A Reworking of Hebrews 11

I had the privilege of speaking at this year's Greenbelt festival on "The Depressives of the Bible". Afterwards a couple of people asked if they could get hold of my conclusion to the talk which was a reworking of the famous passage on faith in Hebrews 11. So here it is. Essentially I was trying to make the point that people with mental health problems, including depression, made a significant contribution to the stories in and the literature of the Bible and so I reworked the Hebrews 11 passage replacing "in sadness" for "by faith". Hope people find it useful.
Edit (13/4/17): The whole talk is now available to download for free.
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"Now this present sadness is a loss of confidence in what we hope for and a lack of assurance about what we do not see. This too is what the ancients were commended for.

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, but we also see that same universe full of pain and hurt and sadness.

In sadness Cain's offering was deemed inadequate and he felt the pain of rejection.

In sadness Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. Yet when he had seen the world condemned he felt a pain so deep that he tried to drown out his guilt with alcohol.

In sadness Saul saw his kingdom torn from him for acting with compassion and then saw the adulation he had once received transferred to another.

In sadness David, and those who came after him, found God in their pain and their music and wrote the words that would echo not just through one generation, but through the ages.
In sadness Solomon, and those who bore his name, found life meaningless, but were unafraid to wrestle with God and cry out at the darkness.

All these people were still living by faith when they died. Yet they did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and wished for them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. In sadness, they were longing for a better country

In sadness Job saw his family wiped out and refused to shut up and accept the perceived wisdom. He chose not to be ill-treated but nevertheless suffered at the hands of the people of God. He persevered because he saw him who is invisible.

In sadness Elijah cried out that God might kill him, even though he had witnessed an incredible miracle. And yet God did not reject him. He turned his back on the fire and the storm, hearing only the quiet sound, but still anointed leaders and put kings in their place.

In sadness Jeremiah heard God's words of destruction for the city and the world he lived in. In sadness he was despised and abused. He chose to be ill-treated by the people of God rather than to enjoy their fleeting pleasures. Yet despite his sadness God did not count him as unworthy.

And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Ruth, Naomi, Ezekiel, Mark and Nehemiah. Who despite sadness conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; whose weakness was turned to strength; Women received back their dead. Some faced jeers and flogging. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and ill-treated – the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground. These were all commended in spite of their sadness, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders. And let us try to somehow pick ourselves up, and stagger on along the path marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, and he who himself was known as the Man of Sorrows. He endured rejection, loneliness, desperation and the cross, scorning its shame, and sits now at the right hand of the throne of God."
(Based on Heb 11&12 NIVUK)

Chinatown: An Introduction

I was asked to give a five minute introduction to Roman Polanski's classic neo-noir Chinatown at last week's Greenbelt Festival so I thought I would post up what I said. It's a film I've loved since I first watched it and preparing for this talk and watching it again a couple of times really deepened my appreciation of it. So without further ado I'll hand over to Saturday night's me.

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Well thanks for coming to our late night screening of Chinatown. My name is Matthew Page and I've been exploring the intersection between faith and film for about 12 years now, primarily about Bible Films, but more recently film noir, the genre in which Chinatown is one of the most pivotal examples, and so I've been asked to give a short introduction to the film.

Chinatown is showing as part of Greenbelt's 40th anniversary, we're showing a trio of films from the year Greenbelt started in 1974. For many Chinatown is not just the best film of that year - although The Godfather part 2 took all the Oscars - but one of the best of all time. It's a fitting film to look back on after 40 years, because the story itself is set roughly 40 years prior to that in 1930s era, great depression hit, Los Angeles. And if you go back 40 years before that, to 1894, oil had been discovered two years earlier and cinema would be invented the following year. In 1894 the population of Los Angeles was just tens of thousands. The discoveries of oil in 1892 and cinema in 1895 sent the population rocketing. Today it's 12 million.

The rapid emergence in such a short space of time of such a large city, essentially in the middle of a desert made water an incredibly precious commodity and therefore the key political issue. So it's the issue of water, and the power associated with it, that drives the plot, as private investigator Jake Gittis is hired to snoop on the LA water board's chief engineer.

