A River Runs Through It

Genesis 4:1-7, Matthew 12:46-50

A River Runs Through It is a movie about fishing and faith—about family and all of the complexities of knowing and yet not understanding our loved ones. It’s also a story of failure: failure to communicate, failure to help, and failure (ultimately) to save.

It’s set in beautiful Montana, with the 1930s life of church, schooling, family dinners, fights, gambling, and speakeasies. It is mostly a story of two brothers, Norman and Paul Maclean and their supporting family and friends. Their father is a Presbyterian minister and their teacher: both in academics and fishing. As the older brother tells the story, he says: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”

It’s not really about a River and not really about fishing. It’s not really about religion either even though the father is a Presbyterian minister and there are lots of scenes in church. On a side note, my Hebrew Bible professor in seminary was both a Presbyterian and an avid fly fisherman. When Norman says, he and his brother were left to assume all great fisherman in the bible were fly fisherman, it’s like Dr. Petersen’s famous lecture in which he attempts to prove that Moses was also a fly fisherman. This lesson came complete with casting lessons for all of us students out on the Emory quad.

In our Genesis reading we had the story of the first brothers, Cain and Abel, and their rivalries before God that ultimately lead to murder.

Norman and Paul MacLean are not exactly like Cain and Abel. They have their rivalries and their fights, but instead of killing his brother, Norman wonders if there was anything he could have done to save Paul from his untimely death—wonders in fact, if it could have been possible to be one’s brother’s keeper. Helping brothers, or mostly not being able to help, is a recurring theme between both Norman and Paul, even Jessie—Norman’s girlfriend tries to get Norman to help her own brother.

But like Cain and Abel, the two brothers are different. Cain tends the fields and Abel raises sheep. Norman travels away for college and Paul stays close to home. Norman becomes a literature professor in Chicago and Paul becomes editor of the local paper. Norman gets married and Paul dates an “unsuitable” woman of a different race. Though they love each other, there is something that inhibits them from truly communicating and understanding each other. After their big fight in the kitchen, (their closest Cain and Abel moment) instead of talking it over and analyzing it, they simply each agree, privately, to be kind to each other again.

If all else fails, if they are disconnected from each other, they can fish, and in fishing, they find away to be together and to communicate their brotherly bond without words. Fishing is an activity that, since childhood, has brought them together. It’s a language they can speak together, to honor their shared childhood and connection.

Their identities, their knowledge of who they are comes to them in different ways, as Norman says: “I knew I was tough because I had been bloodied in battle” “Paul was different. His toughness came from some secret place inside of him. He simply knew he was tougher than anyone alive.”

They are similar though. The MacLean brothers, who fish, who work with words, and yet who fail to understand each other on a fundamental level. And this misunderstanding would not be problematic, but for Norman who wonders if he could have ultimately prevented Paul’s death. His father wonders this too, asking questions about the younger son with a darker, hidden side.

We see Paul’s self-destructive tendencies early on as a child—his desire for danger, for wildness, to push the boundaries—and that only increases as he consumes copious amounts of alcohol in prohibition times, and gambles his way into high stakes debt. Norman observes all of these, joins in at times, and seems unable to intervene in any meaningful way. We are left wondering, with Norman and Rev. Maclean, if Paul could have been saved—if anyone could have done something to alter his path . . .

Toward the end, we see an older Norman, now alone, fishing again—back in the place where it all makes more sense to him and he says: “Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.” Communicating in ways without words—at the river, casting his line.

It’s a melancholy, yet hopeful movie—of carrying those who we love around with us.

We remain mysteries to each other--spouses, children, siblings—who surprise us—either in small or big ways. We can never understand other people the way we understand ourselves, never know exactly what it is like to be someone else, sometimes not really comprehending what it’s actually like to be ourselves.

Sometimes the families we are born into end up not being the best for us.
Sometimes we are adopted into new families early on—
Sometimes we learn to form new families as we get older.

In the gospel, Jesus chooses everyone to be his brothers and sister and mother—not rejecting the family he had—but opening up his family to include the whole world.

Maybe we never truly understand each other—in all the deep nooks and crannies of our identities—But we know that God knows every little details—knows us better than we know ourselves.

In church, we bump into each other, we see each other, we pass the peace, we commune over bread and wine and coffee and cupcakes. But in so many ways we don’t really know each other. We don’t know each others stories, we don’t know each others hurts and scars, we don’t know each others great moments of happiness.
Of course we rely on the grace of Jesus for our salvation, but Jesus also relies on our work: our ministry in his name to all the world.

There’s a certain loneliness in our “developed” world—rich with resources, technology, and yet poor in relationships and love. We are reluctant to open ourselves up to other people to be available to hear their stories to be vulnerable to tell them ours. There are lonely, wounded people sitting all over this room right now. Part of our salvation from this isolation lies in what we can do for each other. The church is God’s best idea for saving the world. And the church is a community of people, a family of believers who work to help save each other, who provide love and support and understanding and the comfort that no matter what, we are never alone, and not just because God loves us, knows us, and is always with us, but because other people also love us, know us, and are always with us: ready to listen, ready to help.
Writer Anne Lammot says the most powerful sermon in the world is two sentences: “Me too.” In the midst of our pain, embarrassment, suffering, humiliation—if another person can look at us and honestly say “me too,” it can save us.
The movie ends with a mixture of geography and mysticism “all things merge into one and a river runs through it.”
We are all one: one people, one family, one loaf of bread—In the name of Jesus Christ.