McFarland USA - movie review

Film Thoughts

McFarland USA

A review by Dan McDonald

 

            I am not a real movie critic. I am simply someone who watches movies and tends to see something in movies that moves me. So I guess it should not surprise anyone that I also liked the movie “McFarland USA”.

            Was the movie a classic? No! It was based on a true story. Did the movie live up to its responsibility to tell the story the way things actually were? Let it suffice that the movie was a Disney Movie. Disney movies are to history what Hallmark movies are to romance. No matter the story or the history the plot lines all involve an initial crisis followed by a resolution that then threatens to unravel until at last it all ends in a happy ending. This is a Disney movie that tells a Disney story around a few facts of an event that actually happened. It is disappointing that when you compare the story told by Disney with the actual history of the McFarland cross country team, you are left in uncertainty concerning how much can be believed. Here is what Wikipedia reports on the historical accuracy of the story. But I believe the story that is told is a good one and that enough things about it must have been true enough that Coach Jim White proved to be able to motivate his runners from the strengths and resources that he discovered already existed within their community and backgrounds. He was not an outsider who merely brought his way of thinking into their lives and changed them as some form of white savior. He was a coach who had learned enough to connect with their way of seeing life to motivate them from within their own cultural background to excel in their endeavors. That is ultimately what the McFarland USA story is all about. It is of a coach who has learned enough of these students’ community life to be able to encourage them to build on their strengths while pursuing possibilities they might never have thought possible. He is able to connect with them in their culture to begin to hope for things which they may have regarded as outside of their reach before this coach had an impact on their lives.

The truth is Coach Jim White never got fired from a previous job before he started coaching at McFarland. The truth is he had been teaching at the school district for enough years that when he started teaching there it was a school of predominately White students. It had become a school of predominately Hispanic students. Coach White had taught in the school district as that process took place.

The movie showed Coach White’s life being touched by the friendliness of the Hispanic community. He became close enough to the Hispanic community that he saw how much hard work meant to the community and also how much community mattered to them. The Hispanic community shared labor, sorrow, joy, celebration, and hardship. I think this is something that people notice about Hispanic communities once you come into contact with them. It is quite believable that Coach White, who built one of the dominant cross country teams in California sports history learned to tap into these cultural resources when he motivated his young athletes to labor at their training so that they might excel at their sport.

It is in telling the story of how a coach learned to motivate his athletes from the strength of their own cultural resources that I believe this Disney movie for all of its faults tells an important story about the relationship between communities and the people who have positive influences on a community.

In the movie it becomes obvious that the Hispanic community’s commitment to being a community of neighbors who share the good and bad of life has an impact on Coach White and his family. Whether or not the events in the story line of the movie actually happened, it is believable to imagine a coach who knew his athletes to tap into the community qualities he recognized were important to his runners. It is believable to imagine a great coach building on the strengths he saw in the students he coached. He could use what he knew drove these athletes to encourage them to reach successes they had not yet begun to believe was a possibility for them.

We sometimes doubt the importance of the outsider who becomes a part of a community. The outsider coming into a community often has insights about a community’s strengths and weaknesses that are not necessarily so obvious to those living within a community from the time they were in a cradle. This is something many of us in various religious communities often see. There are cradle believers who live out a community life as if it were a natural way of living with little thought of any other ways of living; and then there are the converts who seem to notice something in their chosen community that was missing from their lives until they found it in their new community. It is very believable that Coach White saw the commitments possessed by the McFarland Hispanic community and realized these were elements that could be built upon when motivating these young athletes.

It is believable that he saw a reason to hope for great things when a community that had managed to build a life around shared difficulties may have come to imagine that these difficulties would always limit their futures. There is a scene in the movie where one of the young men asks what is the use of what they are doing for they are pickers (vegetable workers) for whom picking is the only life they will ever know. This is sometimes what happens in communities that are built around sharing hardships. They learn to cope while becoming jaded and unable to imagine a hope beyond the ability simply to cope. Coach White had a way of communicating to them that what they had experienced was their advantage in facing the struggles of training not only in their sport but in their lives.