However, it's all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what the plot is about is the same thing as what the film is about. Here things couldn't be further from the truth. The plot is essentially about what happens when Gittis snoops on the water engineer, but the film is about corruption, deception, oppressive structures and power. The plot has little to do with Chinatown the place, but Gittis' experiences there permeates the film in scene after scene.

Gittis, in a brilliant performance from Jack Nicolson, used to be a cop in Chinatown but seems to have left disillusioned. Gittis, with his sharp suits and almost celebrity status puts high expectations on himself, but the film offers little evidence of his ability to make the world a better place. His disappointment at his failure to resolve Chinatown's problems despite the police's intransigence, seep through in scene after scene. Significantly, Gittis is in every scene. The audience only see what he sees and experiences what he experiences. He is our way into the multitude of complex threads that make up the film's fabric. We see its events through his eyes.

But the question of who to link the director Roman Polanski with is more complex. He appears partway through the film as a hood with a knife, but as someone who escaped the holocaust and later saw his wife murdered perhaps Polanski is Gittis, seemingly impotent in the face of evil. Or is he Faye Dunaway's character? Or even, given his subsequent crimes, John Huston's character?

Huston himself provides the link between this film, arguably the first neo-noir and the earlier Film noir movement which emerged and peaked in the 40s and 50s. Huston directed many of the key movies in the film noir genre including the Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, The Asphalt Junction and Beat the Devil. Film Noir was a genre defined primarily by it's themes of paranoia, deception, male impotence and betrayal. Most of the films were set in the 30s, 40s and 50s, many involved private eyes and were very much notable for their expressionistic use of light and shade.

Chinatown embodies many of these distinctives, but brings a new twist. There are three notable differences, firstly the use of colour although far from all film noir is in black and white. Secondly whereas the earlier films very much focused on corrupt individuals, Chinatown is more of a commentary on a corrupt society. Lastly the golden era of Film Noir had very much been hemmed in by the American Production Code which inflicted certain standards on films, including that notion that bad characters had to get their comeuppance. Eventually this lead to a certain level of predictability as to how the film would end. But by the 70s the production code era was over and the tension as to how a film might resolve itself was reintroduced. I won't give away how this film ends but it's worth noting that director Polanski and writer Robert Towne disagreed strongly as to how the film should end.

But if it Chinatown could not have been produced very much earlier, it is also difficult to see it being made any later than 1974. '74 was the year that saw President Nixon resign over a scandal that came to be called Water-gate. The film's "fiction" about corruption and power had become uncomfortably close to real life. But more significantly 75 saw Jaws become a smash hit. The studios changed tack moving towards big adrenaline-fuelled action films and away from slower, more reflective films such as Chinatown which gradually unwind and relish tight dialogue, subtle acting skills and visual lushness. "Forget it Jack, it's Chinatown."

My Greenbelt Talk Available Online

I've had a number of people ask about getting hold of my Greenbelt talk. The majority of Greenbelt seminars are recorded, but I was on at one of the venues where that wasn't possible. So the bad news is that the quality isn't great here, as I had to record this on my laptop, but the good news is that it's free! (Greenbelt seminar downloads usually cost £2). Feel free to post any comments below or email me.

Anyway, you can download my talk - Biblical Horror Stories for Children - from my (currently hibernating) Jesus Films podcast site.

[To save a copy click on the download link under the "Audio MP3" icon. That will take you through to another page. Right click on the "download" button and chose "Save Target As" (Internet Explorer) or "Save Link As" (Firefox) or similar for other browsers.]

Greenbelt 2009

I've been meaning to write a little bit about Greenbelt ever since I got back on Tuesday, but haven't quite managed it. Having not gone since 2007 due to having a 2 week old baby and no cash, it had felt like a long wait, but ultimately it proved to be well worth it.

