We’re not Super Bowlers. We’re old movie fans. While 1.6 million Americans watched the Saints and the Colts kick a funny lookin’ punkin up and down the cow pasture (you really must hear Andy Griffith’s hilarious monologue on football), Barb and I enjoyed a five-buck Hot n’ Ready from Little Caesars and DINNER AT EIGHT. Made in 1933, directed by George Cukor, it featured screen greats John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Marie Dressler, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, and Billie Burke. This was a rare gathering of talent. It was a comedy-drama centered around the plans of Billie Burke’s social-climber to give a dinner party for a famous English couple. Though much talked about, we never see that couple. In fact, they cancel out on Billie to go to Florida. Throughout the day, we follow the lives of the various other couples invited to the soiree, being treated to some of the best acting of the era. We watch Burke throw a hissy fit over the frustration of her plans, see married couple Harlow and Beery trade threats and insults just shy of actual blows, witness the great Barrymore playing essentially himself, a has-been silent-era actor, drinking and blustering through his decline. My favorite of them all was Marie Dressler, playing an aging, but still vivacious former stage actress. She gets some of the best lines, including the last one in the picture, spoken to Jean Harlow. Harlow’s sexy, ditzy platinum blond has startled the older actress, telling her that she’d been reading a book:
Harlow: It’s all about civilization or something. A nutty kind of a book. Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?
Dressler: Oh, my dear, that’s something you need never worry about.
We both enjoyed this one.
Following DINNER, we put in dessert–the Little Rascals. I dozed off on it, but awoke to Barb laughing at the gang–Buckwheat, Alfalfa, and Spanky–in bed together. She had me rewind it so I could watch the scene wherein Buckwheat, who’s using a hot water bottle for his tummy ache, falls asleep. The bottle opens, gushing water onto his bedmates. Each one wakes in turn, wide-eyed, looking back at the other. Nobody had to say what he was thinking. That’s what tickled Barb–and me.
Not long after that we went to bed too. Thankfully, there were no accidents in the night.
My best friend and fellow comics fan, John G. Pierce of Columbus, Ohio, is a long time fan of the Justice Society of America. In an e-mail message entitled “Geoff Johns Gets It Right,” he wrote a very positive review of the last Smallville episode, the long awaited two-hour “event” featuring the JSA. (If anybody’s interested, I’ll post his review.)
I had a big problem with this episode, however, the same basic problem I’ve had with Smallville for a long time, to wit, no Superman–or at least a vastly scaled down, all but unrecognizable version. After nine years, he’s still unable to fly. Instead, he rushed around in a red jacket and blue jeans, since exchanged for a bizarre, black ensemble suggestive of The Matrix and a spaghetti western.
Well. I stood it while other heroes and villains popped up around him with their own powers and costumes relatively intact. I’ve stood it for a long time. But this latest episode, which, I must admit, will surely appeal to fans of the JSA, galled me for the same reason it would appeal to them. I’m talking about how Hawkman, Dr. Fate, and Stripesy (young protege of the late Star Spangled Kid), to say nothing of the rest of their gang, got to be themselves, costumed properly, powered appropriately, even flying up in the sky, while Super… whatever or whoever he is, got to stand around in his long, black Johnny Cash coat and watch!
Those of you who’ve followed comics for a long time, know that, after DC cleaned house in the big event of 1986, the Crisis On Infinite Earths. Herein, the basic mythology of the DC realm–considered by some to be too cluttered and unwieldy–was changed. Whereas Superman had been the first of his kind, the forerunner of all super-types, he now became, well, almost an afterthought. In the new continuity, the JSA now precedes Superman in history. To me, that’s sort of on the order of saying George Washington, the father of our country, commander of our revolutionary forces, first president of the U.S., first showed up in the 1800s.
But I began by talking about an e-mail message from my friend, didn’t I? Here’s a portion of our exchange. John Pierce says,
But really, DC short-shrifted Superman when they threw all the parallel worlds into one
after Crisis. Previously, as you’ll recall, Superman was the first hero to appear (at least
in anything approaching modern times) on every Earth on which he existed. By combining
the various worlds into one, that meant that a Superman-less JSA had operated decades
before Superman made his appearance. And that made no sense. They did their #1
character pretty dirty, I thought.
But — if you accept that in other “realities,” Superman is a latecomer to the super-hero
scene, well, then, this episode fits quite well into that scenario. So, yes, that aspect
bothers me. But it is what it is, and given what it is, I felt that this was a good episode.
But it helps to have my long history with the JSA to appreciate it more, I think.