Coach White definitely had an impact on the McFarland Hispanic community. He coached the team to win the state championship in cross country in 1987, and to more state championships in nine out of fourteen years. A majority of his students who ran on the first state championship team went to college and a majority of those who went to college graduated from college.

The most important lesson I learned from this movie was that a leader is never able to rise above his level of relationship with the community he is hoping to lead. If a leader is to lead a people across the wilderness to the finish line then he needs to know enough about what makes the people within a community tick to be able to speak to their hopes and dreams. He needs to convey to them the way to tap the resources available to them to find their pathway through the fears and obstacles they will meet in life. Such motivation may come from an outsider or from an insider, but it will almost never come from someone who hasn't learned the way those he leads find the motivation in their own lives to overcome all the obstacles. This is true whether one serves as a teacher, coach, boss, politician, or clergyman. Despite all of the film's weaknesses the movie spoke to me of the importance of a leader’s relationship to a community.

 

Jesus regarding murder

Except Your Righteousness Exceeds

Part Two – You shall not Murder

A meditation for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity

By Dan McDonald

 

            Jesus declared to his hearers, according to Matthew 5:20 that unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees that we would by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. This is a transition statement in which Jesus begins to give instruction on the meaning of the God’s commandments. He is proclaiming how the commandments are fulfilled. In Jesus’ teaching while the commandments seemed to express a negative that ought not to be done they would only be fulfilled by a positive life affirming action and attitude to be pursued. The law put a fence up to keep men from doing evil and Jesus turned the commandment from avoiding doing the evil to actually pursuing the good.

            One of the great mysteries within Christian teaching, beyond our full ability to comprehend or to explain, is the teaching that Jesus Christ is God become flesh; fully God and fully man. This leads us to realize two things about Jesus that in our minds might not seem compatible but are both expressed in the Scriptures. On the one hand the New Testament teaches us that one who has seen Christ has seen the Father. The writer of the Book of Hebrews explains that Christ is the express image of the Father. So the Christian is one who believes that our best understanding of who God is, is shown to us in Jesus Christ. But equally important in the Christian understanding of truth is that Christ in his fullness of humanity learned righteousness through learning obedience even as he suffered in that obedience. Luke’s Gospel express the reality that Jesus faced growing in his humanity like we do by telling us in such simple words how Jesus “grew in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and men.” (Luke 2:52)

            One of the interesting considerations of the truth of God’s Word found in the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings of the Old Testament is how the Scriptures became involved in teaching Jesus, the God become flesh, how he was to become that man of God who would save his people from their sins. The Psalms were his prayer book by which he learned to become intimate in hid prayer life with his Father in heaven. He came not to abolish the commandments but to fulfill them. His fulfillment of the Law was neither legalistic nor libertine. He was capable of recognizing that there were things in the Old Testament Scriptures given because humanity was hardened in sin and it was better to allow certain sins to continue than to try to bridle sinful men into societal responsibilities they would not accept in the hardness of their sins. He wove his way through the commandments to recognize that the summation of the law was to love God with all heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love neighbor as one loved self.

            As we look at what Jesus says about not murdering we begin to see that Jesus must have been a man who meditated on the Scriptures. The words he speaks in Matthew 5:21-26 show a flawless exposition of the story of Cain and Abel found in Genesis 4. In Genesis 4 Cain grew angry at his brother without just cause. The two brothers gave their first portions, Abel of his lambs and Cain of his grain. God accepted Abel’s offering but rejected Cain’s offering. The cause for God’s rejection was not because one offered grain and the other offered a lamb. These offerings were clearly not sin offerings requiring blood but first fruit offerings requiring the fruit of their produce. Something seems to have been amiss in Cain as he offered the first fruits of his grain. God reprimands Cain not because he didn't give the right sacrifice but because there was something in him amiss as he offered the sacrifice. Thus in Matthew 5 Jesus speaks about our need to make restitution with our brother before trying to offer our sacrifice. Cain's failure to do so led to destructive consequences.

