Pastor Darren: So again, we continue in our series here dealing with uh some of the uh Academy Award nominees for Best Picture.
Pastor Darren: I choose those in particular because I think, well, if they're getting nominated, uh, they're being considered kind of relevant and worth talking about.
Pastor Darren: So I hope that you are having that same feeling as we go through things.
Pastor Darren: Um this one, one battle after another.
Pastor Darren: It's the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson.
Pastor Darren: Do we have film people in the crowd, Paul Thomas Anderson fans?
Pastor Darren: It's me and Paul.
Pastor Darren: And Paul only likes them because they share a name.
Pastor Darren: That is it.
Pastor Darren: Oh, all right.
Pastor Darren: So nobody's seen Magnolia?
Pastor Darren: There will be blood?
Pastor Darren: Phantom Thread?
Pastor Darren: All right, so those are some of his films.
Pastor Darren: What I find interesting about him is he really digs into some uh uh unique questions about what it means to be a human being, and he finds these situations where that those questions get really played out, and uh they're intense movies generally, very human but very intense movies.
Pastor Darren: Uh some of the uh, well, the title itself in this case of this film, One Battle After Another.
Pastor Darren: I I see two levels going on there.
Pastor Darren: There's the one that phrase, oh, one battle after another, right?
Pastor Darren: We say that when life is challenging, one battle after another.
Pastor Darren: But then there's this other subtext where I think we're being invited to look at uh some of our human tendency towards extremism and some of the problems about that, a life that ends up as one battle after another.
Pastor Darren: So uh this is a film about a group called the French 75.
Pastor Darren: It's a resistance movement focused largely on immigration issues.
Pastor Darren: Uh so uh, you know, somewhat relevant for today.
Pastor Darren: I'll I'll give you uh uh one picture I wanted to show you here, just so you get a uh a sense of who the main characters are.
Pastor Darren: This is Leonardo DiCaprio and Tiana Taylor, Bob and Porfidia Beverly Hills.
Pastor Darren: I'm sure her Christian name given to her by her parents at one point, as he he says sarcastically.
Pastor Darren: Uh, but these are the two characters, kind of the main ones that get things started.
Pastor Darren: They are together in this resistance movement called French 75, and we learn very early on their tactics are very aggressive and very violent.
Pastor Darren: Uh then we've also got on the other side Sean Penn playing a character named Lockjaw, right?
Pastor Darren: And you can see him, uh, and if you're a Sean Penn fan, like I am, uh really good actor, and he really gets lost in a role.
Pastor Darren: In this case, he plays a really bad guy uh as part of the military response to this resistance.
Pastor Darren: We learn that his tactics are also aggressive and violent.
Pastor Darren: Uh, and we learn that uh he's got a willingness to be manipulative in a way that can be problematic.
Pastor Darren: He probably has some mental illness that that plays out, but we won't dig too deep into that.
Pastor Darren: Together with these two factions, they form this extremist tension that drives the whole plot.
Pastor Darren: It drives the whole theme of the movie.
Pastor Darren: And what's interesting is the film really doesn't take sides in this this whole debate.
Pastor Darren: It mostly is talking about the inevitable end of such an extremist confrontation and conflict.
Pastor Darren: So ultimately, story-wise, spoiler alert, perfidia gets manipulated into giving up her movement and allies uh to the other side, and the resistance ends up having to flee and to go further underground in order to avoid being caught and andor killed.
Pastor Darren: Uh so 16 years later, 16 years we find uh Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Bob.
Pastor Darren: Uh he is now Paul in his new identity, and he is also with their daughter Willa, who's now 16.
Pastor Darren: Uh so we're 16 years into the future, and this is Willa, by the way, young actress that's kind of making her her way in things.
Pastor Darren: Chase Infinity.
Pastor Darren: Is that a cool name?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: That sounds like such a metaphorical name, almost like something from a story, not the actress's real name.
Pastor Darren: Chase Infinity.
