Superman

Back in 1983, there was an animated short called 'charade' that won the academy award for best animated short.  I'll submit a link here, because it's worth a peek, though caution, there is some extremely light nudity at the end (a mooning).  

Anyhow, the conceit of the production is that there is one person acting who is extremely elaborate, and nobody can get it, and there's another person who comes out and does basically a pose, and everyone gets it.  The best bit is when the first guy acts out Superman by doing things like changing in a phone booth, being faster than a bullet, lifting a truck, flying, all that stuff, and nobody gets it. The second guy comes out and just takes of his glasses, and someone guesses 'Superman.' 

It's a funny gag, made all the funnier because of the reality of the disguise that Superman himself wears.  I know it's a tired observation now, but how crazy is it that nobody recognizes Superman as Clark Kent without the glasses?  Even as superhero disguises go, it's a feeble one.  And people in the comics always seem to react the same way, by saying 'Clark, you missed it!  Superman was just here!' 

I bring this up because I want you to think about why it is that Superman would need a secret identity in the first place.  That is, Batman is pretty vulnerable when he's wearing a business suit, but Superman? Even if you walk up to Clark Kent in broad daylight and pull a gun on him, he'll only be as damaged as Superman would be because he is Superman. Just in disguise.  Superman may be bulletproof, though, he may be completely immune to poison, stabbings, lynchings, all that, but do you know who isn't immune to any of that? Lois Lane.  Ma Kent.  Jimmy Olsen.  Perry White.  All these people are regular people, and if Superman is found out to have been Clark Kent at any point in his life, all those lives become forefeit.  

So, Superman has a secret identity not for his benefit, but for the benefit of those around him . And unlike most heroes, he is wearing a disguise when he is dressed as Clark Kent. When he's dressed as Superman, that's when he is actually without disguise.  Bruce Wayne puts on a disguise to become Batman, Barry Allen puts on a disguise to become the Flash, and Hal Jordan puts on a disguise to become the Green Lantern.  Superman, though, puts on a disguise to become Clark Kent.  His natural state is Superman.

This is important for Transfiguration Sunday.  I brought this guy up on Sunday as a visible reminder of secret identities, especially Superman.  For on the mount of Transfiguration, the disciples got to see the Lord Jesus without disguise.  For most of the time on earth, he was visible as a human being like any other.  But as with Superman, when Jesus is in disguise, he puts something on, in this case, a mortal nature.  In his purity, without disguise, he is manifest in his glory.  The mild-mannered carpenter is like the mild mannered reporter - that's the disguise.  And why does Christ need a disguise?  Well, like with Superman, it's for us.

The voice from the cloud says something very important to the disciples: "this is my son, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.  Listen to him.'  Yes, listen to him.  That's the hard part.  And you can tell it's the hard part because we tend to want to be like Thomas Jefferson, and to cast the Bible into two separate halves, with two separate gods.  And a lot of people do that, saying to me 'how is it that the God of the Old Testament is mean and vindictive, but the God of the New Testament is nice and mild?'  But that question only makes sense if you don't listen to the words of Christ.  GK Chesterton made a great point, saying that the accusation that the church had taken the simple message of peace and love that Christ gave to the world and despoiled it with him being vindictive is false.  In fact, it is the opposite.  The Christ of the Gospels is firm, hard as nails and in many cases furious.  There are no statues to my knowledge of him denouncing the sinful, or glaring in wrath at the 'brood of vipers.'  There are no statues or carvings of the Lord of Life discussing Gehenna, or promising wailing and gnashing of teeth.  But all those thing are in the scriptures, if you'll listen.  

If you follow through with the recommendation that the voice from the cloud gives, then you'll see that the flesh on Christ is as convincing a disguise as the glasses on Clark Kent. They shouldn't fool anyone, but they do.  If you listen to the words of Christ, it becomes clear that he doesn't just sound like God, he is God.  Not only is it not a different God in the New Testament, the God of the New Testament is the same as the God of the Old, and it is Jesus Christ himself. Once you work that out, then the rest of the New Testament begins to make sense, as a fulfillment of the Old.  You see Christ as the Lord of the Old Testament stepping into the world to drag it out of the sinfulness that it had gotten itself into.  And the words of the cloud are true and good, because anyone who truly listens to the words that Christ says will come away with the impression that this is a fulfillment of everything the scriptures had ever spoken of - from the fall of humanity until the arrival of the savior himself.

