Well, I got a preach a sermon at church this Sunday, as I do every October. We do a movie series every October, and this year we are hearing about “Doubt,” “Serenity,” and “Maleficent.” I was speaking on the movie “Fight Club,” and for those interested, here is the text I prepared (though not exactly what I said…)
The First Rule of Sin Club
I have to apologize in advance, because I’m about to break the first rule of Fight Club.
I’m also about to break the second rule of Fight Club.
So I apologize to any of you who have not seen the movie, because I’m about to spoil it for you. You see this month we’re talking about movies, and we’re talking about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And I thought, what better place for me to start than with the very first “bad guy” that the Bible has to offer us.
Genesis starts off with the ultimate good guy. We see a creator, a provider, a gift-giver, and then we see that we humans are put here to take care of this new world. Suddenly we get two new “good guys,” Adam and Eve, companions and caretakers, happily frolicking about in paradise because they are not truly self-aware. Sometimes it’s nice not to be so self-aware. But then, suddenly, the serpent appears. Here is the original bad guy. The serpent decides that rules are for breaking, but notice that the serpent does not break any rules. No, that snake gets someone else to do it for him.
Now the serpent starts off, the very first thing he says, with an untruth. But like any good lie, it has a bit of truth in it. He says “Hey, I hear you can’t eat any fruit from trees around here.” He knows this is not true. He is just trying to get the conversation started, and like any good politician he is controlling the message.
“No,” says Eve, “we’re allowed to eat pretty much any fruit we want. We just can’t eat that one over there, because it’s poison.” See, Eve knows her stuff. She’s not going to be fooled by any old Facebook graphic. She did her research. So now the serpent has to up the lie. He has to mix further dishonesty into his rhetoric.
He says “You will not surely die.” False. “For God knows when you eat it, your eyes will be opened.” True. “and you will be like God.” False. “And you will know good and evil.” True. So now instead of slightly distorting a truth, we’re up to 50% lies. And Eve believes these lies, and do you know why? Because the serpent was saying what she wanted to hear. It says that Eve only ate the fruit after she saw how good it looked! How many times have we read an article that confirmed something we already believed, and we didn’t bother fact checking it? This past week the Democratic nominees for president had their first debate, and my social media feeds were flooded with two different types of articles. All of my Hillary-supporting friends rejoiced that she had won the debate, and all of my Bernie-supporting friends claimed debate victory as well. I don’t think it mattered who won the debate, because they had all decided ahead of time. So it was with Eve, who saw the delicious fruit that she wanted to eat, and suddenly here was someone telling her it was ok! All I would need is one scientific study claiming that Ben and Jerry’s helped with weight loss, and I would gladly toss out the hundreds of studies that came before it. Look! Proof! I can eat Cherry Garcia every night and be thin! Thank you internet serpent!
So Eve eats the fruit, and she gives some to Adam and he eats it too. The serpent does not eat any, or at least Adam and Eve don’t wait around to see if he does, because now that they know about good and evil, they need some clothes. Meanwhile God shows up and asks them what is going on. Of course he already knows. Ask any parent out there and they will tell you, when they ask a child “What are you doing?!” it is rhetorical. They know what the kids are doing, they just want the kids to admit it. So God asks, and Adam says “It’s Eve’s fault!” And Eve says “It’s the serpent’s fault!” But whose fault is it really? Who is the villain in this story? Who sinned? Who broke the rules? Although, to be fair, it must have been pretty hard to discern falsehoods with no knowledge of good or evil.
Fight Club starts off with a man looking for some sort of meaningful experience to fill the empty void in his life. And he finds it, as you might be excited to hear at a Methodist Church. You see the Methodist Church is host to a number of 12-step groups and other support groups, and this guy joins them all. Yes, it is all a lie, but even a fake emotional connection feels better than the loneliness he had been suffering with. He gives fakes names, creates fake identities, until a woman appears, created from the same cloth. She also is attending multiple support group meetings, and suddenly, seeing her lies, he no longer feels comfortable with his own. Enter the serpent.
