by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given June 2, 2002

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

In the movie Spider-Man, we meet a young man named Peter Parker. He is a teen-ager trying to make his way through the terrors of high school. Peter is the classic nerd: he is smart, especially at science; he wears thick glasses; he always seems to be running after the bus because he is late; and once he gets on the bus, nobody wants to sit with him. The girl he adores doesn’t even seem to notice him.

You may be familiar with the story of Spider-Man. One day Peter is with his class on a field trip. As he is taking a photo for the school newspaper, a genetically-altered spider that has escaped bites him on the hand. By the time he gets home to see his aunt and uncle he is not feeling well at all, and falls to sleep. When he wakes up the next day he feels different, but he is not quite sure what is going on. When he looks in the mirror he sees that his scrawny body is suddenly bulging with muscles.

At school that day, his senses are heightened and his reflexes are suddenly a lot faster. Suddenly, he finds himself spinning a web that ends up sending a tray of food directly at the school bully. When the bully comes after him, Peter realizes that indeed he has a lot more power than he did the day before. Before long he is sprouting little spider claws and he is able to scale the side of a tall building with ease. When he needs to figure out how to get past a particularly big divide he knows what he needs to do: spin a web and use it to get to where he is going. It doesn’t work at first, but after a few tries he manages to spin his web and use it to get across the canyon of buildings. With a shout of glee he flies and spins from building to building.

Spider-Man is born.

Since it was released a few weeks ago, the movie has been a big hit. The actor Tobey Maguire was certainly a great pick as Spider-Man. It is a little surprising to read that he had to go through a bunch of screen tests for the role—something that usually doesn’t happen for a star of his magnitude—because, well, the fear was the he was too nerdy. But of course that is the point when you are talking about superheroes.

The nerd factor is considered very important to the character’s success. From the beginning, when the character of "Spider-Man" was created in 1962 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko of Marvel Comics, the character was a little different from other superheroes. In the past, superheroes came from another planet, like Superman, or were accomplished and smart and ready to do good, like Batman. But Spider-Man was an adolescent. He was a dorky teen-ager struggling with the things that teen-agers struggle with, and that is something many of us, particularly if we think back to those difficult years, can resonate with.

Spider-Man is a basic story of good and evil. It is a story of trying to find your way in the world and trying to figure out how to use your powers. It is a struggle to figure out what sacrifices those powers might ask of you. How we use our power in the world is an issue that a lot of us struggle with, no matter what our age. No matter what we’re doing in the world. And somehow in the world of superheroes, it is all written large and we can imagine what we might do in the midst of all this.

When Peter Parker first discovers his extraordinary powers, he doesn’t know what to do with them. Like you might expect, he is like the proverbial kid in the candy shop. He just doesn’t know where to begin. He decides that what he wants most is to use them to get a car that will impress the girl, M.J., he loves. He doesn’t care about doing good as much as wanting to do the things that he never would have been able to do before. He sees an ad in the newspaper that will make him lots of money if he survives for three minutes in the professional wrestling ring with the Human Saw. He gets into a ring, and to the surprise of just about everyone, including himself, he beats the thug and wins the match. A bright future in the ring seems to be ahead of him.

But the fun and games don’t last long. With a sudden turn of fate, he quickly realizes that, as his Uncle Ben tells him, "with great power comes great responsibility." Soon he is faced with all kinds of dangers, including the Green Goblin, a greedy industrialist who conducts an experiment on himself to win a government contract, only to discover that along with chemically induced superpowers he as also acquired an evil streak that cannot be controlled.

Spider-Man stops the Green Goblin and you can probably guess how the movie goes on from there.

It is one thing to see a superhero on the big screen in stereo sound use his power to do something for the good. It may be quite another when we think of ourselves in relation to our own power. Just mention the word and the first response for some will be to step away. I’ve heard more than one person say, "I don’t want to have power, that is not who I am."

That is not entirely a surprise. When we think of how power is used in the world, too often it is a power over, a power used to dominate and control. It is a power that harms. It is a power that gains influence only to be used to hurt others. It might be power we exert with our bodies, with our positions, or with our resources. It is the power that can so easily lend itself to abuse. Just look at the newspaper headlines to testify to this reality. Just think of the images of the high school bully who still seems to be in power.

But that is not what power has to be. Power is something that can so easily be abused, but that is no reason to not claim the power that we have. Power doesn’t have to be over, it can also be with.

I’m often struck by how easy it is for us to give away our power. When things don’t happen the way we want them too, it is easy to put that off on somebody who is in charge. We can see ourselves as cogs in the wheel with no real power to change much of anything, and in doing that we give away our power to make much of any difference.

When something happens that shouldn’t, too often we will let it go and not look to see how we might change it. When we see someone acting out, we’re willing to let them do that and not to step in.

There are all kinds of reasons we come up with, of course. We don’t want to get into the middle of something. We think we really can’t make much difference anyway, so why bother. We see ourselves caught in some vast web that we really can’t do much about, so we don’t. And once we get used to being in a certain place, even if we don’t like it a whole lot, the familiar may be something we decide to stick with instead of putting ourselves on the line.

But that is not a good use of our power. If we don’t know it and if we don’t use it for good in the world, we can’t get far at all.

The old TV show Dallas told the story of the Ewing family. They were rich and powerful and did all kinds of nasty things to hold onto their money and power, only to have others try to bring them down. In one episode I remember the father, Jock, saying to J.R., the evil son, "Power isn’t something you earn, power is something you take."

While I can’t say I thought much of most of the characters on that show, there was some wisdom in that statement. The power we have been given is given for us to claim and to use well. It is given to us to use in service to the larger world. And power used well does not take away from others, but actually makes for more power for everyone. The power that has been given to us is there for us to use.

