Pastor Darren: Well, my friends, you probably ought to know.
Pastor Darren: As pertains to today, I have always been a pretty big Superman fan.
Pastor Darren: I am of the age that that whole Christopher Reeve version of Superman people must remember that one right, yeah, the Christopher Reeve For some.
Pastor Darren: For who many here says, well, yeah, the Christopher Reeve For some.
Pastor Darren: For who many here says, well, that's the real Superman.
Pastor Darren: Yeah, right, yeah, all right.
Pastor Darren: How many for Henry Cavill, who Did you say?
Pastor Darren: Who?
Pastor Darren: Aye, aye, aye.
Pastor Darren: And I'm trying to remember the name of the new guy Callie, you're young.
Pastor Darren: Yeah, look at us, we're both.
Pastor Darren: She's looking it up for me.
Pastor Darren: We will have it in a mo.
Pastor Darren: So say it again.
Pastor Darren: George Reeves oh, my goodness, I need a time machine.
Pastor Darren: Oh man, so who would list George Reeves?
Pastor Darren: Good Glory, okay, all right.
Pastor Darren: Yeah, we're going back, we're going back.
Pastor Darren: I think there was one that snuck in there Brandon Rausch, anybody, who, who?
Pastor Darren: Anyway, superman's been part of our culture, the zeitgeist, really for how many decades?
Pastor Darren: And I was a big fan as a young person.
Pastor Darren: I remember my big Superman shirt.
Pastor Darren: He was busting through a building.
Pastor Darren: I had Superman pants with Superman on the back pocket.
Pastor Darren: I had a Superman belt buckle, because that's what cool people had.
Pastor Darren: You know this was.
Pastor Darren: I was looking perfect for the 70s back there, looking great.
Pastor Darren: So I am a fan of Superman.
Pastor Darren: You should also know I really like superhero movies.
Pastor Darren: Now some of you might be wondering why.
Pastor Darren: Now some of you might be wondering why, and sometimes I wonder why, they hold on to me.
Pastor Darren: There's the thought maybe you're just a 12-year-old boy that somehow got older and not taller.
Pastor Darren: You know that.
Pastor Darren: Maybe that is what happened there.
Pastor Darren: But I was reading up getting ready for today and I saw something in a philosophy publication that said you know, superhero movies are really just about philosophy and values and right and wrong.
Pastor Darren: So I prefer to think of myself as a deep, deep thinker and not just somebody who didn't grow up.
Pastor Darren: Are we good with that?
Pastor Darren: That's kind of where I am All right.
Pastor Darren: So this summer there was a new Superman movie.
Pastor Darren: I don't know how many of you went out and saw it.
Pastor Darren: I was out there, me and Dr B.
Pastor Darren: We got out there.
Pastor Darren: I don't know about the rest of you.
Pastor Darren: It's good, it's enjoyable time out.
Pastor Darren: I recommend it.
Pastor Darren: Now here's something that's interesting about Superman, the storytelling of Superman, especially as it reflects with our culture.
Pastor Darren: Oh, I should mention we're doing a movie series.
Pastor Darren: Everybody's up with me on that, right?
Pastor Darren: If you didn't know when you walked in, you certainly know it now, because I haven't even mentioned Scripture yet and we've mentioned Superman some 20 times, so hopefully you're caught up.
Pastor Darren: So some of the difficulty with Superman has always been it was difficult to create conflict, which you need conflict in a story.
Pastor Darren: Otherwise it's kind of like what's happening here, if there's no thing to resolve or figure out, if there's no conflict.
Pastor Darren: It's hard to do that with a Superman who really has only one weakness and it's kind of a weenie weakness of Kryptonite.
Pastor Darren: The rest of it, right, he's this perfect being right and not just physically powerful, can do all the things fly, this, that and the other thing but also the model of character as well.
Pastor Darren: Right, he was just the best that a being could be right, and so it was difficult to create conflict in that way because of that reality.
Pastor Darren: So just to go through a little bit of the history we kind of already did.