Pastor Darren: Uh but at this point, 16 years later, they're living in this kind of listless, purposeless state.
Pastor Darren: Bob is now Paul, as I said, and he's lost any sense of any passion or ambition for what he's going to do in life.
Pastor Darren: He's pretty much drug addled.
Pastor Darren: Uh the daughter, Willa, has become uh kind of disillusioned, disillusioned with life and uh especially with this father from what he's become.
Pastor Darren: Meanwhile, Lockjaw, right, the other, the military response, he's risen in power, risen to become a strong power.
Pastor Darren: And not only that, he has found Bob and Willa.
Pastor Darren: So the back half of the film is this chase, you know, a lot of adventurous chase scenes.
Pastor Darren: Uh, we call it a long-playing final confrontation.
Pastor Darren: Uh, but what happens in the journey of this confrontation is Bob ends up kind of finding himself again, maybe not to that extremist end where he starts the film at, but he starts realizing what he believes in again, finding some courage, finding a willingness to fight for things that he believes in, especially his daughter.
Pastor Darren: And Willa, she uh it's kind of thrown uh her well, her world gets turned on its on end because she only kind of knew who she was and what had happened uh just enough to be able to stay safe.
Pastor Darren: So when they come a calling for her, all of a sudden she realizes she is not who she thought she was.
Pastor Darren: And so her challenge then becomes to ask herself, well, then who am I?
Pastor Darren: And this struggle to kind of fill that blank spot out and become who she really is.
Pastor Darren: Um so without getting too deep into the film, it seems to have this subtext about the dangers of extremism.
Pastor Darren: And what we find in the midst of the battle is that there's a lot of damage that's done, and it's largely done to those who drive the extremism, but tragically also to the middle of those and those who are near to those extremists.
Pastor Darren: Um, but there is a sign of hope at the end.
Pastor Darren: Spoiler alert again.
Pastor Darren: Willis has aligned herself with some more legal forms of protest and resistance, uh, and she may have learned how to navigate her sense of social justice and what she is able to fight for.
Pastor Darren: Uh so there's your kind of quick run-through.
Pastor Darren: It's a very complex movie.
Pastor Darren: So uh again, it's provocative.
Pastor Darren: It won't be for everybody, but for those who enjoy it, there's a lot of layers.
Pastor Darren: But uh we get to the point of thinking, okay, well, what is there for us as Christians?
Pastor Darren: How do we look at this story and find something to uh uh get a hold of and see how it speaks to us?
Pastor Darren: Uh and to me, it came largely from this way of uh this message about claiming ourselves and our beliefs, even in a time of trial.
Pastor Darren: By Bob, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, he abandons what he believes in because they have to go further underground.
Pastor Darren: It all blew up on them.
Pastor Darren: His uh wife had turned them all in.
Pastor Darren: Uh, and so he just becomes this shell of something that no longer is living who he believes he is.
Pastor Darren: Willa, again, who had little idea who she is, she has to uh basically take this journey.
Pastor Darren: She's forced to take this journey of figuring out who she is and claiming her own life and her own story in the midst of all of that.
Pastor Darren: So I wonder um if the message for us, what we can grab onto here, is that in difficult times, we're invited, we're encouraged to do the same.
Pastor Darren: We're invited and encouraged to remind ourselves of who we are and what we believe.
Pastor Darren: Paul, in the first letter we're working with, the letter to the church in Ephesus, right?
Pastor Darren: The Paul's letter to the Ephesians, he star he speaks about this battle that we are waging, and he reminds us that it is a spiritual battle.
Pastor Darren: It's the spiritual part of this battle that is the tough thing.
Pastor Darren: Here I'm focused in on one of the passages, Ephesians 6 12, for our struggle, and I think it's on a slide, for our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, it's against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
Pastor Darren: Do you see?
Pastor Darren: Do you see how he's characterized our opponent or or who we're looking to go against?
