"The Force Awakens" – Star Wars
On its opening weekend at the box office, the latest Star Wars move, The Force Awakens, took in a whopping $528 million dollars worldwide.
And no wonder! What a movie!
This movie is so gritty, so human, so true.
In the movie, a group known as The First Order, a kingdom of hateful, angry fearful people corrupted by a lust for power, is about to take over the universe. The only hope against this reign of death and destruction is a group known as The Resistance.
During the movie, ordinary people are swept up in the cosmic struggle between The First Order and The Resistance.
And every choice that every character makes has galactic consequences for either one side or the other.
From birth, we too are caught up in this eternal struggle between good and evil. Even the smallest choices we make will give power to one side or the other.
And this movie reminds us of the importance of asking ourselves what we will choose, how we will choose, and to be aware that every decision we make does have lasting consequences.
Now what does any of this have to do with the story of a baby born in a stable and laid in a manger?
Everything.
Tonight we have just heard a story that begins, not with “in a Galaxy Far, Far Away,” but with these words—“And it came to pass in those days…”
But the story that unfolds is essentially the same.
In the gospel story, the earth is in the hands of Caesar Augustus, and those under his command, like Cyrenius, and they control a large part of the world.
Ordinary people must do as they are told—ordinary people like Joseph and Mary, who have to leave the city of Nazareth at a very inconvenient time in their lives to travel to Bethlehem to pay their taxes.
Ordinary people like the shepherds, who are watching over their flock at night out in the field, and get overwhelmed by light and celestial voices, and rather than dismissing this event as some sort of hallucination, they choose to go and to see this thing which has come to pass, which the Lord has made known to them.
And then they choose to go and tell what they have seen.
The gospel according to Matthew adds more information to this story.
Herod, the king holding Judea in his death dealing grasp, is so full of fear that he feels threatened by the news that travelers bring—that a king of the Jews has been born in Bethlehem.
Herod’s fearful response to this news is to slaughter all male children age two and under in Bethlehem—a slaughter which could be a scene straight out of a Star Wars movie.
So right at the beginning of the story of the birth of Jesus, we see a familiar scenario laid out before us.
The First Order, headed by Caesar Augustus, is in control, but The Force has been awakened. The resistance is on the move, and the decisions that ordinary people make will have lasting consequences in the struggle between good and evil.
We are here tonight because even as old and as worn out as some people would say that the Christmas story is—we still, somewhere, deep down inside, feel something awakened in us by this story of a baby in a manger filled with light—
We long for this story to be true, because we are ordinary people who live in fear.
The current world situation creates within us a feeling of helplessness… The First Order seems to have taken control. We live in a time when people with guns think nothing of killing children in schools and people in churches, killing ordinary people like us who are simply going about their daily lives.
We live in a time when beheadings, suicide bombers, and terrorist acts have become a normal part of the daily news cycle. The world is living in deep darkness.
And yet, this story that we have heard tonight, part of a larger story beginning in the earliest pages of the Bible, and underscored by the prophesies of Isaiah—this story tells us that in this darkness in which we live, a light will shine, a light that burns eternally, God’s light—in Star Wars language, the light of The Force.
Isaiah also prophecies that conflict and war will end, and “all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.”
Even if you’ve never seen any of the Star Wars movies, you would recognize the tramping warriors wearing the massive white storm trooper armor of The First Order. This armor makes the troopers an anonymous force at the beck and command of their ruthless leaders. Basically, they are killing machines.
In contrast, the ordinary people in Star Wars and the people who are part of The Resistance carry weapons and use them, but they do not wear armor. They don’t need armor because The Force gives them power beyond any armor that they could ever put on.
The powers in this world, including politicians and the media, tell us that we ordinary people need to put on armor, big armor that they promise will protect us. They tell us to put on armor because we are afraid.
And this armor is constructed out of the terrors in our hearts, including our deepest fears, our distrust and suspicion of other people, our resentments, our rage, our anger, and our rush to judgment.
Every day others tell us, directly, or indirectly, to put on this armor to protect ourselves because we are just ordinary people with no other protection. And all of us wear this armor to some extent, whether we want to admit it or not.
The gospel story offers an alternative.
The ordinary people in the story—Mary and Joseph and the shepherd, trusted in God. They wore no armor.
The shepherds, when the angels had gone away from them into heaven, said to one another, “Let us go now even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which has come to pass which the Lord has made known to us.”
And so they ran from the field into the city of Bethlehem, to the stable, and crowded around the manger. They had no armor weighing them down, slowing them up and holding them back.
And there they saw a baby in a manger, a child more powerful than any force of evil that the world has ever known or ever will know.
They saw with their own eyes the personification of peace that will reign eternally, long after the struggle between good and evil has come to an end throughout the universe.
We are ordinary people.
Evil is all around us.
And we are full of fear.
But this story tells us to resist the powers of this world by refusing to put on the armor of fear, distrust, hatred and anger.
This story tells us to listen for God’s voice, and then to follow.
Tonight, let us go now even unto Bethlehem, and when we come to the stable, to remove the armor made up of the fear, distrust, hatred and need for power that we have unwittingly chosen to wear—to remove all of that cumbersome and death dealing armor, so that we are free to stretch out our hands and take the infant child into our arms, and hold that child close, as a mother cradles her new born infant.
When we decide to reach out our hands and to hold this new born King close to our hearts, we are absorbing light, hope and God’s justice and love.
But even more important than God’s light, hope, justice and love, is God’s peace—because God’s peace holds within it all light, hope, justice and love—and this peace is the only protection we need to live as people of the light.
My deepest prayer for all of us this night is that as we behold this child and hold this child, that we will find that all of the fear and the evil in our hearts will flee away and will be replaced by God’s peace,
The peace that passes all understanding, the peace that keeps our hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God and of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, the peace that blesses our going out and our coming in from this time forth and forever more.
We are only ordinary people.
We too are full of fear and evil is all around us.
But we need no armor—because God’s peace is our protection and we can travel light, in God’s light.
We are only ordinary people, but even our smallest choices will have eternal consequences.
May we choose on this night to hold this child close and absorb God’s peace,
So that we can travel lightly out into the world as The Resistance to evil—as messengers for the Prince of Peace who is coming to reign in this galaxy and every galaxy in the universe throughout eternity.
Amen.