Sermon for January 18th, 2015
Contents
Proverbs 25:2-10
2It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out. 3 Like the heavens for height, like the earth for depth, so the mind of kings is unsearchable. 4 Take away the dross from the silver, and the smith has material for a vessel; 5 take away the wicked from the presence of the king, and his throne will be established in righteousness. 6 Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great; 7 for it is better to be told, “Come up here,” than to be put lower in the presence of a noble. What your eyes have seen 8 do not hastily bring into court; for[a] what will you do in the end, when your neighbor puts you to shame? 9 Argue your case with your neighbor directly, and do not disclose another’s secret; 10 or else someone who hears you will bring shame upon you, and your ill repute will have no end.
Faith & Film III: The Imitation Game
- Clip #1: Trailer
Three Minute Film Summary
The Imitation Game is a film about the real-life mathematician and code-breaker, Alan Turing. In his rather short life, Turing is credited with cracking the Nazi code that allowed the allies to finally turn the tide and win World War II. He's also considered to be the father of two very important fields today: Computer Science and Artificial intelligence.
Alan Turing loved puzzles. And so the writer and director of The Imitation Game wanted the film itself to be a puzzle--one that was slightly confusing at first, bouncing around three different time periods in Turing's life, with the pieces only gradually coming together to reveal the larger portrait of a fascinating, enigmatic man.
The film begins near the end of Turing's life, as he is being interrogated by the police for what was then called "gross indecency." Turing was a gay man in an era where it was illegal to be so. From here, the movie jumps back in time to Bletchley Park in World War II era England, where Turing and a select handful of others are assembled in to a top-secret team tasked with the mission of cracking the German enigma machine--a machine that encrypts all German radio communications into 158 quintillion possible combinations. It was widely considered unbreakable at the time.
Periodically, the film jumps even further back in time to Turing's childhood at the Sherborne boarding school, where he is bullied by the other boys for being "an odd duck" until meets (and falls in love with) Christopher Morcum, an older boy, also very intelligent, who shows him compassion and introduces him to cryptography, the study of codes and cyphers. This relationship is cut short when Christopher dies of tuberculosis.
Back in Bletchley Park during the war, the adult Turing has built his own machine to crack the code of the Enigma machine, and he calls his machine "Christopher." After some tense moments where the project is almost shut down, Christopher proves successful. However, Turing and his team quickly realize that if they decrypt and act upon every intercepted Nazi transmission, the Nazis will realize the code is cracked and simply reprogram their machine. So Turing comes up with a mathematical forumla to figure out just how often they can act upon this new intelligence to avoid detection and still win the war. In effect, they take on the Godlike task of deciding who will live and who will die.
When the war is over, they are sworn to secrecy and all documentation about their work is destroyed. Years later, Turing is conviced of gross indecency, sentenced to chemical treatment with estrogen in attempt to "cure" him of his homosexuality, and shortly afterwards commits suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide. Several decades pass before wartime documents are unclassified, revealing Turing to be a war-hero. Though not depicted in the film, just last year the Queen of England officially granted Turing a posthumous pardon in recognition of his contributions and heroism.
Christ Type
There's an old saying that to a hammer everything begins to look like a nail. I suppose that to a Christian everything begins to look like a Christ, and perhaps that's not such a bad thing, to see and recognize the image of our Lord reflected in the face of another, even where it was not intended.
It's true that not all Christ types in film and literature are intentional, and since this was a film based on historical fact I wasn't even looking for a Christ type, to be honest. But there he was. It's hard to ignore a Christ type when it's built into the very name itself. Christopher. Christ-opher.
