Bring on the eunuchs!

So I watched Paddington again.  What can I say?  Brilliant film.  Peter Capaldi at his saucy best, lots of life lessons from Ben Whishaw, all so well played and underplayed (except maybe Jim Broadbent is playing just slightly too close to a caricature?).

And then the credits went up, and I was talking to my friend, and among the hundreds and hundreds of names that went up the screen while my eyes were elsewhere was this:

Do you see it?  Shall I zoom in?

And a little closer?  Yes?

That's right.  It turns out that I was one of the compositors on the film of Paddington.  Or, possibly more likely, that one of the compositors on the film of Paddington shares my name.

So, probably the second one.

But the point is, I saw that from across a room on a screen I wasn't even watching, among so many other names.  I think I'm in love with my own observational skills, and I didn't see that coming.

Anyway, hello Ian Fellows.  Great name.  Good compositing (whatever that is).

It's not just visual.  I can hear my own name (or job title) used in a room even when I'm having a completely other conversation.  So can you - except it's probably your name that you pick up on, not mine.  I'm not quite that narcissistic.  Yet.

And indeed I have a magnificent colleague who can hear her own name from - I think - a distance of about a mile.  We perk up and try to find out what's being said, or whether we're needed, or if my name is being taken in vain (I'm the vicar, I get blamed for everything.  I probably killed Kennedy and made that hole in the ozone layer myself, I tell you).

So it's amazing how our brains flag up what's pertinent to us among a barrage of multi-sensory stuff going into our eyes and ears and elsewhere.  Our amazing brains process and discard so, so much, and then my name is on a screen in the same room and I'm all over it.

Which reminds me of a story.

A native American is taken to the big city by someone in big business.  The sounds and sights that assail him are overwhelming.  Cars, neon lights, the chatter of crowds…  and then he stops suddenly, distracted, and leads his friend across to a small green patch on a street corner.  Kneeling down, he roots in the grass and emerges with a grasshopper sitting on his hand.

It's just not (a) cricket

Says his friend in big business: "How did you know that was there?"

"I heard it," said the native American.  

"From all the way over there?" asks the businessman.  "Impossible."

To this dismissal, the native American responds by asking for a coin, and on being give a nickel, he tosses it in the air.  It lands on the sidewalk with a faint ching, spins a second or two and settles.

"Look," says the native American.  And when the businessman does, he sees that whole dozens of people have stopped their walking and are looking at the pair of them where the coin has fallen and made a tiny sound.

"Where your treasure is," observes the native American, "there also will your ears be."

A coin toss, yesterday.

And what I want is to be attuned not to grasshoppers or money, but God's heartbeat.  I say that because I'm not that good at it.  I'm sure I miss lots of times when God is prompting me, or else I dismiss the idea as ridiculous (or inconvenient).  The times when I think I hear him - or feel some degree of empathy with his heart and agenda in a situation - and follow through, the results tend to be worthwhile and entertaining and sometimes even blog-worthy.  I have a friend - Miriam - who follows through with these sets of things and has the most bizarre adventures which can only have been set up by God.  She has the mild advantage of not having a television and living in a caravan off the Oxford ring road.  But.

I tender you as example the disciple Philip in the early chapters of Acts, who is open to the voice of God and finds himself on a magnificent adventure running beside a chariot containing an African eunuch, explaining to him the prophet Isaiah and ending the day baptising him in a river.  But only because he heard.  Only because he was listening.

Thank God he was reading Isaiah 52-3 and not some snatch of Song of Songs...

I'll stay aware of my own name.  I'll try to avoid the lure of money.  I'll dare to do the slightly mad detours that God calls me to take, because that way lies adventure, and staying out past my bedtime, and new experiences, and the reminder that God is still alive and having fun in our world.  Bring on the African eunuchs!

The Two Edges Of Seventeen

One of the joys of life is the Cineworld Unlimited card.  Other subscriptions to viewing material are available, but this one gets me on my bike, out of the parish and up to Parrs Wood or Ashton on a regular basis so that I can

• (a) get my money's worth out of the fee
• (b) watch films!
• (c) get my money's worth out of the fee

Paying a flat rate every month means I will take a punt on some films that I wouldn't generally otherwise see, and that I certainly wouldn't risk £10 a ticket on.  Even when I see a complete dud of a film (no names, but The End and The Harry Hill Movie spring unbidden to mind as 90 minutes each that I won't get back and could have spent more gainfully, like creosoting my toenails or spitting into the rain) it's not an occasion for a rueful kick at the waste of money but rather an opportunity to marvel that there were people in the world different enough from me to enjoy the shocking spectacle I'd have preferred to walk out of, and to wonder whether church is offering these people adequate chance to meet with God.

