Michael and All Angels
Texts: Daniel 10:10-14; 12:1-3;
Luke 10:17-20; Rev 12:7-12
HARRY POTTER VS. STAR WARS:
LEARNING TO READ THE CHRISTIAN STORY
IN LIGHT OF THE POWER OF LOVE RATHER THAN THE FORCE
(Preached from Sermon Notes; the following is a rough transcript.)
You might be taking a look at the Sermon Notes, seeing all the stuff about Star Wars1 and Harry Potter2, and saying, “Oh no!” Many of you might have never seen the movies or read the books, but I’ll try to fill you a little bit, hopefully enough so that you to get a basic understanding. I assure you, though, that I’m using these cultural icons, Star Wars and Harry Potter, for a good reason. You are probably at least aware enough of these franchises that you know they use lots of fantastical images and creatures. They’re in the genre of fantasy. Well, our main readings this morning are from the Books of Daniel and Revelation, which are the two books of the Bible that use what? Fantastical creatures and storylines. I want to use these four fantasies, if you will, to propose that there are two basic stores of the universe — narratives through which we human beings have tended to view our worlds.
One basic narrative is related to us through Star Wars, where the ultimate power in the universe is called the Force. You have those who use the force for good — the Jedi Knights, like Obi-wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker — and they are battling those who use the “Dark Side of the Force” — the Sith Lords, like Darth Vader and the Emperor. And I want to ask: Isn’t this the kind of narrative that has reigned throughout human history? Good defeating Evil through the use of good force over bad force?
I want to propose this morning that the Harry Potter books have a basic narrative that provides a distinct alternative to the Star Wars narrative, but I want to transition to that by lifting up the word Logos. We see it in John chapter 1: “In the beginning was the Word.” The Logos, in Greek. In other words, the main principle of the universe, through which everything is made, John tells us. Probably in the background for John was the Logos of Greek philosophy. One of their philosophers (Heraclitus) had said that the Logos is polemos, in the Greek, from which we get our word “polemics,” arguments.3 Polemos can also be translated as “battle,” “struggle,” “war.” That the governing principle of the world is this battle, this struggle, between the forces of good and evil. Basically, the Star Wars narrative. In other words, the Greek philosophers express the basic storyline for human beings, throughout both the world and history, as the Logos of Polemos. That the governing principle of the world is the constant struggle between the forces of Good and Evil — which in the Star Wars movies is not called polemos but simply the Force. There’s the good side and the dark side of the Force. Which one do you want to manipulate against the other?
Whereas the Gospel of John presents to us a very different kind of Logos, which is all about life; and, chiefly in the story he is about to tell of Jesus of Nazareth, it’s all about love as the power of life itself. And I want to suggest that the Harry Potter books are actually about this alternative narrative around a different Logos. Yes, you have the way of Force, as represented by Lord Voldemort, in the Harry Potter saga, but alongside it you have the power of Love.
Let me set this up a bit. In the very first chapter of the first book (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone), we find out that Lord Voldemort has come to see the infant Harry Potter as somehow a threat to him, and he goes to try to kill him. His mother Lily tries to protect Harry, and Voldemort kills her first. We find out that it is the power of Lily’s self-sacrificing love that protects Harry, so that when Voldemort tries to kill him, his killing curse simply rebounds back on him, nearly killing Voldemort himself. That’s in the first chapter of the first book that we discover how the power of love protects Harry from the power of force and violence.
Harry grows up and goes off to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where his Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, tries to teach Harry that the greatest power in the universe is not the kind of force which Voldemort wields, but love — the kind of love that protected him as an infant.4 I don’t want to spoil the ending too much, but you see it right through to the ending, where Harry never tries to kill Voldemort, while the power of love continues to protect him. The ending is kind of under the theme of Jesus, when he tells us, “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.” (Matt 26:52) There isn’t Harry using a ‘sword’ to vanquish Voldemort. Voldemort essentially vanquishes himself.
So the question is: When we read fantastical stories from the Bible like Daniel and the Book of Revelation, do we read them more according to the Logos of polemos, Force, like Star Wars? Or do we read them more according to what I consider the Christian narrative, Harry Potter, where the power of love outlasts and outlives the power of Force, which someday will spin itself out?
Let’s take a quick look at Daniel and Revelation to suggest a preliminary answer to this question. The Book of Daniel begins with more conventional imagery and settings, not yet the fantasy part which comes later. There are stories we’re very familiar with like Daniel in the Lions’ Den (Daniel 6). Daniel is a Jewish official in the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, decrees some unjust laws, and Daniel will not follow them, and resists them. What do we see? Daniel gathering up his own army, or using the good side of the Force, to battle his way out? No. He submits to the punishment, is thrown into the lions’ den, and is protected. Kind of like Harry, through the power of love.
We see as we go on in the Book of Daniel that these are the angelic forces of protection, like we celebrate today. In the other story we are most familiar with, the Three Men in the Fiery Furnace (Daniel 3) — Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego (we love to say those names, right?) — same as Daniel, they resist unjust laws, and King Nebuchadnezzar — who, in fact, is decreeing that everyone bow down and worship him like a god. Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego refuse to do it and end up punished in the fiery furnace, where mysteriously a fourth figure appears with them in the furnace — and angel, who protects them.
