Sermon for January 10th, 2021

Psalm 8:1-5

1 O Lord, our God, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. 2 Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger. 3 When I consider the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; 4 what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? 5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor.

John 14:8-11

8 Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” 9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.

2 Corinthians 1:3-4

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, 4 who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God.

Faith & Film IX - Rebel Without a Cause

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCIumtsReoM Opening Credits (1:24)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yZrFQUbbG0 Police Station (1:28)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBOcWFBBB04 Tearing Me Apart (1:40)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIMmdsU9n5o Planetarium (4:11)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eselLQax8us Knife Fight (3:21)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDFnYvKl1LU Chicken Run (2:28)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7014C_6ABAg Stand up for Me (2:42)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz7IEGNSzMk House (1:46)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAWzJCHkdcM Not My Father (1:38)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqz5wwsXnUE Jim gives Plato jacket (0:27)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk1MJFwGMjI I got the bullets! (2:31)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhaISNf3pzY Closing Scene (2:17)

Three Minute Film Synopsis

Jim Stark (played by James Dean) is a high school student whose family has recently moved to Los Angeles. The film begins with Jim being arrested for drunkenness and taken into the juvenile division of the local police station. There, he meets two other "juvenile delinquents" his age: Plato (Sal Mineo), who has been brought in for shooting a litter of puppies, and Judy (Natalie Wood), who is in for curfew violation.

All three are eventually released when their parents (or in Plato's case, his nanny) come to get them, and after we get to see the significant dysfunction in each family.

The next day on a school field trip to the local observatory, Jim takes Plato under his wing, and gets into a knife fight with the leader of a neighborhood gang, who also happens to be Judy's boyfriend. Jim disarms the gang leader, who then challenges him to a game of "chicken" later that night, which results in the death of the gang leader when his car goes over a cliff.

Jim, Judy and Plato run away to an abandoned house, where they fantasize about being a family for each other. This is interrupted when some of the remaining gang members find them. Plato, in an attempt to protect his new family, draws a gun he has stolen from his mother, and shoots one of the threatening boys, wounding him. By now the police have been alerted, and Plato escapes, breaking in to the observatory they had visited the previous day, and barricading himself inside. Jim and Judy find him, and talk him into giving himself up to the police outside. Jim takes the gun from Plato, and removes the bullets before giving it back to him. When they finally come outside, Plato panics in the face of the bright lights, and when the police see the gun in his hand, they shoot him.

As Plato dies, Jim and Judy comfort him, grieve, and Jim's parents arrive on the scene. Jim reconciles with his father, introduces his parents to Judy, and they drive away as the sun rises on a new day.

Adolescence and Juvenile Delinquents

In 1944 a psychologist named Robert Lindner wrote a book called "Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath," where he defined a psycopath as someone who is "incapable of exertions for the sake of others." While the book didn't really have a lot to do with the later movie of the same name, I think the film does attempt to make the point that while this emerging class of young people faced real and complex challenges, which could lead to delinquency and even tragedy, they were not, by and large, psychopaths. Despite the disturbing sequence of events in the film, I think it's incredibly optimistic.

Prior to the 1950s there was no such cultural concept as "adolescence." Teenagers were not a recognized group. One simply went from being a child, to being an adult--no ambiguous in between period where childhood and adulthood pulled a young person in both directions simultaneously. The great depression in the 1930s, followed by World War II in the 1940s began to change all that. Furthermore, World War II wreaked havoc on families, something I'll talk about a little later. Suffice it to say that "juvenile delinquency" was a growing concern in America at the time. This film was the first of its kind to address the issue in a realistic and sympathetic manner.

Show Us the Father

This was a reality of post-World War II America: Many fathers died in the war and never came home. Many of those who did were traumatized by war. During the war, many women entered into the workforce for the first time, leaving their children to be cared for by grandparents, and achieving a measure of independence that often resulted in family friction when their husbands returned. World War II wreaked havoc on the family unit, and called into question the very nature of what it meant to be a father in a family.

The Insignificance of Man

After the prologue in the police station, the real action in the film begins--and ends--in the observatory, the planetarium. This is highly symbolic.