            In the fourth chapter of Genesis, the Lord intervenes and addresses Cain and tries to bring him to a righteous reversal of his attitude. He warns Cain that his anger means that sin is near at hand and that sin’s desire is to master him and destroy him. He encourages Cain instead to master his spirit, to set aside his anger. He encourages him to change his attitude towards his brother Abel and to make peace with him rather than to nurse the grudge he has against him.

            But Cain chose to nurse his bitterness. Jesus in preaching in Matthew 5 rightly shows us that “thou shalt not murder” cannot be kept merely by a mere containing of our anger or bitterness to the point that we merely refrain from taking another a human life. The law was not given to teach us a way to contain our anger to avoid murdering someone but it was given to point us towards a noble life characterized by love of God and love of neighbor. As such every ill thought must be transformed to a desire to seek reconciliation with the brother unto whom we harbor ill thoughts.

            Jesus also realized what we often forget about murder. We often say that the first murder was when Cain slew Abel. But Jesus described Satan as the one who was a murderer from the beginning. It was in the Garden of Eden that the Tempter sought to encourage us to sin knowing that sin would bring about death. Jesus also met this tempter, who showed Jesus the peak of the temple and told him that surely he would not die if he cast himself off from the peak of the temple for God would not let his son be harmed. Jesus understood that in every sin there is a murderer inciting us towards our destruction. He understood that against the power of sin and death the only greater power capable of overcoming sin and death was a reconciliation offered by God unto man, and then shared by men and women with other men and women. The world had fallen into the grips of a murderer and now the only true escape was to receive and participate in God's work of redemption.

            This is surely the righteousness that exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees. It would be revisited later when Jesus tried to explain to the Pharisees that the elder brother should rejoice in the younger brother’s reconciliation with the Father. He described in the story of the returning prodigal how unfitting it was for the elder brother to be angry when the Father received the wayward son with joy. The elder brother should have yearned for the father and his younger brother to be reconciled but instead he stood in the way of the returning brother. But Jesus would accept the role of the elder brother, who instead of obstructing reconciliation would by his great work bring us to the Father and open the doorway for our return to the Father through the Son. This would be the righteousness that exceeded that of the scribes and the Pharisees.

Except your righteousness exceeds - Introduction

Except Your Righteousness Exceeds

Part One - Introduction

A meditation for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity

By Dan McDonald

 

            I am a member of an Anglican church which uses the 1662/1928 version of the Book of Common Prayer. As it is the custom of the church in which I am a member this blog makes use of the older prayer book and it is hoped that what I say will be said not as an argument for one prayer book over another, or for that matter over none at all; but rather as an expression of Christian truth meant to appeal to all those who love our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in sincerity.

            For those reading this blog who are neither Anglican nor Episcopalian it is the tradition of our churches to have assigned readings for any given Sunday in a church year and in most instances in at least one service per Sunday the minister will proclaim a message based on the assigned readings. The readings include a text from a New Testament Epistle and a Gospel reading from one of the four Gospels. Our assigned texts for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity include the Epistle reading from Romans 6:3-11 and the Gospel text from St. Matthew 5:20-26. I hope to present to the readers of my blog something of a daily meditation on these texts for the course of this week. I doubt this will be a regular feature of my blog, but simply something I am doing this one time as this week’s texts seemed especially to speak to my soul and seem to be full of a message that might be helpful and important for others to consider.

            We will begin with a consideration of the Gospel text in which we read that “Jesus said unto his disciples, “Except your righteousness shall exceed shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” These are weighty and important words and we should recognize that with the use of such words that St. Matthew would have us treat them respectfully. A cavalier reading of this text will not do. It is important that we see these words within their own original context and see that Jesus was speaking of an issue that he believed was most serious. Surely the hearers of these words in their original utterance recognized the seriousness of Jesus’ words concerning how one would in no case enter the kingdom of heaven unless they had a a righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and the Pharisees.

