Reel Spirituality

When it comes to film, literature, and the arts—it seems that we have a few options as followers of Jesus. The people of God can hide, burying our face in the sand screaming, “It’s all bad; it’s all the work of darkness.” Or worse, “It’s all pointless.” Or, the people of God can wage war. We’re pretty good at this. We could start boycotts, and concoct propaganda defending our particular viewpoint. I think these first two options are not in the best interest of people trying to represent God in the world. I think the people of God are called to engage everything around us. We can and should engage the questions real people are asking. More than questions related to the sacred hour on Sunday morning, people are asking questions about suffering, purpose, pain, sex, money, and meaning.

I do not claim to know everything about Jesus but it seems to me he wasn’t so interested in ignoring the world around him. He wasn’t terribly enthralled with waging war on culture either. Unless, of course, you are a religious person with your doctrinal ducks in a row…hmmm. In the Gospel’s I see Jesus engaging the world around him, asking people about their background, healing them in order to restore their place in the community. Teaching and preaching? Yes, but usually in the context of engagement and relationship.

As biblical scholar and writer Greg Stevenson reminds us (www.caritas2.blogspot.com):

People don’t only watch movies because they’re entertaining. Movies are a form of story telling. Stories are a means of connecting to the world and to one another.

1. Stories explain our world and teach us how to live in it.
2. The stories a culture creates and passes on shape that culture’s identity.
3. Stories, whether classic literature or a campfire story, preach to us communicating values, beliefs and a certain way of interpreting the world.

The primary generators of stories in today’s culture are film and television. There is a theological conversation occurring in America and it’s coming out of Hollywood, (paraphrase from a class taught by Greg on “O Brother Where Art Thou?”).

For a people whose primary religious text is comprised of stories, and whose chief teacher used story as his primary method of teaching—it seems the people of God would do well in any culture to reclaim the centrality of story.

We could do worse than to seek for God in the places we tend not to look.

To listen to the series, Reel Spirituality (Finding God in Unexpected Places)--go to http://rccaudio.christianwitness.us/ beginning Thursday.