Stronger Than The Dark

Human beings have always told certain kinds of stories. We return to them, rework them, set them to music — because they carry something we cannot quite say in prose. These four musicals are not accidentally profound. They are expressions of what the theologian Walter Brueggemann calls the “prophetic imagination” — the capacity to envision a world that does not yet fully exist and to speak that vision into the present.

What these shows share is a conviction that the darkness does not win. The Greatest Showman insists that the spectacular life you have constructed is not the real one. Newsies insists that the powerless have power when they act together. Hadestown insists that love will descend into hell to find you. Les Misérables insists that the song of the suffering dead is still being sung, and the world that killed them is not the last word.

These are not new ideas. They are, in fact, ancient ones — dressed in new costumes, sung in new keys. This series invites the congregation to hear the gospel underneath the soundtrack, to recognize in these stories the same movements of grace, justice, incarnation, and resurrection that run from Genesis to Revelation.