Pastor Darren: Sorry, I miss George Reeves, but I did remember Christopher Reeve, right, we got a little pic of him that we can show.
Pastor Darren: Oh, remember there, he is handsome fellow.
Pastor Darren: Right, we got a little pic of him that we can show.
Pastor Darren: Oh, remember, there he is handsome fellow, right, I understand he wore the costume all the time, just kidding, just kidding.
Pastor Darren: Then I skipped over a couple, but then I jumped over to Henry Cavill, because that was one everybody remembers as well.
Pastor Darren: All right, and you can see just a little bit of the feel for him.
Pastor Darren: The Christopher Reeve version really went over well.
Pastor Darren: Tons of people went to see this movie and there was a lightness to that portrayal and Christopher Reeve a good actor, henry Cavill good actor as well.
Pastor Darren: But you can see he brought a little darkness to it, a little complexity to the character of Superman, for the good or for the bad, we shall see.
Pastor Darren: Now here's the new guy.
Pastor Darren: There, he is another handsome guy.
Pastor Darren: So hopefully you can get used to all of them, I guess, but you can get a sense of who they all are.
Pastor Darren: New Guy is a little bit of a throwback to the Christopher Reeve version.
Pastor Darren: Just so you know, the more lighthearted, the more wholesome In fact that's one of the storylines in the film is how wholesome he really is.
Pastor Darren: So it's interesting.
Pastor Darren: When we hear the new creators of this latest version of Superman, they were talking about how he is supposed to embody the very best of humanity.
Pastor Darren: Now here's the irony of that, and I think most of you probably already know this he was an alien, right?
Pastor Darren: His planet blew up and dad figured out how to send him to this other planet, a planet where we would have special powers from our son, but he was an alien.
Pastor Darren: So when we're talking about the best of humanity, we say that sort of ironically, because he wasn't human.
Pastor Darren: An example, though, of that humanity is shown in the movie.
Pastor Darren: In the midst of battle he's trying to save the world, and a little girl was going to get hurt by some shrapnel of the collateral damage of the battle itself, and he runs and he saves the little girl before he gets back to the villain.
Pastor Darren: He's this guy that not only can do every single thing physically that we would want done, but he's also so moral, right and his character is so deep that even in the midst of battle he's going to rush over and save the girl.
Pastor Darren: Here's my thought about Superman, or one of my thoughts.
Pastor Darren: I think Superman for we Americans, for whom he is an important character, I think he's who we hope we would be if we were super.
Pastor Darren: Sound like.
Pastor Darren: Is that a fair description?
Pastor Darren: You know, if I was super and had all those superpowers, I would be the nicest guy too.
Pastor Darren: I would be saving even the smallest people.
Pastor Darren: I would be making sure everybody had a fair chance, that there was justice going on.
Pastor Darren: I think I kind of feel like that's part of why we like to watch this character, why we go and see the movies that Superman does so a little history Diggy and see the movies that Superman does so a little history digging in.
Pastor Darren: I told you I like Superman.
Pastor Darren: I'm nerding out just a little bit, but it's August.
Pastor Darren: What else are you going to be doing?
Pastor Darren: So you listen to my Superman stuff Created by two Jewish men Actually, they were young people at that point high school.
Pastor Darren: They were young people at that point high school Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and it was in 1938 that they started developing the conceptions for who Superman was going to be.
Pastor Darren: Phil's raising his hand.
Pastor Darren: Are you adding in?
Pastor Darren: Say it again?
Pastor Darren: Are you asking me if I remember 1938?
Pastor Darren: Because that answer's no.
Pastor Darren: No, I actually haven't seen them.
Pastor Darren: But, phil, it sounds like you and I would have a good coffee together.
Pastor Darren: We'd talk about Superman, because I actually had another good conversation with Tom, who brought something up about the creation of Superman.
Pastor Darren: So it's interesting.
Pastor Darren: 1938, I mean, most of us know what was going on in 1938, right, germany was building up, it was moving towards World War II and the aggression that was going to be created and then how the whole world was going to be involved in all of that.
