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Sermon for April 6, 2025 ~ Rev. Elizabeth Wrightman
“I have been to the engine room.” ~from the film, The Poseidon Adventure: three ways we may experience the revelation of God
Reverend Frank Scott, played by gene Hackman, is a passenger on the luxury cruise ship the Poseidon, in the 1972 film based on a 1969 novel. (He has a few tendencies in common with a minister I spoke about 2 weeks ago, co-incidentally.) His harsh comments revolve around God having ‘too much to do’ handling the whole universe, and considering evolution, etc. and “it’s not responsible to expect him to concern himself with the individual’, or to be more blunt, “don’t’ pray to God to solve your problems!” This leads to a believer who one film critic has called the ‘best kind’. Angry, rebellious, critical…..a renegade. I am not saying that I identify with this outlook, only that we are put together differently and therefore may hear the voice of God differently from one another.
Certain guidelines will help us to know if it is really God speaking and acting in our lives, thoughts, and actions though. Naturally we do not want to ‘make up’ thinking that one is hearing the voice of God. We will want to look for unconditional love, for safeguarding the vulnerable, acting out compassion for the prisoner, or the hungry or the ill, etc. Jesus has not left us with any big mystery about the nature of His father. It is not as if we can too easily confuse our own self-interest with what God might be asking of us.
I did not intentionally echo the Night of the Iguana, re: spiritual direction, but here I am anyway! When the Poseidon……our storyteller’s doomed ocean liner crosses near to an undersea earthquake, the tidal wave which strikes it capsizes it completely. As some of you may recall. Rev. Scott assesses the situation with lightning speed, and largely due to his own personal style of ‘hearing the voice of God’, begins to form a super pro-active plan, where hopeless and hopeful join hands… (Not an uncommon narrative on planet earth). “We have to move to the keel!” he yells. (Doing his own triage of events, with harsh, scary, and bold realism…..) No one want to do this! They feel they want to wait for help to come. He crushes this hope, brutally and unsparingly. After long and confusing, harrowing moments, he, personifying in some ways, God’s own attempt to provide safety and help, the story unspools.
And in time, as the thriller reaches its denouement, the people he is both driving and leading out of the capsized ocean liner do not want to go the last, final way that he wants them to. He is returning from a small scouting foray. One of their small party has already died, slipping off an impossible catwalk, in heels. They even see lines of other passengers sometimes going a way that seems more logical for making the escape, off in steamy, fiery, watery, but more likely-looking hallways. They begin to challenge him even more than usual and yell, “Why should we believe you!? Why should we follow you! Look what happened to Linda!
Rev. Scott is at the end of bullying, coaching, hounding and prodding. Exhausted and exasperated he responds with calm authority, silencing every other voice, “Because I have been to the engine room”. There is dead silence. “I have seen it”, he says. “I got there. And you can too.”
Like Jesus, his revelation and his authority come from first-hand experience. His information, although seeming illogical, seeming counter-intuitive, is first hand. Much like Jesus himself, he can say, “I have been to the ‘engine room’. I am qualified, he clearly means, to lead you to safety.
His ‘prayer’ life has been all along to use strong, very personal language with God. He is familiar, reckless, bold and very familiar speaking with God. He is even angrier than when we first meet him, and still praying in a rage, (much like Jesus in the temple driving out the money changers in all four Gospels, and in calling the scribes and Pharisees whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones and corruption inside, in Matthew 23.) And he will soon give up his own life to secure their survival. He will pass the torch of leadership to another man…..and his tiny band, having been introduced to God’s voice through emotional intensity, fury, radical action, terrifying risk…will be the only 6 people to crawl alive from the upturned hull, when a rescue party briefly arrives to basically give up on the search.
Fr. Matt Linn, SJ and Dennis Linn and Sheila Fabricant (Linn) are a team who write and teach widely in spiritual direction, and healing ministry. Pastor Paul and I studied them at length in the early 80’s when we were researching, and immersed in, the healing movement.
