The superpower no one wants but we all have it
Mark 8: 27-38
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
September 12, 2021
Last Sunday David and I saw Shang-Chi, the latest superhero movie from Marvel. It’s the origin story of the title character, Shang-Chi, whose father possesses the Ten Rings, five bracelets worn on each arm which make him immortal and very powerful. His mother is powerful in her own right, an airbender skilled in martial arts who guards a secret village. When they fall in love, they both give up their special powers, because love and a family are worth growing old for. But when Shang-Chi’s mother is killed because of his father’s violent past, his father once again puts on the Ten Rings and trains Shang-Chi to be an assassin to avenge his mother’s death. And his younger sister is abandoned in her grief.
Our hunger for superhero stories is not new by any means. One of the earliest hero stories we have is the Epic of Gilgamesh written during the late 2nd millennium BCE, which most likely inspired the Greek epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, all of which are still studied to this day. The Bible is chockfull of its own superheroes who accomplished amazing things and survived their own challenges. Generations have relied on superhero stories of all kinds for moral correction and guidance, comfort, inspiration, and connection to the Divine, to the power that resides in all of us.
One aspect of the hero or protector or savior story that they all have in common is grief and loss, many times the loss of one parent or both, or family or home. How the protector deals with their grief shapes their character, their choices, and their values. Depending on the story, sometimes the grief response produces a villain, like Darth Vader or Lord Voldemort, or a complicated hero, like Batman or Black Widow or Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch.
Grief can fuel powerful forces like creativity, courage, persistence as well as rage, destruction, and fear. In the gospel of Mark, Jesus asks the disciples who do people say he is. They answer with John the Baptist, a hoped-for leader who was recently killed, and Elijah, a beloved prophet who was promised to return to announce the Messiah. Grief can also encourage our hope, our desire for brighter days yet to come.
Peter then tries to put Jesus in that hopeful place, in the role of hero, protector, savior, but it’s not yet time. We’d rather the story not take that road, not take us toward loss and pain; we’d do anything to avoid it—that infamous stage of grief called bargaining. Instead, Jesus asks that we would pick it up and bear it, that we would willingly join what to all appearances looks like the losing side.
Too often, passages like this one have been used to glorify suffering and sacrifice. Much of the time suffering produces more suffering, even as we hope for the perseverance and character that the apostle Paul promises. With a great deal of help some of us learn to live with grief while some of us gut it out, some of us isolate or numb ourselves or ignore it, and others fall under its ocean depths. Grief is something we all have in common even as we sometimes use it to push others away.
Poet Gwen Flowers writes about it this way:
I had my own notion of grief
I thought it was a sad time
That followed the death of someone you love.
And you had to push through it
To get to the other side.
But I’m learning there is no other side.
There is no pushing through.
But rather,
There is absorption.
Adjustment.
Acceptance.
And grief is not something that you complete,
But rather you endure.
Grief is not a task to finish,
And move on,
But an element of yourself—
An alteration of your being.
A new way of seeing,
A new definition of self.
Each of us is the hero, the protector of our own story, and grief is the superpower none of us wants but we all have it. Grief is the inescapable other side of love, and just as fierce and tenacious. If you watched WandaVision, an entire series about the power of grief and love, you’ll recognize this quote: “What is grief if not love persevering?”
Why talk about grief on Rally Sunday, in our first worship service in person and online? Because it’s the day after twenty years since September 11th—a grief we often glorify and thus continue to nurse an open wound. Because we can be tempted to worship our grief and confuse that with devotion or call it patriotism. Because we’re still in the midst of a pandemic that has taken more than 200 times the lives lost on 9/11. Because we still try to solve our grief with violence, paid for with billions of dollars and human lives. Because our collective grief as a nation has brought us to a perilous place where we shield ourselves from our remorse for our collective sin as an empire. Because grief and trauma call out to be named and cared for.
I wanted us to have Communion this day to remember that we are a Body and to acknowledge that this Body has lived through a lot of grief in the past few years. Adele and Larry, Wally and Delma, Frank and Tom, Storm and Bill, Greg and Paul and so many more are still a part of us even as we grieve their absence. What’s more, we can’t all be together because each of us has our own level of acceptable risk, even as we mourn the life together we once had and celebrate with joy the life we still have.
This Table invites us to pause, even to live in the courageous space between what is no longer and what is not yet, to remember our pain and our joy, our grief and our love, and commune with them, eat and drink with them and with each other’s sorrows and celebrations; to love our neighbor and do justice and be kind despite them and because of them. To remember that none of us does this alone, for God so loved the world that God disrupted their life for us, and we now share this gift, this power with each other. Amen.
Benediction – enfleshed.com
Go forth, heeding the insight of the wise,
that they might show us a way to freedom.
Go forth, in the courage of your own Inner Wisdom,
that it might reveal your heart’s desire.
Go forth in the ancient and ever new wisdom of the Spirit,
that She might illuminate our path to compassionate living.
