Picking up my periodic thread on The Simpsons (1st post: intro + The Joy of Sect | 2nd post: The Father, Son, and Holy Guest Star), I want to circle back to a classic episode that I pithily blogged on years and years ago. “Missionary Impossible” unfolds after Homer makes a huge pledge to PBS, which he knows he can’t keep, in order to end a pledge break and get his new favorite show back on the air. The chase from PBS’ collectors sends him into the hands of Rev. Lovejoy, who rushes him on to a remote Pacific island on behalf of the Christian faith. Homer becomes an accidental missionary. Hilarity ensues.
“Missionary Impossible” (full synopsis | full episode)
This episode has the characteristically circuitous and roundabout exposition that The Simpsons has utilized so thoroughly over the years. While the lampooning of public television and pledge-break fundraising is otherwise worthy of analysis, we’ll jump right into the meat of Homer’s missionary excursion. But only because an anonymous reader just pledged $10,000 to this blog to get me to shut up.
In classic Homer fashion, his solution to his problems is clumsy and overly simplistic: he rushes into the church yelling, “Sanctuary!,” where the persistently indifferent Rev. Lovejoy pauses his organ cleaning to apathetically listen to Homer’s pleas. The cultural/historical reference is insightful; people have long utilized the humanitarianism of church communities as a way to protect them from potentially unjust treatment. We see it especially today in the case of people facing detention or even deportation as part of immigration enforcement. In that regard, church communities and their leaders are leaning on social tradition that worship spaces are not to be invaded and disrupted by law enforcement officials, at least in the case of pursuing nonviolent offenders. Debatable as it is, the custom provides a tool to justice-oriented people of faith and to those who may be wronged by the justice system. On the other hand, this example in The Simpsons is just Homer looking for cover after he made a bad call. Luckily, Rev. Lovejoy has an ace up his sleeve.Lovejoy hides Homer in his trunk -- balled up in a mail sack, posing as children’s letters to Jesus that Lovejoy is taking to the dump -- and whisks him off to the tarmac at an airstrip. He loads Homer into a plane and then asks him how he’d life to be a missionary in the Pacific. Before Homer can deliberate, the door is shut, and the plane takes off. As the jet soars westward into the sky, Homer moans, ”I’m not a missionary! I don’t even believe in Jebus!… Save me, Jebus!”
I think Homer here resembles a lot of folks who get involved in service. Their intentions are decent enough -- help others, open my eyes to tough realities, appreciate what I have -- but the transcendent, supernatural, spiritual piece of it throws a lot of folks off guard. When challenged with Scripture to reflect upon, when invited to apply Catholic social teachings (mmmm… solidarity…), when asked how they encountered Christ in service, the enthusiasm wanes. For example, my parish has a sizeable annual contingent that travels to Appalachia every summer to do home repair and other handiwork service. They fill tons of vans and fundraise easily, but they don’t invite the faith piece of it well and make it almost like pulling teeth. The formation and connections are potentially so simple, direct, and concrete, but many struggle to engage that way, like it’s too much to ask. I hear echoes of them in Homer as he pleads with the church for salvation, resists it when it’s concretely offered, and then begs Jesus for salvation from the salvation He offered. Exhale.
When Homer arrives to the island, the outgoing missionaries, Craig and Amy, give him a real brief orientation: “We taught them some English and ridiculed away most of their beliefs, so you can take it from there!” They abruptly walk away and depart on the plane, leaving Homer to stew on that. It’s a dark tip of the cap to the old way of mission in which white westerners, usually from Catholic religious communities, would forcibly cancel out indigenous belief and practice and impose the rituals and teachings of Christianity. While we can’t ignore the history and legacy of it, we can celebrate the increasingly nuanced and progressive ways that later mission work transpires. The newer norms lean more heavily on inculturation, trying to learn and understand indigenous practices and place them in dialogue with Christianity. Those who feel drawn to the Christian faith aren’t forced to discard their culture to belong. In patient engagement that seeks informed interaction but tries to avoid syncretism, neat crossovers emerge that animate Christianity with the local vitality. I think especially of east Asian cultures’ reverence of ancestors informing the devotions to the communion of saints. On Homer’s island here, no such nuance will unfold. Eventually, Homer will instead clumsily impose his culture like a square peg into a round hole.
