Armor

Last Sunday I preached over Ephesians 6:10-17, if you're not familiar with it, pop over to oremus and have a look. Anyway, since you're reading my blog, I thought you might be interested in the section of the sermon that prompted me to name it "Dr. Doom vs. Colossus. Also, you'll have the benefit of all the visuals I wish I could show the congregation. Try clicking on pictures to see something more... or at least bigger! Hopefully someday (maybe soon!) the church will buy an LCD projector...

The more I think about it, the more I think that the concept of armor and weaponry is neutral until you start thinking about the people inside the armor. And that is what leads me to consider Dr. Doom and Colossus. Both are characters from Marvel comics, both come from titles created by Stan Lee, and both have armor.
Dr. Doom comes from the Fantastic Four comic series. Victor von Doom impatiently sought out the armor that would become his trademark and grant him his super powers after a lab accident left him with a long jagged scar on one cheek. Victor considered the scar to be a hideous deformity and immediately displaced responsibility for the accident from himself and onto his scientific competitor and leader of the Fantastic Four, Reed Richards. Victor was in such a hurry to complete his transformation and hide his supposed deformity that he put the mask of his armor on before it had a chance to properly cool, ensuring that if his face was not deformed before, it certainly is now.
Dr. Doom is the villain of the story, using his special armor for the purpose of destroying Reed Richards and for world domination.

Colossus comes from the X-Men franchise. Peter Rasputin was a Russian mutant born on a Soviet collective farm in Siberia. His super powers first manifested when his little sister failed to notice a runaway tractor bearing down on her. In the instant that Peter selflessly threw himself between the oncoming tractor and his sister, he discovered that he can, at will, turn his entire body into a kind of organic steel, and that while in this state he gains superhuman strength and invulnerability. At first, Peter used his newfound gifts to do farm work. Then Professor Charles Xavier convinced him to join the X-Men and gave him the codename, Colossus. Colossus is one of the heroes of the story, and would prefer to be painting, rather than fighting, and only reluctantly uses his armored form for combat in defense of others and in pursuit of Xavier’s dream of a peaceful coexistence between human and mutant-kind. Colossus sacrificed his own life in order to make airborne the cure for a terrible plague-like disease and was later found to have been revived—cementing himself in my mind as a Christ-like figure in the modern mythos of the superhero genre.

Be good to each other,
Rev. Josh
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