(Started well, that sentence, but it got away from me.)

In a busy world… in a world that is ever more fragmented into cultural niches… in the echo chamber that is Facebook where I only ever read the posts of like-minded people… well, it's good to cross a cultural divide.  See what the other half watch.  And instead of simply watching the films I know I'll like and that will pander to my liberal agenda, I get to see things that challenge me.  A recent Jewish film festival!  I even saw a chick flick recently.  And a mindless action thriller.  And Olympus Has Fallen.  And The Heat.

What I'm saying is, get out of your comfort zone - in life and at the cinema and in the Radio Times and Netflix - and watch something new.  Something stretching.  Something you might hate.

Part of the problems of 2016 has been that - as a Remain supporter in the Referendum - my newsfeed was full of sympathetic Remain posts and people.  It led to complacency because I rarely met a Leave voter - and yet!

The Echo Chamber we call freedom.

Similarly in the States, most Clinton supporters thought Hilary had it sewn up, because their news feeds were full of reasons to disparage Trump, comedy comments on his latest faux pas… and yet!

Pretty well.

So yesterday I went to see a largely female coming-of-age film called The Edge Of Seventeen.  Not my usual fare.  Actually very funny, very serious, and in terms of gender and generation - as far as anyone can distinguish - eye-opening.  A window on another world.

A window on a world other than mine!

Which reminded me that it's not the first film called Edge Of Seventeen.  The first was an American coming-of-age film about a young gay man.  And when I saw that I learned much about what it meant to be American and gay and of an age that came of age in the 1980s.  Another window on another world.

Another window, another world!

And today there was a report out.  Dame Louise Casey finds that segregation and social exclusion are at worrying levels.  Not universally, but there seem to be less bridges between different ethnic groups.  Less understanding between different people.  Disquieting returns of homophobia and misogyny.  A slow-down in the acceptance of trans issues.

Don't let all that hard work be undone...

The incarnation - God moving heaven and earth to cross the bridge between him and us - is a good reason to get off our collective bum-bums and leave our comfort zone for a while - maybe first of all by experiencing different worlds at a distance through the window of cinema.  And then it becomes a reason to turn off Netflix, leave the cinema and go and meet some of these people I've learned a little about on the screen.  Build a bridge.  Start a conversation with a Muslim woman, a gay man, a trans teen, someone festooned in piercings and inked all over with tattoos.  Or an elderly white woman.  A Tory.  Find some safe space, ask some questions, admit to some prejudices, beat back ignorance, make a friend.

More people doing this, please!

Or just read all this, nod sagely at the way my liberal agenda matches yours, and get your favourite box set out for a comfortable re-watch.

Emoji

Gotta love emojis.  These guys.

Saving us emotionally stunted people from having to find actual words to express ourselves for years.  With only a small price of cheese to pay for the privilege.

So, in and of myself, I'm a bit snobbish about emojis.  I refuse to concede that anyone can crystallize my emotions into one crude yellow circle.  I'm uncategorizable.  The profound nuances of my moods defy the art of the emoji-maker.  Or so I say.  I'm still looking for the emoji that says "insouciantly nonchalant and yet responsibly flirtatious, with depths that none can quite fathom, listening to Charles Aznavour in the original French," which is how I would like to be feeling this evening, rather than "a bit flat after a stomach bug, up for a laugh but don't expect any replies to your texts."  See, I'm complex, me.

Or not.

But they're still brilliant, these emojis.  Which one comes closest to how you feel tonight?  When were you last any of the above?

I wonder whether emojis have the whole human emotional spectrum sewn up yet?

And - putting aside the crude ones for a while - I wonder whether Jesus ran the whole gamut?

Most of my recent sermons hang around Hebrews 4 and the confident assertion that:

we do not have a high priest who is unable 

to sympathize with our weaknesses, 

but we have one who in every respect 

has been tested as we are.

Let's just untangle the double negative in the first line:

we do have a high priest who is able 

to sympathize with our weaknesses

Everything we feel, Jesus felt the equivalent.  I say the equivalent because he was patently never pregnant, but I'm imagining a certain empathy between different kinds of pain or pride or passion.

