Sermons

Reality TV

November 28/04
Advent 1Rev.Dr.Cheri DiNovo
Isaiah 2:1-5 Matthew 24:36-44

The wonderful role that mountains play in biblical lore is special because there’s something about having the view that only standing on top of a mountain will get you. I remember interviewing a Yogi once who said that it was very easy to tell the future, all you had to do was stand higher up than everyone else. For example, if you stood up on a mountain and saw a train coming, you could see around the curve, what was lying on the tracks, what the weather was like, you could see it better than the people in the train.

So really when we hear about holy mountains we hear about God’s vantage point, that global perspective that is higher than everyone else’s perspective. Here is a hope for Christianity for Advent: four resolutions we might want to make as we celebrate hope and joy and peace and love and they roughly correspond to global, national, local and personal. These are the resolutions: 1) That we resolve to take action and that we resolve to motivate others to take action for peace. 2) That we resolve that in the next four weeks that we make great thanksgiving, that we give thanksgiving 3) That we learn to be generous and that our generosity may know no bounds in the next four weeks and finally 4) That we might learn humility, that we might learn that there’s a lot of work that we have to do still and it’s on ourselves.

Don’t know about you but I freely admit that I watch a lot of reality TV. I have watched Jessica and Nick quarrel over dinner. I have watched the Gotti’s get a lesson in etiquette.I have watched Paris Hilton shop. That was exciting. I have watched Survivor from the beginning when it was supposed to be about the best and the brightest and the strongest and gradually degenerated into the best, the brightest and the strongest get voted off first because they’re the greatest threat and finally I freely admit that I watch The Swan.

Now this is truly a diabolical show. In the Swan they take some poor, usually victim of trauma, female who is not wealthy enough to afford dental care or medical because remember this is the United States where they mostly don’t have either. They take them away from their families for 3 months, where they endure hours and hours of surgery and at the end of the 3 months they are revealed not as their former selves but as really good renditions of Las Vegas hostesses. That’s what happens! And they look eerily similar to one another. Something else strange about that show, have you noticed that the plastic surgeons themselves could use a little work. Like there’s this one guy with a really big nose and they both have receding hairlines and yet somehow they don’t go in for the procedures themselves. That makes me a little nervous!

Here’s my prayer for Reality TV. I wish we had more of it. I wish Reality TV would really be about what’s really happening. You know it used to be called the News! We don’t get it much anymore. It used to be called the News. I remember when I was a kid in 1968 watching the Democratic National Convention and as the police baton hit what looked like the television screen shattered. It was that close and personal. I remember seeing, during the Vietnam War, soldiers rounding up villagers. We all remember that picture from the My Lai Massacre. We know what it looked like to be a Vietnam soldier because we got to see what it was all about. We don’t get to see that anymore. Might I suggest a possible new thought for a new television show about Fallujah. Guess what? We’re not seeing what’s going on there either.

Let me read you a few excerpts and believe me they did not appear in our mainstream press. You have to search on the net for them but the characters would be great in Reality TV. From the Independent News: " Lieutenant Malcolm was a good chess player. He looked like any other young US Marines officer: skinny, shaven headed, although with a quite beaky nose. Anyway, you could always pick him out. He’d be the one with the chess board working out moves. I got to know him a little bit, as his bunk was opposite mine (this was an embedded reporter). I’d watch as he gave chess tips to those of his men who hadn’t completely given in to poker or hearts. About five hours into the battle, Lieutenant Malcolm was killed.

I asked another young officer, Lieutenant Bahms, about the massive firepower that the marines would bring to bear on Fallujah, he told me: "If there are civilians in there, they are non-combatants, then by no means do we want to hurt a woman or a child. We’re here to protect them, we’re here to keep them safe and we’re here to turn over Fallujah back to them." Lieutenant Bahms was leading a squad responsible for clearing insurgents from the southern tip of Fallujah. I was by now more than a week into the battle, the longest continuous period of urban, house-to-house fighting since the Vietnam War. Alpha company was holed up in a house right on the edge of the desert. You could really see that the insurgents had nowhere else to go. Every night though, the insurgents would attack.

Half an hour after sunset the first rocket-propelled grenades made yellow streaks across the sky, and exploded just behind us. The marine snipers would try to pick off the insurgents circling around the building. The next morning, we saw their bodies splayed out at odd angles already starting to bloat, the flies thick on their faces. Lieutenant Bahms told me how he’s lost his machine gunner. The gunner had been the first into a house, and been shot and killed by those inside. There was a long battle. For three hours they couldn’t even get the dead marine’s body out. When the marines finally stormed the house, they found three other bodies inside, each holding weapons, all women, one was a boy maybe ten years old. You could tell that Bahms was sickened about this, almost in anguish, "They were shooting at my marines, what could we do?" he asked.

Or this character from Iraq, again moments away be real news. This is Dr. Abbas, 28 years old: "We had five people under treatment and they were killed. We do not know why the clinic was hit. Our colleagues from the Fallujah General Hospital which was furthur out in the city, had talked to the Americans and had told us that they would avoid attacking us. Afterwards myself and other members of staff went from house to house when we could to help people who had been hurt. Many of them died in front of us because we did not have the medicine or facilities to carry out operations. We contacted the doctors at the Fallujah hospital and said how bad the situation was. We wanted them to evacuate the more badly injured. They tried to do that but they said the Americans stopped them"

" One of the things we noticed the most were the numbers of people killed by American snipers. They were not just men but women and some children as well. The youngest one I saw was a four year old boy. Almost all these people had been shot in the head, chest or neck."

