Cowboys & Aliens & Preachers

I finally went to see the movie Cowboys & Aliens, and wondered afterward "what was Ron Howard thinking, adding his name to this mishegaas?"  This film seemed so much less than so many of Howard's other wonderful works (Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13  . . .  ), and I just wondered where his mind was when he signed the contract.  Or just maybe there was some other Ron Howard who helped produce this flick?  Yeah, that must be it.  One Ron Howard produced (directed, what have you) the masterpieces; a completely different Ron Howard was responsible for the bombs - or perhaps that's what film scholars will decide a thousand years from now.

That seems to be the way some Bible scholarship works sometimes.  Take Isaiah, for instance.  Because some parts of his absolutely wondrous work are somewhat different in style and language than other parts, some have concluded that there must have been several writers posing as Isaiah.  The same with some of Paul's letters.  The styles of all the letters are not the same, therefore they cannot be from the same author, seems to be the argument.

I've always wondered about that.  The Jonathan Winters recording I have of the 23rd Psalm, for instance, is very different in style than the Jonathan Winters character from Mork and Mindy, but it's the same guy.  Anne Curry shows one side of her personality on The Today Show and a different side on Dateline, but there's no doubt she's the same person. 

And I think back over my 30+ years of preaching, in three different congregations (regularly) and in multiple other congregations as the occasion arose.  I didn't have the same style of scholarship, writing, outlining, delivery, every time I got into the pulpit.  In fact, as I think of some of those early sermons (which I do as seldom as possible!) I cringe to think that the Holy Spirit allowed those to be inflicted upon the people of God.  I hope I've come a long way in my preaching in 30 years. 

And I hope that if Isaiah preached among God's people long enough to write 66 chapters of such wondrous gospel to them, he would have changed his style here and there to fit the occasion or the audience or his own growth in the Spirit.  I would hope that after decades of preaching he would have grown some in the Spirit, and that would have been reflected in his writing.  Paul, too.  Me, too. 

As for Ron Howard and Cowboys & Aliens, well, sometimes even we preachers have to confess the eggs we lay from the pulpit.