Life In Progress

Don't get a chance to see many movies in the theater, but saw Tron Legacy with the kids today. Considering I fell asleep during the original Tron (what 20-25 years ago? as second of a double feature with Blade Runner), this was a better movie than I expected, and actually a pretty good film. There were a couple of theological thoughts I had while watching:

1) Why is it that every "futuristic" vision looks more apocalyptic, sterile, minimalist, and monochromatic than our current reality? Why doesn't our future look more human, not less? When I think of the trajectory of scripture, we are to be more like the nth century church than the 1st century church, with the future breaking into the present making us a new humanity. The question is, Does the church create a more promising and colorful future, or a more boring and monochromatic one?

2) The main message of the film, I thought, was that perfection is ruthless, where perfection is the absence of mess, chaos, and what is ultimately human. It is perfection in a cold, steely, clinical sense - and ultimately dehumanizing. What to make of Jesus call then to "be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect"? Jesus' call is not to perfection as our ruthless and merciless accuser, but as call to a higher love, where perfection is the expression of love for that which is precisely imperfect - that is us. It is a radical call to relationship, a call to embrace all that is imperfect in the arms of grace.