Follow the Lord

Epiphany 6 Rev. Isaac BradshawLuke 6:17-26 Weapon of Choice It seems to me that, way back, years ago, when I was in high school and college, music videos had reached their zenith. MTV, and that strange genre that combined pop music with a short form film had moved from being just filmed concerts… Here is Freddie Mercury singing on stage at LiveAid,…

The Sermon on the Mount – Matthew 5-7

Epiphany 6
Rev. Isaac Bradshaw
Luke 6:17-26

Weapon of Choice

It seems to me that, way back, years ago, when I was in high school and college, music videos had reached their zenith. MTV, and that strange genre that combined pop music with a short form film had moved from being just filmed concerts… Here is Freddie Mercury singing on stage at LiveAid, or here’s Bono jumping around singing Sunday Bloody Sunday… To something that was entertaining, something that captured the spirit of the song, something that made an artistic, thematic or emotional expression.

You know. Art.

Two shots, side by side, unbroken cuts and single takes that follow two different people moving through a concert and backstage until they meet at the end, and both sides join up into a single picture. A technical achievement. Martin Scorsese did the same thing in Goodfellas, except that was ONE single, unbroken take. This was TWO shots, two teams, two crews moving precisely so that they meet together at the same time. That’s one-hit wonder Semisonic’s video for Closing Time.

The manic, tap-dancing 10-year-old girl in a bee costume, getting booed off stage, searching for her fellow dancers throughout broken industrial Detroit, giving up, until she finds a gate in a field inhabited by… TAP DANCERS! In bee costumes! Another one-hit wonder, Blind Melon’s “No Rain!”

But who among us can forget the emotionally driven video for Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares to you? Maybe if you have… I’ll remind you… No camera tricks. No dancing 10-year-olds in bee costumes. Just Sinead looking straight down the barrel of the camera. Black background, black turtleneck, simply singing the song with raw, unfiltered emotion.

But if there was one video that captured the unbridled imagination of the late 1990s and early 2000s, it had to be Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice. No singers mouthing words. Just an actor named Christopher Walken dancing through an empty hotel lobby, until he leaps over a balcony and takes flight, in a bit of magic realism closer to later Laurel and Hardy shorts than anything seen on cable at the time period. It’s a remarkable thing to see. You start out thinking that this a gimmick, a 58-year-old Walken doing a music video until you see him dance and then recall… He was a professional dancer before he started acting, at heart he’s a song and dance man.

The words are slight nonsense… There’s lyrical references to Frank Herbert’s Dune, visual references to Stanley Kubrick. But there’s a theme of choice… Choice between sitting depressed in a hotel lobby… or taking the choice to fly. “You can go with this, or you can go with that… Or you can go with us!” And if you were in your twenties, there was an ebullient feeling that the choices were endless, infinite, and responsibility was found only in making sure you made a choice.

And then 20 people flew planes into towers and office buildings, the endless stream of easy credit and easy money dried up. War. Choices became limited and directed towards, to some degree, survival. And yet, if anything defines our own time, 20 years later, it’s the idea of endless, infinite, and unlimited individual choice.

Our readings today, especially our Gospel reading, speak of two ways of living. A way of blessing, a way of truth, a way of life, and a way of woe and curse, a way of deceit and a way of woe. Trusting in man or trusting in God. Trusting the healing power of Jesus Christ, or the false, feel-good promise of money, or perhaps a bit on the nose for me… a full belly.

The reality is that our perception of an infinite sea of choice is itself false. Our choices are ultimately false or obscured by consumerism. We have these things. (Iphone). Remember what they looked like when they first came out? You had infinite choice between black case. Or a white case. Now, those inifinte choices have expanded to include a white case, a black case, a pink-steel case, a blue finish and a new choice. Red.

Or think even more basic. In the United States, fully 85% of our meat products come from just 4 companies. Infinite choice… from four companies. Now this too points to the much larger principle: that choosing false promises of false hope… that is, sin… produces what seems to be choice, but is in reality, death. A life of no choice but the grave.

A person lies, thinks that they now have more choice, more freedom to choose what they want to do, but in reality commits himself to no choice at all, simply the repetition of lie after lie after lie. They are locked in, committed to untruth, committed to deception at all cost.

A person hordes money or wealth, given infinite consumer choice, only to discover that their choice limited by the ongoing need to create more and more and more wealth. A hunger fed by exploitation of their workers or overwork themselves. Locked in, committed to the untruth that we can take it with us when we go. Committed to deception to prevent cost.

When I came home from Samoa, one of my first stops was to Wal-Mart, and this was, in hindsight, a mistake. Moving from the… limited selection, shall we say, of common items in the jungle stores of the villages to the vast, cavernous expanse of Wal-Mart was overwhelming. I stared at strawberries, a pint of which cost me $15 back on island. I saw the boxes and boxes and mountains of pasta. The aisles of cleaning products. The palms of my hands began to sweat. My knees wobbled. Frozen in the… well, frozen section. I was having something like a panic attack, awash by processing the… choice. Our culture, our society stands a bit like I did in the Walmart those years back. Wobbly. Sweaty. Frozen in place.

How do we, as individuals and a culture find our way out of the frozen aisle? What choice do we make so that, like Christopher Walken, we can dance with joy, leap over the railings and take flight?

We follow the Lord. We obey. It’s really that simple and yet so difficult. This week at the clergy conference, Fr. Aaron pointed out that Jesus’ commands to his followers are not complex. Fish on that side of the boat, Lazarus, come forth, Peter walk to me. These are not esoteric instructions or the reactionary asceticism of a guru. Walk. Fish. Get up.

Or to put in the words of the Beatitudes: Choose to be poor. Choose to be hungry. Choose to weep. Choose to be hated. To what end?

Resurrection. That’s the final choice. We either choose a life of death, or we choose to follow our Lord in through and beyond death and into the risen life of Him who takes us from the gutter to the stars.