“I understood that reference.”
Marvel
Avengers Assemble (2012)
I do enjoy the Subtle Christian Traits
Facebook group. If you’re not familiar with it, content posted in this
community consists of funny, relatable anecdotes and observations of a
Christian and church-culture nature, along with a neverending avalanche of
memes on the same subject, a steady trickle of ‘inspirational quotations’, and
the occasional profound question or prayer request. Facebook friends, do ask me
to add you if you fancy joining the party, though I’ll warn you now that you
might want to impose some pretty stringent restrictions on the kinds of
notifications you’ll let the group give you if you don’t want to find yourself
promptly deluged by them.
Anyway, the reason I brought that up
was because this post was prompted by something I saw on Subtle Christian
Traits this weekend just gone. The below photograph was captioned by the one
who posted it as follows: “Every sermon in every church everywhere this
weekend.”
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| I want to credit the photo, but it seems inappropriate to use the name of the person who posted it given that Subtle Christian Traits is a closed group. I'll settle for initials: credit to JP. |
And I thought – really?
I mean, yes, obviously, the caption
was exaggerating and was perfectly aware of the fact, but equally, at the
church in the picture and presumably quite a large number of others, whichever
human was responsible for delivering the sermon put said sermon together deliberately
around the theme of Avengers: Endgame. Now, as you may remember if you
read my blog a lot, I went to a midnight screening of the film in question, so
I am as acutely aware as anyone that the earliest possible point at which any
ordinary Marvel fan could have completed her first viewing of Endgame was
at some stage in the bleary-eyed small hours of the Thursday just gone. In
order to have written a sermon about it in time for the service on the Sunday
immediately following that Thursday, therefore, our theoretical ordinary Marvel
fan must surely have done one of the following:
1) Blocked out that particular slot in
the sermon-series calendar as a special one-off as soon as she found out Endgame’s
release date, then spent the ensuing weeks and months blindly banking on the
hope that a maximum of a couple of days spent contemplating the film’s contents
would yield a Useful Spiritual Analogy worth forming a special one-off sermon
around;
2) Hazarded, in advance, a guess at
what the contents of Endgame might consist of, or at least what its
broad intentions as a piece of cinema might be, decided that there was a Useful
Spiritual Analogy in that hazarded idea, and then tweaked that analogy after
viewing the film to make it fit with the actual contents;
3) Clumsily shoehorned some aspect of Endgame’s
contents into what she was planning to spend that sermon talking about anyway;
4) Clumsily shoehorned some aspect of
spiritual truth into a speech that essentially consisted of an Endgame review;
5) Bribed, blackmailed, tricked, or
otherwise coerced someone heavily involved with the making of the film into
spilling some major spoilers a long time ago, and happened to have come up with
a Useful Spiritual Analogy off the back off those stolen spoilers in the
intervening peroiod;
6) Or possibly, just possibly I suppose,
genuinely had a flash of inspiration upon viewing Endgame and been so
excited about the Useful Spiritual Analogy that thereupon occurred to her that
she simply had to talk about it on Sunday, regardless of how well it fitted
with whatever other sermon-series plan she might have been following (or,
granted, not; maybe this is the sort of church where you really don’t know what
the sermon’s going to be about from one week to the next).
Look, I love Useful Spiritual
Analogies lifted out of the world of fiction, as you’ll know very well if you
have any familiarity to speak of with me and my weekly ramblings. I’d be the
last person to criticise the use of such analogies. But because I love them and
I use them, allow me to assure you that I know how they work. They do
not occur to one reliably. I can’t walk into a screening of a film
knowing that the next couple of hours will definitely yield a blog post;
equally, sometimes I leave the cinema spilling over with ideas for at least
five. There are pieces of fiction I love that I can’t plausibly relate to
gospel truths at all,1 and others I really don’t care for that
Useful Spiritual Analogies just fall out of without me having ever willed them
to. I don’t personally have anything to say about Endgame right now that
I think would actually edify any of you, but it’s quite possible that in
several weeks’ or months’ or years’ time, I’ll be reading the scriptures and
something will suddenly click in my brain to the effect of, oh, it’s like that
bit in Endgame.