They write in Good Goats ( a wonderful book), of being present at a border between California and Mexico, decades ago, and seeing border guards arresting 5 people on the beach, who had crossed the river illegally. Matt and Dennis had just been in Mexico and felt for the prisoners, being searched, and with their hands up in the air. They had seen much poverty and unemployment in Mexico and wanted to show their compassion for them… feeling that they could understand their actions. The guards tried to speak to Dennis and were friendly but Dennis was so angry at them, and responded coldly. So he tells us that they went into their house, gathered up some granola bars, and took them to the prisoners, and apologized for the cold impersonal way they felt the guards were treating them.
But when they returned to their house they saw Fr Matt Linn, busy cooking in the kitchen. Dennis, still angry, told his brother what had happened at the riverbank…
Fr. Matt says, “Did you also speak kindly to the guards? Did you show compassion for them as well? The angry brother says, “No!” Fr. Matt leads him to see that the gospel…the teachings of Jesus, means of course that we do not only treat people in one situation with friendly and respectful support, but all people. Like Jesus, Fr. Matt knows the true path……… Dennis sees that while his anger was OK at the situation, his hostility toward the guards, his righteous indignation and cold impersonal rejection, could not come from hearing the voice of God. So he and Sheila go back in the house….gather up more granola bars, and return, and reach out to the border guards.
The guards talk and say their work is not only very hard but also makes them feel really bad. They talk about having families to feed also, who rely on them…. perhaps extended families, etc., both elderly and very young….. Dennis had heard the judgement in his brother, Fr. Matt’s words, and the words of the gospel. Through hearing the gospel in this gentle rebuke, the voice of God changes the narrative, and love is able to win out over the disappointing and imperfect messy story, that our world can often find itself in.
A writer who survived the holocaust, Odette leaves us the following footprints of a spiritual ‘ancestor’. Along with many others, crowded into a large truck, surrealist poet Robert Desnos is being taken from their barracks in their concentration camp. The mood is somber and hopeless; the truck headed for the gas chambers. The destination is no secret to the prisoners and guards alike. The fact of the ovens and gas chambers is long-normalized by now, the year being 1944 or 5. Everyone including the guards are silent as the truck arrives.
Suddenly an energetic man jumps into the line and grabs the first man he can reach. Desnos begins to read the condemned man’s palm! “Oh”, he says, “I see you have a very long lifeline. And you are going to have three children.” He is exuberant.
The poet’s excitement is contagious. First one man, then another offers up his hand, and the predictions continue! Long life! More children! And abundant joy!
The mood of the prisoners steadily changes. The mood of the concentration camp guards begins to change, too! The inevitable has inexplicably seemed to change. Doubt has entered into the narrative. Desnos actions and words, seemingly absurd, and contrary to all logic have somehow interrupted the narrative. The guards are so disoriented by the sudden change of mood in their prisoners, that they cannot seem to carry out their orders……..go through with the executions!
Desnos was famous for his belief in our imagination. He believed it could transform society. In this episode he steps outside of the narrative; of reality as it appears. (All participants and witnesses would agree on the common reality………………except for one.) He steps into an alongside world, of his own construction! He brings it into being for all the others! It even recalls the words of Jesus, in Mark 11:24, “When you pray, believe that it has already happened”……. that mysterious scripture.
Desnos was a friend of Hemingway, Picasso and other giants in the arts. He was active in the French resistance, writing and publishing his work, and arrested by the Gestapo in Feb., 1944. All in all he lived in 4 German camps.
Desnos, we would not hesitate to say, is hearing the voice of God, speaking out for light over darkness; life over death. He hears it, not in the calm, sensitive way that Fr. Matt Linn councils his brother, in the story about the Mexican border. And he hears it not through rage and exasperation, in the rebellious, striking out actions of Rev. Scott in the Poseidon Adventure. God’s voice is present in his life by way of the arts…our imagination. Absurdity and surrealism, first cousins to humor and clowning…….that is his gift here. Among the many, many ways we can hear God’s voice, speaking words of justice, speaking words of liberation, speaking words of hope, speaking words of love, his is one. How does God ‘speak’ to you?
~All the men, including Desnos, are loaded back onto the truck and driven back to their barracks. Amen