Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 02.17.13
We all live things just a little bit differently. Two human beings can see the same thing, experience the same moment, and yet leave that encounter with totally different memories of the event.
Like, say, this week, when my wife and I celebrated Valentine’s Day. I was in charge of figuring out what to do, and so my working concept was a replication of our first date. That date involved going to a Vietnamese restaurant for dinner and then to the Multiplex in Merrifield for a movie. But as I’m part-time and she’s looking for work, dinner turned into lunch...which is seriously cheaper. Plus, it’s easier to get a table.
And the Vietnamese place went out of business 15 years ago, we went to another Vietnamese restaurant, the nicest one of the dozens nearby. Hey, I love Poolesville, but there are advantages to Annandale. And the Multiplex that they tore down the old drive-in to build was itself torn down, and replaced by a swanky prefab Insta-City they’re calling “The Meridian District.” Fortunately, there’s a theater there, the kind of theater that doesn't just serve popcorn, but mixes in nuts and bits of chocolate drizzled with fudge and caramel. That, and you can get a beer. I like that kind of theater. When I looked, that theater was still showing Les Mis.
We’d not seen it, and although going to see a movie whose title means “The Miserable Ones” might seem a bit weird for Valentine’s Day, I’d heard good things from friends who share my taste.
It was great. Not perfect, but great. The musical itself is more an opera, and really only has one memorable song, you know, that “I Dreamed a Dream” one Susan Boyle sang and that the impossibly perfect Anne Hathaway now owns. But the performances were authentic and moving, so much so that by the end the coughing, snorting, and sniffling from the cold-season audience around us had been replaced by unrestrained sobbing.
I’m a hard target that way, being a man and all. Movies that try to manipulate me just cheese me off. But this movie pressed all my buttons. Here, a major release film, and it's the most Christian film I've seen in years. One act of mercy, done by a priest in the name of Jesus, and it changes the whole arc of the story? Astounding. And Victor Hugo’s great motifs of law and mercy, embodied by the relentless inquisitor Javert and the transformed, mercy-filled Jean Valjean? The wrenching story of human suffering and redemption? They had me and the missus sitting there with tears streaming down both of our faces. Let it be said: going to a good weepy movie makes for an excellent, excellent date.
Afterwards, I went to rottentomatoes.com, a movie review aggregator site, to check out their reviews. Some reviewers loved it. Some reviewers saw the flaws, but enjoyed it. Others simply hated the movie. What felt to me to be genuine and moving was to them forced and manipulative. Russell Crowe’s on pitch, perfectly decent buttery baritone, which would make an excellent addition to any church choir, was panned. The moving, intimate closeup shots of the principals as they sang, showing every pore and flaw of their humanity, well, those were distractingly stylized. And the two hour and thirty seven minute run time, which may have tested my bladder but not my patience? “I screamed a scream as time went by,” snarked the New Yorker reviewer.
Human beings are that way. We can encounter precisely the same thing, that same objective reality, and bear away totally different reactions. It would be easy for me to say that the only reason they didn’t weep like a baby that movie was because they were bitter, cold empty-souled cynics. But although I might like “Did you cry at Les Mis” to be one of those questions St. Peter has on his entry protocol checklist, I know we each encounter things differently. So we’re cool, you heartless monster you.
That doesn’t mean, however, that every interpretation is equally accurate, and equally life-giving. How we interpret something, how our desires shape and spin and shift it, that isn’t irrelevant. Our interpretations and opinions give form to our relationship with creation. They become part of it. And just as they can heal and redeem and bind up, they can also break and shatter and drive the world into deeper unhappiness.
Like, say, the way scripture is interpreted today in scripture. It’s the story of the temptation of Jesus, of his trial and challenge in the wilderness. This story occurs in both Luke’s Gospel and Matthew’s story of Jesus. It’s not in Mark, of course. Mark doesn’t bother with details he views as irrelevant, so he gives us just one terse sentence: “Wilderness. Forty Days. Tempted by Satan. Wild Beasts. Move along.”
But Matthew and Luke share it in every detail. What that tells us is that this story likely comes from what is called the “Q” source. “Q,” which comes from the word “source” in German, is an ancient collection of sayings and stories about Jesus to which Matthew and Luke both had access.