Pastor Darren: It's not people with guns and uh other physical forms of weaponry.
Pastor Darren: We're talking about spiritual challenges, people who are looking to influence who we are and what we believe.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: That I think the caution Paul's giving us here is we should have our guard up for those negative and and maybe even dark influences around us, potentially even more than a physical threat.
Pastor Darren: What might a dark influence be?
Pastor Darren: Well, possibly anything that's pulling us away from being who we feel called to be, being who we feel God has called us to be.
Pastor Darren: Maybe it's uh an influence that is telling us we shouldn't trust in God's presence.
Pastor Darren: We shouldn't trust in God's justice, we shouldn't trust in God's peace.
Pastor Darren: Maybe those are the dark influences we need to look for.
Pastor Darren: Maybe the dark influences are the the powers, the in the voices that tell us that we shouldn't be loving a neighbor, that there are reasons not to do that.
Pastor Darren: Bob, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, he shows us what it looks like when we lose ourselves, even in times of trial, when we lose our beliefs, when we lose our, to use Paul's word in Romans, our character, right?
Pastor Darren: We become this empty husk, this husk that uh uh um just is a loss of self.
Pastor Darren: That's a battle.
Pastor Darren: We really can't afford to lose.
Pastor Darren: Paul speaks of it when he talks about this armor of God in his letter to the Romans.
Pastor Darren: Uh did you notice?
Pastor Darren: And we I think I preached this last summer.
Pastor Darren: Anybody better at remembering what I preached than I am?
Pastor Darren: I'm pretty sure I preached this last summer, right?
Pastor Darren: And and he talks about uh uh uh uh some of the the things that we take to go into this battle with the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, choose to proclaim the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.
Pastor Darren: These are spiritual weapons, these are not physical weapons.
Pastor Darren: These are the things that that build us up from inside so that we can go and live out what are often battles that we live in this life.
Pastor Darren: I think it's clear that Paul's not talking about physical battle, he's talking about the spiritual one.
Pastor Darren: Will you let the world around you pull you from what you've come to know about God?
Pastor Darren: I think that's the cornerstone question of this.
Pastor Darren: While our characters, Bob and Willa, had to be pushed to remember who they are and why they fight, we are invited to proactively assume this spiritual armor.
Pastor Darren: We assume it as a way of reminding ourselves of what we believe about the world and about God.
Pastor Darren: We remind ourselves of these weapons, or or maybe a better word would be tools that we have to work through life's challenges with.
Pastor Darren: Tools like truth, tools like righteousness, tools like the gospel of peace, the word of God, and maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe most importantly of all the tools, the faith that those tools work and the trust that they are what leads us to the life that we're supposed to live.
Pastor Darren: In this light, maybe we shouldn't be working so hard to get through our suffering so fast.
Pastor Darren: We don't like suffering, we try to move through it as fast as we can.
Pastor Darren: But did you notice Paul in the letter to the Romans, he said we we boast of our suffering.
Pastor Darren: Do you ever boast of your suffering?
Pastor Darren: Stephen does, but he's different.
Pastor Darren: Do you ever boast in your suffering?
Pastor Darren: I tell you, if you were uh working out and trying to enhance your athletic ability, you might boast in some of that suffering because it made you stronger.
Pastor Darren: This is what Paul's talking about, that maybe we need to just focus on whatever suffering we are we have differently, knowing that there's a journey to be had through suffering, which is inevitable for human beings.
Pastor Darren: In the case of Bob and Willa, their suffering was the driver for their awakening.
Pastor Darren: It's what forced them to remember and become who they are again.
Pastor Darren: Paul writes about it in his letter to the Romans.
Pastor Darren: He tells us suffering leads to endurance.
Pastor Darren: Endurance leads to character, and character leads to hope.
Pastor Darren: Let us pray that with life's ups and ups and downs, that we too can emerge with endurance, with the character of knowing who we are and with hope.
Pastor Darren: Amen.