Much as I love and respect my friend, I’m a Superman man, not a JSA (or JLA) man. I’m bone tired of seeing everybody else in proper costume, even flying, except Superman. This episode just poured on the irony in that regard. As a matter of fact, the more I think about it the more annoyed I become.
So, before I forget what’s written at the top of my blog, “Where preacher and pop culture meet,” before I say something I’ll regret, let’s just press “Publish” and go on to something else, shall we?
You yourselves are all the endorsement we need. Your very lives are a letter that anyone can read by just looking at you. Christ himself wrote it – not with ink, but with God’s living Spirit; not chiseled into stone, but carved into human lives – and we publish it…you, written by Christ himself for God, are our letter of recommendation (2 Corinthians 3:3-4 The Message paraphrase).
Hear what he’s saying? Some people spend a lifetime sweating and straining to be successful, famous, to be somebody but they never learn where true significance lies. Paul is telling us we find significance as we touch the lives of people. We write on their lives, leaving an indelible mark.
Paul wasn’t a celebrity, but he knew about celebrity. He knew about credentials and symbols and status. He’d had it—or he was well on his way to getting it–before he chucked it all for Jesus:
Phil 3: 5-7 …circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ (English Standard Version)
Naturally, the items on Paul’s list were things the Jewish culture he grew up in valued. You may not be Jewish, but you’ve got a list of status symbols too. Yet Paul was granted the grace to see what was most important–people! The people God loves, the people Christ died for, the people, dead in sins and trespasses, laying like cold stone, waiting for somebody to write warm life into their lives by the power of the Spirit of the living God!
In simple terms, that means those children we brought into this world are worth every bit of time and effort it takes to raise them properly. What’s more, other people’s kids are worth our time as well. Then there are the aged. I’m amazed at how much the generations are alike. I’ve been around enough of them to know an 80-year-old suffers from some of the same fears and anxieties people decades younger have. He has the same questions about God, Heaven, and Hell a teen-ager does. He has some of the same desires. But we only know that if we spend time with him.
In the end, the world won’t know or care whether we lived or died. But people will. Go, then. Go among them, touch them, speak to them, listen to them. Let the Spirit of God guide your hand as you make the only mark that lasts.
What makes us significant? What makes us somebody? What’s the rubber stamp that declares us fit, competent, sufficient, qualified, endorsed, commended? Is it a bigger house, a better job, a diamond ring? A TV show, a website? A girlfriend, a husband?
For years, I believed my rubber stamp was a bigger church. That, after all, is the stamp of approval on an American pastor. How I’ve worried about it, walked the floor over it, got tears in my ears from lying on my back on bed and crying over it. Don’t get me started!
You’ve got your target; I’ve got mine. We shoot and we shoot. Some of us shoot, the arrow flies and–bulls-eye! We’re on TV. We’ve got our own deep-fried pickle franchise. We’ve found significance in a Significant Other. Others of us shoot and shoot and—aw, shoot!—keep falling short.
“Here in this urn
From Malaber
The ashes lie
of Jonathan Barr
He sought a higher life
Afar
And traveled home
In a jar”
On the tombstone of Jonathan Barr, Nantucket, Rhode Island
We may wonder if that’s where we’re headed: the sum total of our life…ashes contained in a jar just so big.
I imagine it galled the apostle Paul, the contempt that certain people had for him, the jar they’d put him into. He didn’t have a letter of recommendation. His resume wasn’t formidable; it was laughable. The Corinthians were still laughing about that time he was saved from an irate public official by being lowered over the city wall in a basket (probably called him a basket case).
But what Paul lacked in celebrity, he made up for in significance. His credentials weren’t written in pen and ink. He didn’t need a series of videos to endorse him. His credentials were human lives.
SUPERMAN: SECRET ORIGINS #4. Aided by Gary Franks’ fine artwork (its realism reminds me of the work of the great draftsman, Curt Swan), Geoff Johns continues a thoughtful reboot of the S-man’s origin. What drags it down in my opinion is Lex Luthor. I’m getting rather tired of him, or of the interpretation of him that’s held sway for the last 20+ years–a symbol of American corporate greed. To his credit, Johns has recovered a bit of the old renegade scientist, but I don’t understand why the guy has to be the Yin to Superman’s Yang, the shadow that hangs over the city (Lois: “He owns over half of Metropolis.” Luthor: ”Seventy-eight percent, actually”). I liked him better when he wore prison grays and stayed there until he decided to invent some gizmo to allow him to escape for a while:
Guard: Luthor’s invented a giant egg beater! He’s drilled underneath the wall! Our bullets just bounce off!
Warden: You must be yolking!
I agree with my best friend and fellow fan, John Pierce, who says DC should declare a one year moratorium on any use of the character. He’s been way overdone.