For starters, Homer figures he can just hand out bibles and let them read. They tell him they cannot read, and he grimaces, flatly complaining, “Does the word jet lag mean anything to you people? Jet? Lag?” I remember getting to Ireland for my volunteer year with all the zeal of a fresh post-grad. I had so much antsiness to do ministry work, and here I was to get started. It’s quite tempting to think you’ll stroll in and hit the ground running converting hearts and saving souls -- my lapsed Catholic Irish friend, Adrian, would even joke, “Dan’s here to save our souls,” and then jokingly deride me as a “damn Yank.” The reality is that before you can do anything, you have much to learn from those you serve and work with, and a lot more efficacy in your example, your competency, and your companionship really than in whatever amount of “doing” you envisioned.
On a related note, Homer lets out his trademark unfiltered reaction as he learns about day-to-day life on the island. Monologuing about watching TV, sitting on a couch, and drinking beer, he quickly finds out that he will have none of those things on the island. Homer drops to the ground, thrashing his legs, and cries, “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” In a delightful moment that shows how doomed Homer is as a missionary as well as how highly these islanders esteem their western missionaries, everyone copies his “prayer gesture.”
Perhaps figuring he ought to stick to the script, Homer pops open the bible and settles on one of the more infamously gruesome texts one could find, a particularly gorey verse from Psalm 68:
He slams the book shut and casually pronounces it to be “as true today as when it was written,” a fantastically reductive truth that gives the poor islanders no chance to understand. It’s a tremendous nod to humanity’s temptation to see the Bible as an arbitrarily utilizable book of axioms, or worse as a source for proof-texting. It reminds me especially of the rash of social media accounts that offer quotes from things “out of context,” my favorite being the Parks and Rec variant. It goes without saying that Bible study must come with context, and preferably informed exegesis, before interpretation.
Homer should of course go for some broader, more basic strokes of catechesis -- maybe some basic Genesis or Christ’s greatest commandments. Instead, Homer opens the floor for Q&A and quickly realizes he has no A’s for their Q’s.1 Rather than try to learn on the fly how to do good mission, Homer leans instead on his strengths -- social life, especially my means of pleasures that too easily become vices. One could argue that his brand of socializing and community building could lay a good foundation for the germination of a faith community; however, he redirects their development effort from digging a well and building a chapel toward constructing a casino and brewing beer. You can see where this is going.
Homer’s introduction of capitalism and hedonism are a shock to this tight, grassroots community as well as their informal economy. The gambling and drinking quickly cause explosive conflicts and start to ruin the social fabric of the community. Homer realizes his mistake. He bails on the casino and goes to start moving stones toward the completion of the chapel. When they discover him working, they ask him why he’s doing it:Homer: “You’re all terrible sinners”
Islander: “Since when?”
Homer: “Since I got here. Now, either grab a stone, or go to hell.”
They complete the chapel just before a massive volcanic eruption dooms the island and imperils Homer and his new friends. Of course, the episode ends before this is resolved, and the subsequent episode starts from scratch, with everyone back to base one. But before the lava subsumes everything they’ve just built, we get some great lines on church. Sometimes, we look at our churches with great spiritual, architectural, and childlike awe, gawking at the vaulted ceilings, beautiful metals and glasses, and piety-invoking iconography; other times, we see the buildings as dreary destinations for a lethargic hour of obligatory prayer. Homer lands somewhere in between at the end of this episode: “Well, I may not know much about God, but I have to say, we built a pretty nice cage for him.” The final missionary wisdom comes from an astute islander, counseling his neighbor on their holy day obligations:
Islander: “How often do we have to go to church to avoid hell?
Other islander: “Every Sunday for the rest of our lives.”
Islander: “No, really…”
1 Homer has one especially great line here. When asked what the one true faith is, Homer replies, “Not the Unitarians -- if that’s the one true faith, I’ll eat my hat!” The Simpsons writers are pretty ubiquitous with their barbs and criticisms, and that’s one of the strengths of their humor. When it comes to religion, they are fairly magnanimous in chastizing and praising faith appropriately. The one exception seems to be the shallowness of Unitarianism.↩
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