First Presbyterian Church
Spoiler Alert
Sermon for May 21, 2006
by Pastor Susan Barnes

Listen for the word of God as it is found in John 15:9-17

9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. 11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

12 "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

 

Anthem

Listen for the word of God as it is found in 1 John 5:1-6.

1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ 1 has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. 2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. 3 For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome,

4 for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.

5 Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? 6 This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is the truth.

I called my sermon spoiler alert so that you would know I'm going to talk about The DaVinci Code . If you'd like to see the movie or read the book and be surprised, feel free to skip the sermon this morning. I'm not going to give the ending away, but I am going to talk about the book. The DaVinci Code is a rip-roaring good read. I listened to it on CD, and it was hard to stop listening and go eat, or sleep, or answer the phone.

Bart Ehrman, religious studies professor said about The DaVinci Code “The story itself is fast-paced, intricate, compelling, spellbinding. And the historical moments in which the past—especially Christian antiquity—is discussed are integrated so well into the fiction that it seems to take almost no effort at all to pick up information about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the emperor Constantine, the formation of the Christian Bible and the non-canonical gospels. What a terrific way to learn history – completely painless!”

There's been a lot of controversy surrounding the book. If you like suspense novels and codes and history, you'll probably enjoy the book and maybe even the movie. I enjoyed it. I heard that director Ron Howard said, “If you think the movie will bother you don't see the movie.” And I absolutely agree. No one has to see the movie or read the book. It doesn't mean you're close-minded or judgmental. It just means you don't want to see the movie or read the book. If you do see the movie, it doesn't mean you're a bad Christian who believes everything you read or hear. Pastors and scholars I've read have said that the book has encouraged people to read the Bible, ask about ancient manuscripts, and learn more about the church. As I walked into the movie yesterday, I saw a friend who said The DaVinci Code made her start reading the Bible again. I think that's a good thing.

Sometimes in order to enjoy a movie or a book, you have to suspend belief. Like in science fiction, where objects materialize out of thin air when the replicators are on-line. Or in Harry Potter, where children can wave wands at locked doors to make them open. If you're going to worry about the physics of replicators or wands, you're not going to be able to enjoy the story. Good writers concoct some sort of plausible explanation that makes the impossible easier to swallow.

What we know about the real world interferes with our enjoyment of a movie. Some of you might remember seeing old movie westerns where wagon wheels moved funny. As a wagon speeds up in the movie, the wheel goes from an apparent slow forward motion, to apparently stopping, to apparently going backwards.  It's because movies are a succession of snapshots shown quickly.  When the wagon wheel is going slightly slower than the movie frames are going, the wheel seems to go slowly backwards.  When the wheel moves exactly as fast as the frames do, they appear to stop. As the wheel speeds up, it goes forward and looks normal. 1 One semi-conductor website called this phenomenon “aliasing.” 2

There are also things called continuity errors in movies. I first learned about continuity errors when I heard a trivia show ask “How many hubcaps did Steve McQueen's Dodge Charger lose in the 1968 movie Bullitt?” The answer was five. 3I know it's hard to believe, but most critics agree that was the first really exciting car chase scene in a movie. So exciting, most people didn't bother counting the hubcaps falling off.

Maybe you're sharp enough to notice in a movie when dessert bowls were full, then empty, then full during a dinner conversation? 4 Or maybe you saw the old Star Trek episode where the captain wears an eye-catching gold shirt entering the turbo lift but wears a green shirt when he exits. 5 Or in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, “when Harry and Ron are in the Dark Forest and the spiders begin to attack, Hagrid's dog gets in the car twice” 6 without getting out in between.

Or maybe you saw Jurassic Park and noticed that during a conversation about all the electricity having gone out, so the characters have to eat the ice cream before it melts , the ceiling fans are still working fine. Or that in National Treasure, as a character clings to a dusty 200-year-old staircase he just discovered, we see a round and shiny nail being “pulled out of the wood. If it was really 200 years old, it would be square and rusty. 7 Those are called movie “mistakes.”

