Last Sunday after Epiphany (Matthew 17:1-9)  03/06/2011

(Transfiguration of Christ)

The amazing growth of hi-tech devices has created a number of ways to watch movies these days…and my usual preference is the fairly low-tech method of receiving a disc in the mail from Netflix. But this past Sunday, Carol and I decided to catch a movie in the theater before watching the Academy Awards that evening. We decided to go to “The King’s Speech,” a movie about the life and challenges of Prince Albert, the Duke of York. The movie dramatically tells the story of Prince Albert’s challenging life: challenges that would be faced by any member of Britain’s royal family and challenges that were unique to Albert – most notably the difficulties of public speaking for a man who suffered from a stammering speech problem since his earliest days. Everyone faces challenges throughout their lives – some challenges can be avoided or accommodated through the decisions we make; but some challenges must be faced head-on because these difficulties stand in the center of our road of life, they block the very path we must travel if we are true to who we are as individuals. Public speaking (for Prince Albert) was the immovable, center-of-the-road type of challenge. The story tells us that the Prince had already tried several methods of correction before he met a man who had a reputation for his success and for his unorthodox methods of correcting speech problems. The reluctant Prince is finally introduced to his new instructor and after some awkward conversation the teacher asks the Prince to try recording his voice by reading aloud from a book while he listens to music through headphones. Shortly after beginning the test, the Prince is not convinced his teacher’s methods have any merit and he abruptly leaves, but not before he is given a copy of his voice recording. The unhappy Prince returns home and soon his curiosity gets the better of him and he listens to the recording – to his surprise the recording of the bizarre experiment proved that the Prince read the book aloud with perfect speech. The story of Prince Albert’s struggle to overcome his speech problems had really just begun that day, but at the beginning of that long road was this recording – an amazing recording that seemed to be from some different place breaking into the “now” of today…a day that remained to be full of challenges and difficulties. Continue reading →