Genesis 29: 20, 25-28; Matthew 13: 31,32

Into the woods

Today I want to do something unusual: take the message of a musical and see what we can learn for our faith.   I believe the musical “into the woods” paints the human condition extremely well and asks the question people of Christian faith have to respond to. We have just talked about the story of Jacob and his wives.  The trickster gets tricked.  The way the story is told gives the impression of a fairytale. We also heard the short parable of the mustard seed again.  The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. Mustard seeds are small but grow out big.   We also talked about the musical “Into the woods.”  The first part of the Sondheim musical is a zany and chaotic mixing of the four fairy tales of Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella.  The stories are strangely tied together and they continue after the happily ever after.  The princes from Rapunzel and Cinderella talk about their princesses and they are the most hilarious.  All the Grimm brothers’ storylines go haywire and a whole new story is born.  The giant has a wife who wants revenge.  The baker wants Red Riding Hood’s cape. But then in the second act the musical becomes more reflective and raises questions of parenting and being lost and loneliness.  There are four things that I take away from this musical that can shed light on our faith.

First, we are all in the woods at least some of the time.  We have to go through it, but we all lose our bearings and get thrown off course.  For example  I think we are all horrified by what is happened in Gaza and Israel again and we stunned by the downing of an airliner in the rolling wheat fields of Ukraine.  Into the woods sings how children will listen, but these children can no longer listen.  It is all the opposite, the antithesis of fairy tale. It is a horrible tragedy that leaves us all feeling a little more anxious, a little less secure and a great deal sadder.  Jacob too was lost after he cheated his brother and father, into the woods of a foreign land.  In our personal life we can often feel we are in the woods with no way out.  Sometimes we are not “out of the woods yet.”  Our faith reminds us that we will not be in the woods forever.

Second, it is important to get our story straight.  This is true of the Bible story.  The musical completely confuses the four fairy tales. We have to keep telling them, even if they don’t go the way we want them to, even if we are not comfortable with them.  These are what we have to catch a glimpse of what God s like and what God desires and how much God loves us.  We have to tell these stories for in them lies a world of meaning and spiritual wisdom and good news that will help us get through the woods of our lives.  We have to trust these stories and have faith that God can speak through them to us.  You can’t mix and match stories.  You have to leave them their authenticity. We can’t change the stories of the Bible.  You can’t change the Jack the beanstalk fairy tale.  But you can’t change the Jacob story either. It’s set in stone. You can’t change stories as the culture changes. But you do have to keep interpreting them.   As the song “children will listen” says: children may not do what you tell them to do, but they will listen. The message will get through to them.  So even if they go their own way, they will have soaked up the message of the church.

Third, as the musical says “no one is alone.”  I don’t know if we really believe that deep in our hearts.  I think there is loneliness in all our hearts at one point in our lives.  But this is the beauty of the Bible, that it reminds us that we are part of God’s story and that we belong in that story, that in away Jacob is our family as are all the other characters in the Bible.   And this is one really important function of the Church: to make sure that people know they are not alone, to remind them that they should not be alone, that “someone is on their side” and to let them know that they are safe in God’s love.   The question of aloneness is more pressing than ever in our day and age.  Sondheim has really put his finger on this scourge of our times.  Other than families, no one can address this question better than the Church.

Finally, friends, something to think about.  There is Jack and the Beanstalk.  The beanstalk grows us from a magic bean.  So the mustard seed of faith grows up to be a huge tree.  Something small becomes something big.  Even if our faith is really small, it can become bigger.

So, friends, the musical addresses a lot of the big issues of life in our society: there is our lostness in the world, there is our confusion about what the stories that get us through life mean, there is the reality that at one point in our lives we are all lonely and we want to know how to get rid of that loneliness.  It is this lostness, this confusion and this loneliness that can so overpower us that we give up on faith, that we discard it.  Accepting these conditions on the other hand can deepen our faith and make it more meaningful.  The Bible is full of human confusion, lostness and loneliness and those people in the end find a way to God. Even Jesus deals with these questions. May God make bring us closer and may  God make our faith grow. God.