Well, I saw the latest rendition of Batman at the theater on Thursday night, and I will say that it was a piece of work.  I liked it OK, but I am not yet willing to use the word “great” which seems to be casually flung around by most others as the movie’s predominate descriptor.  But it was very good albeit very disturbing.  I would have liked it a lot better if: one, I hadn’t paid $12.50 a head to see it at the IMAX where I also threw down 17 bucks for a large popcorn, large drink and an average hot dog, And two, my expectations were so high as this film is being universally touted as the best thing since Citizen Kane.  The critics love it, everyone who has seen it loves it, it was filmed in the stupendous IMAX format, and Health Ledger is being tagged for a probable posthumous Oscar.  It has already made enough money in the first few days to fix social security, so I stood in line for an hour to get a good seat, I shelled out the bucks, and had a good family night out.  But maybe not great movie night out.

            I want to say a few things about the movie, but not to worry, I will not spoil anything for anyone who has an extra 50 bucks (or in my case 79 bucks) laying around and wants to part with it at the theater.  And what I would like to say is this is not your father’s Batman.  I remember watching the old series on TV with Adam West, and Holy Existentialism Batman, this is not the same deal.  I kept waiting for some cartoon “bonks,” “ouches,” and “Zowies,” during the fight sequences, but nary a one covered the silver screen.  This movie is darker than Blanchard Springs Caverns with the lights out, darker than the new shingles on my one week old black roof.  It was so dark that I saw the Aurora Borealis inside the theater.  And it is deep and thought provoking– that is something else I have against it.

            Yes, you heard me right; it bothers me that I have to think about the meaning of the thing.  And here is why: After the movie was over, Eric (my son) said that it was “real” in that it dealt with real issues, big issues of good and evil and the limits of our humanity.  It is about saving graces that surface in evil and fatal flaws in the good.  It is about the reduction of good and evil to its dualistic irreducible minimum.  I guess that it was real except for a man flying through the night sky around Chicago dressed like a big bat supported only by his flimsy cape.  Looks to me like he might as well jumped off the barn with an umbrella from an aerodynamic standpoint.   My response to Eric was big deal; I don’t go to the movies for reality.  I go to the movies to get away.  Ever hear the motto “Escape to the Movies?” If it is that stinking real and causes me an iota of angst, then I want to skip it, I can get that stuff at work or any night on the evening news for free and blow my 79 bucks on something else useless, something that doesn’t slap me in the face with the human predicament and kick me in the gut with how easy it is to fall off your perch.  After all, I like my heroes to avoid ambiguity; I like them with only saving graces and no fatal flaws.  I admire them not only for their superhuman strength but also that they are so darn well adjusted.  Life is clear to them, there are rules that they never ever violate, and they are principled to a fault.  They are OCD about doing the right thing and about putting the needs of others first, even to their own detriment.  And best of all, when people like me would cave emotionally, they shine. 

            Now many people like their religion just that other worldly as well, but oddly enough I prefer mine a little more domestic.  I am interested a little bit in searching for theological meaning in movies.  There are whole websites such as hollywoodjesus.com that feature getting to the theological themes portrayed in movies.  And even though it is ludicrous to suggest that such a fantasy as Batman is reality based, the mythical vehicle of its message helps us to back off and evaluate experience through a genre that helps us see things about the human condition that we would never realize otherwise.  C. S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien taught us that. And that is why the top 10 grossing movies of all time are fantasy based.  They scratch and itch and get us to look at something powerful and obvious that we would otherwise avoid like the plague.  We do escape in such fantasies, and yet we really can never get away from who we are either.  Our shadow does indeed know, and it sticks to us better than duct tape on polished chrome.  Too bad the average church service doesn’t elicit the powerful type of theological reflection of some movies.  We all too often leave places like this just like we walked in.  I walked out of Batman like I had been shaken by my finitude.  I did get a clearer sense of the human condition and our cosmic struggle of good and evil.  The Joker was a powerful Satan Archetype, and maybe Batman had a Messiah complex, who knows.  A friend called the movie “Sophie’s Choice on steroids,” as it was full of lose/lose scenarios where one had to choose the lesser of the two evils.   And while life is hardly ever that dualistic, there are often hard, forced choices we have to make that could compromise who we really are for the sake of expediency or convenience.

            Batman and most of the arch-villains portrayed in the series were the products of tragedy.  In at least one version of the origins of the Joker, he suffered the death of his parents as did young Bruce Wayne.  Both found them to be life transforming, if not life distorting experiences.  However one chose the path of making the world a better place, and one chose the path of confusion and chaos.  One good and one evil.  Both probably are meant to be eerily similar in their stark contrast, and both greatly dysfunctional in most of their relationships.