The kiss of death

We've got lots of questions about a certain topic right now.  In case you haven't noticed, novel Coronavirus, hereafter referred to as just 'coronavirus,' has been spreading through the world a little at a time for a while now.  And every time we get a new disease like this, people start to ask one big question about a certain part of the worship service.  And no, it isn't communion practice.

The questions come up about the exchange of the peace.  And that's a great topic to talk about.  In the exchange of the peace, you tend to shake hands, and people have asked me about what they can do if they don't want to shake hands, which they might not.  "Pastor," say they, "if I don't want to shake hands with anyone because I don't want to get sick, can I just fist bump?"  You sure can.  You can fist bump, elbow bump, shake hands, or just wave.  It's all fine.  I'm non committal, because I happen to be aware that, as a Lutheran, the 'sola scriptura' answer would be to greet one another with a holy kiss … and that gets used a few times in the scriptures.  But if you don't want to shake hands, bump fists, elbow bump or kiss, what should you do? Well, ultimately, it doesn't matter.  All that matters is that you do something.

You really shouldn't do nothing.  And I'll explain what I mean.  In a situation in which you're expected to exchange the peace, ask yourself why it would be that someone would not want to shake hands / fist bump / elbow bump / even wave to someone? Is it because you don't want to get sick? Maybe. Or maybe it could be the reality that you don't want to wish someone the peace of God.  Because you don't like them very much.  Now, there is a possibility that you like everyone, of course, and you have no disputes with anyone.  But for the rest of us on planet earth, the story of Jonah is one of the best stories for this.  For you grow up hearing the story of Jonah, and it's just the story of a guy and a fish, for a long time.  But the story of Jonah has one major complication for all of us that we should, as adults, want to hear about.  That is, that in the story of Jonah, the whole reason he runs away from his responsibilities, gets into a storm, gets thrown overboard and gets swallowed by a great fish, is because he doesn't want the people that he has been sent to to be spared. He's perfectly content for Nineveh to be wiped off the map, because he hates them and everything about them. They're his enemies, and he acts accordingly.  God wants Jonah to give a message of repentance to the Ninevites, and he refuses to do so probably because he's looking forward to the smiting.  Once you get this about Jonah's story, then you can start to get something about your story as well, that there are probably people that you don't want to share the peace with because you don't actually wish them God's peace.

That's normal and human.  It's so old and universal that it's part of the Bible.  But what you have to contend with is the reality of the words of Christ, who issues all of us a stark warning.  He tells us that we have to approach the altar of God with our issues resolved.  And that's hard to do.  It's hard to do because there are people that you don't like for good reason. I'm not going to do what might be expected, and tell you that you have no real good reason to be angry with people, no you probably DO have VERY GOOD reasons to be angry with people.  Because people are bunk.  They are lazy, rude, have no respect for you.  They tend to take and not give, talk about themselves too much, put their feet on your couch or tell either too many racist jokes, or tell you that your jokes are too racist. There's a good chance that the people you don't like are disliked for good reasons.  And I'll agree with you that it's true.  But the big difference for the Christian is that it doesn't matter.  Not one bit.

How can I be so flippant about this?  Because in the big scheme of things, the real disagreements that you have with other people pale in comparison with your disagreements with the Lord your God.  It goes this way, if you think about it - God has certain expectations of majesty for all of us, holiness and righteousness, and we don't meet up.  But we clearly and openly expect God's attention, his affection, his forgiveness and his company.  We expect his blessings even though we are tempted to withhold our forgiveness, blessings, and love from others.

