Pastor Darren: We've been in a uh movie series of late, and I hope you have enjoyed that.
Pastor Darren: Sometimes I think you get a special treat that I like movies, and sometimes I feel like you get punished because I like movies.
Pastor Darren: Hopefully, we'll just keep that a balance that goes all the while.
Pastor Darren: But uh we've landed here on the last one.
Pastor Darren: It's uh a film called Wicked for Good.
Pastor Darren: Uh it they did, it was actually, well, there's a whole history of it, but this iteration was actually a single stage show that they put into two movies.
Pastor Darren: Uh the first half got all the awards and accolades and all that, and the second half didn't get so many.
Pastor Darren: So my goal was, oh, the the likely Academy Award nominations.
Pastor Darren: Well, Wicked for Good didn't get as many nominations as the part one did.
Pastor Darren: So uh I don't know if that bothers anybody, but I just wanted to acknowledge it because that is what happened.
Pastor Darren: So it's called Wicked for Good, but you'll notice I wrote Wicked for Good with a question mark.
Pastor Darren: Because I feel like uh this is um some of the theme that the story is getting into.
Pastor Darren: We live in such a polarized age where we'll even wrestle over what the definition of good is.
Pastor Darren: And uh so I feel like this story kind of dives into the complexity of that question.
Pastor Darren: So again, just some ramp up into this thing.
Pastor Darren: Some of you know this, some of you don't.
Pastor Darren: Uh, but the original Wizard of Oz story that Wicked is written from is uh, you know, an age-old story written back uh around 1900 by the author L.
Pastor Darren: Frank Baum.
Pastor Darren: He was looking to create a children's story, but it had, now everybody recognizes this, uh, a fair amount of political commentary amidst the story itself.
Pastor Darren: Uh there's a subtle message to the populace within the story uh that he felt, well, that people he felt like they were lacking brains, they were lacking heart, and they were lacking courage.
Pastor Darren: Familiar to anyone?
Pastor Darren: You're seeing the ties that are going on there, right?
Pastor Darren: So they in the story, most of us I think know the story, they make this journey to Oz, looking for this thing that they lack.
Pastor Darren: And what they ultimately come to find is the wizard is kind of just a fake, it's all a facade, and uh, maybe more interestingly, they already had all these things that they were looking for.
Pastor Darren: And they didn't need to come to Oz this entity that they had given all this power to to find out that they had that.
Pastor Darren: They had it all along.
Pastor Darren: So that's some of the sort of subplot that maybe you uh picked up in the original Wizard of Oz story.
Pastor Darren: Now, the first film, which many of you remember, that commentary kind of gets lost.
Pastor Darren: There's this focus on the technical wizardry of the movie, right?
Pastor Darren: The thing that was most eye-catching was how it starts in black and white, and then you remember it gets all colorized, and everybody goes, oh it was one of the earliest colorized films, right?
Pastor Darren: So this was something that was really, really magical.
Pastor Darren: Uh, and it had uh this wondrous tale with these memorable characters.
Pastor Darren: I pulled a picture.
Pastor Darren: See if you remember these folks right here.
Pastor Darren: Do you remember them?
Pastor Darren: Yeah?
Pastor Darren: Anyone getting wistful?
Pastor Darren: Ah, that's back when they made stories good.
Pastor Darren: Ah, yes.
Pastor Darren: With little uh Dorothy there, right?
Pastor Darren: And then we, of course, we can't forget this other character.
Pastor Darren: Don't get scared.
Pastor Darren: James is looking at me, I'm looking at James.
Pastor Darren: Oh, oh, oh! Just a witch, it's an actress.
Pastor Darren: Settle down.
Pastor Darren: I don't know.
Pastor Darren: If you were like eight-year-old Darren, you were scared right now.
Pastor Darren: I this this was the one for me.
Pastor Darren: Like, you know, when you have those images of who's haunting your room, it was this one right here.
Pastor Darren: I I'm not even sure I finished the film until I was, you know, in my 40s.
Pastor Darren: Because I wasn't really, I didn't need to know what happened here.
Pastor Darren: Uh, you know, you see her get the water on her, right?
Pastor Darren: And then I'm out, right?
Pastor Darren: And and and then I learned that was pretty much the end of the movie.
Pastor Darren: I read I I just had to hold out five more minutes.
Pastor Darren: But uh in any case, what happens with the in the film version is that it kind of leans into this uh uh uh a contrast of female archetypes, right?
Pastor Darren: This this challenge or that we had with our cultures and our culture and our stories of women needing to choose, are you gonna be the witch or are you gonna be the innocent pure one?
Pastor Darren: And those were the choices.
Pastor Darren: Uh and um with men largely in control of the stories that got written, uh, this is kind of how it played out for a long time, especially in early Hollywood.
