DISNEY'S MAGIC KINGDOM OF GOD
September 02, 2001

TEXT: Luke:14:1, 7-14
It’s 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 people’s 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 God’s 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 can’t 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 doesn’t 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 world’s 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 you’re 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 Disney’s philosophy was to create the “happiest place on earth” and to build memories that will last forever. Isn’t 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 one’s being.
Disney’s 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 Cinderella’s 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 William’s 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 God’s 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 Disney’s 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 isn’t 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 present—just 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. That’s 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 God’s 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. Disney’s 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 excluding—persons and ideas. Let us entertain these angels of God as emissaries of what we are to become.

-Harry Serio