            They say that life imitates art, and that is surely true as the star of the Batman movie, Christian Bale had his own family dysfunction to deal with this week.  Here is the story (in case you have lived in a cave, uh Batcave this week) as reported by ABC News:

Bale’s unconventional childhood came to light earlier this week when he was arrested by London police for allegedly assaulting his mother and sister. His mother, Jenny, is a former circus performer who worked as a clown and a dancer, riding elephants and introducing circus acts. The Batman star has said he lived in 15 different towns by the time he was 15. He recalled in interviews being part of a circus caravan at age 7, surrounded by beautiful women wearing fishnet stockings and peacock head-dresses. His first kiss, he told a reporter, was with a young Polish trapeze artist called Barta. The current situation Marshall refers to is Bale’s arrest on Tuesday for allegedly assaulting his mother and one of his three older sisters, Sharon. He was grilled by cops for four hours before he was released without being formally charged. Bale said through his lawyers that the allegations were false. It remains unclear what happened between Bale and his mother and sister, but British newspapers are reporting that Bale shoved either his sister or mother during a heated argument in his swanky suite at the five-star Dorchester Hotel on Sunday, the night before the red-carpeted London premiere of “The Dark Knight.”

            So maybe Batman was the product of a dysfunctional family, both the character and the actor, who knows. These early life experiences can really mold us into who we are, and our past can often tenaciously imprison our present in very egregious ways.  So it is with great interest that I share with you the original dysfunctional family from our Lectionary text this morning, the story of Jacob.  And of Leah.  And of Rachel.  And of Laban.  And of Rachael’s and Leah’s maid-servants.  And maybe we will throw Esau, part three, into the mix.  And the tale is too racy for daytime TV; it is a soap opera par excellence.  And it is closest to adult entertainment that one gets in the Holy writ.  I invite you to read the story of Jacob after church (or in the middle of church as it is probably more interesting than anything I can conjure up to say about it) from a modern translation or paraphrase, such as The Message.  Read Genesis 29 through chapter 34, just for kicks and grins.  It will not disappoint.  The great slime ball of a patriarch, AKA Jacob is a pawn in a game between two conniving women.  And you’ve got to love that storyline.

            Now the story goes something like this (I am not making this stuff up, I am not that creative):  Jacob is hot on the trial looking for a wife.  And he must have been an Arkansan.  I know Noah was as he “looked out his Ark-an-saw.”   But these patriarchs were really into marrying their cousins.  Their family tree looked like a stick. And he went out of his way to find a cousin to marry.  And that is not even the weird part of the story.  He laid eyes on Rachel and fell for her immediately. She was very beautiful.  Upon meeting her he kissed her and did what any manly man would do, he broke out in tears.  So she took him home to meet daddy, Laban, who was Jacob’s Uncle.  So he stayed there a while and struck a deal that if he worked seven years for Laban, he could have Rachael’s hand in marriage.  So Laban said, “heck yeah – better for her to marry family than some stranger.”  OK– whatever!  So he works for seven years, then he approaches Laban and said, I have done my part, so give me Rachel. Pony up old man, hand her over.  So Laban says, sure, get to bed, I will send her to your tent tonight so you can consummate the marriage.   So Jacob goes to the tent, and since there was no electricity and it was dark, he slept with the first thing that crawled through the tent door.  Trouble is that when morning came he realized that Laban had pulled the old switcheroo.  It was Rachel’s sister Leah that he had consummated the marriage and slept with.  Now Leah had pretty eyes the text says, but she was no Rachael.  This pretty eye comment might be scriptures cleaned up version that she was so ugly that you would have to hang a pork chop around her neck to get the dog to play with her.  So Jacob hightails it to Laban and said, hey you tricked me you old geezer.  You promised me Rachel.  I worked seven years for her, now I want her, you double crossing cheat.   Laban said cool off son.  Where I come from we don’t marry off the youngest daughter before the oldest. So get off your high horse and go on your honeymoon and when you get back I will throw Rachel in the deal too, just give me seven more years of service.  You can have her as soon as you get back, because it might not be a good idea to send her along on your honeymoon. 

            What goes around comes around.  Jacob who was the quintessential trickster, who double crossed his own brother twice, now is on the receiving end of a double cross and it doesn’t feel so good, especially at the hands of family.  And boy was Laban family; he was his uncle AND father-in-law.  And I’m my own grandpa.  But as we say, the story doesn’t really end here; it just gets gooder and gooder. Jacob didn’t really love Leah, so the Lord intervenes.  He opens her womb and gives her children and causes Rachel to be barren.  This was an attempt by Leah and God to get Jacob to love her. Oh boy.  Hang on, here we go.  She popped out about four sons, named them weird names that served as object lessons of her trying to earn Jacob’s affection, and then she quit having kids.  So, Rachel was jealous and demanded that Jacob give her kids as well, and he said, are you crazy, we have been trying like heck, it ain’t happening.  SO she give Jacob her maid-servant Bilhah and said, well get busy and give me some kids through her so I can one up Leah.  And Bilhah bore him three sons and Rachel said, “hah!  I have won, I have beat my sister, take that you cheap little . . .” oh excuse me, got carried away!  Not to be outdone, Leah takes her maid-servant Zilpah to Jacob and said, “OK, turn about is fair play, get busy and give me some more kids through my servant Zilpah so I can show Rachel a thing or two.”  Jacob seemed eager to oblige in this particular competition, can’t figure out why.  So Zilpah give him a couple of sons and then a very strange set of verses occur in verses 14 and following:

