DISNEY'S
MAGIC KINGDOM OF GOD
September 02, 2001
TEXT: Luke:14:1, 7-14
Its Labor Day weekend and the traditional time for the final
backyard barbecue and gatherings of family and friends. Gatherings
involving food have particular meaning in peoples lives. They
hold people together and define who we are.
You may remember the movie Soul Food about the meal that the family matriarch
prepared every Sunday. Members of this fragmented family came together for this
singular occasion and talked about their lives. Around the table there was care
and concern for one another, mutual acceptance,and respect. When the Grandmother
died, the family no longer gathered. They went their separate ways and grew apart.
They remained fragmented, everyone in their own world, doing their own thing.
There was competition and dissension.
Disagreements and quarrels arose within
the family. In fact, they were no longer a family at all. Finally, one of the
younger members of the family had a plan to get the family together for the Sunday
dinner. It was only after they finally sat down at the table that they realized
that the weekly meal was really something that they were missing in their lives.
It was truly their soul food.
So much of what Jesus taught and did took place in the midst of a meal. Whether
it was at a wedding in Cana of Galilee, or feeding a crowd of people who had
come to hear him speak, or eating with tax collectors and sinners, or having
supper with a Pharisee, it was at a meal that he showed people who he was and
what their lives were really meant to be. There was always a message in the kind
of meal that it was.
Our scriptures for today have in common the theme of hospitality, of making someone
feel welcome. Jesus parable about hospitality refers to the Kingdom of
God and the Messianic Banquet that all Gods children will share in the
afterlife. Have you ever noticed how many of the ancient religions depict the
afterlife in terms of eating a meal? The Egyptians and others packed a lunch
for the departed. The ancient Greeks believed that the blessed would dine on
nectar and ambrosia in the Elysian Fields. The Norsemen would drink their beer
in the halls of Valhalla while telling stories to each other. We all have our
ideas of what heaven will be like.
The idea of the Messianic Banquet begs the question that if we cant get
along here on earth, how will we be able to tolerate one another in the Kingdom
of God? The Jews and Arabs kill each other over what they call the Holy
Land here on earth. Will they also fight each other over sections of heaven?
Of course, the Jews do not have a concept of the afterlife and the Moslem heaven
doesnt include Jews or anyone else. But what do Christians think? Will
all persons be reconciled? Whose beliefs will prevail?
When Timothy McVeigh was executed in June, a newspaper chain surveyed leaders
of the worlds religions as to what they thought would happen to the soul
of the mass murderer. Most agree that there will be some form of accountability,
but few presume to know the mind of God and what sort of welcome, if any, would
be extended. Would you refuse to enter heaven if you knew that people like McVeigh
and Hitler and Judas Iscariot were there? What sort of welcome would you expect?
Jesus parable implies that those whom the world deems unworthy will be
sitting down to dinner with you.
Just what can we expect the Kingdom of God to be like? What sort of welcome will
we receive? What will the accommodations be like?
When Mary Ann and I went down to visit Stuart this past January, we stopped at
Orlando for a few days at Disney World. We had been there several times before.
Some of you have even closer ties. When Richard Huyett in a parody of the commercial
was asked, Now that youre retired, what are you going to do next? Dick,
of course, said he was going to Disney World where he will work at organizing
visits of high school bands. And we all know how much Barry Haydt would like
to manage a Disney store. When Mary Reppert died this past month, I learned from
her family how much a passion she had for Disney, visiting twenty to thirty times
a year. What is it that makes Disney World the incarnation of the Kingdom of
Heaven on earth?
Walt Disneys philosophy was to create the happiest place on earth and
to build memories that will last forever. Isnt this close to our view of
the afterlife where the true believer will attain eternal happiness in the presence
of God and where memory will be the only thing that we take from this life to
the next. When you get on the monorail heading for the Magic Kingdom, the recorded
message says, Welcome to the Magic Kingdom, Children of All Ages! If
you want to enjoy the Magic Kingdom, then you must become a little child. Jesus
said, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will
never enter it.
