Not every movie is bathed in theological symbolism or significance. The Denzel Washington movie, The Book of Eli, the story of the man with the last Bible on planet Earth, is one that is rife with spiritual underpinnings. But perhaps the most lasting mark Eli will make on my life is that I’ll never see that word “believe” again without thinking of “Eli” and his story.
There is another movie that will change forever an everyday activity. Once you see this movie, there is no way you can perform this daily rite the same way. The movie is Psycho (1960). The everyday activity is taking a shower.
How many of you know exactly what I mean? How many of you have ever seen this Alfred Hitchcock classic?
Then you know . . . You hear that awful, screechy music. You feel the helplessness and horror of being cocooned in rushing warm water. You shiver at the coming of that unexpected life-extinguishing knife. Notice, you never see any violence. The movie is so scary because everything is masterfully implied by signs and images, not graphically portrayed.
This is the movie by which Director Alfred Hitchcock also transformed the way we watch movies. Before Psycho movie theaters ran the film they were showing on a “loop,” repeating the movie over and over without a break. Just as the film itself was on a looping reel that went round and round, so the movie experience was on a looping wheel that went round and round. Film viewers came and went whenever they wanted. There were no lines to get into a movie, or a starting and ending time. You could enter the theater at any time, and leave when they movie “looped” back to where they had started.
This practice is what led to the phrase “This is where we came in.” And you always wondered what that meant!
Someone in your party with a good memory would read the signs, get up when they started to see things for the second time, and announce, “Time to go. This is where we came in.”
Genius that he was, Hitchcock didn’t want audiences to find out the mysterious identity of his Psycho until they had progressed, step-by-step, through his terror-building tension. He also didn’t want the problem of late-coming movie-goers fretting for much of the movie how come the marquis star Janet Leigh had not made an appearance. Plus this movie was the first one he funded himself, so he wanted to do everything to insure its success.
So Alfred Hitchcock forced all theaters playing his movie to have set times when the film started, and then empty out the theater until the next showing began. For the first time people had to stand in line to get into a movie. For the first time people could watch the faces and listen to the comments of those walking out of the movie. For the first time, you could be “late” for a movie. Hitchcock made “This is where we came in” obsolete in the movie world.
Defining the moment of a “beginning” was something both Alfred Hitchcock and John the gospel writer had in common. The beginning words and beginning scenes they chose had enduring power and presence to carry on throughout their whole story.
John’s story was focused on nothing less than, “In the beginning was the Word.” It was the first public expression of the power contained in this “Word,” the Logos, the Christ, that is revealed at the wedding party at Cana.
What could be a more common, more joyous event than a wedding? People get married everyday. Yet this wedding was to be a once-in-creation event. This wedding day “in Cana in Galilee” was to be the most memorable wedding ever. It was the first event in a completely new era.
For this wedding, according to the Divine script and direction, is “where we come in.” This wedding is “where we come in” for a whole new life. This wedding is a definite beginning of a new time, with new prospects and possibilities. Jesus’ “final hour” was “not yet.” But with an act as simple as pouring out a glass of wine, Jesus’ “first hour” is revealed. This wine, pressed together and poured out for others, “revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in Him” (v.11).
As his final hour approached, Jesus would again pour out wine, even as he prepared to pour out his own life for others. In a borrowed room Jesus gathered his disciples to celebrate Passover — a meal that would become their “Last Supper” together. As Jesus shared the bread and wine with his companions he declared, “This is my body, broken for you,” and “This my blood of the covenant, poured out for you.”
Our lives are broken as well. Broken by our fears, our hatreds, our selfishness, our inability to love. There is only one way to bring health and wholeness back into our broken lives. As Jesus showed so clearly at his first hour and in his final hour—our lives must be poured out for others.
You know what happens to wine when it sits around too long. Even the best wine will eventually turn to vinegar — sour and worthless, completely unpalatable.
A life that is not poured out for others,
A life that is not given in service and love to others,
A life lived for self alone,
That life sours.
Life cannot be hoarded or stockpiled for oneself. “Hoarding” is now recognized as a distinct disorder. “Hoarders” cannot bring themselves to get rid of anything. They cannot throw away trash. They cannot recycle old newspapers or magazines. Hoarders cannot part with anything once it comes into their orbit. The hoarders’ whole identity is defined by the growing stacks of stuff that fills their homes.