The main thing for me was, I guess, my talk, something I had wanted to do for a long time. Inevitably I ended up speaking at the same time as (but in a different venue to) Greenbelt's biggest named speaker - Rob Bell. It was Bell's only speaking date in the UK for all of 2009, and though he was doing three talks, this was the only one that wasn't in a limited-number-of-seats venue, thereby guaranteeing everyone the opportunity to hear him. This was inevitable I suppose. I was the anti-Bell - an almost entirely unknown speaker discussing a difficult topic. Obviously it made sense to have me fill one of the least popular slots. Thankfully, I got a bit of perspective after a while. If, back in February, the Greenbelt team had offered me the chance to talk at Greenbelt, but told me this was the slot I would have had, I would have taken it with both hands and a big smile. And, as it turned out, my venue was reasonably full, so everything worked out well in the end.

The talk itself went well. There was a desperate, last minute, scramble to find something to put my notes on, and some background noise that made it hard initially to pick up the audience's reactions, but I felt I communicated reasonably well. The questions and comments at the end were interesting and positive, and one old lady made a comment about how the session resolved an issue she'd been struggling with for a long, long time. I almost shed a tear at that point, but thankfully avoided turning into a blubbering wreck.

Anyway, now I've blown all of my egomaniac chips all in one go, I should probably talk about the rest of the festival. I didn't actually get to a lot else this year. Having two, very active, kids made it quite hard work. I can tell you, though, that Bubble Inc. is cool, though not, apparently, as much fun as playing in the toy tents on your own.

I did get to a few grown-up things, mainly talks by two friends - Simon Hall and Stu Jesson. Simon's talk was called "The Thoughtful 'Charismatic'" and was an examination of the Charismatic movement 15 or so years after the Toronto Blessing. He made a number of interesting points, which I'd like to go over again. Stu's talk was "Simone Weil and the Search for Undivided Attention", and was, in honesty, too complex for me to sum up without the risk of getting it totally wrong.

The only other talk I went to was Symon Hill's "What Would Jesus Spin?" about Christians and the media. Given that Hill is the associate director of the Ekklesia thinktank, I was surprised that this was sparsely attended. I was tempted to ask him whether this was a reflection on his ability to communicate with a mass audience or simply an indication of how lightly most Christians take this subject. Hill's main point seemed to be that it is possible to get good media coverage, but it often doesn't happen, and it's usually the result of very creative hard work.

Sadly, I didn't get to much film stuff, having already seen Son of Man plenty of times. I'd have liked to introduce it actually, but assumed that someone else was already filling that role.

The good thing about going to Greenbelt with a large group is that you do tend to pick up what's going on in the festival. Often people speaking there pass comments as well, all of which gives you a good sense of what's happening even if you miss the events themselves. So, in no particular order: Rob Bell was very good and very full (or at least his sessions were); Ockham's Razor was apparently amazing; Musical highlights were Foy Vance, Duke Special and The Welcome Wagon. I also enjoyed hearing Sixpence None the Richer's "Kiss Me" and Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha" drift across the fields to my tent whilst I babysat the kids and finally finished James Crossley's "Jesus in an Age of Terror". More on that another time.

Sadly, just when I was getting into the swing of things, it all had to end, and so we packed up our tent, whilst some friends pegged down the kids, and drove back home somehow trying to communicate to Nina (3) just how long it would be until Greenbelt next year. Sad to say, I'm already pondering my talk proposal...

(Photos of Mel, Nina and Digory (left) and me (right) are thanks to Anna Purver)

Guesting on Premier Radio

I'm going to be a guest on Premier Christian Radio's Big Breakfast tomorrow (Sat. 8th August 2009). Apparently, I'm being interviewed off-and-on in between songs over hour or so. I'm mainly there to discuss Greenbelt and my forthcoming talk there, but I think we're also going to talk about Bible films as well. Following in my footsteps on the Sunday breakfast show is some guy called Gordon Brown. I imagine he'll be listening to my show to pick up a few tips.

It doesn't appear that the show is archived, but you can listen live online or catch it on 1305, 1332, 1413 MW (this may just be Londoners), or on DAB, and it apparently is also available on the TV (Sky Digital 0123, Freeview 725). I've been told it starts at 8:15am (British Summer Time).

