Year A Proper 11, 19 July 2026
St George’s Episcopal, Fredericksburg, VA
“Faith at the Movies: CONTACT”
Collect: Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Genesis 28:10-19a
Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel.
Matthew 13:24-30,36-43
Jesus put before the crowd another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!”
“Hello.”
“I said, ‘Hello.’”
“Um, did you hear me?”
“Nod your head if you can hear me?”
Have you ever received a message that seemed directed to you? One that no one else could hear? One that seemed so personal, and so direct, that maybe you felt a little crazy or confused, like maybe you were hearing things?
What do you really hear? To whom do you really listen? What messages do you really trust?
We are in a time and space when we are being URGED to NOT TRUST. It has became standard operating procedure to NOT TRUST. And then, to add to the NOT TRUSTING, to label the other “side” as crazy. That they are untrustworthy and their messages are false. God help us!
Friends, Discernment is one of the great needs of a person of faith in this world we find ourselves in. Discernment is for each and every one of us. Not just those who are “called” into leadership in the Church, or those facing a particularly hard trial. But God is speaking to all of us all the time. And the question we have to ask ourselves, do I trust this word that I am receiving? And even more, do I trust the one sending the word I am receiving?
I know many people talk about doing what the Bible says. Yes. Of course. But the Bible does not say a lot, especially it does not say a lot about the things that we have to deal with every day in these times. We can apply biblical principles to our current situations, but then we get into interpretation and applicability. And that leads to discernment again, what do we hear and to whom do we listen.
We are all bombarded with messaging all the time. We cannot escape it. If you make a side comment over dinner, you find yourself getting ads about it the next day. That is weird. And that would be an untrustworthy messenger. While the message might have been of interest, the spying on us through our phones and connected speakers is uncomfortable and creepy. There is that NOT TRUSTING again.
But sometimes we receive a word, something we want and maybe from someone who we do not know.
This week, to wrap up our pop culture sermon series, we are looking at the movie Contact starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. It is and has been a favorite of mine for years. It deals with so much. The potential first contact with another intelligence not from our planet. The division between faith and science. The resolve to stand by what you know when voices are screaming that you are lying or are wrong or are crazy. Months ago when I picked this movie to go with today’s readings, I thought, “That will be easy! I can go anywhere with the movie Contact!” And that, in and of itself is the problem. This movie deals with so much, and I have to limit myself this morning so you can have something of substance to take home. And what made me think of this movie today? The first reading for today fits quite well with it, being about a stairway to heaven, which is what Contact is about in a really fitting way.
But looking at the many messages of the movie, and how to apply them, what I want to focus on is Discernment, knowing what to listen to, and to whom. The main character, Dr. Ellie Arroway, portrayed by Jodie Foster, is a tough, and often hard to deal with, astrophysicist. Losing her parents early she has abandonment issues, and pushes people away, even those who love her and may have her best interest at heart. She listens for someone, anyone, who will hear her, and not leave her.
And so, naturally attracted to science, she made listening into a vocation. She is listening hard for a voice in the darkness, and so she goes into SETI, Ess Eee Tee Eye, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. And one night, sitting in the dark underneath the large radar dish array in the New Mexican desert, she hears it. A pulse. A repeated pulse. A repeated pulsing rhythm. It was a deep sound, a sound across octaves. This was not an anomaly, but rather a distinct message, a message from not nearby. Not a satellite. Not a reflected sound. It was a pure voice calling to us from somewhere else.
One of the greatest books on faith parallels this movie. If you are my age or younger I am sure you have read it, most likely. Horton Hears A Who, by Dr. Seuss. A very similar message. A lone figure hears a message that only they can hear. And they have to make a stand against most everyone that they heard it and they are not crazy, and that the message they have received is for everyone. Dr. Arroway or Horton, both have to risk their very lives to take a leap of… not fact, but faith. The experience they share is so real and so true that they do not question it. They stake their reputation and their lives on what they know to be true and cannot prove.
If you have not seen the movie, Contact came out in 1997. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, I was surprised that it was significantly better than the book. A rarity, I know. The book was written by Carl Sagan, who was a great scientist and science communicator, but a so-so novelist. But his ideas found a home in the movie.
And I was surprised when I first saw it how important the role of having a faith is in the story. Not necessarily a certain faith, but ideologically we all believe in something, and that belief is what drives us when we have nothing else to fall back on. For Dr. Arroway, she was dumbfounded by her experience. This hardened scientist is reduced to the babblings of a toddler, and then she says very clearly, “They should have sent a poet.” There is a time and a place for matters of the heart that are more true than 2 + 2 = 4. The etymology of the word science is from the Greek for knowledge. So your con-science is when you decide something “with knowledge” or a “shared knowledge.” Her knowledge could only take her so far, and when she stepped into the unknown, she had to rely on her heart, and on a faith that she did not know she had. Studies repeatedly show that as logical and rational as we think we are, our decisions most of the time are made with our gut, or our heart, or as the Bible puts it, the seat of judgment. We all go there when push comes to shove.
Discernment is based on previous experience, and discernment is based on knowledge we have gained. But at the end of the day, discernment is a hunch. When all is said and done, we all have take that leap of faith.
For Dr. Arroway, she had to believe that the message she had received did not wish her or humanity ill, but that it had our best interest in mind, and for her in particular, that she would be safe and okay.
Friends, when we do not know what is next, we have to know to whom we should look for what comes next. Even saying that is a statement of faith, and like Dr. Arroway, I am reduced to saying that they should have sent a poet up here today to say that the one who began a good work in you is faithful to complete it.
Last fall in a sermon I spoke about how God speaks to us in a language we will understand and hear. Discernment is knowing that deep in our bones, and not letting go of it when voices, soooooo many voices attempt to distract us or contradict what we know to be the Truth with a capital T.
As our Gospel lesson for the day reminds us, there are good seeds who bring forth good fruit, and there are weeds. Like in the parable sometimes it is hard for us to figure out. That is where that Discernment comes back into play. Seeing with eyes that can truly see, hearing with ears that can truly hear. We must try to discern the good from the bad, but it is not our job to sort folks out. That alone remains to God and God’s angels.
So friends, listen. Listen with all you’ve got and all of who you are. And trust God. Always trust in God that the Truth will out, and the Right will prevail. Trust your gut. Listen to that hunch. We are given the task to do the best we can with what we have. God will honor that, for God will be glorified. Amen.
