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Sunday May 21, 2006- Easter 6, Year B

If you went to a movie theater on Friday
you would have noticed people lining up to buy tickets
for the opening of the thriller
The DaVinci Code.
I have to admit I was one of them. The 10.15am showing at the Brandywine cinema over in Delaware
was about half full, I guess,
and after the usual trailers, we settled in to watch the movie,
all two and a half hours or so of it.
And I have to say, that I think the critics are right. It does move a little slowly, especially when you realize they cut huge chinks out of the book,
but as thrillers go, it was a reasonably good way
to spend a rainy morning.

But the reality is
that I wasn't there for the usual reasons you go to see a movie.
I was there
because of all the fuss and controversy
that has erupted around the book and the film version.
A cinema in Australia
has refused to show it,
senior officials at the Vatican have called for a boycott,
some Christians have protested outside showings.
But you know,
now that I've seen it, I'm not quite sure
what all the fuss is about.
It's fiction, a story,
designed to entertain us.
And it does that quite adequately.
But as you know,
the best fiction is based on reality,
close enough
that it seems kind of familiar,
that it connects with reality as we know it,
but different enough
that it creates a kind of alternative world
that we can imagine our way into.
It's how fairy tales work, and things like Harry Potter,
and even the DaVinci Code.
Dan Brown, the author, takes bits and pieces that we recognize
and shifts them and adds some things and takes away others.
This is not a documentary; it's a thriller.
And it's fiction.

But there's been a lot of confusion
about which bits are based on fact and which bits are fiction,
and because both fact and fiction are wound together,
and because they have to do with something that's deeply important to us, our faith, it can be hard to work out which is which.

And so I want to talk a little bit of time today in our sermon to talk about some of the more controversial bits. I'll try not to spoil it for those of you who haven't read the book or seen the movie yet;
hopefully, this will make it more enjoyable for you, and not less!

First of all, in the DaVinci Code
we hear about the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene
were married. One of the major arguments in the DaVinci Code is that there the person sitting next to Jesus in DaVinci's famous painting of the Last Supper is actually a woman, rather than the apostle John, which wis the traditional view. The problem with this argument
has two parts. First, medieval painters usually painted John as a young man — a teenager, really — because traditionally he was through to be one fo the youngest of the disciples. And so you would expect him to have no beard, and be smaller.

Second, we need to use our common sense here. Just because a medieval painter century painted something doesn't mean it was true. It's just a medieval perspective. Just because James Caviezel played Jesus in Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ doesn't mean Jesus looked like James Caviezel does.

And then there's the argument that there are documents that say Jesus was married. There aren't, as far as I know. Some manuscripts, ones that aren't in our bibles, suggest that he might have had a close relationship with her, but none say he was married. And even if he was, I'm not sure it really makes any difference to our faith.

And as for Mary Magdalene, she was regarded very highly in early Christian writings. Although some people have confused her with a prostitute, in fact she is known as a faithful follower. There's no tradition of her as having a child with Jesus. Instead, she is remembered as one of the women at the tomb, and is often known as "the apostle to the apostles," the one who was sent from the tomb to tell the disciples that Jesus Christ was risen, the first person to bear witness to the resurrection.
So that's Jesus and Mary.

Second, the story is a bit confused about how our bible came to be. It's right that the Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicaea in 325, but as far as we can tell from historical evidence, unlike what the movie claims, his conversion was real, not just political. And the things that were debated at Nicea were nothing new — the arguments about Jesus' divinity had been going for years, even decade. And Constantine didn't get to choose what was included in the bible as we know it and what got left out. The discussions about which book belonged had been going on among church leaders for a hundred and fifty years or so. And the way they decided to include some things — like the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and not the gospels of Thomas, Philip and Jude — was by comparing them with what the vast majority of Christians had believed in those first years, and by tracing back which ones were connected with Jesus's earliest followers. They looked at which ones
seemed to build faith, and which undermined it.
And that whole process, we believe as Christians,
was guided by the Holy Spirit.

Finally, Opus Dei. In the book and movie, it's a secret society in the Roman Catholic Church, made up mostly of clergy
who have a secret agenda and will stop at nothing, even murder, to get their way.