My Greenbelt Talk 2009

I'm pleased to announce that I will be speaking at this year's Greenbelt Festival. Greenbelt has a unique place in my heart: an annual pilgrimage that has nurtured, shaped and challenged my faith, year in year out. I first went to Greenbelt 20 years ago (as a 14 year old) and this, I think, will be my 15th festival in all. Given that this is also the first time for me as a speaker at the festival, it's fair to say I'm looking forward to it!

I'll be speaking on "Biblical Horror Stories for Children": looking at the parts of the Bible where God has people killed, wondering why the place we're most likely to hear these stories is Sunday school, and asking how we should respond. I'm hoping to use a clip or two from Bible films, as there are some really good examples of how we selectively read the text to suit our sensibilities. I'm also hoping that I'm not on at the same time as this year's main speaking attraction - Rob Bell.

There's a 15% discount for anyone who books in by the end of April.

Greenbelt 2007

We got back from Greenbelt on Tuesday morning and I've been meaning to write down a few thoughts on it ever since, but life has been pretty hectic, and I've had a stomach bug for the last 24 hours which has left me feeling none too good. This was my 15th Greenbelt (although I've not attend the complete festival for one or two of those), Mel's sixth and Nina's second, and going with a 15 month toddler is certainly a different experience from going as a couple (or even as part if a youth group). For a start, I'm far less into the music than I used to be, so I tend to baby sit Nina and take the opportunity to do a spot of reading. I did catch Vera Cruz as my friend was mixing the sound for them.

I did go to plenty of the talks however – more than I expected to actually, although there were a few where the venue was full up by the time I got there. I'm not entirely sure why Greenbelt gives extra profile to certain speakers and then allocates them a smaller venue – though I know that certain bands in the past have requested the smaller venues for that more intimate feel.

There were a good number of biblical scholars at this years festival, although some of those were the ones I missed, so in the end I only really caught Morna Hooker. She was talking about the nativity narratives in Matthew and Luke, and whilst most of it was stuff I was familiar with there were a few extra things that I came away with. Hooker started off reading Matthew's opening as a way of demonstrating that Mathew is more of a scholar than a teacher. She also pointed out how "disrespectful" the four women mentioned in the genealogies are. Rather than finding Sarah, Rebekah etc we find a prostitute, a woman who posed as a prostitute in order to have a child by their Father-in-law, a Moabite, and an adulteress. Hooker says this links to Mary's "suspicious" pregnancy. She also pointed out two things I'd never thought of. Firstly that the star makes a mistake in leading the wise men to Herod, and secondly that Luke is paralleling the birth of Jesus with the birth of John.

I also enjoyed listening to Christian Aid's Nigel Varndell who had chosen the provocative title "Jesus was a Liar". Of course it was obvious that that was hardly what he meant – and sure enough he was mainly looking at 2 occasions in Mark when Jesus appears to deliberately misquote the Old Testament (Mark 10:19, 12:30-31). The thirs example he gave was from Mark 8:38 ("For whoever is ashamed of me..of him will the Son of man also be ashamed") which comes straight after Jesus has told Peter (who denies Jesus laterin the book) that he will use him to build his church. He used this last passage to say we need to hold Jesus's words and actions in tension.

Other talks I enjoyed were Dave Tomlinson, the always good John Smith and Mark Yaconelli who ably demonstrated that he's a chip off the old block (his father Mike Yaconelli was a huge favourite of mine before his untimely death a few years back). And, of course, Greenbelt wouldn't be complete without hearing Gareth Higgins's annual "Film Review of the Year". I was surprised that he was quite so enamoured by The Fountain and that he didn't give much time to the incredible This is England but otherwise there's a lot of agreement between us and he highlighted a few films that I really need to catch.

Sadly, the film programme was less exciting this year. The majority of the programme was given over to four films from the Church Times's 50 top religious films – The Mission, Babette's Feast, Into Great Silence (my review) and Intolerance. Fortunately they also showed a few other films including the coffee industry documentary Black Gold which I was disappointed to miss earlier in the year. It didn't disappoint, and you can read my review over at rejesus.