SUPERMAN-BATMAN: PUBLIC ENEMIES. The direct-to-DVD has been out a while. I’d taken my own sweet time getting to it because I expected it to be mostly a slug-fest. I hate it when I’m right! Allison Mack, a wonderful actress, is greatly underused as Power Girl. (I wonder if it was a trial for Mack, who’s been saying “Luther” on Smallville all these years, to have to change it to “Lu-thor”?) There’s some clever dialogue, but, what I found most interesting in both the comic book and the animated version, the interaction between Superman and Batman, gets short shrift in the latter: gotta hurry up and get to the next fight scene! Those scenes, by the way, make Batman seem as super as Superman. There was some pleasure in hearing the voices of the original triumvirate, Tim Daly, Kevin Conroy, and Clancy Brown. Still, I was ready for this one to be over long before it was over.
My wife, the lovely and talented Barbara Robinson, who lost interest earlier than I did, would recommend most any issue of Woman’s Day over it.
SMALLVILLE, the return thereof. Oliver meets the Dark Archer and explores his dark side darkly in the darkness. In other words, business-as-usual. Oliver Queen is merely a stand-in for Bruce Wayne, the tortured, in-and-out kind of hero whose main function is to clash with the sunnier Super…, uh, whatever he is. None dare call him Superman. I found it amusing that Clark, who spent most of this episode in jeans and jacket, even bothered to appear in what passes for his costume these days–a cross between garbs out of the Matrix and a spaghetti western.
I’m looking forward to next week’s Big Event, featuring the JSA. But I’m also expecting to be somewhat disappointed. This show is far too leaky a vessel to hold much hope, no matter how much they hype it. Nevertheless, we watched the Legion re-run afterwards. Even though it was just last year that this one appeared, so much has changed. It was kind of jarring to see Lana again, to say nothing of Doomsday and Henry James Olsen (who, evidently, was never the “real” Jimmy Olsen). It just goes to show how the show’s a mishmash of DC concepts and characters, none of which are considered worth much time and effort to make matter. Some of the Legion dialogue was cute: “Hey, Kal, where’s your cape?” etc. I guess they went throwback because it was written by Geoff Johns, who wrote the JSA script.
It isn’t that I don’t think that the sinner won’t have to answer to God. I believe that those who have done evil will rise to face judgment (John 5:29) in terms of condemnation. Further, it may well be that the unrighteous dead now suffer conscious torment, ala Luke 16, and may face more of such beyond the Final Judgment. The scriptures allow room for this sort of thinking. And I certainly believe what the writer of Hebrews said, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). What I don’t believe in is “destruction” that never actually destroys, punishment that is never satisfied, and death that never truly dies.
Some might counter that this is merely accomodating the spirit of the age, going soft on Hell. They might say that, without the threat of endless torment, people will simply grow harder towards God. They might say that the battle for minds is difficult enough without discarding a major weapon. I counter by asking, “What if the ‘weapon’ isn’t a true weapon, but a fabrication?’ I would also ask whether one can think of a fate worse than to be finally and forever discarded? You want my definition of Hell? It’s the place where wasted humanity lies in a smoking heap of blackened desires — the supreme tragedy. Does not this…this imbecility of ultimate non-being spur us toward greater gospel effort?
I find that, for me, it does.
“As a child, Robert Ingersoll heard a preacher proclaim the doctrine that God subjects sinners to unending torment in hell. Ingersoll decided that if God was like that, then he hated Him. Later he wrote of this belief that it “makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go.” There are substantial moral and logical difficulties in believing in a God who tortures His enemies forever. Like Ingersoll, thousands of thinking men have turned away from such a God.”—Tim Crosby in Ministry
Since I very much agree with Leroy Garrett, who once edited a fine little journal called Restoration Review, I’m going to let him do the heavy lifting here. You can find his excellent article, “Is Hell Fire Endless?” at
http://www.leroygarrett.org/restorationreview/article.htm?rr32_09a.htm8328981990
Look under Author Index
I grew up on Hell. The preachers of my youth weren’t afraid to broach the subject. They preached sin black, Hell hot, and Heaven…well, if it wasn’t a sure destination, it was at least there and something to shoot for. A favorite passage was Matthew 25:41: “Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Although they mentioned the fact that the eternal fire wasn’t made for man, nevertheless, if men didn’t repent, they would surely go there–and suffer forever. Although I don’t remember specific descriptions of the tortures of Hell, early on I got the idea that Hell was awful, painful, and, above all, endless.