Pastor Darren: And you can see with that timing why a phrase, a motto like truth, justice and the American way, why that would be a big part of who this Superman character is, a big part of his character, what he is fighting for Truth, justice, american way.
Pastor Darren: The Nazi regime at the time really pushed on those values and on those concepts, right, truth.
Pastor Darren: Well, if we control all the communication, then we control all the truth, right, the Nazi propaganda machine and how everybody in the country didn't really get the full story of all that was going on.
Pastor Darren: Justice, well, justice was a little bit different too, right, because they had this Aryan ideal of the perfect human being, right, who looked well, think of the opposite of who you're looking at now.
Pastor Darren: And that was the Arian ideal, right?
Pastor Darren: Blonde, blue-eyed, tall, thin, all of those things.
Pastor Darren: And the idea was that God had endowed that in some way, that that was the way the world was supposed to be created, that the world will be better if we just cleared way for all of those folks to become fully who they were supposed to be.
Pastor Darren: So when you talk about justice, it wasn't about justice for everybody, it was about this other kind of justice trying to protect that idea of who was supposed to be better than who wasn't supposed to be better.
Pastor Darren: And anyway, I think you get the idea.
Pastor Darren: And then that final value, the American way.
Pastor Darren: Well, that was still getting defined, as it's still getting kind of defined today.
Pastor Darren: So you can see a little bit of the environment and why Superman gets created and the way Superman gets created, why he evolves, the way he evolves and potentially too, why he becomes such a big part of that story of our world and our mythological way of fighting those battles.
Pastor Darren: Another thing that's interesting I'm getting close to where I finished the Superman stuff, so just relax, but I like this stuff.
Pastor Darren: Another thing that's interesting the Nazi regime used this concept called the Ubermensch to talk about this Superman.
Pastor Darren: That's loosely translated Superman.
Pastor Darren: We're talking about that Aryan ideal.
Pastor Darren: Well, that's a little bit of how that evolved or what it evolved into.
Pastor Darren: Was this Übermensch, this Superman?
Pastor Darren: And you might remember or have learned about how that was communicated.
Pastor Darren: The irony of that is that Superman, the character that we know, actually subverted that understanding.
Pastor Darren: He came first of all.
Pastor Darren: He wasn't blonde and blue-eyed, you know he's dark hair and all that other stuff.
Pastor Darren: He was tall and strong.
Pastor Darren: You know his dark hair and all that other stuff.
Pastor Darren: He was tall and strong.
Pastor Darren: But also, superman was about justice for all, not just for this elect few that we were supposed to lift up amidst us.
Pastor Darren: So there's an irony, there's a subversion there, and not only that, he turned out not to be non-Aryan, but he was an undocumented immigrant from a whole other planet.
Pastor Darren: So if we're going to talk irony, there is the irony.
Pastor Darren: So, getting back to the difficulty, having a perfect person in a story, right, you can't beat him physically.
Pastor Darren: So what do you do to create conflict in a story with a perfect person?
Pastor Darren: But you start having conflict around the values that that person or that being stands for.
Pastor Darren: Truth, justice, the American way.
Pastor Darren: That becomes, in some ways, what really starts to be at threat.
Pastor Darren: That's really what we're kind of protecting and where the conflict comes from the story.
Pastor Darren: Now, these are interesting concepts for us today Truth, justice, right, american way.
Pastor Darren: I remember I was in film class and I was going through school when they were talking about the post-modernity Right.
Pastor Darren: Did you all learn post-modernity in art class and other kinds of mediums?
Pastor Darren: Post-modernity it was supposed to become the modern movement, but with all kinds of additions and I probably ought not get too deep into it.
Pastor Darren: But I would remember specifically that part of that movement was that truth.
Pastor Darren: Truth is almost always subjective.
Pastor Darren: It's hard to do something that is not in some way from somebody's opinion.
Pastor Darren: In film classes we would go and you'd watch a documentary and you thought, well, this is news, we're just telling it like it is.
Pastor Darren: But then you realize, wait a minute, somebody had to decide who got interviewed.
