It's always time to notice, 'Logos Made Flesh'
The late Matt Miller knew how to spot a "sacred symbol" in popular culture
People who describe the Internet age often use the term “algorithms” in ways that make this element of software programming sound like a near-demonic force.
I totally get that. Algorithms provide the digital muscle that creates the “doom scrolling” effect in social-media programs. Program are written in ways that pinpoint our weak spots, then provide more of the images and topics that keep us clicking, clicking, clicking. Video games? More of the same.
However, there is another side of the algorithm coin — a positive side.
Every now and then, the “suggestions” program at YouTube points me toward something totally valid, based on my previous searches and the videos that I have watched from beginning to end or have saved and watched more than once.
Rational Sheep readers will not be surprised that, every now and then, the digital gods send me links to posts and videos about religious content in popular culture. #DUH
Several months ago, YouTube led me to the “Logos Made Flesh” video embedded at the top of this post — “The God Who Isn’t There: The Hidden Meaning of Cast Away.” It’s crucial to note that the name of this unusual 2000 film featuring Tom Hanks is “Cast Away,” not “Castaway.”
Host Matt Miller ended this video with a “To be continued …” tag and it was clear that he had more to say. I glanced at his website, looked at some of the other titles, and then filed this video in my Rational Sheep folder on YouTube.
This weekend, I returned to the video when seeking material for posts this week. I wanted, of course, to see if Miller had posted the second chapter of his, in my opinion, amazing take on “Cast Away.”
What I discovered was devastating.
Yes, I found Part 2 of “The God Who Isn’t There.” It’s a totally different kind of video, featuring a long monologue by Miller that opens with the fact that he had been diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor and that this condition had complicated his ability to edit and complete his “Cast Away” commentary. If I had dug deeper, after my first viewing of the original video, I would have discovered that Miller had already died.
It’s an understatement to say that I was stunned.
I am not going to attempt a summary of Miller’s content. It will stand on its own. Please check it out and, while you are at it, look at some of the other offerings on the “Logos Made Flesh” home page.
I am not saying that everyone will agree on Miller’s interpretation of the “God” questions in “Cast Away.” Viewers will notice that the logo for the “Logos Made Flesh” channel is the blood-stained Wilson volleyball from the movie. Enough said.
Obviously, the Hanks character feels abandoned and Wilson fills a painful need for “communion” with someone or Something. Plus, Wilson is created during an effort to create fire and, thus, survive. Hanks has, in the 25 years since the movie was released, noted that people he encounters in public — on city streets for example — often shout “Wiiiillllllsssssonnnnn!” as a tribute.
From my perspective, Miller’s work offers more than mere film criticism. He was, to use Rational Sheep language, spotting “sacred subjects” in the work of filmmakers in the “secular” marketplace.
Thus, this tribute to Miller’s work offers me another chance to define, for readers, one of the most important terms used in many posts I write for this Substack project. We are talking about “signals” from our culture.
The term emerged in my teaching with the late homiletics expert Haddon Robinson, the author of the popular “Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages” textbook. I worked with Robinson at Denver Seminary and, later, at Gordon-Conwell Seminary.
In the book “The Big Idea of Biblical Preaching” — a Robinson tribute volume — I contributed a chapter focusing on the mass-media apologetics project we attempted at Denver Seminary. From that tribute chapter:
So what is a “signal?" I define this as a single piece of media or popular culture focusing on a subject that is of vital interest to the church. It can be a newspaper article, a single episode of a television show, a compact disc, a movie, a new video, a best-selling book or some other item. The goal is to tune in a single worthy signal, out of the millions the media pour over us every day. Above all, preachers must learn to recognize when the media launch a major invasion into biblical territory.
In an earlier Rational Sheep post, I noted that I have cut that definition a bit shorter here at Substack: A “signal” is a piece of mass culture that raises an issue that clergy and the faithful should not ignore. That’s how I defined the term when teaching my “Exegete the Culture” seminars at Milligan College and then Palm Beach Atlantic University.
So, why should we look for “signals”? Here at Rational Sheep, I have noted:
The goal is to recognize when artists and thinkers in mainstream culture ask valid questions — questions about issues that religious leaders and believers cannot afford to ignore, about subjects found in a good Bible concordance.
It’s poignant, to say the least, when talented artists and performers raise questions and then demonstrate that they cannot answer them or offer shallow or even tragically incomplete answers (usually having to do with human emotions alone). It’s especially important to note when media professionals ask valid, important questions, and then offer answers that directly clash with the “faith once and for all delivered to the saints.” Can faith leaders be silent?