During wheat harvest, Reuben went out into the fields and found some mandrake plants, which he brought to his mother Leah. Rachel said to Leah, “Please give me some of your son’s mandrakes.” But she said to her, “Wasn’t it enough that you took away my husband? Will you take my son’s mandrakes too?”
      “Very well,” Rachel said, “he can sleep with you tonight in return for your son’s mandrakes.” So when Jacob came in from the fields that evening, Leah went out to meet him. “You must sleep with me,” she said. “I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.” So he slept with her that night.

And to make an ongoing saga short, Leah gave birth to a few more sons. Oh yeah, there was one daughter in there to, where did she come from?  And then to vindicate Rachel one more time in this conception tug-of-war, Rachael gave birth to one final son.  And it is a good thing that she did, as his name was Joseph. 

            After all this hard work of procreating, there are some conflicts with Laban, where Jacob takes his part of the wealth and runs, and Laban assembles a posse and chases him down.  It was OK to run off with Laban’s daughters and all those grandkids, the best of the flocks, a truckload of slaves, but he was really mad that Jacob also stole his household gods.  Not sure why he wanted them, but he gave them back and Laban let him go.  Anybody got a problem with having household gods? 

            There is a couple of chapter parenthesis where Jacob and Esau get together again, that is sermon fodder in a couple of weeks. And then a very disturbing chapter 34 where the lone daughter, Dinah is kidnapped and raped by some Shechemites. So Jacob and sons catch up with the culprits and hold their anger back long enough to hear the plea of one Hamor who promised the moon if Jacob would give him Dinah in marriage, even though he kidnapped and raped her.  So they tricked Hamor and his men, said that they would let him marry Dinah, but first they all had to become like Jacob and company as they were unclean.  So they all went through ritual circumcision and this is obviously a practice best done on infants on the 8th day of their birth.  But these men went through with it and were so sore that they were helpless when two of Dinah’s brothers came through their camp that night and cut them to pieces with their swords, looted their cities, took all their stuff, and carried off their women and children. Jacob was worried when he found out what the boys had done, as he feared retaliation.  He basically said what were you thinking?  They said, we were protecting our sister’s reputation, you don’t want people thinking that she was a prostitute do you dear old dad?

            Well, that was a long telling of the Jacob saga, but with the lectionary selectiveness, we would miss all that good stuff.  I mean, Leah and Rachel and Jacob put the “fun” in dysFUNctional.  And this is not just any old sorry lowlife, this is the father of a great nation, God’s chosen one, one entrusted with our own spiritual heritage.

            Draw you own conclusions about the theological significance of such a story, for it too is dark, from start to finish.  The saving graces in our characters take a back seat to their fatal flaws.  There are plenty of the limits of our humanness on display here to tear at our own sense of what is right in a very disturbing way.  Of course to be fair, their behavior may not have been so shocking in the day.  But I tend to think it was.  I mean things like slaughtering and plundering have always been frowned upon, and Yahweh was never to hip on having other gods laying around, so I think the whole thing was evil to the core.  I tend to think that we gloss right over it in our deifying of Jacob, who would be renamed Israel.  That is how important he was to the story of our salvation history.

            But what I would point out today is that family values mean all kinds of things. Who would want the family values of one of the greatest Old Testament characters, Jacob?  None of us would go for that.  There are many lines in the sand broached in our story here.  So whose values are we talking about in this political year when we talk about family values?  I am afraid a lot of the folks in scripture would be left out in the cold.  Thank God Jacob wasn’t gay!  As long as he is not that, we believe that we can see his saving graces, and he would surely be OK in the minds of some.

            So what makes up a dysfunctional family?  Some would say that Warren Jeff and his fundamentalist Mormon compound that was raided in Texas in April where more than 400 children were removed from there homes was one big dysfunctional mess.  Others say it is the free expression of Jeff’s religion, and that he is a martyr for the cause.  But a dysfunctional family might be defined “When problems and circumstances such as parental alcoholism, mental illness, child abuse, or extreme parental rigidity and control interfere with family functioning, the effects on children can sometimes linger long after these children have grown up and left their problem families. Adults raised in dysfunctional families frequently report difficulties forming and maintaining intimate relationships, maintaining positive self-esteem, and trusting others; they fear a loss of control, and deny their feelings and reality” (Vannicelli, M.  Group psychotherapy with adult children of alcoholics: treatment techniques and countertransference. New York: Guilford Press, 1989).