Heaven is the place of eternal bliss. In the popular conception,
heaven is where time is suspended, cares and sorrows are forgotten,
and one lives in a state of perpetual joy, doing whatever it is
that brings happiness to ones being.
Disneys Magic Kingdom has become the secular Kingdom of God. The various
regions are the embodiment of our eternal hopes and dreams, the Never Neverland
of what we strive for. The heart of the Magic Kingdom is, of course, Fantasyland,
with Cinderellas Castle fabricated on the model of the mad king of Bavaria,
Ludwig II, who built his fantasy castle at Neuschwanstein. Ludwig was considered
mad because his perception of reality differed from that of his subjects, so
much so that his doctor took him out on the lake and drowned him. We have a hard
time dealing with people who see things differently from the majority. And yet
we all create our own realities.
When Tennessee Williams Blanche DuBois says, I don't want reality.
I want magic, she speaks for a large segment of humanity. Reality is often
so unbearable that persons delude themselves into believing that things are not
as they are, but as they would like them to be. Heaven becomes the world we want
it to be.
Television has become our magic window into fantasyland. For example, the television
series West Wing has become for many people the kind of administration they would
like to see in Washington. A survey during the last election indicated that 75%
of voters would have elected Jeb Bartlet as president.
In Fantasyland we suspend our judgments and sometimes our moral values. Where
else can a beautiful young girl live with seven short, dirty men and no one thinks
that there is anything wrong with it. We prefer the fantasy, not the reality.
Or as the newspaper editor in a John Wayne movie once said, When the legend
becomes fact, print the legend.
Main Street is where you will re-enter the earth dimension with its materialistic
culture and consumer mentality. Here you will go back in time to find security
in the familiar, with values you have come to trust, as though we would project
our human values into Gods Kingdom.
Rita Aero, in her article, The Tao of Disney, says Walt Disney
World is just about as far as you can get from reality without adjusting your
medication. Walt Disney World is designed specifically to address that part of
your mind that feels nostalgia and produces dreams. . . . Visitors to Walt Disney
World enter an altered state of consciousness with some frequency during their
stay. The effect of this altered state creates profound memories and the compelling
positive associations of pleasure, gratification, and fulfillment. . . . The Disney
Experience imprints permanently on the psyche.
Not only is Disneys World magic and filled with wonder, but it also hints
at the Kingdom of God when in places like Adventureland and Frontierland, it
challenges us to a new consciousness that sees life on both sides of death as
a great adventure in which we are all pioneers moving into uncharted regions
of new dimensions of being. It has been reported that the Disney engineers could
not keep Tomorrowland up to date with how we envision the future. The future
just isnt what it used to be, so they have now made that area a memory
bank to recall how previous generations envisioned the future. There is no tomorrow
and no past, only an eternal presentjust like Heaven.
But more than anything else, Disney comes closest to the Kingdom of God in terms
of hospitality and the effort they make to insure that all are welcomed into
the Kingdom. It is no wonder that Disney World has become the largest single
attraction on earth and the number one vacation destination.
When we take another look at Jesus concept of hospitality in terms of a
meal, we can see how important it is to welcome the stranger to the dinner table.
White segregationists in the South understood the power and importance of meals.
Thats why there was such a battle over lunch counters in the Fifties and
Sixties. To admit a person to the table with you is to admit that person as a
full, equal human being, just like you. Something happens when we sit with others
at the table. Bonds of community are formed. There is the possibility of communion.
I would think that Gods table in the Kingdom of Heaven is not like the
segregationist lunch counter, but more like the Amish dining room table with
all the extra leaves that can be added when more guests arrive, where there is
always room for one more.
Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is in the midst of us. The concept is here.
We just have to make it a reality. Disneys World is still an imperfect
dream, but unless we have the dreams and visions, they will never become the
reality. It begins by welcoming, not excludingpersons and ideas. Let us
entertain these angels of God as emissaries of what we are to become.
-Harry Serio |