Q’s story of the temptation is three distinct vignettes, three little stories within a story. Matthew and Luke tell them in slightly different order, but each has Jesus facing the Accuser, who tempts him three ways.
In the first of the three stories, Jesus is tempted with his own power. “You’re hungry. Use your gifts for yourself,” comes the whisper. But Jesus responds with a word of scripture from Torah, with Deuteronomy 8:3, which declares that our relationship with God is more important than anything else. He refuses to be taken in. In the second of the two stories, Jesus is tempted with political power, with control over all of the world. “It’ll all be yours, if you just worship my power.” Again, Jesus responds with a passage from Torah, from Deuteronomy 6:13. And again, he affirms that his relationship with God is central, vital, and unshakeable.
The last of the stories in Luke has Jesus up on the highest point of the temple. This was likely not a tower, which is how I’ve always visualized it. Instead, it was likely a point on one of the outer walls, the southeast corner, which stood the furthest from the valley floor below.
The whispered suggestions to Jesus here are notable, because they’re not just Ol’ Scratch offering power. “You say you trust in God above all else,” comes the sly suggestion. “Then jump. Surely God will protect you from harm.” And then, well, then comes the kicker. Twice Jesus has refuted the temptation with scripture. And what we get with this third vignette is Jesus confronted with scripture. Not just one verse, but two, both from the 91st Psalm. “Angels will protect you,” he hears. “They’ll bear you up.”
Jesus responds with a single verse, again from Deuteronomy 6. “Don’t put God to the test.” But what this final exchange illuminates is the way in which our perspective can change and redirect our encounter with almost anything, up to and including our encounter with the texts of scripture. If we so choose, we can make almost any text about us, and about furthering our agenda.
So here we have competing interpretations of the Bible, and the Devil’s got twice the scripture that Jesus has. Are we to listen to both interpretations, and to assume both are equally valid? Or maybe we should listen to the Man of Wealth and Taste, because he’s got two verses of scripture to prove his point, and Jesus only has one.
Hardly. Where Jesus approaches scripture as a relationship, El Diablo approaches it as data to support his agenda. Jesus lays open the likelihood for one future, and Beelzebub establishes another path. One focuses, and another distracts. One scatters and breaks and brings to ruin, another builds and deepens and strengthens.
As we approach and interpret the experiences that shape and form the foundations of our lives, these competing approaches to interpreting scripture give us a model for understanding the foundation of constructive interpretation.
In his recent book “The Signal and the Noise,” statistician Nate Silver describes the human tendency to interpret based on our biases and our preconceived understandings. Silver made his name by coming up with complicated models that uncannily predicted both the 2008 and 2012 elections, models which more importantly also worked for baseball. Silver’s book is based on an interesting premise. We human beings don’t allow ourselves to see where a path is taking us, because we don’t want to focus on what is truly most important. That truly important thing, the truth that underlies what we are doing, that’s what Silver calls “The Signal.”
The other things, the distractions and the mess and the meaningless chaos, those things are just noise. When we allow our interpretation of reality and the direction of our existence to be defined by the noise, we lose our way. We find ourselves going down dead end after dead end. We find ourselves in one broken place after another, as what we tell ourselves about reality becomes further and further from the reality in which God has placed us. That comes when we follow the “Noise.”
What Jesus shows us, in his rebuttal to the Accuser, is that he is unerring, completely, totally focused on the Signal. He gets what is important, and nothing will distract him from it. He sees things both as they are and as they most likely will be. And in Creation, this place where God has put us together? Power is noise. Greed is noise. Selfishness is noise.
In this first Sunday in Lent, as we enter our own forty days of wilderness preparation, there’s plenty of noise out there. There are plenty of temptations, old patterns of being and brokenness that rise out of the chaos. There are plenty of hardened hatreds and closed-heartednessess that can turn us from mercy and grace. Those can keep us from seeing the real, just as surely as the justice-obsessed Javert couldn’t see the reality of Jean Valjean’s kindness.
Let your interpretations be governed by the same relationship to the deepest truth that guided Jesus.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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