Star Wars Continuity Errors and Gospel Witness

Star Wars moment… but really an anything moment. Trolls will troll, and SW fans are the worst. Which is why it’s great to find an uber-fan like my friend Matthew who just appreciates and even defends while admitting the flaws and challenges… (I told you to pass on ALL that you had learned) he commented on fandoms complaints raging on “continuity errors” to the new Kenobi series. There are legit ones. But folks get so “can’t see the forest for the trees” about them. Continuity Errors is code for hating on plot choices to sacred material. It’s when something in a new movie or book is hard to line up with something from a previous book or movie. Star Wars is full of them.

You know what else is full of “continuity errors”. The Bible. (you know… that text for which a great many people claim it’s inerrant and infallible?)

And the clearest continuity errors about which there are whole courses of studies? The four (DIFFERENT) Gospel Accounts. And John? We created a category of synoptic (seen-together) Gospels because John, the sequel to the ”original” trilogy, is so full of continuity errors that the witness is clearly ‘seeing differently’.

And here is the key (yes I’m getting back to SW but you knew I was going to go far afield and then find a connection, right?)… Witness. The Gospel’s full name implies that none of the four ARE the Gospel… but each is “According to…” thus Matthew’s Gospel (and the others respectively) are “Κατα Μαθθαίον” According to Matthew. The Gospel is a story/truth/claim that has no concrete accessible reality. It is a story accessed by stories of witnesses who give us their versions… and together they paint a picture of the “truth”. It is such with all history. (I recently wrote that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has no less than 4 authoritative versions from Lincoln himself and none of them are exactly the same as the Associate Press’ copy of the live event.)

So… what we have is witness accounts with continuity errors….

So… it was mind-blowing to me to have his epiphany that we can think this the same thing with the SW universe (which even uses the language of canon for what are authoritative texts approved by the powers that be)… none of this is objectively how it all happened a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away… its all just ”according to” material… oral histories and witness accounts rife with continuity errors… and the truth is out there… but not concrete, objective, unambiguous, attenable story. It’s all just approximations of what happened “from a certain point of view”.

In the Wake of Yet Another School Shooting

I believe some of the most revelatory and empowering moments in scripture come from moments in which we experience not the divinity of God… but the deep and abiding humanity of God… and particularly God’s vulnerable solidarity with the lament and grief for the brokenness of creation.

On the day after another tragic school shooting that has left at least 19 elementary school children dead and two teachers… in which our children find themselves preparing for another round of active shooter drills in their own classrooms around the nation… in which we take “last day of school” pictures with our kids while recognizing that yesterday was the last day for 19 children and they didn’t even know it. And their parents’ and friends’ worlds were irrevocably broken and taken from them in ways that will resound with unrelenting pain for the rest of their lives… in which this particular grief joins a long litany of such grief.

In the wake of that we find our nation angry, hurt, and looking for answers…

In the wake of that we hug our children harder and longer…

In the wake of that we look at our own concerns and problems as trivial gifts of life….

In the wake of that we ask ourselves why we can’t solve this….

In the wake of that we ask our leaders why they won’t solve this…

In the wake of that we stop… and we crumble… and we grieve…

And I find myself drawn to God’s grief with us.

It was not just “Jesus wept”…

Hosea speaks out the gut-churching compassion of God…

Paul speaks of creations growing in labor-like pangs of lament for what is not yet…

Moses confronts God with responsibility to never give up working toward a better tomorrow…

Isaiah and Exodus speak of God moved to draw close hearing the cries of God’s people…

Jeremiah’s lamentations dance a complex grief with God and alongside God…

Jeremiah speaks again this complexity voicing God’s definitive word: “I am a God nearby, and not far off…”

God is moved to mourn for Moab… to wail even… to sob and weep…

And Jesus… drawing close to the cross, pulls aside to weep for Jerusalem…

“If only you knew the ways that make for peace….”

Today we give ourselves the grace to be bound up in all the feelings.

Today we give ourselves the grace to do nothing because we are world-weary.

Today we give ourselves the grace to rage at the machine and spit in the eye of the hurricane.

Today we give ourselves the grace to name the complex anger-grief that mourns, weeps, and wails.

Today we give ourselves the grace… to be wrapped in the arms of our mother-God.

But tomorrow must be different. We are long overdue to be…

Drawn close to the suffering heart of brokenness

Halted from perpetuating systems of harm and trauma…

Resolved to write a better story… to live our loss through transformed ways of being…

Formed and forming each other in the ways that make for peace…

Vulnerable before each other and with each other and for all the each others.

Oh God… our God… help us to make it so… to make it so beyond our prayers and in our actions.

Oh God… our God… make us to make it so…

Oh God… our God….

Memorial Day

This weekend is many things to many people… to Hollywood, it’s a mega-movie weekend.  School kids either get a long weekend or, as with my own, it marks the beginning of summer break.  It is full of parties at parks and grilling in the backyard… it’s a day of entry into summer and a celebration of family and community.  It is all these things… but at its heart, it began and continues to be a day of memory… a day to mark the pain and poignance of lives lost in defense of our country.

It is, however, more complicated than that in its origins as it was born out of the Civil War.  It was born out of a conflict in which the lives lost were taken by other lives lost – a war where brother fought brother over the vision of the future of our country and the nature of our communion.  In many ways, we are still fighting that war – less brutal in war dead and yet still with scars and emotions that run deep. 

As we prepare to enjoy the company and companionship, the blessings of creation and the joys of creativity this weekend may we also remember the lives lost in service to the ideals of this country’s project: a place where such joy and blessing may be freely enjoyed by all.  And I leave you, to that end, with these words of memorial that are Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” (the *Bliss copy):

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

*Note: I remark that this is the Bliss Copy because there is not a single version of the Gettysburg Address. The Bliss copy is the most common and most authoritative because it was signed by Lincoln himself though it was a later copy with likely revision from what was spoken at the Memorial. There are five known copies of the address plus the Associated Press version telegraphed on the day of delivery from notes taken during the event. That makes for fun reading and investigating! 🙂

Dying to Live

Monday afternoon I drove down Harrison Blvd and took in the scenes that were… war-torn.  The amazing snow we had on Monday morning had wreaked devastation on the trees. It looked like a tornado had ripped through. Warren’s comment was, “now, I know why trees shed their leaves before winter.”

I am ashamed to say I had not ever thought of the aerodynamic reasons for trees to shed their leaves.  As my friend Andrew Bailey noted from a biological standpoint, “You either make your leaves small and slick (needles) or you drop them and grow new ones in the spring.” I have always understood this seasonal life cycle and I have always tried to learn from the wisdom of that… but this was a very dramatic teaching to demonstrate what happens if we try to hold onto everything.  We become bloated, overdrawn, weighed down… and ultimately break apart. 

Here again the words from last Sunday ring in my ears “The Lord is my Shepherd… I shall not want….”  No one sets out to collect and keep and hold onto masses of things.  No one sets out to be a hoarder of stuff… or books… or space… or memories… but we all feel the temptation to do so… we all use the same rationalizations, “But what if….”

Hearing Warren’s thoughts I realized that in order to live – to survive, and even to thrive – we always have to do a bit of leaning into death.  We have to let go, knock dust from our sandals, and prune off the things that are holding us fast or that we are holding fast to in order to keep ourselves moving gracefully into this present moment and whatever surprises it may bring. 

What are you clinging to?  What is clinging to you?  Where might pruning be in order?