To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Jesus Christ

It is the first week of the pop culture sermon series! And it is also Pride weekend in Fredericksburg so I wonder why I got assigned this week, HMM.

The goal of the pop culture sermon series is to on purpose reflect our scripture readings and the overall Christian project here against a single artifact pop culture, not to replace the scripture but as a backdrop against which we can see scripture in new contrast and context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg2qd9l3sg0

I famously don't love movies, categorically, but there's one little flick from 1995 that I can watch over and over and over again, and it feels like a cup of tea and a warm blanket, and it's called "To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar" which is the autograph written on a portrait of Julie Newmar that our main characters find on the wall in a diner, which becomes important to them as an emblem of courage and luck for the rest of the movie.

The movie opens to stars Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo as drag queens competing in the drag queen of the year ball in New York City. Patrick Swayze as Miss Vida Boheme and Wesley Snipes as Noxeema Jackson tie as the winners of the competition and their award is an all expenses paid trip to Hollywood to compete in the nationwide version of the competition, but! They sell their plane tickets and buy a used convertible Cadillac and choose to drive across the country so they can take John Leguizamo, aka Chi Chi Rodriguez under their wing and take her to Hollywood with them.

The first act of the movie is mostly just road trip montage with a series of hijinks that they find themselves in and it establishes their dynamic. The older queens are wise but conflict avoidant, and John Leguizamo is brash and unpolished but fearless, and for all the ways that Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes allow their fear of rejection or confrontation or violence against them would prevent them from showing up as themselves, Leguizamo waltzes right into spaces with a "this is me, take it or leave it" attitude.

But the movie takes off when, having driven about halfway across the country from New York to Hollywood, their Cadillac breaks down in the fictional small town of Snydersville, Nebraska and they are trapped for the weekend in a place that they are afraid, has no context and no framework to understand them, big city gay guys in wigs and dresses. The comedy of it is that the seemingly naive residents of this town don't really clock our main characters- who are in drag the whole time- as drag queens, they see them more as these, like, flamboyant-bordering-on-ostentatious women who have a weightlifting habit- at one point they get mistaken as members of a women's basketball team- and what ensues is something like 36 hours of these characters all trying to figure out if and how they can co-exist with each other.

The plot of this movie feels like a sequin-and-fringe covered retelling of the Great Commission of the twelve apostles with a little parable of the Good Samaritan mixed in. The central tensions of the film feel so well reflected in the central tensions of these gospel passages. Are you brave enough to show up where you are sent (or perhaps where you find yourself) and help out however you can, even if there's risk? And, who is my neighbor? Who am I the keeper of? These are the questions that Swayze and Snipes and Leguizamo are grapple with for the entire movie, and frankly that I find us grappling with most of the time as Church.

Jesus's commission for his apostles is difficult one. Go from town to town proclaiming the good news. Take nothing with you. Accept only the hospitality of strangers. I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. If it goes badly, at best, you can shake the dust off your feet and move on to the next town and at worst they will drag you before the courts and persecute you. But what you might find there is a host of problems-- illness, heartache, pain, prejudice, violence, fear, even shame- that you can speak to, that you have the skills and spirit and call to address. Are you brave enough to do it, even if there's risk?

And the question always right behind these questions is: what it mine to do? Who are the people that get my help? If I see illness, heartache, pain, prejudice, violence, fear, shame-- how much of it is mine to respond to? What if they haven't earned it? What if I think they don't want help? Or want my help? Or what happens if they don't receive it with gratitude? Who do I have permission to just walk on by on the other side of the road. These questions are very real, they are honest questions- and bearing them openly and vulnerably against the great commission, the parable of the good samaritan, gosh, even the movie- would challenge us I think to be braver and less withholding about the help we have to give.

So what the queens do is they show up and they give their help.

Noxeema befriends a woman who everyone in the town presumes to be deaf and non-verbal, and one day while Noxeema is naming Dorothy Dandridge movies to herself, the woman names the movie that Snipes can't seem to recall. "Hold on, did you say something?" Noxeema asks.

The queens play matchmaker for two different couples who just need a little nudge in the direction of forthrightness and permission.

Swayze calls for a "girls day" and takes them women of the town out to the salon and the thrift store for makeovers and there's a stunning shift in confidence for all of them.

Wesley Snipes tells off a group of boys in town for bullying and strongarms them into a presentation of manners that sticks with them for the rest of the movie.

And Miss Vida Boheme, against the advice of her sisters, waltzes into a bedroom to break up a domestic disturbance between Stockard Channing and her husband, and in the daintiest way possible gives him a knuckle sandwich and chases him off into the night.

And when the time finally comes for the uhh "Pontius Pilate" of the movie to come and enact his vengeance, the citizens of this town rally around our protagonists, to their shock, and chase him off too.

These characters did not have to show up, they did not have to decide to share themselves with this town, they did not have to decide to help, they did not have to go out on the limbs they went out on or risk the things that they risked, but they did, and some really special stuff happened because of it.

We have the same choice to make- we do not have to accept Jesus's commission. We don't have to go about in the world bearing our hearts openly and vulnerably, being ourselves fully and helping others be themselves fully. We don't have to help the people we find, we don't have step out in faith that our neighbors are our neighbors and we are theirs. We're supposed to. We're called to. And, there's nobody making us do it. But, it is the foundation of our faith- the belief that we have responsibilities beyond what the world around us would ask of us, and that without that responsibility to mercy and to care and to vulnerability and to showing up, the world falls apart, even if there is a risk to us to do those things. But when we show up, we believe, usually, something important and even miraculous is bound to happen. People being fully themselves, you being fully yourself, hurt and pain being addressed and amended, a vision of a different kind of orld coming to bear, people who are given permission and space to be fully alive. What a miracle it is, a miracle that we are capable of ushering in ourselves, with God's help. [Special things happen when you show up. You might even win drag queen of the year.] Amen.