In our reading today, we hear of a time of great anguish, like the world has never seen. (My goodness, we’ve seen plenty of those in our history, haven’t we.) And Michael and the other angels are there as what? Chiefly the protectors of God’s people — protectors who help them to outlast these times of anguish, these times of violence, these times of polemos, the Force.
I have a colleague who has proposed, and I think he’s right, that when we read this morning about the “wise ones,” some of whom are even raised from the dead and shine like the brightness of the sky, that they represent a thousand Jewish martyrs that, at the time Daniel was written, had been martyred.5 They resisted unjust laws from their Syrian overlord, and they were murdered on the Sabbath. They had refused to worship their Syrian overlord, and instead were worshiping their God on the Sabbath, and were slaughtered. The Book of Daniel is presenting to us another way to tell the basic human story in terms of the power of love to protect us and help us to outlast the powers of violence and force, even if that means resurrection from the dead after enduring a time of anguish and slaughter.
In the Book of Revelation, I think you see very much the same thing. We read one of the key passages this morning, where there is a battle of sorts. But it ends not with Michael destroying Satan, but simply casting him out of heaven.6 What does that mean? To me, it means that human beings tend to worship the Force as the foundational principle of the universe, the Logos of polemos, such that we don’t even realize we’re actually worshiping Satan. We believe first and foremost in the power of good violence to stop the bad violence — the good side of the Force to vanquish the Dark side of the Force. That belief, that trust, that religious faith, if you will, falls to earth in following Christ. We no longer believe in it.
Which is what Jesus is pointing to in this morning’s Gospel, too. As the seventy go out to heal and to proclaim the Good News, a different version of the basic human story, Jesus sees Satan fall like lightning from heaven. The Satanic powers are still here, right? We know them well. But this day, and every Sunday, we celebrate a different story, a different way to ‘read’ the world around us. That it’s not just Force, polemos, but it’s the Logos of love which John proclaims that protects us and helps us to outlast the powers of violence.
What does that say about the meantime? For one thing, I think we need to confess that, since the time when the Church allied itself with empire, we started to read our stories, our Scriptures more like Star Wars. We see that in Christian Nationalism.7 It’s going to take some hard work for us to begin reading our stories again — to see them in this very new and different way — where the hero is the Lamb Slain, the one who gives himself in love to protect us and to ultimately outlast the times of anguish. Where do we see that kind of story? That’s why for me people like Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and those who in the last century have established the way of nonviolent resistance to those things which are unjust, while refusing to inflict violence on someone else. Instead, we risk suffering the violence, trusting in the power of love to outlast and ultimately overcome the violence. Does that make sense? Do you see the work we might need to do? To begin to read our stories in this fundamentally different way? Amen.
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, September 29, 2024
Notes
1. There are nine major episodes in the Star Wars saga. The original, and most familiar, 1977 movie started in the middle with Episode 4, “The New Hope.” See starwars.com for more info.
2. The original seven books in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling were also made into eight movies. For more information, visit the official website wizardingworld.com. I also have a Harry Potter page on my website — https://girardianlectionary.net/bibliography/harry-potter/ — including an essay I wrote titled “Harry Potter and the Power of Love.”
3. The most famous ‘soundbyte’ from Heraclitus is known as Fragment 53: “War [polemos] is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free.” For more on Heraclitus, see the Wikipedia page on him, where the word “logos” appears 32 times, including a short section on it, which begins, “A core concept for Heraclitus is logos, an ancient Greek word literally meaning ‘word, speech, discourse, or meaning.’ For Heraclitus, the logos seems to designate the rational structure or ordered composition of the world.”
4. A crucial moment comes in Book 5, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, after Harry narrowly escapes Voldemort because Dumbledore has arrived in time to protect him. Dumbledore, by the way, never tries to kill Voldemort, only to capture him, for which Voldemort mocks him. But Harry feels weak after the encounter; he and Dumbledore have the following exchange:
He did not know that you would have ‘power the Dark Lord knows not’ —”
“But I don’t!” said Harry in a strangled voice. “I haven’t any powers he hasn’t got, I couldn’t fight the way he did tonight, I can’t possess people or — or kill them —”
“There is a room in the Department of Mysteries,” interrupted Dumbledore, “that is kept locked at all times. It contains a force that is at once more wonderful and more terrible than death, than human intelligence, than forces of nature. It is also, perhaps, the most mysterious of the many subjects for study that reside there. It is the power held within that room that you possess in such quantities and which Voldemort has not at all. That power took you to save Sirius tonight. That power also saved you from possession by Voldemort, because he could not bear to reside in a body so full of the force he detests. In the end, it mattered not that you could not close your mind. It was your heart that saved you.” (843-44)
5. Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Nonviolence, chapter 6, “Daniel.”
6. In the Sermon Notes, I include an important point about the day’s reading which I didn’t cover in the sermon. The casting of Satan out of heaven is not through violent force but instead “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they did not cling to life even in the face of death.” The martyrs are willing to suffer the violence rather than inflict; their testimony is a nonviolent resistance that causes the transcendence of Satanic violence to fall from heaven — thereby losing its transcendence.
7. A hallmark of Christian Nationalism is its belief in the necessity of political violence as the way to defeat God’s enemies. Good violence to defeat bad violence. Good force over the Dark Side of the Force. It’s the Star Wars narrative that Jesus came to subvert with a narrative centered on the power of love.
