What in the world does Netflix's suspenseful Stranger Things, have to do with All Saint's Day and it's biblical lessons? Rev. Beverly Gibson (Christ Church Cathedral) uses this wildly popular series plot of two seperate realms that are connecting and colliding as an analogy for understanding our spiritual realms of Earth and God's Heavenly Kingdom, and the unity of the living and the dead.
What you will hear:
Readings
Revelation 7:9-17
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12
Topics and discussions
Celebrating All Saints Day at Christ Church Cathedral
Unity of the living and the dead
The eternal presence of God for all people and all creatures
Looking back at those we have lost we experience the harsh realities of the reality of what we know and a realm in which we can only speculate.
The common thread of the town of Hawkins in Netflick's show Stranger Things and the reality of upside down which is decay and darkness and the right side up - things that seem light and full of mercy and light
The two realms of Hawkins is separate but intertwined and connected - much like our world and heaven. Separated but connected
All Saints Day described in the illustration of John's Cloud of Witnesses and the Temple Cult of Heaven in the Book of Revelations is the realm of light and mercy while the realm of earth can seem dark and scary
While Stranger Things is a TV entertainment experience and just an example of a correlation of two realms that collide, the experience of All Saints Sunday is different, and our connection to the Kingdom of God is a spiritual one
Separated but still connected
Jewish apocalyptic literature has a purpose of revealing a temple cult in heaven where God is worshiped eternally no matter what is happening on Earth. Even the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem.
Worship in the eternal temple goes on
We are to worship God from Earth with an eye to this other Temple of Heaven
We worship God on Earth by following the teachings of Jesus laid out in the Beatitudes
Beatitudes - another vision of the blessed who are a part of the eternal worship of God
Mercy is an action
Is a constant and unconditional living force that moves through all things that bind us all together in God
The energy of God's love that runs throughout the universe
Thoreau - aware of God's loving energy moving through all things
There are no quarrels with God. Only we, humans create quarrels with God in our own wilfulness and misunderstandings
All Saint's Sunday focus us on that uniting force through time and space in the eternal now
We live and move and have our being in mercy
To be merciful with ourselves, with others, and with our world is to receive that energy that runs through all creation and unites us
Learning things about ourselves, the world and spirituality can be learned in many modern stories that are all around us
Making something like Revelations accessible to others by using stories like Stranger Things as a metaphor
Bible references in many pop-culture stories and art
C.S. Lewis and the Chronicle of Narnia as an allegory
The universal and ancient stories that is passed down in our traditions and history of a species
These stories of universal existential mysteries combines us to our ancestors and helps us make sense of these big questions of existence and the darkness of our own time
Stranger Things did an excellent job of balancing the existence of the darkness of evil and the light of good
I Sing Of The Saints of God - Saints are everywhere and "I want to be one too"
The Cloud of Witnesses includes the living and the dead
Saints can be alive today by living mercifully and the teachings of the Beatitudes
The transformative power of studying and understanding the lives of Saints
Not hiding children from stories that have dark themes if there is a valuable lesson in the story
We must have eternal vigilance against evil because there is no such thing is real life that is happily ever after
The Bible is a historic and guide that can be used to learn to handle issues that we may not understand, much like the Stranger Things kids used Dungeons & Dragons to give them insight into something no one can explain.
Understanding apocalyptic visions like the Book of Revelations and how to see there are many interpretations of that reading
Talking about death with hope and in the vision of God's love and mercy helps us to ease our fear of death