So.  Jesus was hungry (in Luke 4, chiefly).  Jesus was tired.  Jesus needed company (in the garden).  Jesus got angry (John 2 is a good start).  Jesus laughed (probably at his parables and disciples).  Jesus hurt (crucifixion will do that, as will denial and betrayal).  Jesus was tempted, possibly by attraction to women or men or both.  And there's a whole 30 years with very few clues (but some wild Catholic fan-fic where he's bullied or a gardener or something).

(and he's not a bad Marti Pellow impersonator either)

Oh, and yes.

Jesus wept.

Jesus ran the whole course of human emojis, which means there isn't a thing that we can feel that he didn't.  Betrayed by friends?  Stabbed in the back?  Misunderstood?  Abandoned?  Grieving?  Asylum seeker?  Shunned?  Lionised?  Got a cross to bear?

Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check.

Got the t-shirt.  

No distant God is our God.  Among all the proposed deities in world mythology and truth and philosophy, the Christian God alone is the one who submits to human experience.  I'd call it slumming it, but God made this world and called it good, and who am I to disagree?

And the point of these sermons becomes the punchline of Hebrews 4:

Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, 

so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

When you are bleeding, look for someone with scars (said Leela in Doctor Who).

When you are praying, look for a God who understands.  Who's lived through it.  Who knows, from the inside out.  Look for the one and only candidate for Godhead who spent 9 months in a womb, who had his cord cut, who took that first breath, who was weaned and slapped and changed, who survived losing milk teeth, who made it through puberty, who would have had calluses and blisters and sweat and zits and his voice breaking, who lost his dad and grieved him, who was a big brother to many, who didn't become a rabbi's disciple at 14 and who talked sense about life.

Look for a God with dirt under his fingernails.  Splinters from work, scars from life, smiles from being one of us.  There's not an emoji you can claim for yourself that he doesn't understand.

"What if God was one of us?", asked Joan Osborne.  "I was," says God.  "I still am," says Jesus.

Draw near to him with confidence - not in yourself but in him.

Draw near to him and you will find mercy.  You will find grace.  You will.

Earworms

Ever had an earworm?

No, not whatever it is that happens in Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan.

"It's in my head!"

But that moment when a song infiltrates your brain and you end up singing it again and again.  

Living alone, I suffer from a heck of a lot of them.  As a cyclist I sing a lot, and when a song gets lodged in my head, it's not easy to shift it.  And is it ever a good one?

Nope.

On Sunday morning I was sore afflicted by the theme tune from Rupert the Bear.  You know: 

"Rupert, Rupert the Bear, everyone sing his name!
Rupert, Rupert the Bear, everyone come and join in all of his games!"

And being me, a bit OCD, it wasn't just the chorus.  It was the whole song: "There's a little bear that you've never met before, who's a lot of fun…"  Oh dear.

"It's in my head!"

Double the trouble, because the theme tune from Rupert the Bear (The New Adventures Of, I think) sounds remarkably like a song from Come And Praise, the relevant (read: oh dear) songbook from my school assembly days.  The song in question: 

"There's water, water of life,
Jesus gives us the water of life…"

I'm not suggesting any infringement of copyright by either writer, just a certain kinship of chords.  More on that another day.

But back to my terrible crisis.  How to dislodge an earworm?  Chewing gum, they say, but I don't believe in clergy chewing gum around church on a Sunday like that Veruca Salt girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

An unpleasant gum-chewing spoilt child, yesterday.

Good news: In the end I dislodged the old song with… something more powerful!

Bad news: I dislodged it with a worse earworm.

So now I was singing "One Of Us" by Abba.

"It's in my head!"

"One of us is lonely, one of us is only waiting for a call… blah blah blah… one of us is lying, one of us is crying…"  I never said I knew all the words.

So, mixed result.  Rupert the Bear is gone, and in his place… Agnetha.  Or Anni-Frid.  Interchangeable, surely?

Ah.

But there's a happy ending.  Once the service started, the Gloria got into my head and stayed there, kicking out Anni-Frid.  Or Agnetha.  It was as if Jesus had stood up and addressed Abba, saying, "The power of Christ compels you!"  Not that earworms and exorcism have anything in common.

