The Highs and Lows of Humanity ('The Martian' vs. 'The Revenant')

(*Note: The following post may contain minor spoilers for The Martian and The Revenant)

Two of the most successful films of 2015 (at least among the films that didn’t star an Avenger or a Jedi) were The Martian and The Revenant. These two movies are very different from each other, and yet they make an interesting pair.

One movie—The Martian—is about a guy who is accidentally left behind on a scientific expedition to another planet; the other movie—The Revenant—is about a guy who is intentionally left behind in the wilderness by a villainous coworker. As such, both films are about survival.

One movie—The Martian—tells a story of humanity banding together to save this one man; the other movie—The Revenant—tells a story about a man who is completely on his own.

One movie—The Martian—is filled with joy and hope; the other movie—The Revenant—is filled with despair and sorrow.

So these two films, viewed together, generate some interesting discussion over a range of topics.

But here’s the thing that I find most interesting about these two movies: Both films are an exploration about what it means to be human.

There were actually several movies from 2015 that dealt with this question regarding the nature of humanity (Inside Out, While We’re Young, The End of the Tour, The Stanford Prison Experiment, Ex Machina, and Dope, just to name a few). This seems to be a recurring question that filmmakers are asking these days.

I think it’s a great question.

In the first chapter of the Bible, there is a poem that insists that human beings—men and women—were made in the image of God, or the Imago Dei (Genesis 1.26). In the second chapter of the Bible, we are told that when God created humanity, God “breathed the breath of life” into us (Genesis 2.7).

So human beings are made with physicality, but we are also made with divinity. We are flesh and blood and bones and tendons, but we are also spirit.

As I was watching The Revenant, one of the recurring themes that struck me was that this was a story about how human beings can become like animals in terrible, desperate situations. There is a brutal scene in which a man fights a bear; there is alsoa scene later in the movie when two men fight, and that fight is staged very similarly to the earlier fight with the bear. There is a scene in which wild pigs are scrounging through an encampment of slaughtered Native Americans, and then a human walks through the scene and begins picking up items from the ground and keeping them—essentially mirroring the behavior of the pigs. As I watched, I began to realize that almost every time a human did something, there was also a scene in which a wild animal did something very similar. So The Revenant is—at least in part—about the carnality of human beings.

On the other hand, The Martian pushes the theme far in the other direction. Not only does the whole world bands together to save a single human life, but they use advanced scientific methods to do so. There are no villains in The Martian because in this story every human being on the planet is on the same side. In a time when lots of movies accumulate higher and higher body counts (disaster movies, superhero movies, etc.), the entire point of the movie is to save one person’s life.

The Revenant is about the worst of humanity. The Martian is about the best of humanity.

 We have it within us to be savage and subhuman.

We also have it within us to be fully human—filled with something that transcends our base urges.

We have it within us to act in the best interest of someone else.

We have it within us to care for the weak, the poor, the marginalized, and the forgotten.

We have it within us to see the humanity in others, even when they aren’t like us.

The question of what it means to be human is more relevant today than ever before. We project digital versions of ourselves online, and we spend more time looking at screens than we do looking at one another (granted, I am writing this post on a computer with a screen attached to it). We use heated, hyperbolic rhetoric against one another because we want to be right.

So I’m posting this as a way of asking an open-ended question. It’s something I’m working through myself, and it’s endlessly fascinating to explore.

Are we reducing ourselves to our most animalistic tendencies, becoming less and less human?

Or are we rising to our fully human potential, valuing life and offering hope and joy and love to those around us as best we can?

Each of us has the potential to more or less of who we were created to be.

May we rise to our fully human, Imago Dei, potential.

"I Didn't Want to Go" (or "The Endless Struggle Between Fear and Love")

Can I tell you a story I’m not proud of?

About four years ago, I received an email from a woman who attended the church where I was a teaching pastor. The email said, “My family attends [your church], and you are my sister’s favorite preacher. My sister is dying of cancer, and the doctors think she only has a couple weeks left. I think it would mean a lot if you came to see her. Would that be possible?”

I replied immediately and said that I would absolutely come and see her sister. The woman emailed back and said that they were moving her from the hospital into hospice care and that she would let me know when a good time would be—probably within the next couple days.

Here’s the part I’m not proud of: I didn’t want to go. It wasn’t because I didn’t care or because I had so much else going on in my life that I couldn’t possibly spare the time.

I didn’t want to go because I was afraid.

The dying woman was only two years older than me (she was 31). She had a husband and a two-year-old son. Other than these two details, I knew nothing else about her. I didn’t even know what she looked like. The church was very big, and it was entirely possible for a person to attend services every single week and simply get lost in the crowd.

Which brings me to why I was afraid.

