A Hollywood Ending

A Hollywood Ending

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 25, 2015

Scripture: Job 42:1-6, 10-17

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We all know about Hollywood endings, right? The hero defeats the villain. The handsome leading man gets the beautiful leading woman. The forces of evil are vanquished by some great spy or action hero who has no qualms about killing all sorts of people in the cause of justice and righteousness. The people he kills are, of course, always purely and only evil, so that makes his violence not just acceptable but good. Someday I’ll talk to you about the myth of redemptive violence, but not today. Today I just ask you to remember all the cowboy movies in which the cowboys—always white of course—defeat the Indians, with the Indians defeat always depicted as a good thing, never mind historical reality. The rancher and the sheriff always capture the cattle rustler. Or the cops and robbers movies in which crime never pays in the end. Or the James Bond movies in which our virtuous hero defeats the forces of evil, sometimes years ago in the form of the Soviets or in the form of some totally unbelievable super-villain who, rather than just shoot Bond, James Bond, devises Rube Goldberg-like schemes and devices for killing him that he can always outsmart. Whether the movie is a romance, a comedy, or an action flick the good guys always win and the bad guys always lose. That’s the Hollywood ending. It’s made the Hollywood studios billions of dollars over the years. It has made matinee idols out of actors and heartthrobs out of handsome actors and beautiful actresses. We do love our Hollywood endings.

Hollywood didn’t invent the Hollywood ending. In fact, having stories end the way we want with the good characters at least living happily ever after is a very ancient literary device. We find it even in some of the very ancient stories in the Bible. Ruth marries Boaz. Esther saves the Hebrew people from genocide. And Job gets restored and lives happily ever after. We just heard that one. Scholars aren’t at all sure that it was part of the original story of Job, but never mind. It’s how the story of Job as we now have it ends.

You remember Job, don’t you? He’s a perfectly righteous man who has never sinned, yet a character called Satan gets God to let Satan inflict unspeakable loss and pain on Job, just about everything a human being can suffer short of dying, to see if Job’s faith, strong during the good times, would hold up during the bad times. Job loses all of his many possessions. His children are killed. He comes down with a painful skin disease. For Job it’s disaster after disaster, and he doesn’t deserve any of it. He questions God, because he, like most everyone else in ancient Israel, thought that God inflicted pain and loss only on the bad guys, not on the righteous; and Job is nothing but righteous. Throughout the book of Job three of his so-called friends keep telling him that he must have sinned, that he should confess, and then God would cause the suffering to cease. Job continues to protest is innocence. At the end of the book God appears to Job and says basically I’m God, you’re not, deal with it. God is here calling nonsense on Deuteronomy and what it claims to know is the way God works in the world, which I think is the main point of the book. Then we come to the passages at the end of the book that we just heard. Job gets it, at least sort of. He says to God “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.” He repents of having questioned God, which again I think is the main point of the book, that we are to accept what God does no matter what and not question it.

Then comes the Hollywood ending. The text says that the Lord “made [Job] prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before.” He fathers a new family consisting of seven sons and three daughters, all of them of course beautiful. He lived to a very old age and died “old and full of years,” living to an old age being considered a great blessing in ancient Israel. The text might as well have him riding off into the sunset on a white charger, wearing a white hat of course. For all but these last chapters of the book Job suffers horribly, but surely we can’t have a story end that way, can we? Well, somebody, either the story’s original author or some later editor, decided that we can’t. So Job gets restored. I’ve never understood how having new children could really make up for the deaths of earlier children in one’s life, but never mind. Hollywood ending it is. Job lives happily ever after.

Now, maybe I’m a little weird here, but I don’t like the Hollywood ending that somebody in the book of Job. It doesn’t ring true to the story. It really sounds to me like somebody couldn’t take Job’s unjust suffering so tried to make things all right for him in the end. I think the story would be a lot more powerful, and a lot truer to actual life, if it ended with Job’s confession, with the first of our two readings this morning. I don’t like the Hollywood ending, but I get why it’s there. We all like Hollywood endings. We want our heroes and heroines to live happily ever after. There’s a reason why fairy tales end that way, and there’s a reason why so many Hollywood movies end that way. Hollywood endings sell, and for good reason. We all like it when things go well for people in life. We have all known bad times in our lives, and we don’t like them. We don’t want to read about them. We don’t want to see them on the screen. I get it about Hollywood endings.