Pastor Darren: Uh now we've spent some time now kind of deconstructing that and recognizing that there's many, many ways to be a female in our world and not just these two.
Pastor Darren: And so women watching our stories and our films have more options for models to kind of uh help define themselves.
Pastor Darren: And this is in general, we think, a positive thing.
Pastor Darren: Uh in fact, I might argue that the next job we have is to figure out how to help the men live in this new reality where women are able to make some choices, even if those choices land on those two polarities or archetypes.
Pastor Darren: We still want to figure out how we teach men, to still have the values that they honor in a way that creates space for that evolution of how we see women.
Pastor Darren: But that's a whole other sermon.
Pastor Darren: And it's 1048 already.
Pastor Darren: So finally, we get to Wicked the Book, right?
Pastor Darren: The book that the play was built on, that the movie uh was made from.
Pastor Darren: Uh, first of all, I want to point out it is a story that was released in 1993, right?
Pastor Darren: So this is a relatively old story, you know, and I just think it's worth mentioning how long ago it was.
Pastor Darren: Uh, the author Gregory McGuire decides to play with that archetype uh uh contrast.
Pastor Darren: He's doing that deconstruction work a little bit of helping uh develop more sort of models for what a woman can be.
Pastor Darren: And the way he does this is he asks the question why is the wicked witch wicked?
Pastor Darren: How'd she end up in this place?
Pastor Darren: So here's how he tackles this question.
Pastor Darren: First, he creates a world in which the qualifications for being socially affirmed or accepted are really, really narrow.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: I put up some contrasts up here that you can look at.
Pastor Darren: Yeah, so in this world in Oz, what we come to realize is that being beautiful is good.
Pastor Darren: Less beautiful, less good.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: And the same with powerful.
Pastor Darren: Being powerful is good in Oz.
Pastor Darren: Being less powerful is less good in Oz.
Pastor Darren: All right, it's sort of making sense.
Pastor Darren: We sort of wrestle with some of these in our own society today.
Pastor Darren: Uh, in this kind of world where they're trying to uh um maybe do uh some keep people in certain places and certain understandings.
Pastor Darren: The socially cooperative person is good, and the less cooperative person less good, right?
Pastor Darren: This is how it is in Oz.
Pastor Darren: Here's an interesting one in the story.
Pastor Darren: Remember, it is kind of a magical story.
Pastor Darren: Humans are good, but animals are not good.
Pastor Darren: If you've seen the movie, you'll see that the animals actually were kind of evolved until we started putting them in cages and boxes and they move backwards in that evolution.
Pastor Darren: Then finally, wizards are good.
Pastor Darren: They get to run Oz.
Pastor Darren: Witches, not so good.
Pastor Darren: You know, and maybe that has to do with the fact that this particular witch actually had some powers.
Pastor Darren: Well, the wizard did not.
Pastor Darren: I don't know.
Pastor Darren: Maybe that was that maybe that was part of it.
Pastor Darren: But hopefully you're getting a sense of this is the world uh that Maguire creates in order to start asking this question of why the wicked witch is as wicked as she is.
Pastor Darren: Uh, and uh, so you'll see some of these contrasts, again, similar a little bit to what we have in our own world, other than the humans and animals and wizards and witches, other, you know, but the other stuff, uh, at the same time, the contrasts are much more strong in a story, right?
Pastor Darren: It's a it's a story after all.
Pastor Darren: Finally, we have Alphaba, the name that Maguire gives to this wicked witch, who evidently didn't have a name before that, right?
Pastor Darren: And I think I even got a picture of the initial Alphabet that was on stage.
Pastor Darren: Any Adenaman Zell fans?
Pastor Darren: All right.
Pastor Darren: If you're not an Adenaman Zell fan, you are wrong.
Pastor Darren: All right.
Pastor Darren: She has uh um, what do they say, created, I think, three different roles on Broadway that are like landmark roles.
Pastor Darren: So she is playing Alphabet over here.
Pastor Darren: You can see her in the green.
Pastor Darren: Uh you get Christian Chennewith on the right.
Pastor Darren: She plays Glinda the Good Witch.
Pastor Darren: Anybody get to see that on?
Pastor Darren: I'm sure you saw the the stage show, right?
Pastor Darren: What is wrong with you people?
Pastor Darren: We're gonna do a field trip.
Pastor Darren: Holy smoke.
Pastor Darren: All right, you we are gonna go see the we see stuff.
Pastor Darren: What's a this is a really, really good show, and actually some really good voices.
Pastor Darren: So this is the original uh uh version, right?
Pastor Darren: And and this is the name, alphabet, that he gives to this woman.
