Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church

Romans 1:16-21

Jesus and Hollywood. I asked Bruce if I could preach this message. I spent more than ten years at Hollywood Presbyterian Church as an elder and then as a pastoral candidate. That church is full of deeply devoted Christians working in the Hollywood industry. I have friends who are script writers, actors, producers. They work very hard to do the very thing all of you do. They seek to live lives honoring to Christ while making a living and integrating their faith with their work. It is a very complicated world. But one thing may be much simpler about Hollywood than about the work you and I do. In Hollywood there is only one rule. Hollywood lives and dies by this one rule– make money.

Now here is the funny thing about Hollywood because of the one rule. Even though movie makers are free to tell stories about lying, cheating, stealing, betraying, and worse, what Hollywood is really good at is telling stories that reveal truth about God. I know that half of you just checked out or rolled your eyes or have begun wondering about my sanity. But what if it’s true? Can you imagine a more powerful library of material than the DVD’s in your entertainment center? And if it is true, it will be a powerful example of the truth of Scripture.

Let me walk us through this. Hollywood has one rule – make money. In order to do that, its movies must connect and resonate with a huge audience of people who are able to see themselves in the movie or they won’t be coming and they won’t be spending their money.

So Avatar, the biggest movie of all time, is set on a planet in another galaxy with ten foot tall blue aliens but it isn’t about blue aliens. It is about us. The Lord of the Rings and Frodo Baggins isn’t about hobbits. Harry Potter isn’t about wizards. And All The President’s Men isn’t about the president or his men. They are all about us. For that to be the case, movies have to resonate with people at their deepest core levels, at the levels of love, fear, hope, despair, desire. And those deepest levels are the realm of God.

At a time in history where God is being pushed to the margins of society and science tries to say that there is no God and books are written about the danger of religion, it is absolutely fine for us to acknowledge what the Bible has to say about that. In fact, the Bible suggests that this is a God saturated world, a God saturated world. Scholars refer to this idea as General Revelation. General Revelation says that the existence of God and even God’s nature can be seen and discerned in nature, in creation. That concept is rooted in our text for today.

Read Romans 1:19-21.

There is a second parallel idea, as powerful as the God saturated world. It’s this “all truth is God’s truth.” A good friend of mine, a pastor, was getting a degree from Harvard and had the chance to talk with John Stott, one of the greatest Christian thinkers of our day, on par with C.S. Lewis. My friend was afraid that he might learn something at Harvard that would challenge, even shatter his faith. John Stott told him, “You don’t have to be afraid. All truth is God’s truth. You don’t have to fear that if you dig too deeply you’ll undermine genuine Christian faith. You may indeed discover that some of your beliefs aren’t correct. That’s what happens when you live under biblical authority. But you never have to be afraid of seeking the genuine truth because all truth is God’s truth.”

And it isn’t as though God hasn’t used special effects in the past to get his point across. We all remember Moses and the burning bush. And the Israelites wandering in the wilderness followed a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. God spoke through a talking donkey way before Shrek and in Babylon; the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the wall.

I most love that God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. We can see God’s eternal power in every picture from the Hubble Telescope and get a glimpse of his divine nature from the Discovery Channel.

But it sends chills down the spine to hear the rest of the verse, although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

That means that not everything in movies is true but when there is truth, it is God’s truth and it is usually powerful in its telling. What we need is not to throw it all out but to watch it with some filters. And if we are honest, we can’t throw it all out. Sure, we could decide to not watch movies at all, or TV. But will we not look at magazines in the checkout line? Or listen to radio, read newspapers?

And if we were successful at all of that, what of others who still watch and read and hear? Shall we leave them to partial truth? People are asking powerful, penetrating questions about God and life, about love and betrayal, about meaning and purpose. Since those things are at the core of who we are, you can bet that the movies are talking about them. You can also count on God to sneak into those conversations. His people would do well to pay attention. And besides, it’s not as if it is those people out there. It’s us here who wrestle with deep questions and God wants to meet us and answer us, in Scripture, in life, even in the movies.

So preparing for this series, we have developed a culture filter for you made up of three questions. You can ask these questions of movies, of TV, of articles and books you read.

The first question is:

What part of God’s truth does this reveal? Psalm 25:5 says “Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.”

What part of God’s truth does this reveal? Remember for a movie to make money, it has to resonate with us and so there must be truth, even negative truth. In 3:10 to Yuma, Christian Bale plays a farmer trying to take Russell Crowe, a very bad man, to a train in Yuma, Arizona. His son is with them and he doesn’t like Crowe’s influence on his impressionable teenager.

