This is part two of Mandy Jester’s two part post on the “grey” areas of sexual ethics as exemplified in films she saw at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Part one can be found here.
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The Surrogate
Another movie from the Sundance Film Festival that challenged my previous assumptions of a theological issue was The Surrogate*. The Surrogate is the story of Mark, a man who has polio and is bound to an iron lung. Aa man of faith, Mark must decide whether it is right to have sex with a surrogate versus living a chaste life because of his disability.
Mark discusses his decision with a priest. Despite the Christian tradition of abstaining from sex before marriage, the priest is caught up in compassion for this man who has so little because of his physical limitations. There is a moment after Mark asks his priest his opinion where the priest looks to the cross and you can see in his eyes that he weighs the decision.
On one side, Mark has no friends, no social life, and no chance at normalcy, yet he still deserves to feel human intimacy and love. On the other, the Bible exhorts us to “flee from sexual immorality,” and Christian tradition interprets that to mean abstinence before marriage. The priest says, “I think God will give you a pass this time,” hence giving Mark permission to fulfill his desire. I left the film wondering, “What I would do if Mark sought my advice for the same situation?”
As a youth pastor, I am told to answer questions like Mark’s with black and white responses, but the movie made me wonder if compassion can outweigh the traditional answer. Is this particular example one that God would want us to approach relationally?
More specifically, it made me wonder if God’s intent in making statements about sexual sin was to prevent us from having an experience like Mark desired, or was God’s intent more so to end sinful promiscuity? My questions seem to echo those of theologian Ray Anderson who “suggests that ministry precedes theology.” Theology and doctrine can be black and white, but again life and ministry seems subject to the gray.
The typical Christian answer to Mark’s request is dogmatic, but taking into account what it means to be pastoral, the answer is not an automatic “no.” Mark doesn’t want to sleep around or become a sex addict, he just wants to experience intimacy the same way a person who can move and live without assistance can. How do we know Jesus wouldn’t have taken into account Mark’s story and had a relational response different from that which we might expect?
We see a great example of what I am suggesting in Acts 11, where Peter has a dream (led by the Holy Spirit) where he is given a meal that is considered ceremonially unclean. The voice of the Lord comes to him and says, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” Through this dream, the rule-driven Jewish Christian community is turned upside down after the resurrection of Jesus.
The disciples in Acts had to be open to the Holy Spirit’s changing ways in order to be a more inclusive church, proving that God is alive and very active, even after Jesus left earth. If God can reveal himself through the Holy Spirit shortly after the resurrection, we must at least consider that God might have something new to say to us about dogma not clearly laid out in the Bible.
There has to be room for the Holy Spirit to move in the gray. Detweiler adds, “It may prove helpful to think of the Bible as more of a compass than a map.” This Biblical example also suggests that we can hear from God in many different forms. In the scripture, a dream, but I would also suggest that God can speak to us through film. Detweiler adds, “[General revelation] suggests that God can speak through anyone or anything at any time.” Therefore, if we are listening, we might hear something moving in the films we watch.
In Detweiler’s book, Into the Dark he spends a chapter talking about the issue of Christian ethics in film. He dives into the movie Million Dollar Baby, where he draws out the weighty decision Frankie, one of the main characters, must make about being a part of a mercy death for a paralyzed athlete, Maggie. Detweiler talks about a part in the movie where “the priest, horrified at Frankie’s raw pain, can only mouth Christian dogma before scuttling out of the camera’s frame, far away from the unanswerable darkness sitting beside him” and responds to it by saying, “What a telling statement! It identifies the central tension behind all controversies as ‘moral generalities’ versus ‘individual context.’ What happens when broad community standards are challenged by the particular cases?” Detweiler goes on to ask the same question that I wondered after stepping out of the theater after seeing The Surrogate, “Have we absolutized what God had intended to be particular?”