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
September 12, 2021
Last Sunday David and I saw Shang-Chi, the latest superhero movie from Marvel. It’s the origin story of the title character, Shang-Chi, whose father possesses the Ten Rings, five bracelets worn on each arm which make him immortal and very powerful. His mother is powerful in her own right, an airbender skilled in martial arts who guards a secret village. When they fall in love, they both give up their special powers, because love and a family are worth growing old for. But when Shang-Chi’s mother is killed because of his father’s violent past, his father once again puts on the Ten Rings and trains Shang-Chi to be an assassin to avenge his mother’s death. And his younger sister is abandoned in her grief.
Our hunger for superhero stories is not new by any means. One of the earliest hero stories we have is the Epic of Gilgamesh written during the late 2nd millennium BCE, which most likely inspired the Greek epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, all of which are still studied to this day. The Bible is chockfull of its own superheroes who accomplished amazing things and survived their own challenges. Generations have relied on superhero stories of all kinds for moral correction and guidance, comfort, inspiration, and connection to the Divine, to the power that resides in all of us.
One aspect of the hero or protector or savior story that they all have in common is grief and loss, many times the loss of one parent or both, or family or home. How the protector deals with their grief shapes their character, their choices, and their values. Depending on the story, sometimes the grief response produces a villain, like Darth Vader or Lord Voldemort, or a complicated hero, like Batman or Black Widow or Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch.
Grief can fuel powerful forces like creativity, courage, persistence as well as rage, destruction, and fear. In the gospel of Mark, Jesus asks the disciples who do people say he is. They answer with John the Baptist, a hoped-for leader who was recently killed, and Elijah, a beloved prophet who was promised to return to announce the Messiah. Grief can also encourage our hope, our desire for brighter days yet to come.
Peter then tries to put Jesus in that hopeful place, in the role of hero, protector, savior, but it’s not yet time. We’d rather the story not take that road, not take us toward loss and pain; we’d do anything to avoid it—that infamous stage of grief called bargaining. Instead, Jesus asks that we would pick it up and bear it, that we would willingly join what to all appearances looks like the losing side.
Too often, passages like this one have been used to glorify suffering and sacrifice. Much of the time suffering produces more suffering, even as we hope for the perseverance and character that the apostle Paul promises. With a great deal of help some of us learn to live with grief while some of us gut it out, some of us isolate or numb ourselves or ignore it, and others fall under its ocean depths. Grief is something we all have in common even as we sometimes use it to push others away.
Poet Gwen Flowers writes about it this way:
I had my own notion of grief
I thought it was a sad time
That followed the death of someone you love.
And you had to push through it
To get to the other side.
But I’m learning there is no other side.
There is no pushing through.
But rather,
There is absorption.
Adjustment.
Acceptance.
And grief is not something that you complete,
But rather you endure.
Grief is not a task to finish,
And move on,
But an element of yourself—
An alteration of your being.
A new way of seeing,
A new definition of self.
Each of us is the hero, the protector of our own story, and grief is the superpower none of us wants but we all have it. Grief is the inescapable other side of love, and just as fierce and tenacious. If you watched WandaVision, an entire series about the power of grief and love, you’ll recognize this quote: “What is grief if not love persevering?”
Why talk about grief on Rally Sunday, in our first worship service in person and online? Because it’s the day after twenty years since September 11th—a grief we often glorify and thus continue to nurse an open wound. Because we can be tempted to worship our grief and confuse that with devotion or call it patriotism. Because we’re still in the midst of a pandemic that has taken more than 200 times the lives lost on 9/11. Because we still try to solve our grief with violence, paid for with billions of dollars and human lives. Because our collective grief as a nation has brought us to a perilous place where we shield ourselves from our remorse for our collective sin as an empire. Because grief and trauma call out to be named and cared for.
I wanted us to have Communion this day to remember that we are a Body and to acknowledge that this Body has lived through a lot of grief in the past few years. Adele and Larry, Wally and Delma, Frank and Tom, Storm and Bill, Greg and Paul and so many more are still a part of us even as we grieve their absence. What’s more, we can’t all be together because each of us has our own level of acceptable risk, even as we mourn the life together we once had and celebrate with joy the life we still have.
This Table invites us to pause, even to live in the courageous space between what is no longer and what is not yet, to remember our pain and our joy, our grief and our love, and commune with them, eat and drink with them and with each other’s sorrows and celebrations; to love our neighbor and do justice and be kind despite them and because of them. To remember that none of us does this alone, for God so loved the world that God disrupted their life for us, and we now share this gift, this power with each other. Amen.
Go forth, heeding the insight of the wise,
that they might show us a way to freedom.
Go forth, in the courage of your own Inner Wisdom,
that it might reveal your heart’s desire.
Go forth in the ancient and ever new wisdom of the Spirit,
that She might illuminate our path to compassionate living.
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