In Part III of my earlier Rational Sheep series — “Learning to pay attention to popular culture” — I explained the four-step process I developed with Robinson to help cultural missionaries move from finding a valid “signal” to offering a worthy response in ministry and education.
This is long, but essential:
Step one, obviously, is to find a specific media signal, as previously defined.
Step two requires honest, open-minded analysis. We want to find what I call the signal's “secular subject," as the artist would define it. Interviews often contain clues.
Remember that artists must attract and hold an audience. In one way or another they have to deal with real issues or with what we could even call “big ideas" — life, death, love, hate, money, marriage, sex, fear, children, anger, pride, hatred, war and so forth. We must ask: what was the subject that the artist wanted to address?
At this point, we can pivot to the lives of parents, pastors, teachers and others.
Step three mirrors step two. Once you have found this "secular subject,'' it will almost always have moral or theological overtones. It will be a "sacred subject'' that we share in common with saints and sinners down the ages. Stories change. Images change. Questions often sound new and strange. But the "big ideas'' are remarkably constant, because the stuff of human experience is the same.
Now, once we have paired a “secular subject” to a valid “sacred subject,” we are ready to address the lives of people living in the real world.
In other words, it’s time to address the “separation of church and life.”
Step four is the hardest part, because it requires church leaders to think of ways to respond. This does not require a television network or digital equipment. I believe the church must respond by using its strengths — preaching, Christian education, prayer groups, retreats and other traditional forms of ministry.
However, I remain convinced that it is crucial to actually quote media signals as part of a response. In other words, we must confess that the myths and messages we consume on our couches and at our malls matter. We must talk to our people about their real lives and, like it or not, this means talking about popular culture. We must admit that we are listening. We must try to understand. By doing so, we are not letting the world hijack the church's agenda. We will merely be taking part in a debate in which the church cannot afford to remain silent.
Obviously, Miller was not, at “Logos Made Flesh,” attempting to respond to Hollywood signals using the approach I have offered here at Rational Sheep. What he was doing — over and over — was demonstrating how to walk from the “secular subject” to the “sacred subject.” His attention to detail is quite amazing.
Please watch “The God Who Isn’t There: The Hidden Meaning of Cast Away.” Then, brace yourself, and watch the second part of that “signal” interpretation.
As I said earlier, it will — trust me on this — be worth your time.
I will end with this tribute to Miller from some of his online friends and admirers.
There is something quietly devastating, and quietly beautiful, in the way you have laid out the collision between technology’s mercenary mechanics and the stray mercy of Providence. Algorithms, for all their cold calculus, become, at rare, almost sacramental intervals, unwilling handmaids of grace. Even the architecture of our digital Babel is not beyond the reach of a God who writes His parables in the dust.
Matt Miller’s work, as you so movingly describe it, seems to enact that deeper mystery — a truth I often explore at Desert and Fire: that the Word has not abandoned the world, but has sown Himself secretly within it. This is the heart of incarnational mysticism: that the sacred is not confined to cloisters or cathedrals, but aches within even the most secular spaces, waiting for eyes trained by love to recognize Him. Even a blood-stained volleyball, born of desperation and loneliness, may stand — in its mute, ruined dignity — as a fragile icon of the God who hides Himself in plain sight.
There is, after all, no abandonment that Christ has not inhabited. No island so far-flung that He has not, in His descent into death, made a dwelling-place for the cry of "My God, why have You forsaken me?" Miller’s work — and your tribute to it — reminds us that it is not the "answers" of our age that prove most vital, but the aching questions, the wounds left open, the hunger that no algorithm can quite anesthetize, which calls out across the digital wilderness for Something — Someone — real.
It is precisely here that the mystery of the Incarnation shines most fiercely. God does not despise the mediums and messages of our fallen making; He slips into them. He rides even the accidental algorithms, the haunted movies, the desperate monologues of men dying too young. The Word becomes signal. The desert blooms with hidden fire.
In the end, the true signal is always suffering transfigured by love. And Miller, facing his own death even as he labored to complete his unfinished commentary, bore witness to this: that the final "Big Idea" worth our allegiance is not a concept at all, but a wounded God who chose not to erase our suffering, but to share it — to hide Himself in the longing He first stirred.
Thank you for carrying his signal a little farther down the road, for listening in a world that has forgotten how, and for reminding us — as I hope to remind readers at Desert and Fire — that even now, the Logos Made Flesh is nearer than breath, speaking through the broken syllables of the world, if only we have hearts still enough to hear.