After 40 years, it may be time for the Last Jedi to holster their light sabers. As prequels and sequels of the original movies continue to be released with great box-office success, the Star Wars franchise remains an unstoppable cultural force.
While the special effects are spectacular, it has always been the Star Wars story—extreme evil, great good, desperate danger, genuine love, hopeless odds, and costly sacrifice—that attracted me. Story elements such as these captivate the imagination and linger in the mind long after the screen goes dark or a book goes back on the shelf.
Truly great stories remind us of something borrowed from a larger story. They echo through history and resonate with something deep within our soul. That larger story is God's story—the greatest story ever told—and the climax happens at Christmas.
Star Wars' unlikely characters have always fascinated me. The heroes are nobodies from nowhere, insignificant and irrelevant individuals as far as the galaxy far far away is concerned. Yet they change history.
Like Star Wars, the key characters in the Christmas story are nonentities: powerless peasants who live far from the halls of influence. A homeless couple with a helpless child born in an obscure village.
Yet in fiction and real life, things are not always as they seem.
These seemingly rag-tag nobodies are part of a web of cosmic events they can neither understand nor resist. The insignificant to the world take center stage in God's kingdom.
While the powerful may have yawned at the birth of one more impoverished baby, heaven burst forth with uncontainable celebration at the birth of Jesus, not in the Temple, but the workplace. And who did the angels invite to their party? Not the powerful, but lowly shepherds.
In what is known as the Magnificat or Mary's Song, our Lord's mother echoes this biblical reality.
Peter reminds us of the same truth and challenges our far-too-frequent assessment of our own importance.
So the next time we think, Who am I? What can someone like me do? let's remember who God chooses to use. And the next time we think, I'm really somebody!, let's remember this reality.
Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.