            A dysfunctional family might also be defined as somebody else’s.  Children raised in such settings may feel lonely even in the presence of others; they may have a strong need for approval or be perfectionistic. They often have a hard time owning their feelings or understanding or expressing them very well.  They tend to think in all or nothing terms.  They have trouble with trust and intimacy, and tend to stick to the wrong kind of people that are hurtful to them.  They often can’t relax and have a hard time accepting criticism.  They wrestle with authority, and they believe that they deserve something worse than their lot in life and sooner or later it will catch up with them.  My guess is that Jacob and company let 12 of these kind of kids lose, the founders of the 12 tribes of Israel.

            Well, family values have become a hot button issue in recent presidential elections, although this year it does not seem to be as big.   Maybe a war that won’t end and four dollar gas have changed our priorities a bit.  And of course the family values crowd simply says that we must promote the sanctity of the home and family life as the cornerstone of our national identity.  The problem is, their agenda is often a veiled attempt to discriminate against or harass certain groups who are “not like us.” There are many who have alternative family structures that contain real people who only want to pursue happiness, to be loved and to have meaningful connections, and yet they are made out to be a bigger threat than McCarthy’s Communist.  Why is that?  Because people are threaten by the different.  And we are the most threatened by what lurks in our own shadows, and we are fearful that it might be brought out in the light.

            Even in traditional families, people like Al Mohler of Southern Seminary have criticized young folks who are waiting to get married until they are older, traditional married couples who choose not to have kids as violators of God’s will, and women who don’t stay home or fall into traditional roles as living unbiblical lifestyles.  They pick on good people who refuse to sign on the dotted line of their schema. They use God to threaten others; they use their religion to advocate for their prejudices.  And I don’t know if Jacob invented it, but friends, there is a great deal of dysfunction in the family of God. 

            Family means all kinds of things.  I think that if the gang wars of Little Rock have not taught us anything else it has taught us that truth.  Gangs are alternative families where young people, often neglected and abused, stuck in absentee parent homes, or home filled with drugs and alcohol or simply with parents who don’t give a hoot have found approval, respect, love and acceptance with a group of friends who stick closer than a brother. Gangs provide an alternative family for people who are love hungry on some level.  You see, the other truth is that you can be in traditional relationships and be more dysfunctional than many others in alternative relationships.

            I once met a young man; he was bright, charismatic, very likable and well spoken, we will call him Josh.  He was the husband of one wife, and had a couple of cute kids.  He was also a meth addict as was his wife.  They actually sold it out of their trailer.  Many times he would be stoned in his living room while his wife was “entertaining” customers in the back bedroom.  They totally ignored their baby and preschooler, and another kid that belonged to his wife who lived their and witnessed all the shenanigans as their addiction was a 24/7 job.  They were finally busted, and this young man took the fall to keep his wife out of prison.  He went to jail for eight months and his wife got pregnant with god-knows-who while he was in jail.  While he was in prison, something unexpected happened: this man found Jesus Christ.  He returned home, he witnessed to his wife who told him to go to hell in not nearly as nice words.  She continued to do drugs even though he was clean.  He tried repeatedly to get her to stop for the children’s sake.  He got involved in church and became in demand as a speaker at youth events, while his wife stayed at home and ran the business.  His new found family values and his new spiritual counselors would not allow him to divorce.  I met him when he came into treatment for his addiction for the third time.  He was afraid that he or his wife would die.  He worried about his kids, and her child.  She would still entertain customers in the back room, and his life was a living hell. He was 22 years old.

            So there was a happy ending right? No, not really.  Holy ambiguity Batman!  There is no happy ending in this story for Josh.  He and his wife both came from homes with a lot of abuse and neglect.  The only thing redeeming in his life is that while in jail on intent to deliver charges, he found Jesus.  He said his soul would not rest until his badly addicted wife knew him too.  And even if she never did come around, he would still be with her trying.  The whole 12 step group told him to run away from her as fast as he could or he didn’t have an ice cubes chance in the hot place of making it either.  They called him an enabler, a codependent, a sick-o with stinking thinking. Why do you put up with her we asked.  His only answer was: “I love her.” 

            Go figure– how do you love someone like that?  Why did God stick with Jacob and his promise and all his dysfunctional crap to the end?  It is simple— God loved Jacob.  And I will tell you something else:  that same God loves us regardless of what our values are, even what our family values are.  And that same God calls us and uses us anyway, sometimes in spite of ourselves.  And I don’t know about you, but as a less than perfect human, I find that to be life transforming. And that is why they call it the Good News.  Thanks be to God!  Amen.