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Tender Mercies 17 July 2011 Luke 6:20-23 First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL Ordinary 16 J

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Tender Mercies 17 July 2011 Luke 6:20-23 First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL Ordinary 16 J Psalm 25 Tender Mercies 17 July 2011 Luke 6:20-23 First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL Ordinary 16 J. Shannon Webster Two dozen of you helped me watch a movie last Wednesday – Tender Mercies, a 1983 film starring Robert Duvall. Horton Foote wrote the screenplay. It was nominated for 5 Academy Awards (including Best Picture), and won 2 – Best Actor and Best Screenplay. When the film opened it only opened in 3 theaters, for only 2 months, and made a paltry (for Hollywood) $8.4 million.i Not your typical Oscar winner. But it does remind you of another Oscar winner – Crazy Heart, in that it is a story of a Country Music star, a singer- songwriter who drinks himself into oblivion, winds up with his life on the rocks, and what happens to him then. Music figures mightily in this film. Two of the main character’s songs Robert Duvall wrote himself, and they give voice to the story. “If you just hold the ladder, baby, I’ll climb to the top,” for example. And our middle hymn this morning keys two pivotal scenes. This congregation knows my affection for this music, and may remember I regularly led workshops on “Theology and Country Music” in a previous life. This theme of heartbreak, or shipwreck and redemption, is a staple in this genre, and many others. Some of the most powerful stories are those that deal with redemption, with the death and resurrection of lives. It is usually an outside agency of grace which moves a person from destruction to relationship, from emptiness to meaning. Redemption’s outside agency is often a woman, for a male songwriter, though it may be a wise elder or a transforming experience. There is usually movement from destructive relationships to those marked by mutuality and respect. Country songs about suffering and broken hearts are also about the relief of suffering through redemptive love. And that saving love can take surprising forms. Our Gospel lesson today is a part of Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, as the church has called them, from Latin beatus – happy, or blessed. It is a series of 4 blessings, paired with 4 woes. Blessed are the poor, who will inherit the Kingdom; the hungry, who will be filled; those who weep now, who will laugh; and those who are hated now, who will have great reward in heaven. And Jesus says the opposite for the rich, the full, the ones who laugh now, who (he says) already have their consolation. They will experience a reversal of fortune. There is no threat or challenge here, just a truth about God’s intentions toward humankind. These are not suggestions on how to be happy, nor is Jesus saying you get a ticket to heaven by experiencing hunger and poverty. What he is saying is that the Kingdom of God comes to those with the greatest need. They will have the greatest capacity to appreciate it and be joyful. In the kingdom of God, human need is met, and until we know we need it, we won’t even be looking. It is like the story of the Zen master teaching his student; they sat for tea and the master took the teapot and filled the cup to overflowing and just kept pouring. “Stop, said the student. “It is overfull!” “And how,” said the master, “can I teach you unless you first empty your cup.” So Jesus says, you may be fat and happy now but eventually everyone comes to a place where they need God. Matthew spiritualizes the Beatitudes, makes them abstract. Luke’s simpler version does not see these sayings as ethical standards, but simply requiring of Disciples an emptiness that God can fill. 1 Luke’s Beatitudes are darned close to Country Music, in that sense, and to the film we are in conversation with today. Barsotti and Johnston write: “As stories, movies portray life, they don’t prescribe it. They are more like poetry than proposition, they present, they don’t preach…the Christian faith is first of all a story to be experienced, not a creed to be defended.”ii When we first meet Mac Sledge, in the movie Tender Mercies, he is waking up in the middle of empty whiskey bottles on the floor of a cheap motel in rural West Texas. He had a fist-fight with someone who left the night before, and Mac can’t even pay his room bill. The motel is run by Rosa Lee, a single parent mother of a 10-year-old boy named Sonny. Mac volunteers to work off his debt, and the day turns into weeks, then months. We learn that Mac is a Country Music singer on the skids. He has been a violent drunk, and has lost everything – his wife (singing star Dixie Scott), his daughter Sue Ann, his career, his fans. Everything. We learn that Rosa Lee is a young widow, married less than a year when her husband was killed in Vietnam. She is making ends meet running the motel and attached gas station. There is undiagnosed and untreated depression, and great loss, in this film. Writing about another film, Blood Simple, Cathleen Falsani notes, “We are the authors of our own destruction, setting tragedy in motion by the smallest of choices.”iii There is little dialogue in the movie, no wasted words. Like Matthew and Luke both use geography to point their words – Matthew has Jesus giving a sermon on the mount, Luke has him in the plain, or a flat place – the film puts the action in an austere and treeless West Texas landscape where there is no place to hide. So we are surprised when Mac, working in the small garden on the place, asks Rosa Lee if she might give some thought to marrying him. She says she will – marry him or give it some thought, we don’t know. Later we see rings on their fingers, though little else seems changed. All the pivotal action pieces take place off-stage. We never see the wedding. We never see the process that leads to Mac’s decision to be baptized. We never see the car accident in which Mac’s daughter dies. We only hear rumors of angels. Robert Jewett writes of the film, “God’s ways are too elusive for science, too far off the graph for objective proof. Yet the miracles of mercy are there for all to see.”iv Mac begins to be a person again, brought to life by Rosa Lee and Sonny. We know it in part because he picks up a guitar and begins to write songs. When he learns his ex-wife Dixie is singing over in Austin, he takes a love song to Dixie and her manager to sell it to them. He used to write songs for Dixie, successful ones. Dixie and her manager reject the song, saying it’s terrible. Mac has confessed his sins, and is humble and meek; nonetheless Dixie goes out of her way to be spiteful to him. Crushed, he returns home to Rosa Lee, into the scene that gives the movie its name. Rosa Lee says she is sorry they rejected the song, she thought it was a good song. She says to him, “Every night when I say my prayers and thank God for his blessings and his tender mercies to me, you and Sonny head the list.” Mac took the pickup and fled into the night, stopping at one bar after another but never drinking, finally buying a bottle at a package store. Rosa Lee is home ironing and pacing the motel grounds. Late at night Mac comes in, and says he started for Dallas, turned back, San Antonio, turned back, Austin, turned back, and he wasn’t drunk, he’d poured the bottle out. From Rosa Lee there are no words of judgment or anger. “Are you hungry?” she asks. “I could eat,” says Mac. And if what follows wasn’t sacramental, I don’t know what is. 2 We see the other sacrament soon, opening onto a church service (we see this family in worship several times in the movie), where Sonny is baptized, immersed. Then the curtain reopens and Mac is baptized. Again, we never see a decision-making process that led to this – it all happens off camera. On the way home Sonny says to Mac, “They told me I’d feel different, but I don’t. Maybe a little. Do you feel different.” Mac: “Not yet.” Sonny lifts himself to the rearview mirror. “Do I look different?” Mac, laughing: “Not yet.” That, of course, is where all Christians live, in the not-yet. We are already redeemed by Christ, recipients of grace, but it is working its way out in our lives while we are still imperfect. The fancy theological word for that is “sanctification.” Mac and Dixie’s daughter, Sue Ann, comes to see him. She is running off with a disreputable guy, and may be trying to mend the breach with her father. He asked her if she needed any money. She said she had plenty. Dixie had been taking the royalty money from any song of Mac’s she recorded and putting it in a trust for Sue Ann. There was a lot. “Everything I got come from you,” she tells Mac. Then she asked if he remembered a song he sang her when she was a little girl, one that comforted her at bedtime. The song is a caring reminder of a relationship she had years ago, something she now wants more than any cars and money.
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