A Bug's Life

08/07/16 “The Gospel According to Pixar: A Bug’s Life”    Proverbs 28:5

Micah 6:8

Stories are a vital part of life. We tell other people stories about our lives to draw connection points to relate better to them. We tell children stories to teach them lessons. As Christians we have a book full of stories that help us understand the character and power of God more so that we can be in a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ. 

I have always loved stories. As a child I devoured books. There are many pictures of me sitting in a small rocking chair with a book or snuggled up to my parents as they read to me. As an adult I still love to read, but I also recognize that stories come to us in many different forms in the age we live in, and perhaps one of the most prevalent story tellers of our age is the Walt Disney/ Pixar studios, who tell story through films that countless people watch each year. Many go on to become classics because of the message they present. For the next four weeks, we are going to join together in looking for Biblical messages in Disney films.

Before we begin this sermon series, I want to have a word of caution. I know some of you may be asking, “But Pastor Michelle, why are we looking at movies? Is that really Biblical?” - to which I reply that it certainly is. I am not saying that Disney movies are THE Gospel. What I am saying is that Bible speaks to the condition of our spirit. The Bible is a collection of stories and letters and laws that tell us who we are, that are are pat of our story. Because it speaks to our human nature, the lessons it is trying to present can be seen lived out in the world around us - in movies, art, theater, literature. If only we take time to look. Further, Jesus preached using stories. He took things that people knew about like family and farming and money and wove them together in narratives for the purpose of teaching the people of God. So for the next four weeks we are going to be taking modern stories, as presented by Disney Pixar, and look at what they can teach us about who we are as humans and the Lord we love, if only we look at them differently. 

To kick off our sermon series, we are going to explore a lesser known Pixar film from 1998, A Bug’s Life. This movie tells the tale of a colony of aunts who work for the Grasshoppers, who act as overlords. The ants have a certain quantity of food they have to collect in order to appease the grasshoppers, only one year things went a bit amuck, when Flik, a worker ant, who likes to invent things to make their work easier, accidentally knocked all of the food that had been collected into the stream. As retaliation, the angry grasshoppers tell the ant colony that they now had less time to collect double the amount of food they need. 

But Flik has a plan - he is going to leave the ant colony in order to find bigger bugs to help them fight off the grasshoppers. The colony agrees, but mostly just to get Flik away from them so they can go about their work. As Flik stands on the thresh-hold of his journey he makes the statement “For the colony and for oppressed ants everywhere.”

While A Bug’s Life came out when I was younger, the first time I sat down to watch it was in college when I was studying religion. There was an undeniable connection in my mind between the oppression of the ants by the grasshoppers and the oppression of the Israelites when they were slaves in Egypt. Do you remember the story? The Israelites worked hard labor for the Egyptians, building structures for them. But one day the Pharaoh looked around and realized how many Israelites there were in his Kingdom and he began to get nervous they would have an uprising so he devised a plan to work them so hard that they wouldn’t have the energy for insurrection - he made them work longer hours, asked for double the amount of buildings to go up, took away their straw to make bricks and told them they had to find their own building materials. The people were bone tired. The Pharaoh’s plan worked, until God showed up and called Moses to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt and into the promised land.

For our Jewish brothers and sisters their release from captivity in Egypt is essential to their history, is a vital part of their story. They celebrate it every year at Passover. They memorize it and tell it to their children and grandchildren. It is that important. Yet, the prophet Micah comes to the people on behalf of God and accuses them of forgetting - of forgetting their story, their history, their relationship with God, all of which has caused them to go astray and treat other people badly. Their ethics and sense of justice aren’t as they should be because they haven’t put first things first. 

Where we pick up in the book of Micah this morning the scene is set like a court-room. This is a lawsuit from God against the people of Israel. And they have no defense for what they have done. God is deeply disappointed with Israel. The people have been unfaithful to a God who has always been faithful to them. The people have dismissed the faithfulness of God, and by not remembering the story of how God brought them out of captivity, they have also forgotten the power of their God who saves. 

Micah reminds them who they are and reminds them that their God is just - in fact justice is part of the very character of God. But there is a difference between human justice and divine justice - for God doesn’t make any mistakes. But God is also merciful, filled with loving-kindness (or hesed) that allows the people to repent and come back time and time again. 

There is an age old question of what does God want from us or what is God’s will for us? Micah, after reminding the people who they are and whose they are, lays it right out for them. The Lord requires them to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. Theologian Carol Dempsey points out, “Only when one walks humbly with God will one come to learning understand how to do justice and love kindness”. God’s will for us as the people of God can only be realized when we approach God with an attitude of reverence and openness, but when we do so, we are changed, completely. Our very ethic changes. But it can’t be something we just believe in or speak about, it has to be something that we live into daily by how we treat other people. That is what obedience to God looks like. That is what God is using the prophet Micah to remind the people of Israel about. God’s sense of justice that stands up for the poor and the oppressed, heals relationships in communities, and  seeks to equally distribute goods, benefits, and burdens, becomes our ethic, our sense of justice. It becomes part of our human morality.

Back to Flik the ant. Flik has a sense that things aren’t right. That he shouldn’t be collecting food for the grasshoppers while ants are overworked and don’t have enough for themselves. But the other ants prefer to not rock the boat, to not risk things being even worse for them until later on, when they find out that Hopper, the leader of the grasshoppers, has a plan to kill their queen. But Flik never acted in a way that compromised who he was or what he believed, even in seeking justice. While we are seeking justice we cannot fall to the temptation to act unjust ourselves.

So what does the Lord require of us when it comes to our ethic? To seek justice and love kindness - to respond to God’s love by sharing it with others, all because of our relationship of walking humbly with God. Simple words but hard to live into. Justice is hard, brothers and sisters, especially God’s sense of justice which can be so distant from our own. But may we seek to live in such a way that God’s justice is realized as we stand up for the poor and the oppressed, and heal relationships in our communities and beyond. Amen.