tl;dr: A looser summer talk about the power of story in Lars and the Real Girl
I gave this short talk at my church where we don't have the full and more formal services in the summer. Instead, we have shorter talks where a different person each week answers a themed question and then there is time for discussion. This is less formal (and shorter) than a typical sermon. The question this year was about a story that helped us learn something about God, the world, or people different than yourself.
Scripture Text
Transcript
The famous film critic Roger Ebert once said:
We are all born with a certain package. We are who we are. Where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We are kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people, find out what makes them tick, what they care about. For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it's a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it's like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us." There's a movie podcast I listen to that references this idea often, as the "empathy machine" or the need for "empathetic imagination.
We don't truly know what it is like to be someone else, but stories, movies or otherwise, can be a great tool to help build those empathetic imagination muscles.
There is some scientific backing to this. There are a couple things we know happen when we are engaged with a story.
First, it wraps us up in it. It allows us to forget about our experiences for a time to imagine what it is like to be somebody else. We have to get ourselves out of the way a bit.
As we do that, mirror neurons kick in. When we see somebody else doing something, our mirror neurons fire as if we are doing it. That helps create empathy understanding them, as well as allows us to learn from watching others. Studies have shown that those neurons are firing when encountering a story. It is most powerful with personal stories with somebody you already know, but it is also true in mediated stories like watching a movie.
Combined, this can give us a bigger picture of the world, setting aside my experience to imagine somebody else's. Stories can allow us to learn in ways that we wouldn't learn in a lecture.
Lars and the Real Girl
Maybe the biggest example of this in my life is the movie Lars and the Real Girl. If you haven't seen it, I think you should, but I will recap the main plot.
Lars lives in the converted garage on the property with his brother Gus and sister-in-law Karin. He's very isolated and has some trauma.
One day he tells Gus and Karin that he has a girlfriend he met online, and she is coming to visit. Their excitement quickly fades when Bianca arrives and is a lifelike sex doll that Lars is treating as a human being. This could be a setup for a lot of punching down jokes at Lars' expense, but the movie doesn't take that easy route.
Instead, Gus and Karin are advised by a psychologist that they should play along because Lars needs this to work out some things. But they aren't the only ones who play along. The entire small-town community gets on board. It becomes a story of how the community rallies around Lars and Bianca, by entering his reality, by showing radical empathy. They start inviting Bianca to things; she joins the PTA and volunteers at the hospital and is routinely out with the community one way or another. Lars starts accepting more opportunities to be engaged in the community as well. All of this helps Lars heal.
That community includes Gus and Karin, Lars' coworkers, and the church.
It is the church that gets a small but pivotal scene. Karin and Gus have gone to the church bible study group to enlist their help after hearing the advice of the psychologist.
The conversation captures a tension between wanting to hold to the obvious truth of the situation and doing what is uncomfortable but might be best for Lars, at least according to the psychologist. One man compares Lars to the story of worshipping the golden calf and declares that young people these days have no willpower. I found a script online that includes a few more lines to that effect. One member of the group worries that if they play along, they are encouraging bad habits. There is a "shouldn't expose the children" line, referring to letting Bianca come to church. But then, one of the characters exclaims "what's the big deal" and starts naming things a little strange or unhealthy or maybe even harmful about family members of others in the group that they've all been able to set aside that judgemental voice out of love for them. Many of us have been in conversations something like this at some point in our lives, dealing with that kind of tension.
Eventually they all turn to the pastor, who has been silent so far. He simply says, as the last line of the scene "the question is, as always, what would Jesus do?"
That's a line that could easily read as an empty cliché slogan. I grew up in the period when the WWJD was commoditized on bracelets and everything else. But in the context of the movie, as the final word of this serious debate, without even explicitly answering the question, it is surprisingly effective. In the next scene, Bianca is at church, and everybody is trying to play along, some better at it than others. After that there is little question about how they should be responding.
I first watched this as a seminary student. I was scheduled to give a short talk as part of a chapel service the following week, but it was Friday night, and I was too tired to come up with an idea. I decided to give myself a break to watch what I thought was a light-hearted comedy.
Instead, I got a beautiful story that provided me exactly what I needed for that chapel talk which became about the healing power of community. I actually won a cash award at the end of the year for "evangelism" which I was confused by, so I had to ask and I found out it was because of that chapel talk. That maybe tells you all you need to know about how little anybody talked about evangelism at my seminary, but I was not complaining about the cash award.
More importantly, it was a breakthrough for me.
I have many positive things to say about my church growing up, and other communities through university undergrad. Many of the people there showed the same kind of compassion we see in this movie. But the most important thing in the teaching and in the songs was a particular understanding of the story of Jesus. A starting point for that understanding was that God is out there detached from us being the perfect judge of all right and wrong.
For a lot of reasons, that image had been crumbling for me for the previous few years and I had been doing a lot of reconstructing how I saw God. From the character we see in Jesus, I started seeing a lot more a God who enters humanity, including suffering with us. We could say that is a God who shows a radical empathy. That's a wildly different starting point. And here's the important part for the movie: when you think of God primarily as judge, detached out there, that's how you think you should be and how the church should be, too. The most important thing in any discussion is that you are clear about what is right and what is wrong. That's one half of that tension in that pivotal scene. In practice I experienced a lot of loving kind community in churches. But the concept of church was still largely talked about through the lens of learning to understand God better and to help others understand God better. It was about being right and correcting others who are not.
I also was vaguely aware that there were other kinds of churches that seemed to be a different extreme, refusing to pass any kind of claim on truth, just being a nice social club, respectable middle-class people who already have their life perfect and would have a really hard time ever dealing with an addict or even somebody in dirty clothes coming straight from a night shift. That version didn't appeal to me either, where there didn't seem to be much substance.
I came into watching this movie with an understanding of God that was a lot healthier, with this kind of radical incarnational empathy, but my understanding of the church hadn't caught up.
This movie, and especially this scene, hit at the exact right time in my life. Suddenly I could imagine a church, or community more widely, acting with this kind of radical empathy that I had begun to be able to see in the Jesus story. I probably had heard somebody say that is what the church should be like, but I couldn't really imagine it and it was not sinking in. But now I had seen it in story form and it suddenly clicked. They don't deny reality in the pursuit of being nice above all else. They still clearly understand what's really going on. But they realize that love for Lars means setting aside that judgement and entering his reality. The goal isn't to be nice. The goal isn't to be right. The goal is to embody that radical empathy we see in Jesus that brings about real healing.
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