In the summer of 1962, I encountered a god. True, it was a comic book god, but the encounter was still thrilling. That summer, "funny books" took a turn —a permanent turn, it turns out— for the serious. That was when what-we-now-call Marvel launched The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, and Thor: The God of Thunder. Today, we are surrounded by these and many other Marvel characters. But, back then ...
I was still a "tween" that summer; not yet a teenager, but no longer a little child. Junior High and High School still loomed ahead. I was a ripe target for the angst-filled storylines of Spider-Man and his alter-ego, high school science nerd, Peter Parker. The Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of the Incredible Hulk, with his anger management challenges, perfectly resonated with a young male starting to explode with not-entirely-welcome testosterone.
But the comic book character who enthralled me that summer was the mild-mannered, partially disabled physician, Don Blake. While vacationing in Norway, he found a walking stick in a cave. Blake's limp was pronounced and he needed that walking stick. Later, circumstances caused Dr. Blake to strike that stick on a rock ... and in a flash Don Blake was transformed into Thor, the Norse god of thunder. The "stick" resumed its true form: the mighty Mjolnir, the most powerful hammer in existence.
At the moment of Dr. Blake's transformation, my pre-adolescent brain thought: Wow! There's a super hero inside that guy with the limp! All through the next school year as I read more of Thor's adventures, I mulled that initial thought. But how I thought of it had changed:
There was a "god" inside that man.
Thor was one of the Norse gods. The Greeks and Romans had similar: leader-gods like Odin and trickster gods like Loki, on and on. But these were all, actually, god-come-latelies. Long before those cultures rose, there were other beings called gods. In scripture, we find many cultures that worshiped beings they called gods.
If you've spent any time reading Old Testament scripture, you likely know that God —the God-of-the-Angel-Armies; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God who led the Israelites out of Egyptian bondage— regarded these so-called "gods" as fictitious creations of humans, no more worthy of worship than a rock or block of wood.
This week’s scriptures are filled with God encounters (see the Genesis selection for a powerful example) ... and something else, too. God was angered by any who worshipped those pretenders. We find that God sent a message to those idol worshippers, repeatedly: your “gods” have zero validity.
Eventually, God called them out:
"Thus says the LORD, the King of Israel, and his Redeemer, the LORD of hosts: I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god. Who is like me? Let them proclaim it, let them declare and set it forth before me. Who has announced from of old the things to come? Let them tell us what is yet to be. Do not fear, or be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one." (Isaiah 44:6-8 NRSV)
With that kind of certainty on display, it may not come as a surprise that when the comic book got me thinking about the "god" inside the man, it dovetailed perfectly with another matter on my young mind: Immanuel, God-With-Us, the incarnation of Jesus.
I was much more interested in the true God, the God who was unafraid to declare Himself the one and only; the God so confident of their silence, He was unafraid to challenge those fake gods. The God who entered this existence inside a person ... for real; the God who didn't need a magic hammer to transform him from God to human and back again ... because He could be both at the same time.
This is the God encounter that mattered to me, then ... and now.
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PHOTO: https://thevikingdragon.com/blogs/news/how-thors-hammer-mjolnir-was-created
A different version of this reflection appeared in July 2017 as The Gods of Summer.
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READINGS FOR THE COMING WEEK
Proper 11 (16) (July 19, 2020)
https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu//texts.php?id=151
Genesis 28:10-19a
Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24
Isaiah 44:6-8
Psalm 86:11-17
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43
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Are we still in the First Wave? Or has the Second Wave already started? In either case, DaySpring’s Lectionary Breakfast is still not meeting due to COVID-19. Let’s keep everyone in our prayers ... and keep reading. For this week’s reflection, we’re going back to the summer of ‘62
Many blessings,
Steve
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