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The One About Gandalf and Sam

Writer's picture: The Rev. John WakefieldThe Rev. John Wakefield

 October 27, 2024 - The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost



My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

 

Good morning, Epiphany. Before we get started today, I need you to get on the same page with me: this is, after all, the Sunday before Halloween. Halloween is everywhere now in our culture and especially in our schools; our girls went to a headless horseman event downtown yesterday, and we’ve already been trick or treating a few times. It seems Halloween is now its own liturgical season. To that point, my elf ears this morning are not the norm here at Epiphany or elsewhere in the Episcopal Church, though we may have similarly odd traditions of our own. If they are distracting to you, try to embrace the fun side of being together this morning. At my last parish, our priests would encourage everyone to wear costumes on this Sunday, but I didn’t know if you were all ready for that quite yet. Maybe next year. This sermon will be pulling in a few fictional characters, so it’s a bit different in that way too. Still, I think there’s a good lesson for us here today.

 

I’ll be preaching on Job, the Old Testament story familiar to many that has provided us with readings for the last four weeks, for all of October, in fact but I’m going to start with a different story today, one that I think is even more familiar in 2024.


Some of you might know that I was raised on Star Wars movies, the original trilogy thank you. I have a lightsaber in my office, and I’ve read over 125 of the subsequent books associated with that universe, which is somewhat embarrassing since their philosophy and theology leave quite a bit to be desired. I also love C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia books; The Horse and His Boy was my favorite book of all time for a while, and a seminary course on the very Anglican Lewis helped deepen my love for all things Narnia. But when I’m pressed to choose my #1 favorite fantasy/fictional world of all time, as Lily did this week, well, the choice is an easy one for me, and maybe some of you can guess it given that setup. It’s J.R.R. Tolkien’s world of hobbits and elves, dwarves and men... of Gandalf and Sauron and Gollum and Middle-Earth. My favorite story, of course, is The Lord of the Rings.

 

While I’m proud of that fact, I hesitate to admit the following publicly, because some do scoff at this (including my former priest, who is a Tolkien expert, scholar, and purist), but I first came to Tolkien’s fantasy world through the Peter Jackson-directed movies about twenty years ago. Fellowship of the Ring released in theaters in December of 2001 when I was 17 years old. The Two Towers opened the next December in 2002, and The Return of the King, the final chapter of the trilogy, came out the next year, in 2003, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture along with winning all eleven awards for which it was nominated, tying it with Titanic and Ben-Hur for the most decorated movie of all time. Abbey and I introduced our oldest daughter, Lily, to the movies a few years ago, and she was hooked. We blew through three 3.5 hour-long extended editions of the trilogy and then we watched the Hobbit trilogy and the first season of Amazon’s Rings of Power show, all in a few short weeks. Now we’re watching the extended editions again in the morning before school... for the fourth time, I think, Lily? My comfort clothes for around the house include a Lord of the Rings hoodie. I think it’s okay for me to share that Lily is going as a woodland elf for Halloween this year, and that these are actually her ears. It’s a whole thing in our home.

 

Now, I go back and forth on who my favorite character is in Tolkien’s fictional world. Sometimes, it’s the wizard Gandalf, fantastically played in the movies by English actor Ian McKellen. Gandalf, among other things, sets the hobbit named Frodo Baggins on his quest to deliver the ring to the fires of Mount Doom. On other days, my favorite character is Samwise Gamgee, played in the movies by Sean Astin, maybe more popularly known around this part of the country as Rudy of Notre Dame football fame. Sam is Frodo’s friend and gardener who accompanies him on the journey, providing him with very much needed support. Today, I think I lean towards Sam, but it’s a Gandalf quote that stuck with me this week, that resonated with me during my first reading of this final chapter of the book of Job on Monday, for what I hope you will see as relevant reasons.

 

The famous quote comes in the first movie (or book), Fellowship of the Ring, as Gandalf, Frodo, Sam, and the rest of this fellowship are walking underground through the creepy Mines of Moria. Frodo has volunteered to bring the ring all the way to Mordor, basically to the home of all evil, and the wizard, two men, a dwarf, an elf, and three of Frodo’s hobbit friends are coming with him on the journey. Already though, not even a third of the way to their destination, they’ve encountered some serious trouble: orcs, trolls, octopus monsters, and evil-wizard-induced snow storms have tried to stop them, with plenty more trouble still to come. Then, in what is one of my very favorite moments in all of fiction, Frodo sits down with Gandalf in a moment of peace and says, “I wish this need not have happened in my time.” I wish this need not have happened in my time. Frodo wishes the ring had not come to him, that he and his friends need not face all the challenges they’re facing and about to face. Gandalf replies to Frodo, “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. 