Here’s the sour part: the fuller the space becomes, the emptier their lives grow. Instead of relationships, a career, a home, a purpose — hoarders have nothing except piles and piles of trash, even if that “trash” is cash.
Pour yourself out. Pour yourself out into your mission. Pour yourself out into your family. Pour yourself out into your church. Pour yourself out into your community. Pour yourself out into the world that God loved so much God sent Jesus to die for it. Pour yourself out as Christ poured out his very life for each of us.
J. D. Salinger’s third book Franny and Zooey (1961) was originally a series of two stories in The New Yorker in 1955 and 1957. There is a scene in the book in which Franny, a 20-year-old theology major, has just come home from college for a long weekend in November 1955. She’s a nervous wreck. Her concerned mother, Bessie Glass, brings her a cup of chicken soup.
Franny, unhappy, impatient, depressed, pushes the steaming cup of soup away.
Franny’s brother Zooey sees this rejection and is indignant.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Franny,” he says.
If it’s religious life you’re studying, you ought to know that you are missing out on every single religious action that’s going on in this house. You don’t have enough sense to drink of cup of consecrated chicken soup, which is the only kind of chicken soup that Mom ever brings to anybody?
What was Franny missing?
The kitchen is the church
The mother is a priest
The soup is a sacrament
The pouring out of the soup is a healing.
“Mom’s chicken soup” is “poured out” as a sacrament to soothe the soul, to quash the queasiness of a depressed daughter.
With that first cup of wine poured out at the Cana wedding and offered to the steward of the banquet, the wedding feast was transformed. Instead of running out of wine, it was suddenly obvious there was a vast amount, an untapped abundance, of the very best wine available. All it took was pouring out that first cup for the floodgates to open. All it took was pouring out that first cup for the water jars to become wine goblets for all.
November 2009 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down. To commemorate that event all over Germany small villages and large cities built their own re-creations of that hated wall. Their celebrations were inspired by the re-enactment of the collapse of the wall at the original wall. A thousand polystyrene blocks of mock wall were set up like gigantic dominos along the central stretch of the old border between East and West Berlin.
When the moment came, Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa gave the first push. Walesa, a devout Roman Catholic who himself gives credit to the Polish shipyards and the Polish Pope John Paul II for the Fall of the Wall, was the leader of the Polish labor union Solidarity whose protests and human rights demands widened the cracks in communism’s foundation. Walesa pushed the first “domino” at that mock wall, and his single action started the chain-reaction, the “domino effect” that continued until the entire edifice collapsed.
As one eye-witness put it:
“All over the city, smaller Wall replicas had been put up in school playgrounds and parks. Children waited impatiently and, at the signal, rushed yelling to knock them over. It was all such a success that Wall-busting might become an annual festival. Invented tradition? Trivializing symbolism? No doubt, but is there a better way to synthesize the taste of sudden freedom than bashing down a barrier?” Neal Ascherson, “They’re Just Not Ready,” London Review of Books, 07 January 2010, 18.
Do you realize this morning that the first domino has already been topped? Do you understand that Christ has toppled the wall of sin and death? Do you also know that the last domino has been guaranteed to fall. It will fall obediently flat.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
What Christ asks us to do with our lives is to jump into the middle of that domino chain reaction, and to add our presence and push to God’s wall-busting mission.
[If you can end you sermon with a “pouring out” animation of this “champagne pyramid,” fantastic. If you can’t find anyone to set this up for you, then end the sermon by telling this story. Or maybe one of your parishioners has this in their wedding video that you could show the congregation. Sparkling Martinelli Cider and/or Sparkling Pomegranate Juice make great substitutes for the champagne.]
One of the most popular features at weddings nowadays is the “champagne pyramid.” A crystal pyramid is created out of stacked levels of glasses. But for all the glasses to be filled with bubbly, only one glass is filled. Only the glass at the top of the pyramid, the “capstone” glass, is poured into.
But when the “capstone” glass is filled to overflowing, the champagne overflows down and over all the other glasses. From one glass, the top glass, all the flutes will be filled. The pouring out of the first makes it possible for all the other glasses to fill the glasses below them.