United Methodist Church Westlake Village

The Superman Within: Finding Your Spiritual Superpowers

• United Methodist Church Westlake Village

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Superman has captivated American audiences for generations, from Christopher Reeve's wholesome portrayal to Henry Cavill's darker interpretation, and now the latest iteration returning to Superman's optimistic roots. But what makes this character so enduring isn't just his extraordinary abilities—it's what he represents: the very best of humanity, ironically embodied by an alien.

Created in 1938 as World War II loomed, Superman's motto of "truth, justice, and the American way" stood in direct contrast to the Nazi concept of the "Übermensch." While the Nazi regime promoted an Aryan ideal of superiority, Superman—an undocumented immigrant from another planet—championed universal justice. This brilliant subversion established him as a character who fought not for the few, but for everyone.

The storytelling challenge with Superman has always been creating meaningful conflict for a nearly invincible character. The real struggles often center around the values he represents—truth and justice—concepts that have become increasingly complex in our modern world. We now live in an era where "my truth" acknowledges individual perspectives but complicates our understanding of objective reality. Justice, too, becomes contextual and contested.

This complexity mirrors challenges Christians face today. In John's Gospel, Jesus speaks of a deeper spiritual truth that transcends subjective experience—a truth about God's grace and unconditional love that frees us from the burden of our imperfections. For followers of Christ, our "superpowers" aren't about physical strength but manifesting the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

When we embody these qualities, we make God's presence real in the world. In a society often divided by competing truths and justice claims, perhaps our greatest superpower is the capacity to love unconditionally, to forgive generously, and to create communities where everyone is valued. How can we be super? It might simply mean being the person Christ calls us to be.

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Pastor Darren:

Well, my friends, you probably ought to know. As pertains to today, I have always been a pretty big Superman fan. 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. For who many here says, well, yeah, the Christopher Reeve For some. For who many here says, well, that's the real Superman. Yeah, right, yeah, all right. How many for Henry Cavill, who Did you say? Who? Aye, aye, aye.

Pastor Darren:

And I'm trying to remember the name of the new guy Callie, you're young. Yeah, look at us, we're both. She's looking it up for me. We will have it in a mo. So say it again. George Reeves oh, my goodness, I need a time machine. Oh man, so who would list George Reeves? Good Glory, okay, all right. Yeah, we're going back, we're going back. 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? And I was a big fan as a young person. I remember my big Superman shirt. He was busting through a building. I had Superman pants with Superman on the back pocket. I had a Superman belt buckle, because that's what cool people had. You know this was. I was looking perfect for the 70s back there, looking great. So I am a fan of Superman.

Pastor Darren:

You should also know I really like superhero movies. Now some of you might be wondering why. Now some of you might be wondering why, and sometimes I wonder why, they hold on to me. There's the thought maybe you're just a 12-year-old boy that somehow got older and not taller. You know that. Maybe that is what happened there. 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. So I prefer to think of myself as a deep, deep thinker and not just somebody who didn't grow up. Are we good with that? That's kind of where I am All right.

Pastor Darren:

So this summer there was a new Superman movie. I don't know how many of you went out and saw it. I was out there, me and Dr B. We got out there. I don't know about the rest of you. It's good, it's enjoyable time out. 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. Oh, I should mention we're doing a movie series. Everybody's up with me on that, right? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Oh, remember there, he is handsome fellow. Right, we got a little pic of him that we can show. Oh, remember, there he is handsome fellow, right, I understand he wore the costume all the time, just kidding, just kidding. Then I skipped over a couple, but then I jumped over to Henry Cavill, because that was one everybody remembers as well. 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. 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. 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. Now here's the new guy. There, he is another handsome guy. So hopefully you can get used to all of them, I guess, but you can get a sense of who they all are. New Guy is a little bit of a throwback to the Christopher Reeve version. 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. 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. Now here's the irony of that, and I think most of you probably already know this he was an alien, right? 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. So when we're talking about the best of humanity, we say that sort of ironically, because he wasn't human. An example, though, of that humanity is shown in the movie. 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. 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. 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. Sound like. Is that a fair description? You know, if I was super and had all those superpowers, I would be the nicest guy too. I would be saving even the smallest people. I would be making sure everybody had a fair chance, that there was justice going on. 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. I told you I like Superman. I'm nerding out just a little bit, but it's August. What else are you going to be doing? 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. Phil's raising his hand. Are you adding in? Say it again? Are you asking me if I remember 1938? Because that answer's no. No, I actually haven't seen them. But, phil, it sounds like you and I would have a good coffee together. We'd talk about Superman, because I actually had another good conversation with Tom, who brought something up about the creation of Superman. 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. 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. The Nazi regime at the time really pushed on those values and on those concepts, right, truth. 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. 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. And that was the Arian ideal, right? Blonde, blue-eyed, tall, thin, all of those things. 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. 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. And anyway, I think you get the idea. And then that final value, the American way. Well, that was still getting defined, as it's still getting kind of defined today. 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. Another thing that's interesting the Nazi regime used this concept called the Ubermensch to talk about this Superman. That's loosely translated Superman. We're talking about that Aryan ideal. Well, that's a little bit of how that evolved or what it evolved into. Was this Übermensch, this Superman? 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. He came first of all. He wasn't blonde and blue-eyed, you know he's dark hair and all that other stuff. He was tall and strong. You know his dark hair and all that other stuff. He was tall and strong. But also, superman was about justice for all, not just for this elect few that we were supposed to lift up amidst us. 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. 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. So what do you do to create conflict in a story with a perfect person? But you start having conflict around the values that that person or that being stands for. Truth, justice, the American way. That becomes, in some ways, what really starts to be at threat. That's really what we're kind of protecting and where the conflict comes from the story. 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. Did you all learn post-modernity in art class and other kinds of mediums? 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. But I would remember specifically that part of that movement was that truth. Truth is almost always subjective. It's hard to do something that is not in some way from somebody's opinion. 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. But then you realize, wait a minute, somebody had to decide who got interviewed. 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. So truth starts getting a little more complicated.

Pastor Darren:

Most of you have heard the phrase my truth. 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. That culture had kind of tamped that community down and we were trying to say wait a minute, that truth deserves to rise up. Everybody is worthy. 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. Do you feel that complexity, like I do. I mean, I wrestle with that today. Right, and I imagine everybody in the room is like oh right, these are the truths I'll accept. These are the truths that need to be squashed and thrown in the ocean. Right, are we all? We all agree that needs to happen. We just wouldn't agree. What goes in the ocean would be my guess. So truth is this complicated term and then justice can become just as complicated. We start talking about what is right and what is wrong. Well, tell me what the context is. 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. He was a really good guy, this Superman. 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. This guy is just straight good, the embodiment. 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. 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? 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. 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. Instead of being made free by the truth they were I'm sorry instead of being freed from their sin. I wrote it wrong here. Who's to blame for that. I'm going to talk to somebody. You confused me. Well, it probably fits, because the people Jesus was talking to were equally confused because they thought they were free already. 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. 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? How many of you? John's your favorite gospel Cowards? Oh, there we go. Roz and Nancy, I saw going up, the rest of y'all, oh. But John was a little more. I'm going to use the word spiritual. 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. 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. Do you remember how that goes? And part of what was there was that Jesus always existed. 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. 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. 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. But we kind of want to go this way. 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? There's a grace that is real, there's a forgiveness that is real. 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. 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. You don't have to wear a tattoo on your forehead for every sin that you have done. That's the freedom, that's the truth he was trying to get across. Trying to get across so we, as regular human beings in this world, trying to figure out which truth, what is truth? 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. We're trying to live our world, a meaningful world. 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. 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? Amidst all those complicated truths, doesn't it come down to what Jesus was saying? 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? What if being a loving Christian is that way? 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? 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. What. 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. 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. What if those are the superpowers that we have been given to share with a world that needs to understand that they are worthy? Each and every person is worthy. When we live those things, we make them real in the world. When we live joy, it becomes real in the world. When we live kindness, it becomes real in the world, something that is shared with others, something that others can experience as well. From us, we make God real when we live these things. We have that superpower In a world that needs kindness. We got that and we can share that. How can we be super? How can we be super? It might look like just being the person that Christ tells us to be. It might just be believing the things that Christ invites us to believe, and maybe together we can save the world. Amen, amen.