This is the issue.  You know that you have true and good reasons to be angry at a large number of people, for sure you do.  But you have to deal with the fact that when Christ tells you that you have to deal with, and make peace with people who you don't care for too much.  And if you tell me that they're tiresome, unpleasant, or whatever, then you have to deal with the fact that before God, you are as much. And more.  And once you work that out, it's very difficult to have a relationship with people in which you can choke them out and ask that they pay back what they owe you.  Jesus tells a parable about that, in which a man who was forgiven 10 thousand talents then chokes out a man who owes him 100 days work.  If you're wondering how much money ten thousand talents is worth, in today's prices, we're looking at  25479255000

That's a tidy sum.  If I did the math right, which is questionable, we're looking at about 25 times the GDP of Canada.  That's a lot of money.  It's an absurd about of money, so large that that man could never pay it back.  Several generations could never pay it back, it's nonsense.  And this is the sort of debt that we are dealing with when it comes to God.  We sin against him all the time. And when you figure that out, then dealing with one another becomes much easier, because you understand how much you have to be forgiven, and then the concerns that you have with others become easier to deal with.  They're easier to deal with because you're not God, and they don't have a massive debt owing to you bigger than the one you yourself owe to God.  Essentially, nothing about this is too terribly complicated.  If you're a beggar at the foot of the Lord, if your relationship with him is as one who is essentially begging for mercy, then it's extremely difficult to hold grudges against those who have committed relatively minor slights against you. It's really only then that you can make peace with your accuser while you are on the way, because you are both in debt to the same master, and it is that master who forgives the massive debts of you both.

Do it again

Sunday was a curious confluence of events.  We had a fairly prominent festival in the church year on Sunday, with the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple and the purification of Mary.  But it was also Candlemas, for those of you who celebrate that event.

But in case you weren't paying attention, there were some secular events going on yesterday as well.  We had the Big Game yesterday, in which the Kansas City Chiefs, representing the great state of Kansas, beat the San Francisco 49ers.  And if that wasn't enough, we also had Groundhog Day yesterday.  For those of you who don't know, Groundhog Day is a day in which certain towns have a celebrity groundhog who may or may not see his shadow when he emerges from his burrow.  The conceit is that if the groundhog sees his shadow, then there will be six more weeks of winter. If he does not, then there will be an early spring.

Now, as I said, there are several groundhogs all plying this trade, from Punxsutawney to Shubenacadie to Balzac, and they end up having varying predictions that are all over the map.  It's a fun thing to do, and to keep up with, but here's my prediction as a human being who lives in Regina SK.  Ready?

We will have six more weeks of winter.  Guaranteed.

How do I know? Did I see my shadow or something?  No, I sure didn't.  And for the record, 31st of January here in town I saw people wandering around the city in shorts, but I'm still predicting a longer winter.  And the reason for that is that I have lived on the prairies for almost my whole life, and after enough years of living on that Canadian prairies, you start to notice a pattern.  And that pattern is that beginning in October, things start to get cold, and they don't tend to get nice until April.  In reality, you can't expect things to get nice until the days start to get significantly longer in April, or sometimes into may.  The odds of having a spring that starts anywhere before the middle of March is extremely unlikely.  As I say, this is based off of almost 4 decades of the exact same results, over and over again.

If you repeat something often enough, you start to get a pretty good handle on it. And that's what the movie Groundhog Day is about.  If you haven't seen Groundhog Day, go ahead and watch it.  It's pretty good.  The plot centers around a weatherman, played by Bill Murray, who covers the Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.  He hates it, and has essentially open contempt for the entire festival.  After a day of having contempt for the people, town, and festivities, he finds that he and his crew can't leave town, and have to stay overnight.  And when he wakes up, the day starts again, the exact same way.  Over and over and over and over again. The day doesn't change, no matter what he does. He tries driving out, killing himself, going to jail, and nothing changes.  The day always plays out the exact same way.  And over a long enough time, after having enough repetition of the same day over and over again, Bill Murray starts to get it right.  He lives the day essentially 'perfectly,' and ends up finally leaving that day upon the realization that he has gotten it right.