I was afraid that she—the dying woman—would ask me why God was letting this happen and that I would have to tell her that I had no idea. I was afraid that she would be disappointed in me—that she would wish she had requested a different pastor from her church. But mostly, I was afraid to be that close to death. Like I said, she was two years older than me (two years younger than I am now), and she was facing my greatest fear. She was dying young, she felt afraid and helpless, and I was afraid to be so close to that much pain and sorrow.

So I waited to hear from the sister, feeling nervous every time my phone rang. A full week after I had heard from the sister, I had still heard nothing. I called the home phone number to check in and see if I had missed a message. The dying woman’s mother answered the phone and told me that her daughter was deeply sedated, so she wouldn’t ever know if I had come to see her or not. The mother also said that she had called her own pastor (she attended a different church), and he was with them now. Essentially, the mother was telling me “Thank you for your time, but your services are no longer required.” They didn’t want me to come see the woman after all.

We hung up, and I felt relieved. Again, I am not proud of this story. In fact, I almost deleted that sentence about feeling relieved, but I left it in because it’s completely true.

Three days later, I received an email saying that the woman had died.

I think about that experience all the time. I think about how afraid I felt and how I wish I had tried harder to see her before it was too late. I never met the woman, but I still feel like I let her down. My fear stopped me from being useful to her at her greatest moment of need.

Earlier this week I received a text from a childhood friend. He told me that his mother is dying, and they don’t know how long she has left. I didn’t even think about my response; it was instinctual. I instantly texted back and asked, “Can I see her?”

I’ve known this family for over half my life, and I love them so much. We don’t see each other much these days, but that’s only because life has pulled us all in different directions. There has never been a time when I didn’t feel a certain sense of endearment and warmth toward this family. So when my friend said that his mother was dying, I felt none of the fear I felt four years ago; I simply needed to see her.

I didn’t become braver in the last four years. I’m still a coward. But I love this family, so fear was simply not part of my thought process.

In the situation from four years ago, I had no personal attachment to the dying woman. I felt sad for her—deeply sad—but I had no direct personal connection with her, so my ability to feel love was consumed by own fears and insecurities.

In the situation from this week, my personal connection was so deep that fear never had a chance. There was no time to be afraid; the urgency love was too powerful.

I guess this is what it means when the Bible says that there is no fear in love and that perfect love drives out fear (1 John 4:18). Four years ago, fear nearly paralyzed me and all but made it impossible for me to sit with a dying woman. This week, love demanded that I go see my friend’s dying mother.

When a person is only a name on a page or a tiny .jpg file next to a screen name, fear comes easily. A lot of our hate comes from a place of fear—we fear the people we don’t understand, we fear their point-of-view, and we fear what might happen if they are right. And so that fear—that dehumanizing way of seeing the world—pulls us farther apart. It prevents us from existing in this world as we were meant to.

When the person we’re engaging has no face—when we don’t know them or at least can’t see them—it’s easier to engage with fear, because the unknown allows for that. That’s why it’s easier to make enemies on Facebook than in real life.

When a person’s understanding of God demands that they show hate toward others or allows them to dehumanize people who are different from them, they are operating from a place of fear—fear of other people and fear of their angry God.

However, when a person’s God says, “Love your enemies,” perhaps that is a way of saying, “Don’t let the fear stop you from being human. Perfect love drives out fear.”

When fear keeps us out of hospital rooms, it’s time to reengage our capacity for love.

May we love in ways that drive out fear.

Grace and peace.

The Undivided Soul

This post is the second part in a series called After You Believe. I borrowed the series title from a book by N.T. Wright, but the content is not directly taken from the book. I just liked the title. (Read Part 1)

I want to make a confession: I am in therapy.

Still reading?

Great.

Seven or eight years ago, I started seeing a therapist, trying to work through some baggage that I was still carrying from my childhood. After about a year, I “graduated”—which is to say that my counselor felt that the work we had originally set out to do was finished. So I stopped going.

Then, about four months ago, I realized that I needed go back to therapy. As it turns out, as life goes on, we confront new struggles, new questions, and new ways of doubting ourselves. Now in my early thirties, married with two kids and a whole life of adulthood ahead of me, I realized that there were things I needed help with.

In this blog series, we’re talking about what it means to live a life of faith; we’re responding to the question, Now that I believe in Jesus, what do I do now?

One of the answers to this question is why I go to therapy.

In the book of Genesis, when God creates human beings, we are described as being made in “the image of God” (Genesis 1:26).

Much later, in the book of Deuteronomy, the people of Israel are given one of the most important prayers in the Scriptures:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

In the book of Matthew, Jesus is asked about the most important passages in the Jewish Scriptures, and he begins by quoting this same prayer from Deuteronomy.

