August 11 Worship: "Now You See Me"

We continued our look at religious themes in summer movies by turning our attention to the magical heist caper "Now You See Me" and the issue of justice that it raised.  In particular, I wanted to build on the recognition that any personal attempt at retribution or justice usually never approaches a perfectly just ending, where people get exactly what they deserve in the end.

More than this, though, I wanted to use this idea of a limited view of justice -- the idea that although we recognize there are many injustices in the world, we are most concerned with how things will turn out for us and those we know -- and compare it to a similar vision of divine justice.  What if we tried to understand how God could get such limited justice -- so that everything would end up in a way that God deserves.  Drawing upon the prophet Isaiah, and contrasting other examples as the end of Job and the background of the flood in Genesis, I suggested that the loss that God feels because of our wrongdoings and sinfulness cannot be perfectly be addressed -- meaning that God cannot get full justice for creation based on our actions.  Instead, I believe God offers forgiveness as the best way to restore some wholeness into the broken world -- a world that God carefully created and filled with people and things that God loves.

To be honest, I talked quite a bit in the sermon on Sunday -- longer than I had planned, though I really didn't get sidetracked.  (I spent longer than I had anticipated trying to explain our usual view of justice, which focuses on how we want things to work out well for us.)  But the topic of justice was in no way exhausted.  If I were a Baptist who preached for an hour on Sundays, I could easily draw the link from this view of divine justice to the coming of Jesus Christ as Emanuel, "God with us" (and have filled out the hour).  Still, despite wishing that the middle section was shorter, I believe that the final 10 minutes of the sermon are vitally important for Christians who want to mature in love and forgiveness -- and I don't think those 10 minutes make sense without understanding the common view of justice, even common in the Bible, which is usually more about what we want and what we think we deserve, rather than what God wants or deserves.

If you missed Sunday's sermon, if you'd like to listen to it again, or if you'd like to share it with others, you can find an audio recording here.