Happy ever after. | Faith & Film | Rev. T. J. FitzGerald | 06.30.24
Sermon Transcript
Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father, prepare to die. May it ever be so. Blessed be and amen. No, just kidding. I just always wanted to do that. For those of you who don’t know, that is one of the most famous lines from one of the most famous movies from our faith and film series this summer. We kicked it off together and it was delightful, right? It was fun. Yeah. Good. Okay, so maybe for some of you. I had a good time, right? One of the things I noticed, I don’t know if you did, is that all the movies that we chose to talk about faith meant choosing five movies that are all fantasies, right? They all had a fable-like quality to them and none more so than the Princess Bride. The Princess Bride was released in 1987. I remember it actually. I remember seeing it when it was in the theaters when I lived in Plano. It came out in ’87.
It’s based on a book by William Goldman. William Goldman also wrote Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid and All The President’s men, sort of a… I mean, Cliffs of Insanity. He also wrote what most consider the quintessential book about how movies actually get made in Hollywood called Adventures of the Screen Trade, which I commend to anyone interested. The stories that Goldman tells, if they’re to be believed at all, about what goes on in getting movies made about the balances between money and power and popularity, about timing and luck and money and about ego, and really about payback, are all true in his book about the film industry and are also in many of the scripts he writes for the screen, and none of those may be more perfect than the Princess Bride. The movie opens with a young Fred Savage being greeted by Peter Falk, who plays grandson and grandfather respectively. The grandfather gives his grandson a gift because he’s sick in bed. And the grandson opens it. He is all excited and then is a little bit deflated because it’s a book and what kind of book is it?
A kissing book? That’s right. Attaboy. It’s not just a kissing book. There’s politically motivated kidnappings and murder plots, decades long revenge killings, poisonings, strangulations, flesh-eating, eels, torture, threatened, self-harm, everything you’d want in a children’s book. Just charming. At the screening here on Wednesday, I think roughly half or a third of the comments though we’re about what happens to one of the villains, the main antagonist of the movie, Prince Humperdinck. Humperdinck. I kept trying to move the conversation along and then the next person would ask, “Well, let’s get back to Humperdinck. What’s happened to that guy?” And it was people of all ages I might add. They wanted to talk about what became of the pompous, arrogant, low-down, cowardly leader of the country. Can’t imagine why that was on their mind.
Some people even kind of fantasized about how he’d meet his end. Anyway. But it remains a mystery, at least in the world of the movie, what happens to this villain to this very day. Now what I love about the movie is that almost every character in it has a life-altering event that they have to deal with in the story. There are very few sort of standby stock characters just kind of hanging around or set dressing. There is a complexity to the journey of almost every character, even the ones with less screen time. And that attribute more than the fantasy, the hilarious line readings, the chop-licking, bloodthirsty revenge is it’s that change and that transformation of those characters that makes them interesting. And it’s what makes this story and so many of the best stories really come to life. This weekend marks the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York City’s West Village. And at this time of year, we hear a lot of stories about that night and what really happened, and then what followed it.
The Stonewall Inn is a bar on West 4th and Christopher Street. If you’re looking for it, it’s around the corner from the duplex and across the park… I’m just looking for all the people nodding and across the park from the monster. Yeah, sorry. I’m just remembering where to tell all my friends to meet me when I was in my misspent youth in my twenties, but I don’t want to get you all lost. Over the last decade or so, it’s been really remarkable. A new generation of historians have done remarkable work in starting to retell the stories of those riots. Famously, people like to talk about who threw the first brick, who broke the first cocktail glass, or who lobbed the first stiletto heel at the police. Oh, and I’ve heard the stories my whole life, I’d say about how it really started that night, and you’ve probably heard some of them too.
My favorite goes like this, Judy Garland… As all good stories start. Judy Garland sadly had died on Sunday, June 22nd 1969, and Ms. Garland was one of the most notable public supporters of gay people in the country. Her fame and her public calls for understanding and support of the gay community had made a deep impression in that community that already thought she was pretty fabulous to begin with. And the Friday evening, June 27th, 1969 was the first time everyone who had lost Ms. Garland that we could be together in community again. So when the patrons of the Stonewall were there and when the police came in that night for a raid, the patrons already beside themselves with grief at losing one of their great champions, chose that moment as friends of Dorothy to come together and to fight back and would accept nothing less than the land they heard of dreamed over the rainbow. The end.
I like that story. I grew up hearing it in New York and many other places. I’ve read now that it’s been a bit discounted, a little dismissed by historians, partly because it makes the patrons seem like kind of caricatures of sad weepy gays at bars. To quote a famous debate, “I know what a Gay Bar is at 2 AM. I’ve worked in a gay bar at 2 AM and you sir, do not know what a gay bar is like at 2 AM if you think that.” But okay, what are some of the other stories? A few years ago, an interesting one, a police detective who was retired and worked in Manhattan in 1969 had another take on that night. He says that the Stonewall was owned by members of the crime family at that time and that they’d been paying the police to stay out of the bar, but the amount the police were asking was starting to get to be too much.
It’s sort of like an episode of the Sopranos, and so the family was thinking of getting rid of the bar because of it was becoming too expensive just to keep the police out. So the owners refused to pay and then called the bluff of the police, who happily obliged by raiding the bar. Then the result was that the patrons egged on by the owners of the bar fought back. The end, right? I don’t know. Maybe the most enduring story is the one that was corrected by its own hero. Marsha P. Johnson, the poet, activist, sex worker, woman of faith, and all around badass, was said for years to be the one who fired the shot glass heard round the world. That kicked off the riot. It was years later when she learned about these rumors of this story about her circulating that she was like, “I wasn’t there, but I got there as soon as I could.”
