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"JESUS AT THE MOVIES: LIFE AS A HOUSE" | 2 Samuel 7.11-16 | July 20, 2003 |
Tearing down the old shack and building a new house becomes George’s paradigm for life. He plans to leave this earth having replaced as much of the bad stuff of his life (though George uses different words not allowed in polite company) with something new, from the ground up. The tear down and the build up are hands-on projects that at least give meaning and purpose to his life, if only the last four months of what he assesses as his miserable life.
One thing that sets the human species apart from other species on this planet is our desire to make meaning in life. We spend a lifetime in search of meaning, capturing it wherever we can, trying to hold on to it and figure out a way to multiply it. We spend a fortune on psychiatrists and medical doctors and vacations and chachkies in pursuit of happiness and meaning. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to meld our profession with our pursuit of meaningful activity and thus find some fulfillment on a daily basis. So George, whose life like all of ours is defined by death, is hell-bent on building the house as a way to make meaning for himself and reconnect with his family to make up for lost time. George comments that his life is a ‘jig-saw puzzle.....[with] lots of pieces that are wanting to make sense.”
Joseph LaMantia writes about meaning:
The operating principle of the human organism is “to make meaning”, to tell a story with words, images, music or dance, to create a myth or even a science. In other words, to create a coherence from its encounters with its experiences. It is indispensable to the human organism’s simple survival that it formulate, create, even appropriate from other humans this “thing which hangs together”...some useful and attractive “meaning.”
Meaning is that which can diminish doubt, satisfy curiosity, relieve anxiety, allay fear from the otherwise overwhelmingly chaotic events of human existence. Having these salutary effects tends to promote a sense of hopefulness and thus serves its creators well. All cultures, including the religions that spring from them, are the manifold accretion of individual and collectively developed “meaning.”
Is it not true that most of us find life enjoyable when we are involved in meaningful activities or involved in meaningful relationships? When we are feeling productive, valuable, and the things we do make sense and have purpose, we are usually happy. When life has meaning for us, we are generally able to cope with most anything.
In the movie, George’s ex-wife Robin, now married to Peter with whom she has two young boys, finds herself bored with her second marriage. Her husband is a great provider, and they live in a palatial home, wanting for nothing, but her life is devoid of meaning. Peter is aloof, and Robin finds herself more and more interested in helping George tear down and rebuild the house she used to live in with him. It is an interesting paradox each day as she leaves her spacious luxurious home to go to the old shack to help her ex. She does it because she finds meaning in it. It is a paradox as well that George, the man who is dying, engages those around him who are dying emotionally from boredom, from routine, from wealth, from busyness. George unwittingly becomes a messiah of sorts not by force but by becoming the house he is building. “I thought of myself as a house,” he says.
Jesus said that his meaning in life was to bring people a way to find life in all of its abundance. For George Monroe, it was like being born all over again when he realized he was dying; he had a new lease on life, if only for four months. But those four months were redemptive; they bought back, as it were, the first 40+ years that had made no sense to him. And he literally lived more completely in four months than he did in all the years that preceded it. It was a new life. It is the Profound Eternal Paradox that the ‘bad news’ of a terminally ill disease became the birthing room for something profoundly new and meaningful. The house became a way of literally and figuratively tearing down the old and building in its place the new.
Mircea Eliade contends, and rightfully so, I think, that every building is a paradigm for creation. That every building–whether house, office, church, museum–represents in a tangible way the act of creation and the continuing evolution of life within its walls. It is more than just a utilitarian edifice; it is alive with creation, it is a holy creation, it is a piece of art that endures for all who see it and live within its walls.
“I became what I was meant to be. I built myself a life. I built myself a house,” says George Monroe. Paul reminds us that by God’s love the whole human race is built on the foundation of those who have gone before us, with Christ being the cornerstone of a building that is more than a building. And we are ourselves buildings where a holy love resides. For there is something larger than life that goes into the building of a house; it is something more than lumber and nails and a lot of sweat equity. There is some Larger Builder through whom the whole thing is joined together, and rises to become a holy temple. A house becomes something more than a house when one lives ones life as a house.
