What's Your Superpower?

What would your super power be?

 

On Sunday I preached about the kinds of power we admire and long for, the kind of power of which we are in awe.  Superheroes capture many of our imaginations.  I am learning a lot about Rogue – the one from the X-Men – these days.  I’ve always kind of liked Rogue, at least as she’s portrayed in the movie franchise (I’ve never really been into comics) but having a child obsessed about something brings a new level of knowledge.

Rogue’s power is enviable in that she can adopt another’s power at a touch.  And yet she, understandably, also sees this as a curse.  It drains anyone she touches of their power and sometimes of their consciousness.  She can’t control it.  It robs her of intimacy even while it gives her great strength.  In the power Jesus wields, again and again we see him offer his power of healing to another.  Instead of taking from another he transforms what is broken, withered, captive into something whole and healed and free.  He’s the anti-Rogue.  Except that if one definition of rogue is “Not controllable or answerable; deviating, renegade” well, maybe Jesus and Rogue have something in common after all.

He is in control of his power to heal and offer release, however Jesus is certainly not answerable to any earthly authority.  His is a ‘new teaching’ and its author is God alone.  When we’re asking each other, or when we’re talking with our children about what power they would like to have consider that we already have power at our disposal.  Ok, it’s not a superpower maybe.  But we do have the power to heal, reconcile with and free each other and so do our children.

As I think about our power to heal, free and reconcile I’m reminded of the Circle of Grace teaching that the children are learning.  Central to the understanding of their Circle of Grace is knowing that all around them, the Spirit of God is empowering them to know themselves and use their feelings and intuitions as signals to understand their environment.  As children – as any of us – become more in tune with our senses and feelings, as we understand those around us we are empowered to protect ourselves and those in our midst.  It’s no force field, but it is powerful.

Powerful Graphic Resources

If you are interested in the direct intersection of faith/ethics and graphic novels, you may want to check out one of these resources from our library:

Pax Avalon, about a peace-making superhero with the power of God on her side.  This graphic novel written by Reese Friesen  chronicles  the city of Avalon is under siege and in her heart she knows that violence is not the solution.  There’s a trailer on YouTube here.  There is at least one further addition to the first novel in the series and a web comic that will be the forerunner of a third.

Radical Jesus: a Graphic History of Faith is by several authors and illustrators. Menno Media calls it “A compelling, graphical rendition, Radical Jesus tells the story of Jesus and his social message, not just in his own time, but also through the Radical Reformation, recent centuries, and our own time.”

Bizarro Jesus

I don't know if it was Joe (my spouse) or Jerry Seinfeld who first introduced me to Bizarro Superman. I am not versed in the world of comics (surprising to me, then that I have two entries labeled such) but I was reminded of Bizarro this week as I reflected on the parable of the Greedy and Vengeful King or The Parable of the Pounds, from Luke 19:11-28 - it's a toughy.

A cruel and greedy king, some people who oppose him, some servants who invest his money, and one who does not. This parable bugged me and bugged me because I don't want Jesus to be the king. The king is so cruel, so unfeeling, so power hungry, so cavalier. He seems to be the opposite of everything that Jesus stands for - just exactly like the real-life kings and rulers then and now.

Well, exactly! Jesus is not the king, he's the bizzaro king. Or rather, the king is the bizzaro Jesus. Luke, in having Jesus tell this parable was creating the anti-Jesus. Alvin Schwartz, the creator of Bizarro Superman, said this about his character Bizzaro Superman:

"I was striving, you might say, for that mirror-image, that opposite. And out of a machine which would reveal the negative Superman, came the mirror image, - always remembering that in a mirror everything is reversed...The times were such that one-dimensional characters, your standard superheroes, even in comics, seemed rather simplistic, like paper cut-outs. What was demanded was the full dimensional personality - a figure that carried a shadow, if you like. I was certainly inspired to some degree also by C.G. Jung's archetype of "the shadow" - and Bizarro certainly reflected that, as well" Bizarro talked in opposites and didn't know good from bad.

Jesus is the king who exalts the humble, seeks the lost, gives life to the dying. So when Luke puts Jesus in the mirror, he gets a king who does the opposite of those things, who exalts the already exalted, who turns the loser away and who kills the ones showing the life-spark of opposition. The readers recognize the king for who he represents - the corrupt and vengeful kings of Israel's provinces - and identify with the fearful slave and the protesting bystanders. The recognize the injustice. That is exactly what Jesus wants. The kingdom of God, the 'upside-down kingdom,' turns the world that we know, and the violent values that it practices, on it's head.

Link to the sermon that started it all here.

X-men and the Bible

I was recently told, when discussing the idea that follows, "Just because you see a metaphor doesn’t mean you have to use it." But I just can’t let it go. It didn't make it into the sermon, but this is what blogs were made for…a forum for personal musings and inane comparisons of the biblical figures to popular comic book and movie characters.

I just saw the most recent instalment of the X-men movies - The Last Stand. I liked the character of Rogue (played by Anna Paquin) in the previous two movies and would have hoped that the writers would have developed her better in this ‘final’ instalment of the series. (I guess they can only do so much when there are twenty five characters to develop and there’s a butt-kicking quota). Each of the mutant/superhero/supervillain characters in the series have different powers. Rogue’s power is that she adopts the powers of anyone she touches. as well as the person's thoughts. While Rogue takes on the powers of the person she touches, that person is drained of power. She doesn’t know how to control her ability to do this, and to keep from harming anyone she comes in contact with. Since she can't control it, it controls her. She is unable to touch anyone without harming them and this is most painful to her, a teenage girl, where it comes to her relationship with a boy she cares about.

So in the same span of time that I saw X-Men I was working on a sermon on Mark 5:21-43 about Jesus healing a girl and a woman. So maybe it's true and drawing a comparison between Rogue and the woman in this story is stretching it. But in some ways, this woman is like Rogue. First of all, she is isolated because her disease. She has endured 12 years of vaginal bleeding (there you go…if you were ever wondering what ‘haemorrhaging’ meant) which makes her unable to touch or come into close contact with anyone without transferring her uncleanness to that person. It isolates her from society. Second, more specifically, what would have been especially hard: she is unable to marry or be with a man because having sex with a woman who is bleeding goes beyond unclean. Levitical law calls for death. In that culture not only does her disease rob her of the intimacy of marriage, it robs her of the status that only comes to women when they can be a wife and mother.

In the movie, Rogue sneaks off to the evil Magneto for the ‘cure’ to the mutant gene that causes her to be able to take power from others. The bleeding woman sneaks up to Jesus. And there the comparison comes to a big fat end. Jesus is the one with the power and no-one else - no super hero, no individual by her own power, not even doctors, though we are grateful for the gifts that God gave them. Jesus' power to save is for any of us who will reach out an touch him in faith. We too are gifted by the Holy Spirit to love and to heal and to restore relationships. Yet when we use this power, give it to others we are not depleted, but only grow stronger.

There is no villain in the story of the woman, except disease and isolation itself. And the ‘hero’ is Jesus and his power to save us not for the next life, but to be whole and holy in this one.