Pastor Darren: So we start our uh movie series here.
Pastor Darren: I am uh grateful that uh being a guy who really enjoys movies and enjoys the cultural um, I guess I'll say relevance of movies and the stories that our our culture culture uh tells itself and describes itself with, defines itself with.
Pastor Darren: I've always enjoyed that.
Pastor Darren: And uh so we did something last summer where we did uh uh a movie series and people really enjoyed it then.
Pastor Darren: In fact, do we still remember talking about Superman?
Pastor Darren: We had a little fun with that one.
Pastor Darren: It was interesting.
Pastor Darren: I was learning things about Superman as well.
Pastor Darren: Uh so I thought, well, this will be a kind of a neat change of pace uh uh as we move through the Christian year.
Pastor Darren: Uh so we're dealing with Hamnet.
Pastor Darren: Uh and uh we saw some of you had the chance to go see it.
Pastor Darren: Uh in large part, it's a film about grieving.
Pastor Darren: And it raises the question: is there a more provocative time in life spiritually than the time of grieving?
Pastor Darren: That is a time where we're we're faced with our mortality, we're faced with the the limits of our power and our capacities, our uh ability to be able to change things.
Pastor Darren: And thinking specifically of those times when we've lost a loved one, there's no opportunity to fix it, to make it better.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Our limitations in that time of grieving are so apparent to us at these times.
Pastor Darren: And I use the word provocative here to say provocative time instead of challenging time because it's also the time where we tend to do the most growing, largely because we're we're left with these questions, right?
Pastor Darren: We feel super vulnerable, we feel super powerless, but in the process of working through our grief and working through those questions, we reconfigure how we view our lives and our life and how we view ourselves, and then we emerged, hopefully, changed, having found a way to make sense of the world and how it works and our limitations in the world.
Pastor Darren: So let me give you a quick summary of Hamnet.
Pastor Darren: It's a story of two people who are making peace with the death of their young son.
Pastor Darren: Now, I give you an official warning of spoilage right now.
Pastor Darren: It is very difficult to talk about a film without having some spoilage in front of you.
Pastor Darren: All right, and especially in this film, which I will attest, it really lands the ending.
Pastor Darren: It really does a strong job on the ending.
Pastor Darren: And so it's hard to not spoil it a little bit, but it is the story of William Shakespeare, and probably even more so about his wife, Agnes.
Pastor Darren: Now, some of you who remember your sophomore English class, you probably uh remember that wait a minute, Shakespeare, he married Anne Hathaway.
Pastor Darren: You should recognize that there's 500 years in between Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway.
Pastor Darren: He couldn't possibly have married her.
Pastor Darren: I guess that's a cultural joke.
Pastor Darren: Some of you will get it.
Pastor Darren: No, that her her she also uh went by another name.
Pastor Darren: The woman that Shakespeare married, she also went by Agnes.
Pastor Darren: And in this particular film, they use that name.
Pastor Darren: I bring this up partly because the two-name thing is in play with Hamnet also.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Agnes and Shakespeare's son, his name is Hamnet, but he would also go by Hamlet.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: So again, if you paid attention in sophomore English class, you're probably starting to do the math just a little bit, and you know that there's a connection between this film, Hamnet, and the play Hamlet, that Shakespeare wrote.
Pastor Darren: So now I got to catch you up on Hamlet because I'm guessing you weren't listening all that much in sophomore English class.
Pastor Darren: Am I right?
Pastor Darren: Maybe I wasn't listening.
Pastor Darren: You know, Taylor was, but she's smarter than the rest of us.
Pastor Darren: So Hamlet is this uh young Danish ruler.
Pastor Darren: His father is killed, but that father returns as a ghost to let uh that his son know that the person who killed him was his brother Claudius.
Pastor Darren: And Claudius now has usurped the crown, even married Hamlet's mother.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: So you can see the setup is pretty complex.
Pastor Darren: So it's totally guilty of totally shortening the story, so much so to be really insulting.
Pastor Darren: Hamlet develops a plan to expose this truth.
Pastor Darren: And as with all Shakespearean tragedies, everybody dies in the end.
Pastor Darren: That's kind of how it goes with Shakespeare.