She went on actually to be instrumental in the following year in starting the march that followed. The March for Gay Liberation, it was what it was called originally from the Stonewall in to Sheep Meadow in Central Park. And then 10 years after that march, Johnson led the 10th Pride Parade as its celebrity grand marshal, after founding initiatives through that decade for some of the most vulnerable youth and other people in the entire city of New York in her community. And these are only a few of the stories that try to make a history out of that day, that try to meld and forge a greater story of meaning from these lives that were changed in this time. An ailing and beloved superstar, the pain at her loss and her grief and her death, a group organizing to profit from perpetuating harm clashing with local crime families.
You see what I did there? And an activist born in the late hours of this weekend, 55 years ago, fighting in the street for equity, dignity, and the right to be who she knew to be herself out loud in public, free of repression by the state and by society. Happy Pride indeed. Now I don’t want to get into any debates, though somehow I feel a lot better about my own debating skills this morning than I did before last week. But many of us are experiencing the outcome right now of years and decades of debate. Debate about what should be read and shown to our kids in classrooms, about the kinds of stories that we should tell, and we are not alone. In fact, some of the most terrifying regimes in history have placed in classrooms dangerous, hateful, damaging texts that the world has ever known, and some have forced teachers even to read them to children.
Even despotic dictators are actually divided about this horrifying text that we are talking about today, Ferdinand the Bull. I mean the Bible too, but we’re going to get to that. Folks, you may not know it. Some of you may. The kinds of fights there have been about Ferdinand in classrooms are legendary. The story goes that Franco and Hitler burned every copy of Ferdinand the Bull that they could find, calling it propaganda. It was not allowed to be sold in Spain until 1975. It was written in 1939. But then Joseph Stalin loved the book, right? He granted its special status in Poland saying it was the only non-communist children’s book allowed to be sold in the country. And even today, there’s a fight about the book among who? Peace activists.
Some love it and others hate it as an unflattering picture of who they are and their work in the world. One of my favorites, Ernest Hemingway, rewrote the story and published it in a magazine turning Ferdinand into the strongest, biggest, bravest, meanest bull that anyone had ever seen. Good for Ernest. And rumor has it that Gandhi himself loved the book, called it his favorite book, that FDR had a special personal copy in the White House, and that 30,000 copies of the book were distributed in Germany after the fall of the Nazi regime. All of this over a children’s story, or as our poet puts it, “A lesson really about not being what you’re born into, but what you’re born to be.”
The sweet story has played a role in the worst parts of how humans show themselves to one another. And since politicians can take such powerful stances on children’s books from Spain, it really should not surprise anyone that a short snippet from Exodus and Deuteronomy if we’re being real, which actually say totally different things in both instances. Again, if we’re being real. This story that has two different plots in the same volume is being debated now, shouldn’t come as a surprise. And perhaps you saw that the Lieutenant Governor of Texas was not far behind Oklahoma’s Governor in promising to display the commandments in classrooms throughout the state.
As troubling as this is, and it is, a colleague of ours in Louisiana wrote this week, imploring their friends and their colleagues, especially those outside these states where some of these debates are happening, not to be entirely distracted solely by these headline grabbing stories about commandments, Christian charter schools, and teaching the Bible in classrooms because underneath and around these big cases, these rafts of legislation are more and more pieces coming up in legislation, attacking the dignity of persons and their right to determine their own fates, their own identities, and receive the care that they need.
And their right to determine this is turning into a collision between values and policy, between story about people you don’t know and politics that’s hard to grasp, between self-determination and state domination. That is what is growing. It is a painful, tender, anxious time for very many of us. And those who feel under attack, who fear for the future of their children maybe, and especially children who are a little more like Ferdinand than some of the other bulls, are faced with hard choices about how to raise kids in times like this and the really tough choice where. Someone told me a story yesterday that they met a new family in Portland and asked why they were moving there, and they said those words, “We have kids.”
In a place like this or where you may be, online, in times like this, perhaps the most important places that our faith lives, where our faith must grow. It’s in this distance between what a child is born into and what they are born to be. When the difference between those two things is deemed unacceptable by a parent, by a faith, by a government, and most painful of all by that child themselves, this faith must go once more into that breach, dear friends, and hold that child, that child really of age as they are awakening to their true identity and tell them the story of a faith, of a divine presence that always, that always, that always cares so much more about what they are called to be than what anyone is calling them. And we are not going to stop that anytime, anywhere.
Or to paraphrase everyone’s favorite swordsman, “Hello, my name is T. J. Fitzgerald. You threatened one of our children. Prepare to fight.” In the Princess Bride, if it tells us anything, it’s that true love is worth fighting for, cost what it may. It reminds us as any good story must to keep telling the story of this faith, to keep telling a story of a faith so bold that says to those who long to be held in dignity, held in freedom, held in holy love that tells them as you wish here. You want to rewrite a story of your faith from one of pain and into one of care, here we say, as you wish. You want to retell the story of your faith from one about a distant, about an unyielding God into an intimate, creative, love surpassing all understanding, here we say, as you wish.
You want to write a new story of a faith that does not demand you to believe in it, but rather one that believes in you, that tells this story over and over of the value of every second of every sacred life through wars and strife, through pain and want, division and tyranny, we say as you wish. That is the story of a faith so bold. That is the story that we weave together every week, every month, every year, until a future reigns again where all are respected for exactly who they are. Tell that story. For it is in this way, we may reach, we may each, we may all finally live happy ever after. May it ever be so. Blessed be and amen.
