And some days you get the two for one special ...
In the movie, The Iron Giant, a boy named Hogarth befriends a giant metal man, an iron giant almost 100 feet tall. Who is this giant? Where did he come from? Why is the government after him? Is he dangerous? These are the central mysteries of the story.
Throughout the movie, Hogarth spends a lot of time teaching the giant what it means to be human. When the two explore the woods and find a deer recently shot by hunters, Hogarth demands that the giant show respect to the fallen animal and then makes the pronouncement, “Guns kill.”
Guns kill.
It turns out to be massively important because the giant is himself a gun. He is a weapon. Though we never find out who made him, it becomes clear as the movie progresses that he was designed for one purpose—destruction.
And when the government finally finds him and attacks him, he becomes a slave to his design and turns into a massive death ray.
It is at this point, though, that Hogarth steps directly in the giant’s line of sight and implores the giant to reconsider who he is.
“You are who you choose to be,” Hogarth tells him.
The giant stares at the boy and realizes what he was about to do and he rewrites his programming.
“I am not a gun,” he says.
But the story does not end there. A paranoid government agent launches a nuclear weapon at the giant, not realizing that because the giant is standing in the middle of the town, the bomb will destroy the giant and every person in the town.
Knowing the bomb is fixed on him, the giant makes another decision. He says goodbye to Hogarth and launches himself into space. He races to meet the nuclear bomb head on. And as he does he hears Hogarth’s voice.
“You are who you choose to be.”
At the last second, the giant closes his eyes and whispers, “Superman.”
The bomb hits the giant and both bomb and giant explode.
I’ve seen this movie probably twenty-five times and I cry every time.
I cry because the giant closes his eyes before he crashes into the bomb. He’s afraid and yet still does the right thing.
I cry because he chooses to be Superman. I cry because this metal man shows more humanity than most of the human characters in the movie.
I cry because he chooses to be a hero.
In her sermon today, Pastor Debbie spoke about identity. The gospel reading included the passage where Jesus asks the disciples who people say he is. And then he asks Peter who he thinks he is and Peter says simply, “The Messiah.”
Pastor Debbie took that a step further to talk about our own sense of identity. Who are we? And what she said reminded me so much of the iron giant. I don’t have a copy of her sermon so I’m going to have to paraphrase, but I believe she said, “We are not what we do. We are who God calls us to be.”
We may think we know who we are. We get up every morning, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, do the laundry, pay the bills, feed the cat, go to church.
But we are so much more in God’s eyes.
On a personal level, it was a relief to hear Pastor Debbie’s words.
I’ve been really struggling over the past few weeks with who I am. I know I’m called to the priesthood, but because of the circumstances in my life, I’m not able to embrace that call (in this case by going to seminary fulltime) the way I would like.
I find myself frequently bitter and angry at anything that keeps me from that call.
It’s been making me miserable quite frankly.
But the other day Pastor Debbie told me something that she would echo a few days later in her sermon. Again I’m paraphrasing, but basically she said that even though I wasn’t in seminary fulltime, it didn’t mean I wasn’t 100% committed to the call.
In other words, going to seminary only part time, for now, doesn’t take anything away from who I am or what God intends for me. It doesn’t take away anything from the call. In God’s eyes, I am, I have been and I will always be what He has intended me to be.
Someone built the iron giant to be a gun. He was made to be a gun. People treated him as if he were dangerous. And for a brief second, he believed what society told him he was. It took a little boy to help him realize who he had been called to be, a hero.
We can’t let our day-to-day lives dictate who we are. We can’t let ourselves be defined by the person we curse at on the highway, by the project we turn in late at work, by the extra hours we put in each day, by the spam we receive in our inbox, by the people we sometimes let down.
We aren’t perfect.
But we are something, something wonderful, in God’s eyes and we need to always strive for that.