Pastor Darren: No, with all apologies, one of potentially our greatest play, our greatest drama.
Pastor Darren: Uh, but I hear with I'm here with other priorities, so I want to jump in.
Pastor Darren: But the fact that Hamlet was written so soon after Hamnet's death, it led this author, her name is Megan O'Farrell, to explore the potential influence of that death on the play itself.
Pastor Darren: And then the director, Chloe Zhao, uh, she did the same thing and put that book to film.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: So following the thinking and comparing real life, right, Shakespeare and Agnes' life, to uh the original play, uh, we can see some comparisons.
Pastor Darren: These are the comparisons that she found or the lines that she drew.
Pastor Darren: Uh, instead of the reality, which is that William Shakespeare and Agnes' son Hamlet dies, in Hamlet he has the father dying and then reappearing to his living son Hamlet.
Pastor Darren: And instead of this difficult and vulnerable death of a young son, which is what they experience just in real life, now in Hamlet, we have this heroic son, the heroic son that's going to avenge the death, uh, the tragic death, the unjust death of his father.
Pastor Darren: Maybe this is the son he was teaching him to be, the son he would have become, the son that Shakespeare would have thought he might be.
Pastor Darren: So we also have a picture of this son Hamnet.
Pastor Darren: Just to give you a sense of, you know, they set us up pretty good.
Pastor Darren: Can you imagine this little guy passing away?
Pastor Darren: They'll tug out the heartstrings just a little bit.
Pastor Darren: So my uh my mantra for these sermons on these movies that we often uh they often deal with religious and theological concepts uh in our cultural stories.
Pastor Darren: So these stories that are part of what we tell each other, what we go and see and pay $20 to see.
Pastor Darren: Uh we often deal with religious and theological concepts in those movies, even when we don't always know that we are doing it.
Pastor Darren: And in this case, I think it lay in the approach to a loss and to grieving.
Pastor Darren: I think that is a lot of where some of the similar questions are happening between this movie and this book and stories of faith that we wrestle with as Christians.
Pastor Darren: In the film, there's this really powerful scene with Agnes.
Pastor Darren: She's just learned that her daughter has survived her illness, probably from the plague, we don't know for sure.
Pastor Darren: But her son has not survived it.
Pastor Darren: And she lets out this guttural cry.
Pastor Darren: The cry for all parents, for all mothers who've lost their child.
Pastor Darren: It's a super moving scene in the film, and it's bringing to light the grief, the pain that comes in this moment.
Pastor Darren: Our scriptures do the same thing oftentimes.
Pastor Darren: Psalm 13, which we're using today, is often attributed to King David, right?
Pastor Darren: But in many ways, these are the words of the Jewish people, not just King David.
Pastor Darren: They are the words of a people who have had times of abundance.
Pastor Darren: And they are people who have been completely oppressed at other times.
Pastor Darren: So they've known high times in life, and they've known really, really low times, times at which the bulk of their community was moved away or taken from them.
Pastor Darren: What I want to do is read for you again Psalm 13, but I'm going to invite you at this time to think about your low time, your difficult time, and allow maybe these words from Psalm 13 to speak into that dark time in your life.
Pastor Darren: How long?
Pastor Darren: To hide your face from me.
Pastor Darren: How long must I bear pain in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
Pastor Darren: How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Pastor Darren: Consider and answer me, O Lord my God, give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death.
Pastor Darren: And my enemy will say, I have prevailed.
Pastor Darren: My foes will rejoice because I am shaken.
Pastor Darren: But I trusted in your steadfast love.
Pastor Darren: My heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
Pastor Darren: I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.
Pastor Darren: Can you hear yourself dealing with your pain in those words?
Pastor Darren: Those times when you were looking for answers when there weren't any.
Pastor Darren: Shakespeare himself, he had challenges in dealing with his grief, especially in the film.
Pastor Darren: We learn early on that Shakespeare isn't comfortable with simply talking.
Pastor Darren: It's in the courtship with Agnes.
Pastor Darren: And he even says it, he doesn't know really how to just talk to people.
Pastor Darren: But he likes to tell stories.
Pastor Darren: This plays out just a little bit later as the couple has to deal with this tragic death of this son.