            Matthew 5:20-26 is a subsection of the Sermon on the Mount which fills the fifth through the seventh chapters of St. Matthew’s Gospel. It may be described as Jesus’ kingdom of heaven sermon. He begins the Sermon by articulating the Beatitudes in which he describes what sort of manner should characterize the citizens of the kingdom of heaven. They are to be poor in spirit, to mourn, to be meek, to pursue righteousness, to be merciful, to be pure in heart, to be peacemakers, and to be such people who will be naturally persecuted by a world that is committed to something other than life within the kingdom of heaven. Jesus then goes on to describe his relationship to the law and the prophets who had proclaimed the truths of the kingdom of heaven before him. He tells us not to be mistaken that he has not come to abrogate or set aside any of those laws and prophecies and declarations but to fulfill them. He warns those who would break the least of these commandments that whosoever teaches men to break the least of the commandments would be declared least in the kingdom of heaven. It is in this context that Jesus says that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees that one would by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.

            It would seem in accordance with St. Matthew’s Gospel that this Sermon on the Mount was spoken early within Jesus’ ministry. It probably was first spoken before his message was met with the resistance of the scribes and Pharisees. I believe that what we are looking at in his teaching that unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees is his own estimation of his own ministry. He entered the ministry having been baptized by John in the Jordan River, having been declared the Son of God by voice and sign, having met the Tempter in the Wilderness, and only then did he begin his ministry declaring “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Jesus had a clear understanding of himself in his proclamation of the Sermon on the Mount that with his coming into the world the kingdom of heaven was being presented unto the sons and daughters of Israel.

His words describing how a greater righteousness was needed than that of the scribes and Pharisees were not so much spoken as a criticism of them as they were spoken of the great importance of the words and life presented to mankind in him. Every other ministry in all history would have received the same comparison. John the Baptist had understood this very truth for with the coming of Christ, John proclaimed “I must decrease but he must increase.”

The Sermon on the Mount which summarizes Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of heaven came early in Jesus’ ministry. Jesus understood the need of men. He would teach this message consistently and would faithfully proclaim and image this message with his own life and works so that in the course of the next three years those who followed him would gradually come to see the astonishing importance of his message. He proclaimed the summary of the kingdom of heaven early in his ministry because he knew that it would take everything he did and said to enable those who followed him to understand the greatness of his coming into the world with the kingdom of heaven. The world got its first glimpse of this with his preaching of the Sermon on the Mount. For we read that when he finished preaching the sermon “that the people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” This was one who did not point men and women to the kingdom of heaven, but one who brought within himself the kingdom of heaven to men and women and children everywhere he went.

When we return, next time to our consideration of Matthew 5:20-26 let us realize the context of the message when he began to speak especially to his disciples, when he said to them “Thou shalt not kill”. We shall see that his meditation on the commandment not to murder led within his own understanding and teaching directly to his pointing out our need to be reconciled to others on account of the sin which remains in us. In his teaching thou shalt not murder was a commandment that in its fulfillment necessitated our seeking of reconciliation with others.

 

Where does Patriotism fit in

Where does Patriotism fit in?

Written by Dan McDonald

 

      Judy Collins sang the song “Both sides now” in which she described clouds, life, and love in both sides from the side of what makes life worth living and what brings so much pain and sorrow. Philosophically it is as much an Ecclesiastes sort of song as Amazing Grace was a song written expressing St. Paul’s confidence in the Gospel. Judy Collins had hit recordings with each. I’ve often imagined those things in life which after looking at them from multiple sides we had to admit all that we really knew was the illusion of the thing. For me, patriotism has often been a both sides now experience.

            When I was a little child saying the pledge of allegiance at school and growing up on a farm, I especially took pride in knowing that we were the nation that manufactured more products and exported more food than any other nation on earth. I did not grow up in a religious family. In my first ten years of life, except for a wedding or a funeral I never went inside of a church. My patriotism did not include any sort of “Christian” understanding. But I learned to feel sorry for those who were not Americans. Being an American seemed to make a kid special. I experienced a patriotism that believed my nation to be blessed whether or not any God actually existed. If there was a God up above the clouds, he seemed to have especially loved America. I sometimes think that is a sort of patriotism many Americans continue to feel. Whether there is a god or not, he sort of loves America. Many fellow Christians, especially on the conservative side of the political aisle, seem to imagine the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as the closest thing to infallible documents since the writing of the Bible. After I became a Christian I also sometimes looked at patriotism in that way. I sometimes argued vehemently about how my views were true to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