In reality, Opus Dei is an organization within the Roman Catholic Church made up mostly of lay people, who are trying to live out their lives as Christians as fully s possible. They tend to be conservative in their traditions, and not everyone like the way they do things and their influence, but they are not evil as they seem to be portrayed
in the DaVinci Code.

Those are some of the things that have got people worried about this movie. They are scared
that confusion between fact and fiction
will undermine our faith.
And so let's change course for a little while, and think about that question.
What is the basis of your faith? Is it based on whether something about Jesus can be proved or not, or is it based on something else?

The Christian faith
has never really been based
on empirical proof.
Most of what we believe
you can't prove.
Most of what we experience
we can't prove.

And what our scriptures are, above all,
are witnesses. They are the stories of people
whose lives were changed,
changed by an encounter with the living God.
That's not something
that you can prove,
it's not something
that we can find historical evidence of.
All we can find
is the stories that people told,
people like Peter, who one day denied that he even knew Jesus
and a few weeks later
was standing up in front of crowds of people
to talk about the Jesus he knew
and later testified in front of soldiers and judges;
he changed
from a coward
to a spokesperson.
And what changed him
was an encounter
with the risen Christ.

It was the same for all the early Christians.
You heard it today in the first reading. There they were,
Peter and a few other followers,
and a bunch of pagans. It wasn't like the other times, when it had been Jewish people who were converted, people who believed in the one holy and living God, and just needed to hear about Christ. These were people who had nothing in common with the disciples, who believed in who knew what other gods, maybe the gods of the Romans or maybe even no gods at all.
But Peter began to speak to them, to tell them the story of Jesus,
and next thing he knew
the pagans
were speaking in tongues — just like the disciples on Pentecost — and praising God.
The evidence was there. They had encountered the living God.
And so Peter
baptized them on the spot.

But it didn't just happen then. The great church leader of the fourth century, Saint Augustine, worked his way through various philosophies and religious heresies,
along with a mistress and at least one concubine.
He was sitting in a garden one day, in absolute despair,
when he heard what sounded like a child's voice saying, "Take and read".
And he picked up his copy of the letters of Paul,
and read from the book of Romans,
and suddenly his despair lifted and he believed.
Augustine's life changed. He was baptized, and later became a priest and then a bishop,
and his writings are still a source of encouragement to us today.
Augustine was changed
by an encounter
with God.

Similar stories are told of Martin Luther in the sixteenth century, who was a key figure in the Reformation,
and John Wesley in the eighteenth century,
whose conversion
was the root of what we now know
as the Methodist Church.
Each one of them
had an encounter
with the living God
that changed them
forever.

More recently, I remember as a teenager hearing the story of Nicky Cruz, the teenage gang member whose story of conversion
was told in the book and movie, The Cross and the Switchblade.

You may know people yourselves, people whose lives
were in a mess
and who somehow
came across Christ
and were totally, utterly
changed.

But for most of us
it's a lot more ordinary. Our conversions
are more like a gradual change of heart and life.
They're the sort of things you can see as you look back over your life — discovering that you've been able to forgive someone
who you never thought you'd be able to,
or that you don't miss at all
the money you have pledged in thankfulness to God,
or a decision you made that seemed small at the time
but you now realize
changed the course of your life
forever.
You look back
and you can see
that you have been changed by an
encounter
with the
living
God.

For me
seeing the movie of the DaVinci Code
reminded me
that the reason I believe
is not, first and foremost
because someone has proved to me
that what is written in scripture is true, that by doing enough archaeological digging, enough scientific analysis
this stuff about God
can be demonstrated to be
without any doubt
true.
No, the reason I believe
is that I can see the difference
that faith makes in people's lives
that I can see the difference
it makes in my own life,
and the only way I can explain that difference
is that we have encountered
the living God.

And that's what really matters.
So if someone asks you about the DaVinci Code
use it as an opportunity
to share your faith,
to tell your story
of how God
has been at work in your life.
Because that's the real truth,
the truth
that can transform
our world.

 

Sermon ©Raewynne J. Whiteley 2005