Pastor Darren: Their marriage is really challenged in their grief.
Pastor Darren: Shakespeare already has to live and work in London, in the city, whereas the family's in Stratford.
Pastor Darren: So Shakespeare's not there with the family.
Pastor Darren: He isn't there when Hamnet dies.
Pastor Darren: And he isn't there when it comes time to grieve, to walk that journey.
Pastor Darren: In a way, he's not talking about or even processing the grief.
Pastor Darren: And for Agnes, this becomes too much.
Pastor Darren: She finally goes to the city to confront him.
Pastor Darren: She arrives and sees a poster for this play that her husband had put together, was directing.
Pastor Darren: And believe it or not, it had the title of her young son Hamlet, which infuriates her.
Pastor Darren: This man who doesn't seem to be processing his grief with her at all, but now he'll put their son's name on walls and doors so people might come.
Pastor Darren: So she goes looking for him.
Pastor Darren: She finds herself at the stage of the play itself.
Pastor Darren: She crawls all the way to the front of where all the people are, and she begins to watch this play.
Pastor Darren: And who comes out but Bill Shakespeare, William Shakespeare himself, as the father, the fallen father, the ghost, who was there to talk to his young son.
Pastor Darren: It's a scene in which we can see him live out the relationship with the son he had hoped to have.
Pastor Darren: And it's in this moment that she realizes, as we do as we watch the movie, that this is his way of grieving.
Pastor Darren: This is his way of processing.
Pastor Darren: He's going to deal with this grief, but it's going to be in story.
Pastor Darren: We don't know a lot about the full true history of all of it, but in this film, in this story, Shakespeare's method for grieving is in his creativity, in his storytelling.
Pastor Darren: I land us with uh a passage from a gospel, the gospel of John, chapter 12, verse 24.
Pastor Darren: Because our Christian story, it's often grounded in our redemption and in new life, right?
Pastor Darren: This is a cornerstone of the Christian understanding of how life works and how God works.
Pastor Darren: We believe in new life, we believe in redemption.
Pastor Darren: And it's a passage where Jesus is telling his disciples that he is soon to die.
Pastor Darren: And he wants to convey the importance of this death, that it's actually even quite necessary.
Pastor Darren: That importance probably varies for a lot of Christianity.
Pastor Darren: There's a lot of different Christian understandings of why that death is important.
Pastor Darren: Some would say he has to die in order to be resurrected.
Pastor Darren: This is our evidence of Jesus' identity.
Pastor Darren: Others would say that that sacrificial death actually adjusted, changed the way God deals with us.
Pastor Darren: Now we're going to be grace-based, we're going to be forgiveness-based.
Pastor Darren: Others would say God doesn't really change in that way.
Pastor Darren: But the death was necessary because it's what gave the story, the message, the weight, the weight that it needed to be able to spread to the rest of the world, so that 2,000 years later you would all end up in the United Methodist Church of Westlake Village talking about it.
Pastor Darren: Still, others, they might say his death conveyed the depth of Jesus' love for us, a depth that inspires us to respond with our own love for others, with our own sacrificial understanding for life and the beauty of life.
Pastor Darren: Whatever the specific understanding is, Jesus wants us to understand the importance of his death.
Pastor Darren: He has to die.
Pastor Darren: In getting that message across, he says, Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain.
Pastor Darren: But if it dies, it bears much fruit.
Pastor Darren: The story of this film is that Shakespeare himself is able to find life amidst death.
Pastor Darren: We wouldn't want to over-appreciate, to lionize death or pain, but we do want to recognize the possibility that amidst death with God we can find new life.
Pastor Darren: We can find fruit.
Pastor Darren: For Shakespeare, it was in the creation of possibly our greatest dramatic play of all time.
Pastor Darren: For others, it might lay in some other creation, some other artistic Endeavour uh endeavor, some project that we work on, some change in our heart or in our spirit, some new life that is created in other lives, that fruit will look different for different people.
Pastor Darren: But it is our invitation today, not only from Scripture, but I believe from this film, as a people of resurrection, the invitation is to work with God to find hope amidst difficulty, to find hope amidst pain, to find hope even amidst death.
Pastor Darren: Amen.