Middle of Nowhere
A final film that challenged me at Sundance was Middle of Nowhere. This riveting film is about a young woman who stands beside her husband through his incarceration. Though friends and family tell her he is trouble, she continues to believe in him and in their relationship. When she finds out he has cheated on her while in prison, she embarks on a journey to figure out where their relationship stands, which includes her jumping into a new sexual relationship with another man.
As I watched the film, I felt compassion for Ruby (the main character), and as I learned her story, I found myself cheering for her as she rediscovers love with another man. Though my religious dogma tells me that she is married and should not be engaging in a relationship with a new man, her story tells me how faithful she had been and how her husband’s mistakes broke the bond they shared. Again, Ruby’s story took me from a place I thought I knew, the black and white of not being with another man while married, to the gray – feeling compassion for her and recognizing the complexity of her unique situation.
However, unlike the other dogmatic issues that arose in other movies, this particular issue seems to be one that the Bible lays out clearly, and I do not see a way around the hard details. In Luke 18, a man asks Jesus what he can do to inherit eternal life and Jesus quotes the Ten Commandments saying, “Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal…” The Bible lays out some rules that are hard to interpret differently. Through the new lens I am compelled to use, I am still able to open up questions and seek God to interpret the situation at hand. Even though compassion and story cause us to want to give Ruby a pass, when we read scripture we see that there is not room for interpretation in these verses.
Conclusion
Alister McGrath quotes Dorothy Sayers in his essay on ethics, “It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feelings; it is virtually necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe.” When it comes to choosing our response to the dogma we have been taught, as much as we must use story and feelings to interpret the situation, we must also rely on the words God set forth and assess if the Bible is clear on certain issues.
The gray is still valuable, even when traditional dogma wins out. The gray causes us to research, pray, reflect and listen. Ultimately, it softens our hearts so that we may offer grace and compassion in our truthful assessment.
Though some dogma is clear in the Bible, many issues cannot be seen as black and white. God gave us each a story and as we tell it, complexities and intricacies come up that cause us to move away from our thoughtless ideas and positions. With all my heart I believe the Word of God is God breathed and accurate front to back, but I also believe that God left room for interpretation, room where He can continue to reveal himself over time.
When Adam and Eve were in the Garden walking with the LORD, they had never experienced grace. God had always claimed the attribute of grace, but until sin was brought into the world, that grace was not revealed. If God can reveal his grace in time, can God not still be revealing God’s attributes today. If we were able to figure out God and be completely convinced of our interpretations of scripture, wouldn’t we be god? I for one, am glad God is bigger and more compound than I can comprehend.
So through films, our eyes are opened to a conversation. Perhaps there are blacks and whites to many of the theological concepts I’ve discussed, but perhaps not. Perhaps, we should enter into the gray more often. Films encouraged me to get to know more GLBT individuals before deciding on their legitimacy as leaders in a church. I am also encouraged to learn the full story of each human I encounter, before judging them for having sex out of wedlock. I desire to learn a person’s motives before judging their actions.
Many people may find this exploration disturbing. But to me, Jesus was radical and relational. He wouldn’t let the people kill the adulterous woman in John because he knew her story. He revealed a loophole in the traditional law by showing that we all have sin and deserve condemnation. Jesus spent significant time with tax collectors, because he wanted to know their stories. Jesus never ignored the truth, but he lavished grace on people. I desire to lavish grace on people I meet as I hear their story and abstain from seeing their life in black and white.
Each of us in entitled to conversation around the gray in each theological conversation. I agree with Marin: “The key factors that glue the Bible’s overarching principals together throughout both Testaments are the call to love our neighbor and have compassion on the oppressed, and that God gives each of us an ability to receive freedom in Christ.”
Jesus is clear that these values are most important and my new ability to see the gray, which was opened up to me at the Sundance Film Festival, allows me to react and respond using these two God-given principals – love my neighbor and have compassion on the oppressed – before judgment. I hope that by exploring the gray people can be known through their stories and receive freedom.
*Editors note: Since it premiered at Sundance, The Surrogate has been retitled The Sessions. We have chosen to maintain Ms. Jester’s references to the previous title to better reflect the version of the film she saw.