Difference between revisions of "Sermon for January 29th, 2017"
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It's worth noting that while Rowling was raised, and is, an Anglican, she wrote the first book in the Harry Potter series while attending a Presbyterian church, where her oldest daughter was baptised. | It's worth noting that while Rowling was raised, and is, an Anglican, she wrote the first book in the Harry Potter series while attending a Presbyterian church, where her oldest daughter was baptised. | ||
| − | + | Because of all this, when I heard that Rowling was going to continue the story with a series of prequels, I wondered if she would also continue her prolific use of Christian symbols, themes, and messages in this series, too. I was not disappointed. | |
====All Creatures of Our God and King==== | ====All Creatures of Our God and King==== | ||
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http://youtube.com/watch?v=ze8WQlMtJWE Bowtruckle | http://youtube.com/watch?v=ze8WQlMtJWE Bowtruckle | ||
Revision as of 15:36, 28 January 2017
Contents
Proverbs 12:10
The righteous know the needs of their animals, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.
Luke 11:33-36
33 “No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar,[a] but on the lampstand so that those who enter may see the light. 34 Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light; but if it is not healthy, your body is full of darkness. 35 Therefore consider whether the light in you is not darkness. 36 If then your whole body is full of light, with no part of it in darkness, it will be as full of light as when a lamp gives you light with its rays.”
2 Corinthians 4:16-18
16 So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. 17 For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, 18 because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.
Faith & Film V: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Three Minute Film Summary
This film (like all of JK Rowling's stories) has a tremendously complicated plot line. My first few attempts at a summary were almost as long as the movie itself, so I'm borrowing (and modifying) language from a very concise summary I found online from Nick Riganas.
Holding a mysterious leather suitcase in his hand, Newt Scamander, a young activist wizard from England, visits New York while he is on his way to Arizona. Inside his expanding suitcase hides a wide array of diverse, magical creatures that exist among us, ranging from tiny, twig-like ones, to majestic and humongous ones.
Film Clip #2: Welcome to New York
It is the middle of the 20s (70 years before the events in the later Harry Potter series) and times are troubled. The fragile equilibrium of secrecy between the unseen world of wizards and the ordinary or "No-Maj" people is maintained by an organization called the Magical Congress of the United States. That balance is at risk of being unsettled, as the the voices against wizardry keep growing with daily protests led by puritanical evangelist Mary Lou Barebone and (on the opposite extreme) fuelled by increasing disasters ascribed to a dark wizard, Gellert Grindelwald.
In a twist of fate, Newt's precious suitcase gets switched with an ordinary one, belonging to an ordinary (non-magical) New Yorker, Jacob Kowalski.
Newt Scamander is arrested for being an "unregistered wizard" by Tina Goldstein, an auror (which is the wizard version of a detective) for the Magical Congress. With Newt's suitcase in the wrong hands, several creatures manage to escape to unknown directions. Before long, this situation catches the attention of Tina's boss, Senior Auror Percival Graves, who targets both Tina and Newt amid panic caused by an invisible, devastating and utterly unpredictable menace that wreaks havoc in New York's 5th Avenue.
And this time, I'm not going to give the ending away.
The Wizarding World of JK Rowling
Fantastic Beasts is written by Joanne Rowling, set in the same world as her more famous Harry Potter series of novels and films. This film is a prequel to those stories. When the first Harry Potter novel came out in the late 1990s, conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christian groups were instantly up in arms. It was, on the surface, a book about a school for witches and wizards, and there is a famous prohibition in the Old Testament against "witchcraft." Many churches and religious groups demanded for the books to be banned from schools and libraries, some led book burnings, and all of them failed to recognize that the Harry Potter series is, at its core, based on the gospel message of Christianity. How very embarassing for Christians not to even recognize their own story, only slightly hidden in medieval Christian symbols and allegory.
By the seventh book in the series (there were SEVEN books!) it was kind of obvious, but for those of you who still haven't read them, suffice it to say that in every novel, the main character experiences a death and rebirth in the presence of a sybmol of Christ. In that last book, two verses from the Bible show up, and Rowling has said they epitomise the entire series. 1 Corinthians 25:26, "The last enemy to be defeated is death itself," and Matthew 6:21, "Where your treasure is, there your heart is also."
When asked why she hadn't been more open early on about the influence of her faith in the stories, Rowling said that she had been afraid that if people knew, they would have figured out the end to the series long before she got to the last book. And while (ironically) so many Christians didn't figure it out, a few did, and predicted the series' end long before it was written. In one interview, Rowling was asked if she, as the author of children's books about magic, believed in magic herself. She said, "I don't believe in magic, I believe in God."
It's worth noting that while Rowling was raised, and is, an Anglican, she wrote the first book in the Harry Potter series while attending a Presbyterian church, where her oldest daughter was baptised.
Because of all this, when I heard that Rowling was going to continue the story with a series of prequels, I wondered if she would also continue her prolific use of Christian symbols, themes, and messages in this series, too. I was not disappointed.
All Creatures of Our God and King
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ze8WQlMtJWE Bowtruckle
Belief Obscured
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bATM-Z2wILw Not one of Grindelwald's Fanatics
