Pastor’s Podium

The 80th anniversary of the release of one of my favorite movies, The Wizard of Oz, was celebrated in the last month or so. I enjoy watching films and looking for religious themes. Almost every movie has religious elements — themes of redemption, forgiveness, searching.

For those who are looking, the themes can be blatant. ET comes from outside this world, has the power to heal and restore life — including what seems to be a resurrection — before ascending to the sky and promising “I’ll be right here,” pointing to little Elliot’s heart. There are all sorts of religious themes in movies. I am still working on Robocop, however.

In the Wizard of Oz, on that blackand-white Kansas farm with Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, Dorothy Gale’s life was okay but not completely satisfying.

She had the unsettling feeling that there was something more, something better over the rainbow. Bluebirds, maybe? Sometimes our lives can feel like that. Goals we have worked towards our entire life fail to satisfy; things haven’t turned out like we have planned; we realize we are not really the master of our home or our workplace or even our life. We are discontent. There is a yearning for more.

Because of a fearsome and hard-toignore tornado, Dorothy ends up in Technicolor Oz. Movies and books often depict Utopia, a perfect world that doesn’t turn out to be quite so perfect. As soon as she gets there, a place where she had said she longed to go and appeared to have everything she asked for, she immediately wants to go back. Teenagers!

Dorothy is sent on a journey to Oz and the Wizard down the Yellow Brick Road through a frightening forest. She is threatened by hidden dangers of lions, tigers and bears. We also can face inner demons on our spiritual journey — threats of discouragement, evil, temptation, pride.

Dorothy realized she couldn’t make it on her own — she needed friends and allies, as well as other resources. We, too, need friends and help on our spiritual journey. Our spiritual journey is easier as part of a community.

She meets her first helper, the Scarecrow, a failure at the very thing he was supposed to do. Scare crows — but they make their home on his shoulder.

If he only had a brain.“How can you talk if you don’t have a brain?” Dorothy asks.“Well, some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don’t they?” he answers. Some helper.

After she meets her first helper, the Scarecrow, Dorothy has an encounter with ugly, threatening apple trees. She picks the inviting fruit, but the trees smack her hand and growl at her. They are ugly, mean, grotesque trees and as a young boy, that scene frightened me. Scarecrow mocks them and they throw the apples at them. Dorothy eats one and finds that the apples are unusually sweet. A lesson we can get from the movie is that sometimes sweet apples come from grotesque trees.

We have problems in our lives — sometimes horrible problems. We have severe illnesses, job losses, problems with personal relationships or a general uncertainty of what tomorrow will bring. So what was the apostle Paul thinking when he wrote “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good. (Rom. 8:28) We ask, how does this cancer, this divorce, this storm work for good?

God’s grace often comes to us first as an assault, as a kick in the teeth. Grace is not always gentle at first, but sometimes harsh. We can feel broken as we are forced to face the inescapable nature of our sin, of our inability to make it through a dark and threatening forest without help.

But often in the most unlikely of places, in a hospital bed, in a courtroom, in a nursing home, even in the deformities of our lives that look a lot like complete loss or defeat, there can we find the forgiveness, the life, the hope that Jesus offers. There we can be forced to realize our reliance on God. There we can be given the stunning sweetness of God’s grace. We can bite into it and let the juice run down our chin, savoring completely the warmth of God’s love and acceptance.

Our gracious Savior wants the best for us. He wants us to be with Him in heaven for eternity, and sometimes He uses grotesque trees to provide sweet apples.