Just last Thursday I took Aidyn, my three year old daughter to the movies. It was her second time seeing The Incredibles, but my first. I enjoyed it so much it became number one on my best Pixar movies passing Monsters Inc. The writers and animators for Pixar were able to capture so much with so little in The Incredibles.
First they captured our culture attitude toward good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lies really well. Whatever you want to call it, I don't like the term postmodernism but that seems the most used term. We are now either at the end of modernism or moved into something else, people dispute which it is all the time, regardless everything in our society has been deconstructed so that nothing has any value.
You can't trust business because they exploit workers and customers for profit, you cannot trust education because the people in power only teach you what they want you to know, you can't trust organized religion because the put God into a box that they can control and force you two worship him, and you can't trust Superheros because someone might get hurt while they are saving someone. Someone might get hurt while they are saving someone???? So in The Incredibles the legal system so exploits this idea that all superheros have to go into government sanctioned identity protection services. They must learn to live as normal people, not doing what they were created to do.
The thought doesn't cross anyone's mind does it that perhaps it is evil that is causing people to get hurt, and sometimes when good comes into conflict with evil the results might be tragic but not nearly as tragic if evil ruled the day. So the superheros go into hiding, pretending to be someone they aren't, and are systematically picked off one by one. They are isolated then decimated. These superheroes who protected the world, become weenies.
Yet the world needs superheroes. There is a need to save, protect, and defeat the forces of evil and everyone deep in their hearts no matter how skeptical and cynical they are know this. We are the champions of truth, Christ's followers. There is no need to go out and argue with an irrational world that they need us, we just need to go and be who we are. We are people created in the image of God, we are saved sinners, we share in Christ's righteousness, we know that our ultimate destination is glory.
Would you live differently if you knew how you were going to die? Of course you would because you would be able to do anything except for the one thing you know is coming down the pipeline. Each one of us may not know how we are going to die, but we know something even better. We know our destiny after we die, therefore there is nothing that we should fear in this life. Let us stand up, be who we were created to be, and let the world deal with those who call themselves followers of Chirst.