Our nameless hero, called only The Narrator in the credits, is on a business trip when he meets Tyler Durden in the seat next to him. Tyler is a soap salesman who latches on to the dissatisfaction that our narrator feels, and decides to do something about it. It isn’t long before The two men are living together in an abandoned house on the edge of town, living a life free from the burdens of over-consumerism. They are searching for something visceral, something real, and this search leads them to a fistfight with each other, not because they are upset, but because they are curious about the experience. This awakens something in them both, and before long they have collected a growing number of men who finally come alive in the struggle. In a sanitized world of guard rails and comfy couches, a little physical violence seems like a revelation to them. And Tyler’s forked tongue is very convincing.
“Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived,” he says. “I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
But like the Biblical serpent, his words are half-truths, lies with kernels of reality designed to manipulate, and like his garden counterpart he succeeds. Tyler Durden convinces hundreds of men to give up their safety and security in exchange for what he deems the truth. Once they’ve swallowed what he’s selling, their eyes are opened and they see how naked and shallow their lives once were. And now that he has them where he wants them, Tyler starts building his army of chaos and destruction.
You know what’s amazing to me is that the serpent was able to twist God’s own words and use them to deceive. There is truth in the message, but there can be sin in the interpretation. How often have we seen the Bible used as a weapon? How often have the very words of our savior and our God been used to hurt, to judge, to condemn, all in the guise of following God’s instructions. Where are the serpents, and how can we tell them from the prophets? As Tyler starts waging war on society, you can’t help but agree a little with his message, if not the interpretation.
Our once-willing narrator begins to see that things are going a bit too far, as his friend and ally starts leading people over the edge, and when people start dying he realizes that it has to stop, and he knows right where to place the blame. Tyler Durden is responsible for this, obviously. Having traded in his support groups for Fight Club, the narrator discovers that this wasn’t the answer either, and it’s time to end it. The only problem is, like many a slippery snake, Tyler has disappeared. And so our hero, our good guy, drawn reluctantly into something that is way over his head, heads out across the country, looking for the villain, the bad guy, the serpent. The narrator of this tale sees himself as the Adam, duped into tasting something that, no matter how appealing, should have been left on the tree. But unlike Adam, he means to set it right, spit it out, take back his old life, and defeat the snake.
And now I’m going to have to spoil the end of the movie for you, so I apologize, but this is the reason I wanted to share this message with you today. As the narrator continues his search for Tyler Durden, strange things begin to happen, leading him to finally realize the horrible truth that is so evident upon a second viewing of the film. There is no Tyler Durden. Or rather, our narrator has been him all along, a second personality created to help him deal with his unbearable life. Adam, as it turns out, was the serpent the whole time.
When there is sin in your life, who do you blame? Have you ever lost your temper and said or done something you know wasn’t right, because of, well, fill in the blank. Because of traffic? Because of a long, hard day? Because you were treated poorly first? Is there ever an excuse for your sin? When you eat the apple, who do you say gave it to you? How differently might the story have gone if Adam had said “Yes Lord, I ate the apple, please forgive me.” And if Eve had come up and shouted “No, Lord, It was my fault! I gave it to him, because I had some first! Please forgive ME.” I wonder if the story would have had a different ending.
Instead, they hid. They hid from God, which you would have thought they would have known is impossible after eating that fruit of knowledge. They did not claim their sin, but instead concealed it. What do we do in secret, thinking that no one will ever find out? What do we hide from the world, that we think we can hide from God? I know we’re not Catholic here, but I wonder if that is power of the confessional. When our sins see the light of day, they turn out not to be as bad as we imagined they seemed, lurking in the darkness. When we speak our sins aloud, we know that they can be forgiven, and this is what Adam and Eve and Fight Club can teach us. We are our own serpents sometimes, deceiving ourselves into thinking that what we do is not sin, or worse, that our sins can be hidden. The first rule of Sin Club is “You do not talk about Sin Club.” But we are children of God. Don’t be a member of Sin Club, be a member of Christ’s faithful followers. Live in the light, and share your joy with the world. And you know what, share your sin with the world too. Unload your burdens. Because you are already forgiven. And you have always been loved.