Director Garry Marshall's movies always have lots of continuity errors in them. He said that matching is for sissies. 8 He always goes for the best performance, thinking that the audience will focus on the story more than the scenery.

Usually that's true. But I remember looking forward to seeing Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I saw it after my trip to the Middle East. In the movie, Indiana discovers some huge buildings carved into sandstone cliffs and finds treasure inside. The problem was those sandstone buildings are Jordan's most well-known tourist attraction: Petra. Pictures of Petra were on the Jordanian money I used and on the draperies in my hotel room. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief that this ancient city was ever lost and waiting for Indiana to find it. I was especially irritated because I wanted to enjoy the movie, but I couldn't because my firsthand knowledge got in the way.

The first I heard of The DaVinci Code was a review complaining that the author Dan Brown referred to Leonardo daVinci as ‘daVinci,' instead of ‘Leonardo.' Leonardo was from the town of Vinci; daVinci is not his last name. That's why in the Dewey Decimal system in the library all biographies of Leonardo daVinci are under 921 L. “L” for Leonardo. So this was my first clue that the book wasn't all about accuracy.

The copy of the book has a page titled “Facts” before the prologue, where Brown writes “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”

It turns out that page is part of the fiction that Dan Brown wrote. So people who know about art, architecture, history, secret societies, and ancient documents might find their knowledge prevents them from enjoying the movie and the book the way knowing about Petra got in the way for me in the Indiana Jones film.

In my conversations with people who have read the book, they are surprised to learn that Brown made some factual errors. Some people get defensive, saying “it's only fiction.” Scholar Bart Ehrman says “Maybe there's not real harm in that. But for those of us who spend our lives studying …history, it can grate a bit on the nerves.” 9 When a book is a bestseller for years and it contains some mistakes about the Bible, I feel obligated to say something about it.

Here's just a few examples of simple mistakes:

The Dead Sea Scrolls aren't Christian documents, they're Jewish.

Tamar in the Bible wasn't a temple prostitute.

The gospel of Philip wasn't written in Aramaic.

The Nag Hamaddi texts aren't scrolls; they're leather bound books from the fourth century CE. The books are Christian in that they speak of Jesus. But they aren't narratives or history, but collections of sayings. Scholar Elaine Pagels said these texts “imply that you can go off on your own and discover the divine within yourself. You might not need the church. You might not need a priest. You might just go meditate or have your own vision.” 10That would have fit right in with Dan Brown's conspiracy plot, but he doesn't use it. Instead, he has a character saying that the church destroyed the gospels that spoke of Christ's human traits and exalted the gospels that made him godlike. 11 The problem is that when we read the gnostic gospels, we can see they emphasize Jesus' divinity over his humanity. The gospels in the new testament speak much more about his humanity than the gnostic gospels do.

There're other mistakes I didn't know until I read Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind the DaVinci Code. Brown describes one-way streets going the wrong way in Paris. He has jasmine smelling in April when they don't bloom in Paris until July; he tries to find significance in the 666 panes of glass that make up I.M. Pei's pyramid at the Louvre-- he calls 666 Satan's number; the problem is there's 698 glass panes in the pyramid.

None of the gospels, gnostic or otherwise, say Jesus was married, not to Mary Magdalene nor anyone else. It doesn't mean he absolutely wasn't married, just that its not stated anywhere.

There is one line in the Gospel of Philip that says “The companion of the [gap in the manuscript] Mary Magdalene [gap] more than [gap] the disciples [gap] kiss her [gap] on her [gap]. 12 A character in the book reads this line from the gospel of Philip “And the companion of the savior is Mary Magdalene. Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth.” So Brown filled in the gaps in the manuscripts to fit his story, much like the children did with the Madlibs today.

And even if Christ did kiss Mary Magdalene, there didn't have to be anything romantic or sexual about it; the disciples greeted each other with kisses, and early Christians are called to greet one another with a holy kiss 13.

