Obscurity?

 "With our mask-wearing proclivity ever-present, removing those masks seems counterintuitive to both common sense and religious sensibilities. We have a deep-seated aversion to naked honesty, inside and outside the walls of religious institutions. As author Rachel Held Evans observes, "We think church is for taking spiritual instagrams and putting on our best performances". Common sense tells us to fake strength lest others spy our weakness, to boast of our best, and not admit the worst. Religious sensibilities so easily echo this. Don't admit you doubt... Admit, in generic terms you are a sinner (that's permissible), but never get specific (that makes you weak). "The pious fellowship doesn't permit actual sins" Bonhoeffer wrote, "so we must conceal our sinful selves from that. We dare not be actual sinners. So we will remain alone in our sin and our hypocrisy".

Chad Bird - Night Driving- Notes from a Prodigal soul.

"So here we are... out on the raggedy edge".

Mal Reynolds - Serenity.

"IF we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness".  1 John 1:9.

I really enjoy the films of Denis Villeneuve. In Arrival, he sought to examine what happens when our frailty has to confront the entirely extraordinary - will we recoil back into our ruinous and selfish behaviours, or will we seek to be honest and expose ourselves to something that will truly transform us?

In Blade Runner 2049, he asks us to explore what makes humanity worth something, showing, again, that it's not the external definitions or actions which really matter there, but what defines us at our core, in spite of our various failings, which counts.

Villeneuve uses the cinematic screen as Michelangelo used a certain chapel's ceiling - as a canvas to tell a rich and elaborate tale about what we are and the truth that we know we could be something more.

2021, however, presents him with a very serious problem.  After spending several years seeking to create a new big screen rendition of the first part of Frank Herbert's epic Science Fiction novel, Dune, he finds himself, like all of the world's movie industry, facing a wall that may well prove insurmountable for quite some time. With the global closure of the cinema industry last year, the studios are rushing to make deals with social media platforms to allow their latest productions a means of distribution to the public, and, just as important, provide a source of income to keep them in business, at least for the present, but this is far from an ideal solution. For one thing, if contracts are signed between studios and net suppliers, it will mean that Cinemas simply will not re-open, and that leads to another even more telling and far more damaging consequence.

Years ago, I recall seeing the brilliant Shakespeare in Love, which, among other notable qualities, captured some of the sense of energy and delight there must have been in the 16th century in seeing some of those astonishing plays for the very first time in a Medieval theatre. Having been to the theatre and seen Shakespeare performed, the sense of connection to something that overwhelming (the movie constructs this around the writing of Romeo and Juliet) is palpable, but ask yourself what it would be like to live in a world where plays were not performed, only known about from what was written in transcripts and perhaps on line studies of their contents... what would that be like?

Christianity isn't a disconnected, dis-embodied, "manner" of thinking or speaking or behaving. Like a creative work of art, it's aim is to always join us, heart and soul, to life deeper and higher than our own by requiring us to be genuine in relation to such, so how can we fulfil such a calling if the very means provided to us to bring about such connection are muted, dis-jointed or entirely absent?

In the days of the Reformation, this problem quickly became pretty clear.

"The church had exchanged God-given grace for a human religiosity, a jury-rigged, lashed-up system to seek to appease the divine. This exchange of truth for a lie - the oh so tempting idea that sin is 'contained' and thereby controlled, something we can manage through our own rendition of ritualised practices, a fire we can contain, is a perennial problem.

Grace contradicts every system... especially 'rational' religion which seeks to maintain that 'god helps those who help (organise) themselves'. Luther states in his Heidelberg disputation that the person who believes in this manner of 'doing' only 'adds sin to sin'. Grace is only received when we despair of our natural facilities". (Biblical Authority after Babel - Kevin Vanhoozer).

The scope of cinema creates something that simply cannot be translated into a tablet or even a widescreen TV. In like manner, the way we so often chose to operate as church can dissolve or minimise the very key aspects that our faith and our fellowship need to convey, unpack and resolve - otherwise, we are simply going through the motions, performing a validation of what's 'natural' - contrivance.

Beyond the 'controlled' image we so easily project is the real side of life... of us.

Jesus meets us right there, as I was so brilliantly reminded this week in this superb posting.

Church really cannot be church without such realisations front and centre.