Naming our Heroes
You might have noticed that I have been referencing superheroes more often than usual in my sermons. Jesus and John the Baptist as Batman and Robin? Or is it Cyclops and Wolverine? Magneto and Professor X? Or Iron Man and Captain America? This is not JUST because the new Black Panther movie has recently come out, but also because I have been reflecting a lot about heroes during and following my sabbatical.
The vast canon of Hindu deities, after all, offers lots of heroes to consider. King Arthur flour bears that name for a reason, and any travel through the American West is a reminder of many people we have seen and heroes and how complicated those hero narratives have become. It turns out conquering the American west may have been more than just surviving snake bites and cholera. As a child, I was raised on Arthurian Legends and cowboy movies. The hero ideal for a ten-year-old me was a lone knight/cowboy surviving in the desert, saving the innocent women, locking up the bad guys, and making it home in time for supper.
It turns out that it was never quite this simple.
Not only did our heroes rarely, if ever, do it all alone, but they also sometimes hurt people, sometimes a lot of them, in the process.
Our heroes aren’t always heroic, I guess.
Maybe there are really no good people or at least no perfect people, but really only good decisions. Good choices, good moments.
The biggest change in how the Marvel superhero universe has been presented to the world recently is that the characters are no longer two-dimensional. Not only are the movies vivid 3-D narratives, but the characters are more than just good and bad. More often than not we find ourselves rooting for the bad guy or mad at the good guy in the story.
The Bible is full of these kinds of heroes, as is the story of our faith. Men and women who have done amazing things in the name of God and yet who also set some really bad examples made some really bad decisions.
What separates out those we call heroes often has as much to do with location than anything else. What did they do when given the opportunity to follow God more closely? Did they get closer? Or run away?
The Shepherds and the Magi got closer. Herod went the other way. Paul got closer. The roman emperor went the other way.
When given the opportunity to follow God more closely will you get closer? Or will you go the other way? This is the question being asked of us this Advent as we prepare for the birth of Christ.