One of the things that always bothered me about that understanding of Hell was the gap between our belief in it and our efforts to warn sinners of it. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that if what those old preachers said Hell was–awful, painful, endless–was true, then we all ought to be out busting our humps telling people about it. If Hell really is that bad, then it’s something to lie awake nights over, isn’t it? It’s a belief that should either make you go crazy or turn you into a tireless evangelist. Yet I, who held that belief, wasn’t either one.
I suppose it was this cognitive dissonance, the irony of believing one thing and doing (or not doing) another, that got me to studying the matter. I read a couple books on the subject, which I recommend to you: Four Views on Hell (Zondervan) and The Fire that Consumes (Verdict Publications). The first presents four understandings of the doctrine of final punishment: Literal, Metaphorical, Purgatorial, and Conditional. The latter view refers to “conditional immortality,” i.e., that human beings don’t possess an immortal soul and will not then suffer endlessly beyond the grave. It is this view to which Edward Fudge, who wrote the second book, conforms. Fudge is no mean scholar who’s done his homework on the subject. Among his conclusions is one most pertinent to the verse I quoted above, Matthew 25:41, specifically, to the word “eternal.” After exhaustive scriptural study, Fudge concludes that it doesn’t always mean “of endless duration.”
I’m not going to recount what Fudge wrote here. You can find the book and read it yourself. What I want to say here is that his thinking on the subject helped me with something I’d been puzzling over for a long time, to wit, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” It seems to me that, if something’s vitally important then it’s that important all the time, not just now and again. If a human being’s choice is Endless Bliss or Endless Torment, then surely the Author of Salvation would’ve wanted it stated clearly throughout His word. Here, however, in what’s arguably the most famous capsule of the Gospel, the choice isn’t stated in such terms. The choice is either eternal life or…perishing. Same goes for what Paul wrote in another verse always on the lips of an evangelist, Romans 6:23, “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life…” If Hell is endless torment, endless burning, or, to soften the blow, just endless regret; if it’s endless something, why, oh, why don’t John or Paul say so? They say the choice is between life and death. Life and death, not life and living death or life and endless punishment or life and burning hell. Life and death!
Check out my new article, “A Place for Heroes?” posted at Breakpoint.org.
http://www.breakpoint.org/features-columns/articles/14246-a-place-for-heroes
At the theatre: EXTREME MEASURES. A father (Brendan Fraser) goes into a partnership with an eccentric scientist (Harrison Ford) in an effort to find a cure for his two children. The kids are afflicted with Pompe disease, a form of muscular dystrophy. The partnership between Ford and Fraser is uneasy at best. Fraser’s character is a businessman; he’s the money-raiser for the operation. Ford is an anti-social researcher who’s uneasy outside his lab. Both men are driven to succeed, one for his children, the other for himself. Both are extremists. Somehow they manage, however, to surmount their differences and achieve their goal: creating a vital enzyme which victims of this disease can’t produce in their own bodies. This is one of Harrison Ford’s best performances in years. Fraser is completely believable as the determined dad.
On DVD: IMAGINE THAT. Eddie Murphy plays a high-powered executive whose little daughter carries a blanket through which she communicates with imaginary friends. Murphy’s character reminds me of the type Ray Stevens sang about, “You’d better take care of business, Mr. Businessman!” He’s divorced, emotionally distant from his little girl, and impatient with her fantasy life–until, that is, he discovers that her “imaginary” friends know things about the world of high finance! They possess knowledge that he uses, leading to a string of stunning successes. The remainder of the film is predictable, but I found it more entertaining than the first 30 minutes or so which are rather tedious. The ending is sentimental, as I figured it would be, but I don’t mind a dose of sap now and then.
On VHS: THE BIG COUNTRY. This big ol’ William Wyler western is the sort of film about which you can affirm, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore!” More’s the pity. It stars Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, and Jean Simmons. Peck is at the top of his game as the quiet ship captain who finds himself sailing an ocean of prairie populated by cowboys and cowgirls fierce as any shark in the Pacific. Because he doesn’t feel the need to prove himself to his spoiled fiancee, the rancher’s daughter, he’s dismissed as a coward. But Greg Peck wore the mantle of Hero effortlessly. At times, the movie drags a bit. Then are scenes that might seem to go on too long–e.g., Peck is thrown again and again from the saddle before he teaches “Ol Thunder” who’s boss; a seemingly endless fist fight with Charlton Heston’s surly Top Hand (“All I can say, McKay, is, you take a hell of a long time to say goodbye”). But director Wyler evidently thought that a Big Country was big enough for big, long set pieces. Along the way, there are funny bits and clever dialogue. The climax is as gripping as anything done before or since. Burl Ives sinks his teeth into his role as a rival rancher, one of his best performances. The invigorating score, by Jerome Moss, is well worth the Oscar nomination it received. Yup, this’un’s a good ‘un.