In Matthew 12 and Luke 11, Jesus tells a parable about a demon being driven out of a man (much like an earworm), but the story ends badly when the evil spirit, having wandered the world looking unsuccessfully for a new home, comes back to the gentleman in question to find that he hasn't replaced that spirit with anything new… and with no stronger presence to overwhelm either the man or the spirit, the end situation is worse than the beginning, because the spirit, finding the house (as it were) swept clean, moves straight back in and invites some friends.

The peril, says Jesus, of just trying to throw out bad old habits or demons or ways, unless we replace them consciously and deliberately with something - someone! - new and stronger.  Just as my earworms  went round and round, with an annoying one being replaced by another, no less annoying, so does life work.

That's why giving up smoking is so much easier if you have something to do with your hands to replace all that fiddling around with cigarettes.  That's why people smoking their sonic screwdrivers seems to be the future.

One of these will help you stop smoking.  And one will unscrew things, sonically.

If you want o dislodge a strong man, says Jesus, you need a stronger man.  He keeps on proving that by driving out illness and demons and doubt in the gospels, and still driving out addiction and idolatry and darkness today.  But he's equally clear that we need to keep something - someone - stronger in our hearts and heads, because otherwise the old habit will take hold again, perhaps more powerfully.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if we don't let Jesus into heads and hearts, we'll let someone or something else in instead.  G.K. Chesterton famously said:

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

G.K.: crazy hair, brilliant thinking on the human condition.

I'm glad the Gloria happened along that Sunday, because it gave Anni-Frid the boot.  I'm glad Jesus happened along when I was 17, because he's given - and still gives - the boot to all sorts of things I don't like that I give house-space to.

Life without Jesus revolves.  It's a carousel of one distraction or addiction after another.  Politically, that's why revolutions are called revolutions: they revolve one lot of sinners out of office and revolve a whole new set of sinners in.  And we wonder why the promises of the children of the revolution disappear.

It's because Jesus alone delivers, and he won't be running the world until he comes back.  But in the meantime, we can claim some space in our own hearts and heads by throwing out the old crap and refilling that space with Jesus.  Or else life is just a long and pointless series of earworms, and it'll be hello Barbie Girl before long...

Basil Fawlty's Goldfish

Goldfish, yeah?

They go round and round and round.  They (popularly) have a short memory.  They go round and round and round.  And they go round and round and round.  Did I mention that they go round and round and round?

So, yeah, goldfish.  Aren't you glad you're not a goldfish?  On the plus side, they'd be great in Doctor Who because (a) they have no eyelids so they can't blink so they're not going to be crept up on by a Weeping Angel; 

(b) they have short memories so not being able to remember the Silence isn't going to be a huge drawback.

What was I saying?  

Aren't you glad you're not a goldfish, destined to repeat the same behaviour over and over and over again?

Except that some of us do.

Well, certainly in sitcoms.  Some of the best/worst (and possibly even funniest) sitcom characters are the ones who can't learn, who never learn, whose principal personality flaw is the source of the com in the sitcom.

Like in Dad's Army.  Without Captain Mainwaring's pompousness, there's not much left to drive the plot.  And that means he never changes (or that the writers know well that the scripts and the money will dry up if he does).  Every time someone lights the fuse of Captain Mainwaring's pride and self-insecurity and pompousness, it's a dead cert that there will be hilarious consequences.  Or, if you ask me, "hilarious" consequences.  Cue barrage balloons and netting and "don't panic" and bumbling and desperate cover stories and humiliation.  Captain Mainwaring, fictional construct as he is, can't change. he just goes round and round and round like a goldfish.

The chances of this ending well?

Or Basil Fawlty.  There's a man driven by pride and life's unfairness and fear of his little nest of vipers Sybil.  They only made twelve episodes, but if they'd made twelve thousand each one would still end with Basil Fawlty's overweening unctuousness or pride dropping him in it big time.  He can't change.  he can't break out.  He just goes round and round and round like a goldfish.

Let's think: how will this pan out?

Who else?  There's Hyacincth Bucket, there's Alan Partridge, there's David Brent, there's Edina Monsoon…  You can spot their own futile cycles of missed opportunities to learn from the dire consequences int which their overriding character flaws propel them.

And then there's Jay in The Inbetweeners.  Interesting one, Jay.  He spends three years as a compulsive liar, fabricating sexual conquests and making boats that would have Baron von Munchhausen blushing down to his very toenails.  And then in the first film after three series of the TV sitcom are over… Jay is redeemed.  Redeemed!  A life crisis creeps up on him and he gets the kind of happy ending, the kind of character overhaul that he's long needed.  It's a magnificent end to an okay film.

