As many of you know, I’m a bit of a fan of superhero culture. On Saturday, Michele and I took our niece and nephew to Supanova: a convention celebrating all things sci-fi and fantasy and geek culture generally.
My niece dressed up as a unicorn from Unstable Unicorns and my nephew dressed as the Mandalorian. For those of you that don’t know, the Mandalorian is a character from the world of Star Wars. At the end of the day, we saw the cosplay parade. Cosplay is where people dress up as characters from comics, TV shows, video games, and movies. Some of them put hours and hours into these costumes and they look spectacular. Part of the appeal is that these characters are larger than life; they are big and bold and heroic. Many of them are literally called super heroes. But of course, it’s not just us comic book geeks that have heroes. We have all sorts of people that we look up to or admire, people in sports, in politics, in the media whom we try to emulate. I wonder who you might consider as a hero.
One of the things I’ve noticed in a lot of superhero comics and TV shows and movies lately though is that the heroes and villains have become a lot more nuanced. At Supanova, I got to listen to Michelle Gomez who has made a career out of playing sympathetic villains. On the flipside, our heroes often face moral dilemmas where it’s not so easy to choose right from wrong. And more and more, these heroes do things which we may find questionable. They’ve become more nuanced, or to put it another way, they are writing our heroes to be fallible, to be flawed, to be human.
We get a bit of that in today’s Old Testament story (Genesis 18: 8-21). Three of the world’s major religions see Abraham as the forefather of their faith. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all see Abraham as one of their religion’s heroes, the one whose faith and obedience to God led to the blessing in which we all share. Paul consistently points to Abraham as an example of our faith. This is just one example: For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” (Rom 4:3) Likewise, the writer of Hebrews says: By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance, and he set out, not knowing where he was going. (Heb 11:8)
So now we come to another story of this great man of faith, the forefather to our belief. In this story, Abraham’s first wife, Sarah, becomes jealous of Abraham’s second wife, Hagar, who has given Abraham a son who is older than her son. Although Isaac holds God’s promise, it is Ishmael who is Abraham’s firstborn, and the sight of the two boys playing together upsets her. She demands that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away. And so, Hagar and Ishmael are sent into the wilderness to die.
But let’s take a moment to refresh ourselves on the background of this story. In chapter 12 of Genesis, God promises to Abraham “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” and God also says: “To your offspring, I will give this land.” and then in chapter 13, God says: I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted. We’ve got this promise from God, but Sarah’s getting on in years, so then in chapter 16: Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian slave whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abram, “You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. He went in to Hagar, and she conceived,
So now Abraham’s got two wives, but that’s what biblical marriage looks like (let’s not talk about the third wife just yet). Then in chapter 17, we get this: “I will establish my covenant with Isaac as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. As for Ishmael, I have heard you; I will bless him and make him fruitful and exceedingly numerous; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation. But my covenant I will establish with Isaac …” That’s the story leading up to this: two wives, two sons, and while the older son carries a promise from God, it’s the younger who carries God’s covenant. But then, Sarah sees the two sons of Abraham together and gets jealous for the sake of her son, Isaac, so she tells Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away.
This forefather of our religion, this great hero of faith, takes a slave girl as his second wife because, although God has promised many offspring, he sees this as his only chance to have kids. Then despite God’s promise to bless both Isaac and Ishmael, this great hero of our faith sends his wife and son into the wilderness to die, simply to avoid the domestic turmoil in his home. When we think of Abraham at this point, some words that may spring to mind might be weak, faithless, cruel, unjust, confused, or possibly defeated. One word that definitely doesn’t come to mind is “heroic”.
Now there are some biblical commentators who have tried to justify Abraham’s actions. I believe that they do this because the very idea that one of their heroes might be fallible and flawed is too difficult to cope with. That happens a lot. When you read the books of 1 & 2 Chronicles, you find the same stories as are in Samuel & Kings but they’ve been rewritten, tidied up. The kings in those stories become a lot less fallible and flawed and the theology is a lot less messy.
We don’t like our heroes to make mistakes. In the song, Holding Out For A Hero, there’s a line: I’m holding out for a hero ’til the morning light. He’s gotta be sure, and it’s gotta be soon And he’s gotta be larger than life We need our heroes to be bigger and better than the world around us, to give a sense of assurance and a sense of purpose, to inspire us see beyond the mundane. But then it’s no wonder we feel betrayed when our heroes are shown to be flawed. And what that happens, sometimes we will try to defend the indefensible, or to deny any wrongdoing no matter how apparent to avoid having to admit that our heroes are wrong.
This week, I watched the documentary on SBS called “The Kingdom” about the fall of Hillsong and some of the culture in Pentecostalism. What was detailed was an excessive abuse of power that was allowed to continue for far too long because the leaders of that church had become the heroes of that church, and no one wanted to believe that their heroes could do wrong. But what we also saw was that when we start to think of our heroes as infallible, then those leaders start to fear letting their vulnerabilities show; they cover up their mistakes. And because they heroes, no on holds them accountable.
In this documentary about Hillsong, there were some people who had turned their back on Christianity entirely, and at the other extreme, there are some who have dug their heels in and refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing. We’ve seen the same thing in American politics, from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton and more recently as well, but we’ve seen it in other arenas also: from Lance Armstrong to Woody Allen. When one of our heroes is shown to be flawed, then those who are hurting from the betrayal can start to fight with each other, needing to argue their hero’s innocence, or despising everything and everyone associated with that former hero.
We talk about Jesus as the light of the world, who brings our actions into a clearer light. The way of Jesus exposes that which we would rather keep hidden. Time and again, we’ve seen these cover ups come to light, exposing the exploits of those we’ve admired. And when that realisation hits, and our heroes are shown to be fallible and flawed, it hits hard. When that happens, as we read in Matthew’s gospel (Matt 10:34-36), the way of Jesus will set son against father, daughter against mother, brother against brother, and so on.
But the way of Jesus is also the way of humility. It is the way of forgiveness. It is the way of redemption. One of the things I love about our scriptures is that they don’t paint things as all roses and sunshine. In our Old Testament stories especially, there’s a genuine authenticity to the foibles of humanity. They remind us that even our heroes are fallible and flawed. They show its heroes to be fallible and human, to make terrible mistakes.
That’s what makes the story of Jesus so powerful. Jesus comes as the perfect one, not to sit in judgement over this fallible and flawed humanity, but to become part of us, part of our fallibility and vulnerability, and to show us the way into reconciliation with God and with each other, demanding accountability but offering grace and forgiveness, without pretence and without fear.
Amen.