Pastor Darren: Somebody had to decide how that interview rolled out, how the cameras were placed, how the lighting was placed, all of which have influence on how a story is told, have influence on what the story is about.
Pastor Darren: So truth starts getting a little more complicated.
Pastor Darren: Most of you have heard the phrase my truth.
Pastor Darren: I told my truth and I remember, you know, as that started coming up I understood where it was coming from, that there were a lot of people we weren't able to hear from.
Pastor Darren: That culture had kind of tamped that community down and we were trying to say wait a minute, that truth deserves to rise up.
Pastor Darren: Everybody is worthy.
Pastor Darren: Then, as life starts moving on, we start realizing well, that's a bit of a Pandora's box now, because everybody has their truth, so we've opened permission for everybody to claim the value of their truth.
Pastor Darren: And then we realize all our truths don't always agree and all of a sudden truth becomes this weird complicated concept.
Pastor Darren: Do you feel that complexity, like I do.
Pastor Darren: I mean, I wrestle with that today.
Pastor Darren: Right, and I imagine everybody in the room is like oh right, these are the truths I'll accept.
Pastor Darren: These are the truths that need to be squashed and thrown in the ocean.
Pastor Darren: Right, are we all?
Pastor Darren: We all agree that needs to happen.
Pastor Darren: We just wouldn't agree.
Pastor Darren: What goes in the ocean would be my guess.
Pastor Darren: So truth is this complicated term and then justice can become just as complicated.
Pastor Darren: We start talking about what is right and what is wrong.
Pastor Darren: Well, tell me what the context is.
Pastor Darren: And so we end up in this complicated place of trying to defend truth, trying to defend justice in a world where those are complicated concepts anymore.
Pastor Darren: The creators of today's film kind of moved away from some of those complexities and just went back to.
Pastor Darren: He was a really good guy, this Superman.
Pastor Darren: He just had very clean character and there wasn't the complexities like the last Superman came out With all the darkness and the brooding that they had.
Pastor Darren: This guy is just straight good, the embodiment.
Pastor Darren: He was the super mensch of sorts, and it leaves us in this place as a community of Christians or people who are walking the Christian journey in some unique way.
Pastor Darren: How do we connect to that in the ways that make sense, the culture's telling this story and communicating these values and these challenges?
Pastor Darren: We want to be relevant, we want to be connected to these stories in some way, and so I hunted out a passage from the Gospel of John that spoke to truth, that spoke to justice and, surprise, surprise, jesus made it even more complicated again.
Pastor Darren: There's even two definitions of truth and freedom in the passage we picked.
Pastor Darren: I don't know how much you were paying attention or if you could follow along, but Jesus, he was talking to his disciples about this deeper, ultimate truth that existed right, and in doing so, he talked about how people were enslaved to their sin.
Pastor Darren: Instead of being made free by the truth they were I'm sorry instead of being freed from their sin.
Pastor Darren: I wrote it wrong here.
Pastor Darren: Who's to blame for that.
Pastor Darren: I'm going to talk to somebody.
Pastor Darren: You confused me.
Pastor Darren: Well, it probably fits, because the people Jesus was talking to were equally confused because they thought they were free already.
Pastor Darren: They were free because Abraham and Moses freed them from the enslavement that they had physical enslavement and the family of Abraham, the lineage of Abraham, were all freed because they understood God in this deep, deep way, and so there was freedom that came from that.
Pastor Darren: But Jesus was talking about something deeper than that.
Pastor Darren: If you've read your gospels, you know that, john, he drank from a little different tea than the other guys, am I right, john people?
Pastor Darren: How many of you?
Pastor Darren: John's your favorite gospel Cowards?
Pastor Darren: Oh, there we go.
Pastor Darren: Roz and Nancy, I saw going up, the rest of y'all, oh.
Pastor Darren: But John was a little more.
Pastor Darren: I'm going to use the word spiritual.
Pastor Darren: What he was trying to get across was something that was a spiritual truth, and so he was trying to get these people who were listening to him to understand this spiritual truth.