Jay: shafted by scriptwriters.

But then someone decided a sequel was in order.  And of course a reformed and redeemed Jay is no use, so he's returned brusquely to his old ways.  Old ways cubed, it seems.  What can we say?  Them's the rules of sitcoms.  Change isn't really a possibility.

So.  Thank goodness it's only goldfish and sitcom antiheroes.

Oh, and Abraham.  Abraham - justified by faith! - is actually quite often driven by fear.  Chiefly in the midriff of Genesis, as a bit of a nomad, he is afraid that when he lodges in a place, its king will (a) steal his wife and (b) kill him (although mostly (b) I think).  And so he passes off his wife as his sister.

And it ends badly, because when he doe sit in Egypt, his wife is adopted by Pharaoh for his harem, and Abraham survives by dint of being her "brother."  But God delivers plagues on Egypt - yes, because of Pharaoh's less-than-enlightened approach to wooing, but also because of Abraham's deception.  In the wake of the plagues, Abraham's cunning ruse is discovered and he is told off and sent packing.

At no point does anyone involved say, "Well, that went well."

To be fair, when the choice to pass your wife off as your sister ends with pulsating pustules and expulsion, you might invent a fresh plan.

Not Abraham.

He does it again, a very few chapters later.  With - can you guess? - pretty well identical results.  

(The odder thing is that his son Isaac, years later, has a similar fear… and an identical plan… which goes spectacularly wrong.  Isaac makes it a family affair, a traditional mistake.  Oh dear.)

So real people too are driven by the wrong things to make the same mistakes over and over.  Even people of faith can be driven by fear to become records jumping in the same groove… stuck, scratched, not getting any nearer the end of the song.

And you may well recognise this trait in yourself.  We're all pre-disposed to make mistakes, to jump when things go wrong, and mostly in an unconstructive direction.  Fear, selfishness, pompousness, all sorts of inabilities to laugh at ourselves, all mean that we too can be goldfish.  Round and round and… did I mention that already?

And then Jesus comes along.  Jesus addresses people who keep making the same mistakes.  The disciples who continually argue about superiority or greatness.  The man at the pool of Siloam who repeatedly never makes it into the healing waters, almost as if he's chosen to sabotage his own life.  Almost as if he's worn a comfortable groove and is staying there rather than facing the challenges of getting well again.

Jesus breaks their chains.

Now this has the capacity to end well.

And Jesus breaks our chains too.  Patterns of behaviour, kneejerk reactions, terrible stuck-record grooves… Jesus died not just to free us from sin and death, but from mediocrity and futility in this world too.

You don't have to be a goldfish.  You can fly free.  Jesus will break those patterns and chains that keep us smaller than we should be, that keep us limited.  Next time you come bumping down to earth, or realise that little bits of your history keep repeating themselves, have a look and ask Jesus to break you out of the mad repetitions.  There's no need to be Abraham, let alone Captain Mainwaring or Hyacinth Bucket.  You can let the Son set you free, and then you will be free indeed.

Flesh And Blood

Don't you hate it when the Bible is misused by people?  Doesn't it annoy you that God and his people are brought into disrepute by wilful and opportunistic misappropriation of odd verses within it by intolerant people who are serving themselves rather than God?  You know, as if the Bible (and the wonderful God behind it) promoted racism and homophobia and a general disdain for the poor and the other?

Tell me when I do it myself by mistake, please.

It annoys me most when I hear people use the phrase "flesh and blood."  Usually, people say they have to look after their own flesh and blood, which means preferential treatment for family members.  And while Paul (who wrote some of the Bible) is clear that we have a duty to the people under our noses, it's only a short step from "don't neglect your nearest and dearest" to "family first" to "stuff the rest of you."

Likewise, "charity begins at home" is often just a positive spin on "I look after my own," itself not a country mile away from "I'm all right, Jack" and "Get lost."

But flesh and blood… flesh and blood seems to find its origin as a phrase in one of my total all-time hashtag amaze balls really rather good Bible passages.

Isaiah 58.

The bit where Isaiah (or God) (or Isaiah) (or God) (or both) spell out what true religion looks like.  It's not religious observance.  It's not showy church attendance.  It's not having been in the same pew for so long that you can claim the indentation in the wood as your own.

