NOT Showing at a Movie Theater Near You!

Sermon 3-4-18

Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and from our Lord and savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

You’ve found the best seats in the movie theater -  lights go down, your popcorn is buttered and ready to go, and for two hours you are immersed in the world of Wakanda, a peaceful, highly technologically advanced country with a rich history, thriving under the rule of King T’Challa… whose alter ego is the super hero Black Panther. But all is not peaceful in Wakanda for long – soon, challenges from both within and without threaten to shroud Wakanda and the rest of the world in war and violence. Will King T’Challa be able to thwart the villains’ evil plans? Will Wakanda survive? I won’t spoil the end of the movie for you, though you can probably guess how things work out. It is a super hero movie, after all…. And one I would highly recommend, if you haven’t seen it yet!

While we may be experiencing a golden age in super hero movies, we all know that super heroes are not new. We read about their adventures in comic books as a kid, we watched them in Saturday morning cartoons, we pretended to be them during recess. We keep going to movie after movie …. And we even have super hero vacation Bible school themes, like we did right here last year.

Let’s face it - we just love super heroes and heroines. We love to watch them win. Heroes are strong. Heroes rescue innocent people. And for two hours we get to escape our own complicated and divided world. For two hours we are instead immersed in a story where it seems so much simpler to tell good from evil. No wonder Hollywood is making money hand over fist. Because we find that our own world is not like this at all.

For as long as there has been people, there have been stories of super heroes that come to the rescue us from ourselves.  We long for a world where a super-human being comes to save the day, to right all the wrongs in the world, and to defeat the bad guys – and it’s even better with epic explosions and high-tech gadgets. We long to have such a super hero at our disposal, because perhaps then we would not feel so powerless about the world we live in.

For as long as there have been people, the reality is that the strong overpowers the weak, and the mighty oppress the vulnerable, and some have lorded their power over others. We have conquered, exploited, persecuted, and disposed of one another, in more ways that we can count. It is no wonder that we long for God to swoop in to right the wrongs, to free the captives, and break every yoke that we have created for one another.

When Jesus arrived on the scene… at first, he seems to be just the super hero that God’s people have been waiting for. By now, the Jewish people have been oppressed by a rotating carousel of empires for hundreds of years – living for generations under so many thumbs of so many foreign powers.  Enter Jesus, ready to do something big.

Just before this story in the Gospel of John, Jesus attends a wedding and preforms his first sign – the infamous changing of water into wine. And the next thing we know, Jesus is entering the temple – the very center of the grand worship complex of his time – and shaking things up with his righteous anger. Just add some explosions and an epic-ly loud soundtrack, and you have a scene straight out of one of these super hero movies. Here Jesus is doing exactly what a super hero might do –Jesus confronts the people in power who are taking advantage of the “little guys” as he busts up their stuff, overturns tables, and drives them out with his whip of cords.

This gets Jesus in trouble with the religious authorities: Jesus threatened the source of their power and refused to play by their rules. But Jesus also refuses to play by OUR rules as well. We THINK that we want a big strong super hero to conquer the world … as long as we benefit. We THINK we want a super hero on a big white war horse to kick butt and take names in order to usher in the Kingdom of God. But this is not exactly how Jesus’s story goes.  

The truth is, Jesus would make a terrible super hero. It’s true that he starts strong by the cleansing of the temple, but it all goes downhill from here. Instead of going right to the top, to directly take on the powers-that-be, Jesus goes straight to the bottom. He chooses as his inner circle a group of rag-tag fishermen, social outcasts, radicals, and others who flunked out of rabbi school. Jesus surrounded himself with the weak, the powerless, the suffering, those who are sick and demon possessed, with women and children and tax collectors and sinners. Jesus healed the chronically ill, fed people without checking their credentials, and taught these people that the kingdom of God is FOR THEM TOO. It’s not just for the rich. It’s not just for the powerful or the strong. The kingdom of God is for ALL PEOPLE.

But where Jesus really fails at being a super hero comes at the end of the story, as we look to the end of the season of Lent and toward Holy Week, when we remember the last days and hours of Jesus life. This part of Jesus’ story is not filled with epic battles and triumph and winning. The last hours of Jesus life is full of failure, betrayal, suffering, and death.

Jesus makes a terrible super hero, because super heroes aren’t supposed to be weak. Heroes aren’t supposed to give up all their power. Heroes don’t hand themselves over to the evil people of the world to be beaten up, humiliated, and then to be killed in a painful and disgraceful death on a cross. But this is exactly what Jesus did.

Jesus was rejected because he did not live up to our standards of what power looks like. To the people of his time, and to us too, Jesus looks weak and pathetic. What kind of super hero is this? Dying on an a cross? Certainly not a very good one. What super hero would willingly choose a cross, anyway?

As Paul wrote to the fledgling Christian communities in Corinth, who also struggled with living in a very conflicted and divided world…. The cross does not compute. Not to them, and not to us. The cross seems like a stupid, foolish, and weak way to save the world. And yet, it is exactly the way that Jesus chose to save us. And it is exactly the way that we need to be saved.

As it turns out, what seems like God’s foolishness is wiser than our best wisdom… and what seems like God’s weakness is stronger than any superhero might.

Just what is the foolishness of God? Exactly what is God’s weakness, God’s kryptonite, as it were?

Love.

Let me say that again. God’s weakness is love. God’s love for us, specifically. God loves us SO MUCH that God would do anything, go to any length to share that love with us. God would gladly look foolish, weak, and moronic if it means being present and entering into our suffering with us. God would rather show us unequivocally the endless bounds of this love, than play by the perverse rules of our power games. Even if that means submitting to those power games, even if that means submitting to death itself…. All So that in the end, death would no longer have any power over us. To borrow from another super hero movie, Jesus may not be the hero we want, but he is the hero that we need.

Jesus became fully human and fully embraced everything that meant… which if you think about that for more than a few seconds you realize this is a TERRIBLE idea. Humans are MEAN and we do lots of BAD THINGS to one another. We have invented so many ways to hurt one another. And yet, by coming to us, Jesus says that WE ARE ALSO WORTH SAVING. We are also worthy of LOVE.

We don’t have to earn this love. We don’t have to be strong, or powerful, or influential, or successful, or healthy, or have it all together. There is nothing we can do. This love is just THERE. And it belongs to all of us. Which is perhaps the most foolish, most moronic, most amazing and wonderful thing of all.

Martin Luther wrote a prayer intended to be prayed before receiving communion: “My Lord Christ, I have fallen, I would gladly be strong. For this purpose, you have instituted the sacrament, that which with it we may rekindle and strengthen our faith and be helped. Therefore, I am to receive it... I now come to be helped.”

So, like Luther, here WE are to receive this help and this love. Jesus proved that his love for us – which could be perceived as weakness – was stronger than human hatred and fear. What looks like foolishness to others - following a man who lived love so fully he died a humiliating death on a cross – turns out to be our path to new life.

So, this becomes the beginning of our own super hero story – what looks like an end becomes a beginning. After the night comes the dawn. After death comes resurrection. After Lent and Holy Week comes Easter. Thanks be to God. Amen.