Pastor Darren: We learn that her greenish skin color in Oz is accepted, but not necessarily appreciated or honored in any way, right?
Pastor Darren: She's in many ways kind of shunned by society, given harsher treatment in society.
Pastor Darren: All right.
Pastor Darren: Um, this is partly why we picked uh that scripture from 1 Samuel, uh, uh where the Lord says to Samuel, do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him.
Pastor Darren: Here's the key phrase: For the Lord does not see as mortals see, they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.
Pastor Darren: A simple little message from the Old Testament that still rings true and is lived out here in wicked for good.
Pastor Darren: But in Maguire's story, he maps out how for Alphaba, her life is a little bit oppressed, or a lot of bit oppressed, even by her own family, with her father blaming her for her his uh other daughters, her Alphabet sister's uh ailment that she has.
Pastor Darren: Uh but despite all of this, she ends up in this privileged school where she's able to find herself.
Pastor Darren: And not only is she able to kind of find herself, but she starts realizing this calling to social justice, this calling to undermine the oppression that uh Oz has.
Pastor Darren: Uh and so moving quickly through the story, Elphaba gets her chance to go visit the uh wizard, just like Dorothy and uh the scarecrow and the tin man and the and the lion get to.
Pastor Darren: Uh, and uh her hope is to be able to undermine, get help undermining some of these oppressive societal roles.
Pastor Darren: She has especially concerns about her professor who was a goat, and uh, but he was moving into this oppressive situation, being caged up and becoming less and less the goat that he was created to be.
Pastor Darren: Ultimately, Alphaba learns, just like Dorothy learned, that the wizard isn't what he says he is.
Pastor Darren: In fact, any power he has seems to be used just to appease the people and to keep them all at bay.
Pastor Darren: She also learns that he is actually kind of invested in this oppressive world because it keeps everybody in the structure uh in place with him at the top.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: So that wizard he doesn't really want to take any of that down.
Pastor Darren: This comes as an awakening for Alphaba, just in the same way that Dorothy and her friends get this awakening uh that uh um really the wizard is just a fake.
Pastor Darren: There's nothing up there.
Pastor Darren: So I'm gonna save the ending for right now because I want to take a jump into the Christian themes that I found that were uh living and breathing through this.
Pastor Darren: I know some of you are like, why is he talking about a movie?
Pastor Darren: He keeps talking about a movie.
Pastor Darren: I'm here on a Sunday morning and it's 1055.
Pastor Darren: Shouldn't he be talking about Christianity here somewhere along the line?
Pastor Darren: Yes, here it is.
Pastor Darren: Sop it up.
Pastor Darren: First, that heart for the poor and oppressed.
Pastor Darren: Hopefully you were making those connections.
Pastor Darren: It wasn't that difficult to see what's being done there.
Pastor Darren: The fact that uh she's being oppressed for her skin color, well, we've been wrestling with that as a species forever.
Pastor Darren: We've been wrestling with it as a country since we've been a country.
Pastor Darren: So hopefully you're seeing that uh that connection as it's uh uh being made to our own life right now.
Pastor Darren: Um if you are not concerned for the poor and oppressed, then you're probably not being a scripturally correct Christian.
Pastor Darren: If you're reading your Bible, there is no way around that mandate.
Pastor Darren: We are supposed to be in the favor of the poor and in favor of the oppressed.
Pastor Darren: It's just in there.
Pastor Darren: Interesting that you could argue that for Alphaba, the trait that gets her oppressed, her skin color, right, it is what opens the door for her empathy to everyone else.
Pastor Darren: Because she gets to feel that oppression.
Pastor Darren: She knows the pain, she knows the disappointment, she knows the injustice of that, and that's what opens that up inside of her.
Pastor Darren: We might ask ourselves how it's often our own weakness or our own uh less accepted traits, our vulnerabilities that lead us to do our good work for others.
Pastor Darren: It's that peace that opens up a window into empathy and allows us to see the divine in all of us and be committed to the justice being served for all of God's children.
Pastor Darren: And given this too, hopefully we can see how tragic tragic it is when we try to hide or even condemn those unique traits that God has given us, given us to help us understand the world, help us to understand ourselves and others.
Pastor Darren: Finally, a second Christian theme, and this is the one that plays out uh with the the film uh Wicked for Good Part 2.
Pastor Darren: The Value for Sacrifice.
Pastor Darren: This is when I spoil the film.
Pastor Darren: Uh I think I got one more pick, don't I?
Pastor Darren: I might be able to show that up there.
Pastor Darren: Yeah, okay.
Pastor Darren: Oh, I didn't get close enough.
Pastor Darren: So this is the newest version of Glinda and Alphabah, right?
Pastor Darren: And uh hopefully you're uh um I we should zoom in a little bit more.