I get it, but here’s the thing. Life isn’t like that. The priests who wrote the book of Deuteronomy wanted us to believe that faithfulness to God produces wellbeing in this life. They simply were wrong about that. I wish they hadn’t been, but they were. No life, no matter how faithful, is free from pain, grief, loss, and death. We are humans not gods, and living nothing but Hollywood endings just isn’t there for us. We wish it were. I wish it were, but it isn’t. Maybe we like Hollywood endings so much because we all know at some level how rare they are in real life. Just take a look at your own lives for a moment. Have they always been happy? Have they always been prosperous? Has there never been loss? Have you never known grief? If so you are lucky. I almost said blessed there, but I think lucky is a better word. If you haven’t experienced sadness, want, loss, or grief just wait. The only way to avoid them in this life is to die before you experience them, and that isn’t such a great option either. Life can be full of joy, comfort, caring, and love too, and I hope that your lives are and have been. But those blessed things certainly aren’t all that life is about. Most of us don’t get to live a Hollywood ending for the entire course of our lives.

There is nonetheless a way that traditional Christianity sort of promises us a Hollywood ending. Christians have long believed that we all have an eternal soul that survives out physical deaths. Christians have long believed that at least some of those souls are destined for a blissful eternity in heaven. Certainly there are passages in the Bible that at least suggest that reality. It is a very comforting notion, and there certainly is good reason to believe that it is true. I find great comfort in it myself. I have had occasions when I have felt the continuing presence of people I have loved who have died, so the survival of some aspect of our personhood beyond death seems an established reality for me. Our being destined for eternal bliss after death sounds a bit like a Hollywood ending to lives that are often filled with pain and grief. That’s no reason not to believe in the reality of life after death, although perhaps it makes it a bit easier for atheistic cynics to make fun of Christian belief. So be it. I’ll take that belief over atheistic cynicism any day.

Yet I think that there is another way that we can understand how God relates to us and we relate to God beyond belief in an eternal life of the soul. This way of thinking about it is really good news, and it sounds a bit less like a Hollywood ending. It doesn’t promise us freedom from pain. It doesn’t promise us freedom from illness, loss, grief, heartache, or death. We all know that those things are part of life. No, this way of thinking about God gives us something that is actually deeper and more powerful than our vain hope for a Hollywood ending in everything that happens.

See, God isn’t in our lives to dictate outcomes or to prevent everything we think is bad. Rather, God is in our lives to be a sustaining, loving, forgiving, comforting presence with us in everything that happens. God is with us, holding us in unfailing arms of love in everything that happens. That, my friends, is a true Hollywood ending. It is a true Hollywood ending because it makes everything all right in a most profound, existential way. It is a true Hollywood ending because it tells us that whatever pain we feel, whatever grief we experience, even our unavoidable death are not the ultimate truth. They are not our eternal fate. And it tells us that we never face them alone. We always face them with God. Yes, that reality is not always easy to perceive. At the end even Jesus didn’t perceive it when he cried from the cross My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Yet even in that moment of deepest existential despair for Jesus, God was with him in his feeling of Godforsakenness. God is with us too, no matter how hard it may be for us to know that profound truth.

When my first wife was dying, on one of her worst days, she had vision. She saw herself and me held safely in God’s hands. After she died we put on her grave marker the words “Safe in God’s hands.” That’s our Hollywood ending. That’s the living and the dying truth of our lives with God. So will all our losses in life be restored the way the ending of Job says Jobs were? No. That’s not what God has for us. But we can know in the deepest recesses our souls that we are safe in God’s hands no matter what. Existentially safe. Eternally safe. Safe in a way Hollywood can never show us. Safe in the way Jesus shows us. Thanks be to God! Amen.