(3:10 to Yuma). http://www.wingclips.com/movie-clips/310-to-yuma/dodge-city

What part of God’s truth does this reveal? That goes by quickly but what I saw was the truth of human temptation and the way some are drawn to it and others try to stay away. But the deeper truth was subtle. Russell Crowe brags about his wild life but when confronted with the truth of those he has hurt, he has a moment of hesitation and responds, not arrogantly but maybe thoughtfully, like a man who realizes the cost of admitting there is a God. There is a truth about human beings that they will keep looking forward, keep running fast in life, not daring to look back or slow down, not wanting to look at themselves for fear of what they may see. And on the other hand, there are those like Christian Bale, afraid, not of the past but of the future, afraid for him and those he loves.

Almost every person I counsel is a Russell Crowe or a Christian Bale, running from the past or afraid of the future. There’s a lot of truth in those few seconds. What part of God’s truth does this reveal? Second question:

Where does it fall short? Proverbs 14:12 says, “There is a way that seems right to a person, but in the end it leads to death.”

Movies may show God’s truth but they also fall short of it. Let’s look at another example. Have you or someone you have known, had to care for someone who has lost the use of their faculties? Are you in a relationship with someone who is emotionally unavailable? Have you for any reason felt that you are in a one way relationship and yet stay engaged because you care, and therefore have had to wrestle with all the issues that brings up in you? Hollywood gets that reality and truth. See if you relate to this.

(Wall-E). http://www.wingclips.com/movie-clips/wall-e/helping-eve

Since the creation of the world God's divine nature has been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. What part of God’s truth does this reveal? Love, care, relationship. We resonate and even get tearful with two non-speaking, metal robots from the future because those things are in our nature and they are in God’s divine nature as well. But, where does it fall short? Maybe that isn’t so obvious or easy to determine. There isn’t a sense of the divine there. There is independence and extreme self-reliance. There is humor and longing, but not the impatience or frustration that comes with isolation like that.

But, now that we’ve brought up love, is there any question that there is a divine creator who loves and wants to share that love with His creation? Just look at human beings. Loving and being loved is vitally important to us. We hurt when love is broken. If human beings could recognize the evidence for God and his characteristics by seeing it in themselves, we would have an embarrassing abundance of proof emblazoned across movie screens. That leads to our third clip and the third question in our culture filter:

What does this inspire me to do? Or who does this inspire me to be? Philippians 3:13, 14. Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on.

Imagine a boyfriend took a bus eighty miles to meet his girlfriend on her family vacation but when he gets there, her dad turns him right around and sends him back home. It might look something like this.

(Dan in Real Life). http://www.wingclips.com/movie-clips/dan-in-real-life/murderer-of-love

Truth like that is excruciating. And clips like that let us ask the question, “What does this inspire you to do?” “Who does this inspire you to be?”

Three questions that provide a filter to recognize truth in this God saturated world. What part of God’s truth does this reveal? Where does it fall short? What does this inspire me to do? Or who does this inspire me to be?

Are these really relevant? Just this week I say the new movie Clash of the Titans in 3D. It’s everything it was designed to be… and nothing more. But, even there, the God saturated, God drenched world reveals itself. The hero, Perseus is a demigod, the child of the Olympian god Zeus and a mere mortal queen. Liam Neeson is Zeus and his famous line is “Release the Kraken.” But, his most powerful line came out of the blue, at the end of the movie in shocking clarity. Almost as an afterthought the god Zeus says to his offspring, Perseus, “I wanted to save the world but I didn’t want to sacrifice my son doing it.” My jaw dropped. Of course they knew what they were writing when they put that line in, but, all the preachers in all the churches in all the world will not make a statement this year that is heard by so many people that so clearly draws the line between what Christianity teaches about God and everyone else.

The next time you watch a scene in a movie, watch with more than your physical eyes, watch with a filter that lets you see with spiritual eyes and see the deeper, core level longing going on, in the scene, but also in the writers and directors and actors. Because it is there. Just before our text in Romans 1, the author passionately expresses the truth he knows. In verse 16, he writes, I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.

Movies can take us only so far. Hollywood asks the deepest questions but cannot provide the ultimate answers. And, while all truth is God’s truth, Scripture is the final filter for culture and all other truth. God has put the power of salvation; the answer to the questions raised in all the movies, God puts that power on our lips and in our actions. Will others see it in us? Of course there are questions we can’t answer. Of course there are problems we can solve. Of course we have our own questions and problems that cause us doubt and sap our confidence. But in the spirit of every movie trailer ever made, we say, “In a world filled with doubt and trouble, truth elusively points to hope, and one people stand, against the odds, a light in the darkness, a people who are not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.