I am a big fan of the Star Wars saga as many Americans are but my love of that universe goes beyond the movies to the many novels that have been written in the ever expanding Star Wars storyline. In the not too distant past I started reading the Darth Bane novels which are set about 1,000 years before the movies. It was Bane who set up what is known as the modern Sith order. There were many Sith and it was he who killed all of them and set up the two Sith at a time rule. I found as I read the books though, there are several lessons that modern Christians can take from these stories.
The first lesson is his pride in the title of “Darth.” This had been lost because they were trying to be all inclusive so when he first became a Sith he was called Bane of the Sith until he decided to adopt the ancient title of Darth. I see a trend among Christians many of whom are well meaning and they try and drop the titles that distinguish who they are. You can walk into a community or Bible church and not know if it’s Pentecostal or Baptistic until the service starts. I find that disturbing. We can be inclusive and unified without doing away with those things that define us. The term Christian was a name given by enemies of Christ and those of our sect have worn it as a badge of honor since then. We should take pride in it but what kind of Christian are you? Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Pentecostal? Those titles define how we believe and we should find them as a source of pride not as a bad thing.
I fall under the Baptist tradition and I’m proud of what that means. The title stands for our belief that baptism follows a profession of faith and is not to be applied to infants in order to gain salvation. We do not fall under the Protestant title because Baptists didn’t come out of Rome. We have existed seperate from Rome since the days of the apostles. Often meeting secretly and not taking any formal titles. Many who followed the teachings now called Baptist were tortured and burned at the stake by the Catholic Church. There is a long tradition of loyalty to Scripture and that is nothing to be ashamed of.
The next lesson is his devotion to the ancient writings. If you read the novels when Bane was training in the Sith Acedemy he finds that the lust for power that was a staple of the Sith Order was gone and they were teaching partnership and equality. They had abandoned the ancient ways and were spending all their time practicing the “new methods” and yet they seemed powerless. Bane begins to spend all of his time in the library reading the ancient Sith writings. He begins to excel the others in his power and knowledge.
This is the case in the church today. So many christians and churches are spending all their time in the new ways of building their church and they end up with a building full of people but powerlessness. They have abandoned the old ways of personal evangelism that changed hearts and brought power to the church. They are always looking into the new books and new ways yet the ancient writings(Scripture) is ignored. We need to learn from Darth Bane and realize that the new ways are not the best way or the right way. We need to not remove the ancient landmarks that our father’s have set for us as Solomon advised us to do. Let us seek to walk in the old paths and follow the advice I recieved from an old preacher when he said if it’s new it’s probably not true.
The Gospel Beacon 