In 2 Samuel, God speaks to King David that a house will be built which will honor his life, tragic and flawed as it is, and that David’s descendants, the people of Israel, would inherit this Temple. By its being, David’s legacy would live on, and generations to come would know of a Holy Grace that permeates even the most flawed of lives. The house is God’s house, and it will be built to honor things Holy but in the name and memory of a man whose life was less than perfect.
The ending of this movie is really the beginning. We learn midway through that George’s father, in a drunken stupor, drove his car into the path of another car, killing both of his parents and the driver of the other car. The 3-year-old daughter of the victim in the other car survived the crash, but was paralyzed for life. George has spent his life living with a deep-seated anger with his father for that fateful night. The house that George built finds its ultimate purpose after George has died when his son Sam seeks out this girl, now a young woman, and gives her the house. The house becomes the redemptive symbol–as powerful as any cross–to make amends for the recklessness of a father whose careless ways had taken the lives of more than his own family. This house that George built was a house that was life itself for a man in his last months of life, giving him purpose and meaning that had escaped him for years. And now the house is a legacy of love and meaning to others whose devastated lives find some meaning in this house.
What would you do with four months of living if you knew it was your last four months? I would suggest that all of us would strive for something that would bring meaning to our lives, which suggests that we would do well to begin building whatever houses we can right now to live purposefully, with intention, and to pass on to those who will come after us. Amen.
–Gary L. McCann
2 SAMUEL
God declares to you David that he will establish a house for you. When your days are over and you rest with your ancestors I will raise up your offspring to succeed you. They will build a house for you in my name, and your house and kingdom will endure forever.
EPHESIANS
You are citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of apostles and prophets, with Christ as the cornerstone. In God the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple. And you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives in Spirit.
PASTORAL PRAYER
Eternal Spirit, whose Essence is the center of all we are and all we do, we are here again today to revel in the delights of this life you have given to us and live abundantly in the house that is the world around us. We are renewed to see birds take flight–whether eagle or sparrow. We are revitalized in our energies when we hear a brook babble as it encounters a rock or to sit in the cool conditioned air of our homes on hot summer days to sip iced tea or admire from afar the garden that we have worked on cooler days.
Even with all of this around us, we find ourselves restless sometimes. Life is often void of meaning, and the purpose that carries us from one day to the next often dies on the vine in the scorching heat of life’s difficulties. The news of wars that continue and new ones waiting to be waged, and human lives that are put in jeopardy for sometimes petty causes, weigh us down. And just as we begin to conquer one disease, another comes along to take its place. People out of work and people working that don’t find it meaningful take a toll on our society and ultimately everyone in it.
Cause us to realize that life’s meaning is not intrinsically tied to our feelings or our evaluations, for these are limited in vision. Cause us to realize that meaning can be found in any activity if we will but catch the vision for life that you have given to us in the teachings of Jesus and other messengers of your Love. May we be diligent to search for purpose in all that we do, not only for ourselves, but in all that might spill over into the lives of those around us as well.
May we use these summer months to rejuvenate ourselves, to find some time to get away from the schedule, some moments when we might recharge the batteries of our souls with a walk through the woods or the words of a good book or by digging deeply into the soil of the garden. Inspire us with creative ways to connect to the earth and the Universe and by so doing to connect with you, the builder of this spherical house that floats in the vastness of space in your eternal creation.
Make us sensitive to others, that our words and actions may give meaning to their lives and thus in ours as well. Break down walls of prejudice against those who are different from ourselves. Well up within us springs of joy, that happiness may be the cup of cool water for beleaguered days not just so we will feel good, but so we will be refreshed to refresh others.
May this be a day of hope and peace, in our hearts, in our minds, in our community, and in the world. In the name of the Eternal Spirit of life, Amen.
| Copyright © 2003 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved. |