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| Thanks to CaptainThinker at newgrounds.com for the super cute Endgame fanart. |
Which in fact brings us to another
point, because sometimes, yes, the analogy occurs to you when you’ve got your
head in the Bible, but more usually, it occurs to you when you’ve got your head
in the fiction. And I’d say that’s the right way round, actually, because you very
much want to have the Bible in your brain when you’re looking at fiction, and
indeed all the rest of the time as well; you want to view everything else the
world presents you with, with scripture as your lens2 – whereas, by
contrast, if my mind keeps straying onto Marvel or Doctor Who or Harry
Potter or whatever when I’m trying to study God’s word, I tend to consider that
more of a hindrance than a help. Makes sense, right? And this means that
usually, when the analogies I blog about occur to me, they consist of things
I already know about the gospel that are highlighted particularly well by
some aspect of the fiction I’m currently enjoying.
Useful Spiritual Analogies are not, in
other words, an exercise in going deeper into the meaning of scripture for myself.
They rarely start with scripture; sometimes, indeed, I have to go on a
bit of a hunt for a passage that makes the gospel point that occurred to me in
a way that suits the context. I might perhaps be illustrating a point that’s a
new one to some of my delightful readers, and crucially, it’s a very good thing
to be reminded of the core gospel truths that one already knows from new and
different angles, but Useful Spiritual Analogies are not and must not be the
beating heart of a teaching ministry. They’re a great sort of side dish, if you
will, but the main meal – the part without which the thing is not substantial –
has to start with the scriptures. It has to be rooted in them and grow
out of them; it can’t rely on any other material for its form and identity.
The typical faith-and-fiction format
of my blog is not, therefore, what I’d call a main-meal teaching ministry. I’d
be worried, I mean to say, about any Christian who was receiving most of her
teaching in a format like that, that makes the outside analogy a part of what
it fundamentally is. If it imposes that on itself as a condition, then
the goal has become something other than simply to open the scriptures to one’s
brothers and sisters so that they might be built up by them. Doesn’t that
strike you as very dangerous?
Now, I’m in no position to comment on
the quality of the teaching at the church depicted above, or indeed any church
whose sermon last Sunday was themed around Endgame. Maybe some of those
sermons were really excellent, I don’t know. Again, I’d be the last person to
deny that analogies lifted from fiction can be useful for highlighting
spiritual truths. But I really don’t buy that all these preachers themed their
Sunday sermons around Endgame because they had seen a genuinely Useful
Spiritual Analogy in it that they believed would be more helpful for the
edification of the congregation than anything else they might have spoken
about.
I suppose the obvious question off the
back of that is, well, why, if not for the sake of maximum edification, did all
the preachers give sermons about Endgame, then? I suppose I can only
assume it comes out of a desire to be making up-to-the-minute references. Maybe
they don’t trust their listeners not to be thinking about Endgame all
through the service anyway and figure they may as well as try to
tap into that. Maybe they think that sermons of this type are a way of attracting
more people into the church. Maybe they, like me, are just a little too fond of
fiction and prone to getting carried away rambling about it. Any which way, the
phenomenon worries me.
Please do your very best to put
yourself in the way of proper main-meal teaching, adelphoi – teaching governed
by no condition except that it should help the Church to understand what God
has said and so be moved to love and serve him more wholeheartedly. And as far
as your giftings allow, dispense such teaching. I’d be the last person to deny
the value of Useful Spiritual Analogies taken from fiction, but I’d also be the
last to say that that’s what the normal pattern of church teaching ought to look
like.
Footnotes
1 For example, the Japanese animated feature Your Name,
which I have now decided is my favourite film, has never yielded so much as the
germ of a blog post idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU47nhruN-Q.
2 Speaking of lenses, by the way, shout out to Pullen
& Symes Opticians who recently supplied me with a gorgeous new pair of
specs to replace the ones I broke at my baptism: http://opticiansinexeter.co.uk/.
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