Pastor Darren: Maybe some of you remember the very beginning of that gospel.
Pastor Darren: The way it all starts In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and all that trippy stuff that sounds like a beatnik wrote it in about 1963.
Pastor Darren: Do you remember how that goes?
Pastor Darren: And part of what was there was that Jesus always existed.
Pastor Darren: He just took a human form at some time, right, but that spirit, that reality was always true from the beginning of time, from the beginning of our world.
Pastor Darren: Here, and that was the truth Jesus was trying to get across is there is a deeper spiritual truth that exists and I am here to tell you about it, I'm here to model it for you to it.
Pastor Darren: It will bring a new awareness to this world, an awareness that helps you free yourself from the less positive parts of our world, free yourself from the reality of sinfulness, which we all have, right, that sinfulness that God wants us to go this way.
Pastor Darren: But we kind of want to go this way.
Pastor Darren: Mostly we go God's way, but not all the time do we go God's way.
Pastor Darren: Jesus is talking about a spiritual truth that says you know what?
Pastor Darren: There's a grace that is real, there's a forgiveness that is real.
Pastor Darren: So, even though we know you're human and you're going to stray from God's way, there's still forgiveness, there's still love.
Pastor Darren: So when Jesus says, when you start to understand that then you will be free, because you will be free to live out the life that God wants you to live, hopefully getting better and better at following God's will, but knowing that you won't always be perfect.
Pastor Darren: You don't have to wear a tattoo on your forehead for every sin that you have done.
Pastor Darren: That's the freedom, that's the truth he was trying to get across.
Pastor Darren: Trying to get across so we, as regular human beings in this world, trying to figure out which truth, what is truth?
Pastor Darren: How are we going to find truth in this world?
Pastor Darren: I'm hoping this passage helps us with that wrestling a little bit, helps us to understand a little more of who we want to be.
Pastor Darren: We're trying to live our world, a meaningful world.
Pastor Darren: We're trying to live out this reality of that spiritual truth about the world, the truth that involves grace, the truth that involves forgiveness, the truth that involves unconditional love, and we want to be that super mensch, but in a Jesus way.
Pastor Darren: Isn't the base question then how do I live in a way that communicates my belief in God's love for me and God's love for all?
Pastor Darren: Amidst all those complicated truths, doesn't it come down to what Jesus was saying?
Pastor Darren: There is this deeper truth of unconditional love that is shared with all of humanity.
Pastor Darren: If we were trying to be the superman that we actually might have some capacity for being, or superwoman that we actually have the capacity to be?
Pastor Darren: What if being a loving Christian is that way?
Pastor Darren: What if the love that we've been given by God and invited to share by Christ is our actual superpower, the thing we have to offer to the world, the thing that nourishes, the thing that helps others find their way in a complicated world?
Pastor Darren: Maybe we've been given that and we are super in the way that we can share that we get to the people that says God loves you no matter what.
Pastor Darren: What.
Pastor Darren: If you could be super, how would you strive to live that out, not to be too redundant for the summer here, but we did talk about micah doing justice, loving, kindness, walking humbly with god.
Pastor Darren: I wonder if being super might dovetail with those.
Pastor Darren: Somehow we spent some time in the fruits of the Spirit from Paul's letter to the Galatians Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
Pastor Darren: What if those are the superpowers that we have been given to share with a world that needs to understand that they are worthy?
Pastor Darren: Each and every person is worthy.
Pastor Darren: When we live those things, we make them real in the world.
Pastor Darren: When we live joy, it becomes real in the world.
Pastor Darren: When we live kindness, it becomes real in the world, something that is shared with others, something that others can experience as well.
Pastor Darren: From us, we make God real when we live these things.
Pastor Darren: We have that superpower In a world that needs kindness.
Pastor Darren: We got that and we can share that.
Pastor Darren: How can we be super?
Pastor Darren: It might look like just being the person that Christ tells us to be.
Pastor Darren: It might just be believing the things that Christ invites us to believe, and maybe together we can save the world.
Pastor Darren: Amen, amen.