Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. David Williams; 03.06.16
Scripture Lesson: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
This last week, I've started in on my next writing project. It's a screenplay, the screenplay for the book I'm going to have published--God willing--this next year. My agent encouraged me to take a swing at it, because, well, it doesn't hurt to have one drafted.
Honestly, I'm finding it a little hard to focus. I'll start writing and visualizing the scenes, and the next thing you know, I'm daydreaming about what I'll say when I accept the Oscar. "I'd like to thank the Academy," I mutter, while my dog stares at me like I'm crazy.
But the whole screenplay thing is kind of ironic, because I increasingly find myself uninterested in movies.
I’ve been a cinephile much of my life, thoroughly enjoying film as a medium. I’d dutifully bop along to the thee-aa-tah many weekends for whatever they might have been showing. I’d dive in to the classics at home, from slotting in a VHS to watching the little tray slide in with the DVD to scrolling through the selections on Amazon Prime.
And yet now, it all seems kind of the same. Everything’s a reboot or a remake or a mashup, part of a great Circus machine that blorts out an endless stream of pre-fab entertainment product. It starts to all feel, well, like it’s been done. Guardians of the Galaxy felt the same as Star Trek which felt the same as Star Wars, just different faces and franchises applied to the same movie, over and over again.
I start feeling like Frances at the end of Bread and Jam for Frances, which I hope Hollywood never ever touches, because there’d be some dark backstory and a cameo by Lady Gaga.
I mean, look at the Superhero Movie Industrial Complex. It’s collapsing, slowly but surely, under the weight of pretending to take things to the next level, to the point where the genre is beginning to devour itself. It’s Superman versus Batman! And yet another Avengers Movie, only now they’re fighting each other! It’s got all of the sophistication of arguments I used to have around the cafeteria table when I was in first grade, with all the artistic integrity of Frankenstein meets the Wolfman or King Kong versus Godzilla.
Speaking of which, there’s another King Kong movie coming out this year, apparently an origin story, because...well, I honestly don’t know why we care about King Kong’s backstory. He was a littler giant gorilla, and then he became a bigger giant gorilla. Wow. And they’ve decided to remake Ghostbusters, only with women, which I’m pretty sure was the entirety of some agent’s elevator speech. “It’s, like Ghostbusters...only with goils!” Because the sisters are doing it for themselves now, by which we mean piggybacking on an existing beloved franchise.
Maybe it’s midlife. But where once I enjoyed film, now I feel like the author of Ecclesiastes. There is nothing new under the marquee of the twelve-plex.
Coming to terms with newness was something that the Corinthians were not particularly good at doing. Oh, they thought they were. But from this strangely cluttered letter, Paul gives us a powerful sense of just how much that first church couldn’t find their way to real change. Unlike first Corinthians, which tells a single story and moves graciously from one section to another, Second Corinthians wanders wildly all over the place.
The tone of the letter changes suddenly and abruptly, with odd transitions and shifts of emphasis that just make no sense whatsoever. Given the clear gifts of rhetoric that Paul shows in his other letters, most competent critical scholars believe that this text is a mashup, a cut-and-paste job that weaves together three or more free-standing letters into one single text. One moment Paul will be waxing eloquent about love, and then suddenly he’s attacking someone, and then he’s right back to being positive again.
Here in this morning’s text, we’re in one of those positive sections, as Paul stirs and cajoles the folks in Corinth to truly embrace the reality of what Jesus taught. Because as much as they fought about Jesus and took stands and argued over who was holy and who was not, the Corinthians never quite got around to changing.
In his dealings with the Corinthians, Paul repeatedly had to deal with that community’s complete inability to do anything differently. Oh, sure, they’d gotten all excited when Paul had first shown up and joined his colleague Apollos in starting up this new community. It felt new then, exciting in the way every new cult from far off lands felt exciting when it first sailed in to that port city. But the years passed, and things just didn’t change. All of the rhythms and patterns of their old way of life just kept right on keeping on.
Paul challenges them, over and over again: stop this pattern of hatred and conflict. Stop blaming others. Stop finding reasons to attack one another, and really commit yourself to creating relationships of reconciliation with one another.
And that’s the heart of the change that Paul sees unrealized in Corinth, the new story that they just can’t quite seem to bring themselves to tell.
The old pattern, the pattern of conflict and adversarial relationship? Again and again in this passage, Paul articulates the alternative, the really new thing that defines a different path of life:
{And again, an off the cuff conclusion, at the end of which I say:}
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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