Deep in our story, we are told that we are made in the image of God and that one of God’s key defining attributes is that God is “One.”

In other words, God is whole—undivided.

In Matthew 5, Jesus challenges his followers with these words:

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:48)

At face value, this is one of the most discouraging passages in all of Scripture.

Be perfect? Thanks, Jesus. That’s a big help.

But the English word “perfect” doesn’t fully communicate what Jesus is really saying here.

In Greek, the word Jesus uses for “perfect” is the word telos.

Telos doesn’t mean to be without flaw or to never make mistakes.

Telos means to be whole—undivided.

In The Message version of this text, Eugene Peterson translates Jesus’ words this way:

“In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity.” (Matthew 5:48, The Message, emphasis mine)

To be perfect, in Jesus’ sense of the word, is to be the fully-integrated versions of ourselves.

To be whole is to live out our God-created identities.

To follow the way of Jesus is to seek to be a whole person.

This is why I go to therapy.

I realize that, in my quest to be a whole, undivided, fully-integrated person, I’m going to need some help.

When we ask questions about What should we do now that we believe in Jesus, we are often looking for a list of rules—a moral code coated with a little bit of Jesus-style language.

However, the point is not to assign people to a new moral code or to illicit “Christian” behavior from people. It's bigger than that.

In his book After You Believe, N.T. Wright says it this way:

“Virtue… is about the whole of life, not just the specifically ‘moral’ choices” (p. 71).

When we ask what kinds of moral choices we should be making, we are thinking too small.

It’s not that there are not morals or that morals are irrelevant; it’s just that to follow Jesus is much bigger than that. It’s not about following a list of rules; it’s about becoming fully-integrated people. This includes morality, but it does not stop there. It permeates every corner of our being.

This is our pursuit: the undivided life.

Let me put it another way: To follow Jesus is to be put back together again.

Sometimes this means naming our brokenness and attempting to seek restoration from that.

Sometimes this means making choices that reflect who we truly are or, more significantly, who we were meant to be.

Sometimes it means walking into a therapist’s office and saying, “I need a little bit of help here.”

Whatever it means for you, may you be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. That is, may you be put back together as a whole person, regardless of what has fractured you in the past.

What do you think? What are some things that have helped you be put back together? What role do you think morality plays in this conversation?

Click here to read Part 3 of this series.

A Remodeled House, The Munsters, and the Human Spirit

There is a house in Waxahachie, Texas that has been remodeled to be an exact replica of the house from the TV show The Munsters. The house is complete with a grand staircase that opens up, a rotating suit of armor, trap doors, and every other detail that made the Munster house unique.

It’s not a museum or anything; a family lives there.

So why did this family—the McKees—remodel their house to perfectly resemble a set from an old TV show?

Because they love The Munsters.

They spent what must have been a lot of money and a lot of time in order to make their home look exactly like the set from a TV show that they love.

This seems ridiculous—insane, even.

But there is something beautifully human about this. What do we do when we love something or have something in our pasts that left a special mark on our hearts? We memorialize it—we create a way to remember something that we never want to forget.

We erect a statue. We hang pictures on the wall. Sometimes (very rarely) we even remodel our homes to look like the set of an old TV show.

The need to memorialize is a very human impulse.

In the book of Genesis, we meet a man named Jacob. During a very low point in his life, Jacob is fleeing from his brother and stops to sleep for the night. While he is camped out, he has a life-changing encounter with God (Genesis 28).

Years later, Jacob returns to the spot where he had camped so long ago. When he arrives at the spot where he had once encountered God, the text tells us this-

Jacob and all the people with him came to Luz (that is, Bethel) in the land of Canaan.  There he built an altar, and he called the place El Bethel, because it was there that God revealed himself to him when he was fleeing from his brother. (Genesis 35:6-7)

When Jacob returns to this spot, he builds an altar—a physical reminder of his encounter.

Jacob is saying, “I never want to forget what happened here.”

In the history of our faith, we have established several physical reminders of those things that we are never meant to forget.

Baptism reminds us that we are part of the new humanity—that we are participating in the resurrection of Christ in the world.

Communion—taking the bread and the wine—reminds us that we are recipients of an impossibly beautiful gift and that we are all brothers and sisters when we gather together around the table.

We create beautiful art because it points back to something that could never be expressed with mere words.

Jacob’s altar is a way of saying, Something meaningful happened, and it must be remembered.

The Munster House in Waxahachie exists because the human spirit cannot deny its own journey. We are hardwired to remember—to memorialize the past as a way of embracing who we are becoming.

As we look back with gratitude, may we embrace the story that God has placed us in.

May we remember that which must never be forgotten.

What are some things in your own life that help you remember your own experiences and journey? Do you think the act of remembering is important in our attempts to become better people in the world?