This story is a good one to tell when we are thinking about the presentation of our Lord in the Temple. For in the Temple, Jesus meets up with Simeon and Anna, two people who had been in the Temple for years, dedicating themselves to the Lord and His service.  These are people who have been living out the history of Israel in their lives.  Simeon and Anna were older people, who had been hearing the same stories year in and year out.  And they had lived through numerous Passover festivals, and had seen lots of baby boys brought to the Temple to be redeemed as well.  And this redemption was a way of remembering and retelling the passover story again and again within the family, with the clear instruction that when your son asks you why you do these things, you tell him that it is because the Lord brought you out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and so on.  These were stories that the people of Israel told one another all the time, they were repeated every year, every time that they had a firstborn male, human or animal, of their household.  And these stories were told very frequently indeed, to the point that the Passover became the single most important, foundation story of the Hebrew people.  The story of freedom from slavery, the story of liberation from captivity, of God stepping into history with a mighty arm to free his people from captivity is a story that had to be told over and over again, or else the people of Israel would be tempted to forget it.  But more than that, as they continued to tell the story over and over again, as it was told not just through Simeon and Anna's lives, but through the lives of the nation of Israel as a whole, it became clear that the good people of Israel were not just recounting an event that happened in history, they were looking forward to what that event meant for all of them forever.  The story of the Lord's Passover wasn't just a story of a moment in time for a few people, it was a story that prefigured a much bigger conclusion.

Upon the arrival of Jesus Christ, Simeon recognized him for who he was, not just a child who would be redeemed with two turtledoves like all the rest, but rather the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.  This is not a boy who had to be redeemed, but rather a boy who would, himself, do the redeeming.  Once you tell a story often enough, once you internalize it and make it a part of you, and you become significantly better at working out what it is all about, from every angle.  After all, if you hear the story of the Passover once, you may think that it is a story limited to a single moment in time, when God stepped into history and rescued a people.  But if you keep on telling it, you will realize that something else becomes clear as you hear it again.

A lot of people have a lot of ideas as to what the movie Groundhog Day is all about, but I'm going to let Harold Ramis tell you through God's gift of the internet.

 Harold Ramis was a Jewish gentleman, and according to him, the story of the movie was the story of the Torah.  That is, the stories of the Bible do not change.  If you're on a one year series, or a 3 year series, or if you're just doing your devotions, you'll notice that even though the stories don't change, you experience them differently.  That is, the story of Jonah moves from being a story about a man and a fish when you're a child, to a story of avoiding God's call as a teen, to a story of God's insistence on his love for your enemies as an adult, to a story of God's grace applying to his children as a parent.  Same story, but you find different things in them.  Simeon had heard the story of the Passover countless times, had seen countless boys come to be redeemed, and then all of a sudden, even though it was the same story, same ritual, this time it meant something different. This wasn't just the story of one child, or one nation, this was the story of the world being redeemed.  This was the story of the king of kings, the Lord of Lords, the salvation of the world, the light to the nations.  The Passover story was identical, had not changed, but now Simeon could see what it was about all along.

It had always been about the redemption of humanity.  The celebration of the Passover meal was a way of prefiguring the arrival of Jesus Christ.  Once Jesus had arrived, then the story became wonderfully clear, as though you had finally seen the two silhouettes instead of a vase, and now couldn't see anything else.

That's part of the reason we tell the same stories over and over again.  So that as your lives change, the grace of God can speak anew.  And if you don't believe me that that can happen, try a test case.  Go read Calvin and Hobbes if you're a parent, and see who you identify with now.  Apply that case to the scriptures next.  Think about the Lord's prayer when you were a child, how you understood that your daily bread came from God, and how he grants you all you need of body and soul.  But then, when you're a parent, go back and think about it again, and realize that the Lord's prayer means something more now.  You know what it is like to lay your life down an hour at a time for your family, to give to them without them noticing what goes into their survival.  All of scripture works that way, and the way that God speaks to you changes, even though the story does not.  It's why we, and Christ himself, tell you that you have to continue in his word, and if you do you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.