Pastor Darren: I think it would be appropriate to mention, especially giving these themes, that in this case they uh cast an African American Alphaba, hopefully helping to resonate with that social justice theme.
Pastor Darren: I well, I'd like to think that's why they did it.
Pastor Darren: But I'm gonna spoil the film a little bit.
Pastor Darren: Alphabet, she looks to unite the masses to try to deconstruct the oppression.
Pastor Darren: She's gonna try and make some good, right?
Pastor Darren: And what that she ultimately realizes is that the masses have a little bit of difficulty dealing with, I guess we would say, the nuances of life.
Pastor Darren: Often we people, we humans, we want to put things in their boxes, but this is good and this is bad.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: And Alpha realizes this is going to be true.
Pastor Darren: They are not going to be able to uh help her to do this social justice work.
Pastor Darren: I'm gonna remind you once more, this is a 30-year-old story.
Pastor Darren: A 30-year-old story.
Pastor Darren: And I know some of you are like, well, that's not very old, but it's important for us to recognize this is before cell phones, this is before social media, all these advancements that we have that have made it maybe even more difficult for the masses to understand good versus bad.
Pastor Darren: Thirty years ago, he's anticipating that this is going to be a problem.
Pastor Darren: And uh some of us would say, uh, so when I say uh that we have trouble recognizing good versus bad, we should be willing to admit we know something about that.
Pastor Darren: But Elphaba, she soon realizes that despite her heart for others, despite her heart for justice, she won't be able to get the people to follow her.
Pastor Darren: They are not going to follow her to create that justice.
Pastor Darren: In fact, it's the opposite.
Pastor Darren: It will be the fear and hatred that they have for her that enables them to follow her friend, the good witch, Glinda, and to do the right thing.
Pastor Darren: It's a complex kind of twisting thing there, but Glinda and Alphaba have become very, very tight.
Pastor Darren: They are both recognizing the good that needs to be done, but they're also recognizing, at least Alphaba recognizes, that they're not gonna let her do it.
Pastor Darren: That their hate, their fear isn't gonna allow them to follow.
Pastor Darren: But if she can carry their hate in their fear and take it on her shoulders, then Glinda can be the one, because she trusts her to do the right thing, to do the good.
Pastor Darren: So Alphaba, she allows the people to see her, I will say, ended, so I'm not fully spoiling anything, trusting that the good will it leaves Glinda will be used appropriately.
Pastor Darren: She allows herself to die in a way that carries their fear and their hate, leaving a halo of trust around Glinda.
Pastor Darren: Hopefully, you can hear the Christ-like references that are being made here.
Pastor Darren: She takes on the inadequacies, she takes on the sins of the people, knowing that this is what will open up their heads, this is what will open up their hearts.
Pastor Darren: Can you see why we're focused on Philippians 2 this morning?
Pastor Darren: In this passage, I hear the world is the world is the world, is the world is the world, is the world is the world.
Pastor Darren: It is what it is.
Pastor Darren: But we need to be like Christ.
Pastor Darren: It's a beautiful, beautiful place, but it is a broken place as well.
Pastor Darren: A place of of human imperfection.
Pastor Darren: In that reality, we are called to be like Christ.
Pastor Darren: But in this really specific way, at least in Philippians, it's through our humility.
Pastor Darren: For Paul, this meant an emptying of himself, an emptying of his divinity in order to be like us, in order to be human, to make that connection with.
Pastor Darren: Us.
Pastor Darren: It wasn't a show of power, but it was to be a model, a model of the pathway to life, to a blessed life, not just for us, but for all.
Pastor Darren: And it's a pathway that is grounded in humility and sacrifice for others.
Pastor Darren: In the case of Christ and of Alphabet, to a certain extent, it meant the sacrifice of their lives.
Pastor Darren: They had to give up their life.
Pastor Darren: I don't believe that that's what we are being called to in the same way.
Pastor Darren: We aren't being asked to give up our life.
Pastor Darren: I think what he's likely speaking of here, Paul in this case, is the death of our hubris, the death of our arrogance, the death of our desire to be Jesus or to be God.
Pastor Darren: This isn't a good place for us Christians, this place of arrogance and hubris.
Pastor Darren: We are as imperfect as others, charmed by the world's temptations, just like anyone else, sometimes even rationalizing less good actions, telling ourselves that it's God's will.
Pastor Darren: The story of Wicked, the Wizard of Oz of Christ, is here to tell us.
Pastor Darren: Maybe it's in this humility that we can come to know God better.
Pastor Darren: Maybe it's in this humility that we can come to understand the challenges and nuances of being a human better.
Pastor Darren: Maybe it's in this humility that we can come to know the good better.
Pastor Darren: Amen.