Richmond's Rumblings

Richmond’s Rumblings

My favorite film director is the American John Ford. He lived throughout much of the last century, making more than 100 films with several of his best-known having John Wayne as his leading actor. A good number of his films were set in the post-Civil War American west such as Stagecoach (1939), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). My favorite of Ford’s films, The Sun Shines Bright (1953) is a lesser-known adaptation of stories from the writer Irvin S. Cobb and placed in Kentucky during the early twentieth century. The reason I can watch Ford’s films over and over is not that his portrayal of our history following the Civil War was in any sense without blemish (it wasn’t) or to somehow validate the treatment of, among others, Native Americans (it isn’t). Comparing Stagecoach in 1939 to Fort Apache in 1948 is rather what the British writer Charles Dickens might have also understood as having been borrowed from the title from his best-known work The Tale of Two Movies. 

I appreciate Ford as a director instead for what he does even as he appears to be doing little of the sort. Ford knew both how to appeal to an audience and seemed to understand their preconceived notions better than they did. Subsequently, as he does through each of the films I mention here, Ford created circumstances in which very ordinary matters seem to be occurring, but they are actually presenting a very different, and in Ford’s perspective more properly American point of view. It’s almost as though one must be in “on Ford’s code” to allow oneself to see that, as an example, a Black servant in the Kentucky of 1905 literally running the front door and into his employer’s (and best friend, as it happens) home while also realizing that such an action was strictly against the presumably accepted social rules of the time and place. That sequence is near the beginning of The Sun Shines Bright and signals, without appearing to do so since it is done in such an apparently normal manner, that Ford is doing something other than validating the system which supported those absurd and immoral rules. There was, you may recall, an instance somewhere near a year ago in worship when we played another scene from that film, and it too carried more than one notion of a “code” that undermined the way people of 1905 Kentucky, as well as America of 1953, understood themselves. 

I have in recent years also come to believe that in very different, but at least somewhat akin ways, God chooses to be with us through various forms of what we might call a “code.” For reasons well beyond you and me, God continues to choose that we humans need to receive what God wishes and expects by somehow being with us in ways that we appear to understand, but usually miss part or most of what God has in mind for a particular moment. A friend and former pastoral mentor, referring to the views of his theology professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School (I knew this man, but never had a class with him), calls this method God’s “luring” us toward a choice or point of view that God seeks from us. God does not, as it were, speak directly to us, but through a “code” that we can understand, accept, and follow. What we also begin (again) to discover is how God’s “luring” is not what we almost certainly think it is. It often seems to oppose what we perceive as our desire. As we come to realize, with God’s help and ongoing “luring” through our “code,” what God gives to us, however, it becomes easier and infinitely more rewarding than for what we what we had otherwise been grasping. 

What we can say finally is this: John Ford’s films, despite what we might first perceive, believed that all Americans were equal before God and before the law. We also, and for us more centrally, can understand what God is doing amongst us by saying in Jesus Christ, we have access to God’s “code,” and God’s promise that as we follow along, God’s intentions will open before us what is, at the moment, inconceivable. God’s promise is before us. We can follow it together as God’s people in Neosho. 

Shalom, Live Long, and Prosper,

Richmond