I think Dan Brown could easily have kept to the facts and still had a rip-roaring good story; I know I would have enjoyed it more. But he focused on plot instead of accuracy.

If we can't trust him to get some basic historical facts right that don't matter to the plot, can we trust his theory about Jesus and Mary Magdalene that matters very much to the plot? Is he so good at anagrams and puzzles and laying out clues that these inaccuracies are his inside joke on his readers that we can't trust him at all to tell us the truth about anything?

I'm not disturbed by Brown's claim that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married, and that Jesus fathered a child. I know that bothers a lot of people who think that sort of speculation is sacrilegious or heretical. It doesn't bother me at all. I know it's just speculation and it's been around for hundreds of years.

What disturbs me much more is his emphasis that the church is all about lies and secrecy. For me, the church is about love and hospitality.

In the book, the search for the Holy Grail is about searching for the genetic descendants of Jesus, as if those genetic descendants would be more special than anyone else; that they would have some sort of secret the rest of us aren't privy to.

It reminded me of the sneetches that we heard about last week from the youth during children's time. The sneetches that had stars on the bellies were better than the sneetches that had “no stars upon thars.”

I think of the biblical passages where Jesus says “those who do the will of my father in heaven are my mother and brothers and sisters.” He called the disciples his brothers. He said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. He emphasized that our loyalty needed to be to God, not to our patriarchal family when he said “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life.” And then he also said “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

Family lineage wasn't important to Jesus. Your status and class didn't confer special blessings on you; it might mean you had more responsibility, but it did not mean you were better beloved by God.

Some say that the holy grail is an answer to people's spiritual problems, that it symbolizes people's spiritual quests. But the grail legends came out of the practice of selling relics to Christian pilgrims. There's nothing about the grail in the Bible. Religious relics are still big business. Churches and religious orders have fought over the bones of saints. Much of The DaVinci Code is about such fights.

But for me, the quest is simple: Love God. Love the children of God. Obey God's commandments to love one another.

That love sometimes is a lot of work. It means we practice hospitality and wipe down tables and do dishes and hold committee meetings and volunteer to teach Sunday School or we serve on session or deacons or sing in the choir or serve on a committee. We don't complain behind people's backs, we offer to help them. It means we make the time to talk to an old man who is suffering from dementia, to listen to a young man who doesn't speak clearly; or we offer to help a struggling family. We hold our children accountable for their behavior and correct them and praise them. We acknowledge whenever they do something amazing, like put on Youth Sunday. We commit to being a part of this church community, where according to our mission statement, “In God's eyes, none is greater, none is less.”

But there's a lot of joy in figuring out how to do it together. Amen.

1 www.stat.unc.edu/faculty/marron/DataAnalyses/movement_anal.html

2 www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/appnote_number/928

3www.imdb.com/title/tt0062765/goofs and www.answers.com/topic/bullitt . Actually, the real answer now is “more than four” because the movie used 2 different Dodge Charges and the hubcaps changed positions because they filmed the chase scene over three weeks.

4Pretty Woman, www.us.imdb.com/title/tt0100405/goofs

5 “Charlie X,” www. moonlily.com/moonblog/?p=3

6 www.us.imdb.com/title/tt0295297/goofs

7 www.moviemistakes.com/film4621

8 Marhsall, Garry, Wake Me When It's Funny, chapter title

9 Ehrman, Bart, Truth and Fiction in the DaVinci Code , p. xvi.

10 Burstein, Dan, ed. Secrets of the Code, p. 137.

11 Brown, Dan. The DaVinci Code, chapter 55.

12 Gospel of Phillip, 63.34-35.

13 Matthew 26:49, Luke 7:38-45, Acts 20:37, Romans 16:16, 1 Corinthians 16:16, 2 Corinthians 16:20, 1 Thessalonians 5:26, 1 Peter 5:14.