It's loosing the chains of injustice, setting the oppressed free, sharing your food, providing the poor wanderer with shelter.  Go on and read it.  Best.  Bible.  Chapter.  Ever.

And the people who do those things - care for the badly-done-by, basically - don't need showy religion.    Certainly not to signify to God how they're part of his program.  Their light - says Isaiah - breaks forth like the dawn.  The Bible is crammed - or littered - with these warnings that church attendance doesn't cut it if our behaviour the other six days is oppressive, unjust, intolerant, exclusive.

Anyway, in the heart of this hard-hitting, greatly liberating chapter comes the phrase:

"Do not turn away from your own flesh and blood"

and God and Isaiah don't seem to mean your immediate family.  Your own flesh and blood will be the whole human race.  Jesus said something about who our neighbour is (spoiler: everybody).  There's even that lovely dirge we used to sing in primary school: "and the creed and the colour and the name won't matter…"

Much of the EU debate has raged around how we might be poorer if we remain/leave.  Very, very little - shamefully little on behalf of the majority of campaigners on either side - has been said about how this country might help others.  There's a terrible, wrong assumption that of course we want to close our borders, of course immigrants (refugees, migrants, everyone who can't stake their birth to a corner of the UK) are trouble, of course we deserve better just by dint of popping out of our mother's womb on this sceptred isle.  What on earth happened to hospitality?  Responsibility?  I hope the UK I see in this debate isn't every local community writ large.

And people talk about a Christian country, as if a Christian country were one in which only Christians were allowed in.  My friends, that would be a deeply unChristian country.  Ever since God's people found themselves with borders, God has been clear that the measure of a country's spiritual health is its treatment of people who have no other help.  Widows and orphans and strangers and aliens.

Being a Christian country isn't about denying other cultures a way of life.  It isn't about imagining that being arbitrarily born in a place gives one rights or makes one superior.  Being a Christian country should mean that we care for the sick (ah! the NHS! love you) and look after the less able (hello ATOS) and do something marvellous and constructive when people arrive whose own home has become untenable through civil wars and fundamentalist governments and air strikes.

I don't always know what.  I can't crunch the numbers.  But I know that when we turn aside - from human need, from a Big Issue vendor, from drowned bodies on a shore - we become a little less Christ-like, a little less God-like.  

But when we address ourselves to the poor and displaced, the outcome to our hearts is different again.  Isaiah 58 is chock-full of promises:

If we do away with oppression… if we stop pointing the finger… if we call time on malicious talk… if we spend ourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed…

then

our light will rise in the darkness!

then

our night will become like the noonday!

then

our needs will be satisfied in a sun-scorched land!

then

we will be like a well-watered garden.

And our reputation?  We will be called Repairer-of-Broken-Walls, Restorer-of-Street-with-Dwellings.

I want those on my tombstone (if I can manage it) and I want them on the UK's coat of arms - that we figured out that the only way to be great in any way at all is to be carers, above and beyond whatever call of duty we think we might have.  Greatness doesn't lie in looking after your own flesh and blood, but in looking after everybody's flesh and blood.

There are great things about Great Britain: increased acceptance within our borders is the big one.  But to be properly, usefully, truly Great, we need to look beyond, and down and across, and seek the kingdom of God before the United Kingdom.  We could light up the dark night of international politics by being a beacon of hope and welcome.  Our own night might even become noonday in the process.

Anyway.  Flesh and blood.  Christian country.  It's all words.  It's only the actions that mean anything.

Rich, Ripped And Royal

Back to superheroes, people, and in my time I've pretended to be Superman and played the brilliant comic creation Supersmashinglovelyman.  I hope no pictures exist of that.

But who's my favourite superhero?  Who do you think I rate most highly from the Marvel/DC world?  And who's your favourite superhero?  The Human Torch?  Mr Fantastic?  Sparky The Battery Boy?  Mr Boombastic?  Ok, I made two of those up...

I'll tell you mine in a minute.

But first, I recently walked out of a superhero film at the cinema.  It was Captain America: Civil War, it was an hour in, and there'd been some extended conflict between Captain A, the Black Panther, the Winter Soldier and some other dudes I wasn't caring very much about.

Part of the reason for leaving was that the film didn't bother with the courtesy of "Previously on Avengers" or somesuch.  Casual viewers like me were just baffled.  Don't tell me that a film weighing in at about two-and-a-half hours can't muster two minutes to bring us up to speed on things.  Friends managed it.  Doctor Who manages it.  Even Coupling managed it.  But Captain America?  No such luck.

