winners. The prevailing understanding of God, in any culture, is what the rich, powerful and influential would have us hear him say.  When ’Scripture’ serves vested interest, especially economic interest, we ought always to be extra careful.  I was reminded of the challenge of Liberation Theology to take hold instead of what it called the ‘hermeneutical privilege ofthe poor’.

For me though, the crucial contribution is much more cinematic.  The deliberate, graphic, intentional violence, to shock, assert authority and humiliate is rare, even in contemporary films.  One parallel seems obvious though.  Perhaps the only modern-day equivalent of the flogging scenes in ’12 years a Slave’ are those presented in Mel Gibson’s ‘Passion of the Christ’.  And there we have it, in action not words, story not doctrine, ‘the word of God made flesh’ and that flesh ripped apart by those with the power to do so. That’s Scripture.