 

I think there’s a distinct echo of this theme in the story of Job that we’ve been hearing in our Old Testament readings over the past few weeks. Three weeks ago, on October 6, when I preached about miracles and angels and not being quite sure what was happening but simply knowing that we as Christians were called to look toward Jesus... three weeks ago, Job was just beginning to suffer. See, God gave Satan permission to inflict painful sores on him, and his wife told Job to simply curse God and die.


Job’s situation would not get better from there; all ten of his children die in this 42-chapter story, along with all his livestock and all his servants. He loses his possessions, his wealth, his family, his health, his comfort. His friends were sure that Job must have done something wrong to warrant such punishment from God, but Job knows that he hasn’t, that that couldn’t be why he suffered, God doesn’t work that way. He curses the day of his own birth, he wishes he’d never been born, he wishes these things need not have happened to him in his time. But Job still knows and trusts that God is sovereign and omnipotent; he does not curse God and die, and after then seeing God answer him out of a whirlwind in last week reading, Job this week presents us with the first proper and reasonable response in the face of all of it (and is thus rewarded).


In the face of suffering, Job responds in prayer.

 

Job, this morning, answers the Lord: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted... therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know...” Essentially he says, “I see you, God, I am awed by you, and I’m sorry for questioning your omnipotence, your plans, and your power.” This response may strike us as odd or even unlikely given all Job had suffered, all he had lost, but Job in chapters 38-41 is hearing directly from the almighty creator God. He is reminded that we cannot possibly comprehend as much as God; we cannot come close to understanding how all things work together, no matter how we may try. Instead, then, of bemoaning or worrying about the difficulties we suffer or even about the state of the world, we must learn to rest in God’s loving presence, trusting in God above all else. N.T. Wright writes that this theme covers all three of our lectionary texts today, with an intercessory Jesus in Hebrews and the healing of the blind man in Mark. His clear theme is this: “Coming before God in prayer is our central God-given human task, the one by which, whether spectacularly or quietly, everything is transformed.”

 

Prayer, you see, will shape us. I’ve talked these last few weeks about how being in loving, Christian community shapes us, forms us, differently from the other systems around us that hope to form us into consumers, into fighters, into warriors, into worriers, into addicts. Prayer is the key practice of that loving, Christian community, as the central God-given human task in this people and this place we call the Church. We devote, at the least, an hour on our Sunday mornings to prayer and worship. What we do in this service is not silent or centering prayer, but it is completely prayer nonetheless, conversation with the God of the universe, as we come into regular touch with the omnipotent and unexplainable God through word, sacrament, and song. This practice of being present here at Epiphany forms us both horizontally, in our loving relationships with each other, and vertically, in our understanding that there is something transcendent above all that we see. And we simply, like Job, must stand in awe of it.

 

J.R.R. Tolkien, as a lifelong Christian who artistically weaved his theology through all his fiction, uses Gandalf in the Mines of Moria to assure Frodo that the suffering he faces is indeed regrettable, yes. No one wants to endure suffering, no one wants to face challenges, whether they be in hospital rooms or war-torn battlefields, or whether they face anxiety or depression or despair or heartbreaking loss, or whether they are actually traversing the rocky, desolate lands of Mordor with orcs at their heels. No one wants that. But though no one wants to endure suffering - some of us are suffering here today, some of us have suffered recently -  we will all face it.


Our role, then, is simply to decide what our response to suffering may be, what we will do with the time that is given us.

 

As your rector here at the Church of the Epiphany, I am asking you, pleading with you this morning, to first consider prayer as your response when you face anxiety about the future, when you despair at the state of our nation and society, when you face suffering of many kinds, as James reminded us we would just a few short weeks ago. Consider first turning to God, resting in God’s loving presence, and knowing, as the old song goes, that God has the whole world in God’s hands.

 

This sermon could and maybe should end there, but since I get to preach in elf ears today, I want to say a bit more. I mentioned earlier that while Gandalf is one of my two favorite characters in The Lord of the Rings, today I lean toward Samwise Gamgee as my favorite, the other hobbit on the journey to Mount Doom. Sam has a monologue at the end of the second movie that’s full of lessons for us this morning. In the face of being as uncomfortable as he has ever been in his life, avoiding orcs and navigating battlefields and legitimately suffering on their quest when he has spent his whole life as a peaceful gardener, Sam says this to Frodo: “In the end, it’s only a passing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.” He continues later, after Frodo asks him the question, “What are we holding on to, Sam?” Sam replies, “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.

 

I could not present one of the very-Christian and very-theological quotes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s universe without the other this morning. They work together too well. We will suffer, as all do, and we are to turn to prayer as Job does, first, yes. We really must make that turn. And then also, we as Christians in this particular time and place, like Sam and Frodo in theirs, must hold to the fact that there is good in this world, and know deeply that it is very much worth fighting for. Amen.

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