But too often, we end up not wanting to recognize how much power we have, no matter what our station in life might be. It is easy to want to deny the power that we have in the world. When we choose not to vote, we give away some of our power. When we decide not to speak up even when we know we should, we give some of our power away. When we let our fears hold us back from doing what we think is right, we give some of our power away.

I know that knowing our power and making the right choices is not always such an easy task. Power can be intoxicating. It can get downright complex how one action fits into another. We may not always know the best thing to do. It may not be clear. But it is also true that sometimes we just don’t want to stir things up. We simply don’t want to get into it. It is just too easy to step back and see what happens and then to complain about the outcome. But life has a way of teaching us lessons about power and the responsibility that comes with it. It may happen whether we’re ready for it or not.

When I was in college, the first job I had on the student newspaper was to be an arts reporter. This assignment soon turned into the role of the theater critic. I had acted in high school and had taken a couple theater courses in college. All of this experience combined meant that I thought that I was more than ready to take on this role at the college newspaper.

I reviewed a number of productions. I quickly started to get the hang of it. And I have to also say that I quickly came to enjoy seeing my name in print and having people read what I had to say about any given production. I got more and more confident about what I was doing. I got more and more confident about passing judgment on any given production. Before long I was having visions of the day when I would be doing this for the New York Times.

One week I had reviewed a college production. I don’t remember what it was but I did not hold back when it came to saying what I thought of the leading actress. I didn’t pull any punches. I was taking a theater class at the time—and no, this did not make me particularly popular—and on the day that the review came out, I happened to see this person, in the theater building, sitting there reading my review, tears streaming down her face.

Until that moment, I hadn’t quite made the connection between the actress I was critiquing in the production and the student and person who would be reading the review. I needed to say what I needed to say, but I didn’t have to be mean about it. I was in a position of power and I needed to do my work in a way that reflected that.

In that moment I quickly came to learn that lesson. It wasn’t so much that I shouldn’t have written the review—that was good and fine. The issue was how I did it, the way that I did it. I didn’t need to tear apart a fellow student. I could have been nicer as I did my work. Sometimes I may hurt others, but I have to be as aware as possible of the consequences before I do something.

That has proven to be a great lesson in my life. Be careful when you have power. With power comes responsibility.

But I’ve also learned that we should not deny our power. It is something each of us has in life. Each of us is born with a unique set of gifts and challenges. We are each born into a particular set of circumstances. And we bring all of that into our being in the world. Some have much more than others, but we all have ways that we can use what we have.

Each one of us brings our power into the world in a different way, and with that comes a responsibility as well. If we are connected to the web of life, part of that connection needs to be that we work to heal brokenness in the world. Part of how we find wholeness for ourselves is to do what we can to work for wholeness in the world.

In the movies, whether it is John Wayne or Spider-Man, the hero is the one who acts out of the good to save the whole. There are the good guys and the bad guys and there is often not much in between. When someone is bad, they are really bad and they need to be stopped. In their world, the choices are so clear. The Green Goblin or some other evil doer is going to wreck havoc unless the hero does what he can to save things.

And it is amazing what happens. They transcend the limits of self to serve something larger. It seems that in the midst of great evil, people are called to be more than they think they can be. They discover strengths that they may not have realized they had.

And in them, we see what we would like to be. Part of the struggle we all have is to know how we are connected with all of life. We struggle with how our individual lives connect to everything else. How we give and receive and somehow the world all lives in balance. The choices for us ordinary folk may or may not seem so clear. It is easy to get lost in some gray area where we don’t know what we can do. Or it may seem easier, at least in the moment to stay in that gray area.

It may be easier for us to imagine ourselves in the world of the superheroes—at least in what we would like for the world to be like. For them, it seems very clear. For us it means a call to know who we are and to know what we believe in. It is a call to know where we have power and to imagine how we can use that power for the good. We may come to see ourselves in a new way, and be more fully aware of our potential. In the movie, when Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man, when he is becoming more aware of his power, the girl he loves suddenly notices him and says that he seems taller than he did before. He tells her that he used to hunch. It may be like that for us, as well.

We would like, when there is trouble, for the hero to come swooping in to save us and to figure it all out. There are those times when that would be so nice.

But of course the real world isn’t like that, or at least it isn’t always as easy to tell. But in imagining ourselves in the roles of the superheroes, we are able to transcend the fears that hold us back, that keep us from taking risks, that keep us from claiming our power. That is probably the reason why they are so popular. They allow us to do things that we perhaps cannot imagine ourselves doing, or at least not doing without great difficulty.

In Spider-Man the ending, as you might expect, already sets up the sequel. That is usually part of the Hollywood story as well.

In the world we live in, we can’t always know how it will turn out. We can’t always know what difference our actions will make in the world. We can’t always know what the next chapter will hold.

But we do have what we know. All we need to do is to look at the heroes around us: Those who go on rescue efforts on Mount Hood. Those who work for justice in places where working for justice means that you put your life on the line. Those who, in the very ordinary hours and days of living and being, know themselves, live out of that knowing, and do all sorts of wonderful and powerful things. Those are not the things that will ever be the subject of a movie, but they are the work of superheroes nonetheless.

PRAYER

Great spirit, help us to have the courage to be fully in the world. Help us to have the courage to do the work we are called to do, and not be held back by fear. May we be surprised by the power that we have. In all of our days may we use our power well, may we use it in service to something greater. Amen.

BENEDICTION

In your living, spin your webs that keep your grounded, but also help you to fly. Go this day, good people, in love and in hope. Amen.

Copyright 2002, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.