Another character in this Reality TV series , Rahim Abdullah, 46, a teacher, said that anyone in the street was regarded by the Americans as the enemy, "I was trying to get to my uncle’s house, waving a piece of white cloth as we had been advised when they started shooting at me. I saw two men being shot. They were just ordinary people. The only way to stay alive was to stay inside and hope your house did not get hit by a shell."

Vietnam is happening right now. We just don’t get to see it. The estimate is that since the fighting in Fallujah started, 45 Americans have been killed and 450 injured and that 1200, 1200 civilians have been killed in just a few weeks.

Now the question we might want to ask ourselves is what can we do about it. We’re in Canada, how can we help? So here is the resolution for hope in the first week of Advent. We know this and other atrocities are being carried out in the name of democracy and far too often, sadly, in the name of Christianity. What can we Christians do to say, "Not in my name you don’t!" 15 minutes a week. If we tell our MPs how delighted we are that Canada ostensibly is not part of the coalition of the willing. If we told our MPs that we are concerned that our CPP investments are going to furthering the killing that is happening right now in Fallujah. If we took 15 minutes to send in those postcards at the back (15 Days and 15 Ways Campaign against Violence against Women) and in 15 minutes a week we could speak to our neighbours about doing the same thing. That’s hope!

Nationally, I want to tell you about a wedding I did on Friday night. This was a wedding right out of Martha Stewart. It was absolutely incredible: five course meal of the most delectable food I think Gil and I have ever eaten at the McLean House, some of you may know that, it’s up at Sunnybrook Estates. Most of the power brokers I would say, of this city were at this wedding. There were bankers, lawyers, and they were politicians. There was an incredible preponderance of United Church folk. Gil and I were sitting next to the clerk of session of Pickering United and his lovely wife who was chair of their Ministry and Personnel Committee. All around us was gaiety and rejoicing. And the parents got up and talked about how happy they were that this wedding was taking place, how they welcomed this new partner into their lives and also of course, because they’re parents to extol the virtues of their offspring. One of their offspring was the Vice President of the Royal Band of Canada, the other offspring, a senior economist and whiz mathematician who also worked for the Royal Bank. At the head table there were many partners in Bay Street law firms and guess what, I looked around that room and I though there is a God and that God resides smack dab in Canada.

I wished that this scene of this incredible wedding could be broadcast by satellite to every American household because both the offspring that got married were two women, beautiful women and I felt so proud, so proud, so happy for that glorious moment. We still live in a land of freedom and civil rights and we truly believe that civil rights should extend to everyone, not just people like us. So we need in the next four weeks together to make this resolution, to give great thanksgiving for the fact that we live in a land of peace and those same MPs that you’re sending those letters to, you make sure they know how proud you are that we have civil rights in this country. How proud you are that they voted on the right side of this issue and trust me there’s only one right side to this issue.

On the local level, the third week of Advent, the week of joy: let’s make a resolution to be generous, for four weeks let’s be astoundingly generous. Here’s an easy way to get there: you heard the Gospel passage, you heard Jesus say any day may be your last day. Any day, said Christ, you could stand before your God and account for your life, any day that could happen to you. Funny, today when I came into Church I was having chest pains and I thought, oh no, may it not be today O Lord, it was just indigestion, just indigestion. Any day could be your last day. What difference would it make if we did think that any day could be our last day? We would not, I warrant, worry about our Visa or Mastercard bills. We would not care. We would not care about the petty little grumbles we have with other people. We would look across the table at our family and we would tell them how much we love them, right away, right now. We would call up friends that we haven’t spoken to in a while, "Thank you just for the gift of friendship." You know we might even decide that we don’t want to go to work that day, we just might want to rejoice or we might find that we want to go back to work with renewed vigour, with excitement and really do our job well. We might decide to do something completely different. We might decide to be astoundingly generous because after all what do we have to lose on this, our last day.

Why don’t we, this Christmas, wrap a little gift and put it under the tree to the environment, to the Church, for people in Africa who have AIDS, why don’t we let our generosity extend beyond our own family and encompass the whole world? It might be our last day so let’s make the most of it.

Finally, the fourth week of Advent is about love and let’s say it’s the week that we get to look at our own person, the person that meets us in the reflection in the mirror each day and first let us look at that person with love, because it’s a beautiful reflection. It’s a reflection made in the image of God and let us be humbled before that image. "Wow", we say looking at the picture of our own face, "Wow, that’s me!". Kids are great for this you know. Kids say, "Wow, that’s me and ain’t I purty!" "Ain’t we purty!" Imagine if you will that Jesus was invited to dinner on this the last day and you were setting the table for Jesus. My mom used to say that we should approach the dinner table and have the manners as if the Queen were coming to dinner. I grew up in a very British household. It never made a lot of sense to me because I always knew that the Queen would never come to dinner at my house. It didn’t make sense even then.

But Jesus just might. So set the table as if Christ might be there and behave as if Christ were there. It would be a lot calmer, a lot more peaceful. And I was thinking about the people from that reality TV series called ‘The News’ that I’d really like to see like that Lieutenant Bahms and that teacher and Dr. Abbas from the hospital. Set a place for them as well. And if they were to look in the mirror at where they were and what they were doing in the light of God and as though it were the last day and it ‘is’ there last day, what would they think and what would they do? What would they choose?

What do we choose? In what way every day do we make the choice for God or apart from God? Let’s look in the mirror with all humility because you know the first week of Advent somewhere in the world, in some occupied country, in some war torn village, in some little shack, some young woman is waking up finding herself very pregnant with only about four weeks to go before she gives birth and she has a huge great smile on her face because there is nothing in her heart but hope and joy and peace and love because she knows just like we know in four weeks, she will give birth to the Messiah.

Amen.
Amen.