 

 

            I later came to look at patriotism from another side. I began to see that our illustrious documents contained flaws within them. The Declaration of Independence spoke of all men being created equal. But it also listed as one of the reasons for declaring independence from Britain that the British crown and parliament had failed to provide for the colonists in their dealings with “the merciless savages”. The context is that the British government, following the French and Indian War was deeply in debt. They wished to avoid war with France and Spain. The regions claimed by Britain west of the Appalachians, were also claimed by Spain and wanted by France. So Britain instead of risking war tried to establish the region as a land for Native Americans and restricted colonial settlements in these lands. When the British government closed off these lands west of the Appalachians to colonial settlement it abrogated several colonial charters which claimed their land from sea to sea. Even a colony like Connecticut claimed that its narrow strip of land ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. A majority of the signers of America's Declaration of Independence were involved in the real estate trade. One of the few accomplishment which was accomplished by the newly independent states under The Articles of Confederation was to establish a protocol for the selling of land by the government in the territories west of the Appalachians. The lands were to be auctioned off and were generally sold to real estate development companies. One of the objectives of the America's Revolution was to abrogate the creation of a large territory for the Native American population. The Declaration of Independence's language was modified to enable states with large slave populations to maintain slavery despite the "all men were created equal" clause. Then the Constitution provided for slavery as well as the ugly business of the importation and selling of slaves, and agreed that slaves would be counted as 3/5^th citizens for the purpose of electoral representation, although they would not have the right to vote in any of the states.  It was easy, armed with such knowledge, to move from a happy patriotism in my nation to a perspective of skepticism and cynicism that regarded my nation as an inherently hypocritical nation. It was easy to sing along with Joan Baez’s rendition of the satirical “With God on our side”.

 

 

            I’ve looked at patriotism from both sides now and am tempted to imagine that patriotism is only an illusion. But in the final analysis I believe that G. K. Chesterton helped me to understand a way of helping me to see a useful form of patriotism. The English Chesterton criticized another of his fellow author’s patriotism in the era when the sun never set upon the British Empire. Chesterton saw in another author’s love of England and Britain what seemed to be primarily the love of Britain’s greatness, prosperity, and superiority over other nations. Chesterton rejected this sort of basis for patriotism. He described patriotism in its essence as a love of home where one who was raised in a particular land and culture has a natural preference for that land and culture for no other basic reason than that this was one's home.

The patriotism which is built on a country’s greatness or superiority or exceptionalism is a dangerous patriotism. It is dangerous because it is prone to view other races and nations as inferiors. It is dangerous because it sets a people to be always on the verge of worshipping our superior ways, our infallible documents, and transferring the superiority of our documents to a supposed superiority of our own particular brand of humanity. It is dangerous because with our confidence that we live with God on our side, that when a prophet of God addresses our faults we tune him out because he fails to realize that God is already on our side.

But there is a patriotism that can be built on the idea that it is natural for us to love home. We may love to travel, but usually we desire to come home. In the spiritual life, coming home is often a metaphor illustrating humanity's yearning to reach wholeness. We yearn for home, even if our journey home is understood to be the seeking of an unseen city. We seek that unseen city in our tents and in our homes in which we live as aliens and strangers until we find that great unseen city. In the end the truest reality about patriotism is that it is about a place which in this present setting we feel at home.

 

Home-owners are almost always thinking of improvements or moving up

Jennifer Lopez’s Long Island mansion is for sale

 

Some homes are in more obvious need of improvement projects

 

            I imagine that depending on our places in American life, we either imagine the United States as if it is kind of like J. Lo’s mansion that is a dream of near perfection or we might imagine our nation as a home in desperate need of repair. I sort of imagine, in both instances, that the true patriots are those people who look around and seeing other people sharing our national home begin to ask those other persons “How do we make our home better?”