Except I did.

So I was baffled by events.  But more than that, let's look at its superheroes.

Captain America.  He's a buffed-up fellow, to say the least.

Iron Man.  He's a millionaire geezer who's basically joined the powerful by being rich, who has more money than sense and if he gets a bit trashed he just digs not very deeply in his pockets and rebuilds his super suit.  Heavens, sometimes he sends his suits in as automatic drones, I think.  He doesn't even bother showing up!

Iron Man.  No sympathy.

The Black Panther.  He's pretty quickly unmasked as… the crown prince of an African nation.

And these are the people I'm meant to sympathise with or cheer on?  Rich, royal and ripped.  Frankly, that appeals about as much as this football sport where people fork out big money to watch 22 overpaid millionaires run around a field.

It doesn't end with the Black Panther.  

There's Batman.  A rich man with a big shed and a butler.

All the bravery money can buy.

There's Superman.  Pretty well invincible, only ever interesting in the presence of kryptonite.

Superman.  Get a neck!

Problems of the royal, ripped and rich.  Spare me.  I don't watch the Kardashians either.

And the big reason, then, is that they simply don't connect.

Whereas my favourite superhero is…

…

(drum roll)

…

It's Spiderman.

Web-slinging, wise-cracking Spiderman, yesterday.

Sure he has some powers (bitten by a radioactive spider, so it's fortunate they weren't experimenting with radioactive worms or cockroaches that day), but otherwise he has no huge inheritance.  He earns his cash as a photographer with a grouchy boss.  He has women trouble.  He has an elderly relative to look after.  He's human.  He's us.

In my youth I recall reading the story of the origins of Spiderman as an idea for a character, and how Stan Lee was almost persuaded not to publish him after someone asked, "Who wants to read about a superhero with problems?"

But the answer is, we do.

Proper problems of laundry and love, rather than the massive existential problems that Superman and Batman have.  Wangst, I believe they're called, making much out of some massive ideology that the rest of us have no time for because we have to earn our living and put the recycling bins out without the help of Alfred.

Spiderman is actually in Captain America: Civil war, albeit briefly and some time after I left the auditorium.  Ah well.  maybe he swung in to tell them to lighten up and to stop whining about their first world problems, and that anyone else would kill to be ripped, royal or rich.  Oi!  Avengers!  Shut it!

Go Spiderman, especially in his underrated incarnation played by Andrew Garfield.  "Don't come in!" he shouts at his Aunt May as he tries to hide his costume in his room in the two-bed condo he shares with her, "I'm all kinds of naked!"  Now there's a problem.  And when he gets home, it's more often his costume is ripped than he is, and he gets to sew it up by lamplight, much like Father Mackenzie, darning his socks.  

A real person recovering from fighting for others.  BUPA health plan not included.

Where was I?  Of course, Spiderman has that in common with Jesus: neither is rich or ripped, and Jesus puts aside the royal side of things in order to be born in hay, raised with splinters, live with idiots and die in agony.  No Alfred, no Batplane, none of that blarney about Jor-El.  He could call on battalions of angels… but he doesn't because that would be cheating.  That wouldn't be incarnation.  That wouldn't be identifying with us.  Jesus chooses to live like common people, chooses to do whatever common people do.  And while it's true that if he called his dad he could end it all, Jesus doesn't.  He's no tourist.  He's here and he means it, and he lives like us and suffers like us, so that finally we have a hero we can identify with.

Batman wanders round muttering gnomically and darkly to himself.  Largely incomprehensibly, too.  Superman speeds in, speeds out.  

Batman vs. Superman.  Be honest, who gives a monkey's who wins?

Spiderman, however, he stops to banter.  And tellingly, he's your friendly neighbourhood Spiderman, two adjectives that would have Batman turning in his grave and Superman raising an eyebrow.  How vulgar, belonging to people.  How vulgar, belonging with people.

But it's what Spiderman does, and it's what Jesus does.  And I'll take that common vulgarity of mucking in and staying like us anyday.  Jesus loves us, never lords it over us.  Long live heroes who share our problems and are heroic nonetheless.  It shows it can be done, and I may even stay til the end of the film…

Jesus: strawberry and halo never in evidence during earthly time.  Or at all, probably.  Human face, always.