Christians: The Anti-Zombies - Ephesians 2:1-10
A few years ago, vampires were all the
rage. Everywhere you turned there was a
new vampire movie and with their glittering and sparkling, all fear had
subside—teenage girls, rather than cowering in fear at the thoughts of vampires
were almost ready to stick their necks out for a bite. Thankfully that fad has faded into the twilight.
However, I don’t know. We may have gone from bad to worse. We’ve moved from the once-bitten, undead to
the brain-hungry, viral infected living dead—moving from vampires to a
fascination with zombies. Whether it is
the growing popularity of AMC’s The
Walking Dead, the fact that you can type a Google search with “zombie
apocalypse” and come up with over 8 million matches, or the fact that a growing
number of fundraising races are becoming zombie oriented…such as this coming
weekend in the RTP with the Zombie Escape or next weekend in Winston Salem with
the Zombie Apocalypse 5K run/walk/shuffle.
Think you don’t know anyone involved in the living dead…you might be
surprised.
Just what is a zombie?[i] With traces that go all the way back to 2000
years before Christ with The Epic of
Gilgamesh out of Mesopotamia, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstien from 1818, and its modernized depiction through film
with George Romero’s 1968 Night of the
Living Dead, a zombie is an reanimated human corpse, usually considered,
“mindless” with a hunger for human flesh, particularly human brains. Kind of gross, right? Why would anyone in their right mind want to
be a member of the living dead? Oh,
wait, zombies are mindless—they have no “right mind.”
Why do we have all the popularity of,
first vampires, and now zombies in our society today? There could be any number of reasons, from
the fact that some people just like to be scared, to an attempt, especially in
the case of vampires, to take the scary and make them something more palatable,
or maybe, and I think a great deal of it lies here, it is the quest of all
humanity to answer the question of just what is on the other side of the grave,
or what can free me from the grave.
My brothers and sisters, if it is
simply an unspoken, conscious, or even subconscious effort to escape the grave,
we, as followers of Christ, have the answer.
As those who seek to follow Christ, we are not the living dead (though
sometimes our long drawn faces which suggest that following Christ is pure
torture would offer the opposite) nor the undead, but we are the “formally
dead, now alive.”
“You were dead through the trespasses
and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world…But God,
who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us…made us
alive together with Christ…”
We were dead.
“Wait a minute preacher! I haven’t been dead…not even close. My heart has been beating since before I was
born. I may have even been in the
hospital a day or two, but never on the slab in the morgue.”
Okay…if we don’t want to admit that we
were dead (in the sense that we understand dead) then we will have to admit
that prior to surrendering our lives to Christ, to acknowledging His active presence
in our lives, we were zombies—we were living dead---walking around day in and
day out in our sin, mindlessly following the course of the world, living under
the influence of Satan, trying to be like everyone else readily gratifying the
desires of the flesh. We were
zombies…maybe not hungry to munch on human flesh, but sometimes acting out and
engaging in behavior to satisfy a sexual hunger for flesh outside the
God-ordained relationship of husband and wife; sometimes acting out a hunger
for power and control, trying to rule over the flesh of others; sometimes that
fleshly hunger was greed, desiring to have more and more; or pleasure,
injecting, inhaling, or ingesting in our flesh those substances that would make
us feel good. Paul reminds us that “All
of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires
and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.” That’s where we were, walking, talking,
“living dead,” zombies.
But no more, Paul says, we are no
longer to be counted among the dead, but among those that God has raised from
the dead. We have been brought out of a
sentence of death just as Christ was brought out of the tomb, by the grace and
love of God. We no longer need be
concerned about the grave, because we have been freed from the grave. We no longer offer our lives to Satan as lord
of our lives who can only offer death, but have declared our allegiance to
Christ and thus been guaranteed a life that will have no end. We don’t have to worry about what eternal
life is on the other side of the grave, my brothers and sisters, because
eternal life does not being when this mortal flesh ceases to function, eternal
life begins the moment we move from death to life—from living for our flesh to
living for Christ…when we surrender and submit our lives to the Lordship of
Christ.
It is in giving our lives to Christ,
that we become Anti-Zombies. How?
Zombies are considered mindless. Paul reminds the followers of Christ that we
are not mindless in our actions, but are called to have the mind of Christ, as
he tells the Philippians, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ
Jesus,”[ii]
or reminds the church in Corinth, “we have the mind of Christ.”[iii] As disciples, we are not called to walk around
as unthinking zombies, but should constantly be challenging ourselves to
understand better, seeing and responding to the world and those around us in
the manner that Christ would have responded.
Zombies don’t have vital signs. Disciples have vital signs…definite markers
that tell whether we are living for Christ or among the dead of the world. Christ says, “By this everyone will know that
you are my disciples, if you have lone for one another.”[iv] Paul reminds us that those filled with the
Spirit of Christ, will bear fruit: “Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not
gratify the desires of the flesh. For
what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is
opposed to the flesh…now the work of [Zombies] are obvious: fornication,
impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger,
quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and thinks like
these…By contrast, the [vital signs] of the [Living are] love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”[v]
Zombies are in a constantly decaying
state. Disciples, on the other hand, “If
the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised
Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his
Spirit that dwells in you.”[vi]
Zombies are unemotional with no
feelings of mercy toward their victims.
Christ tells all who would follow Him, “Be merciful, just as your Father
is merciful.”[vii]
Zombies wander aimlessly, led only by
their hunger, their only purpose to satisfy that hunger. Those who have received the gift of life
through Christ have a purpose, a reason for existence. “For we are what he has made us, created in
Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of
life.” Not because of good works, but by
God’s design in response to being truly alive, those who follow Christ, by
design, are active with the purpose of making God’s Kingdom and Love visible to
the world through good works.
Finally, Zombies, though the “living
dead” or “undead,” like their “undead partners” vampires, can be killed. A zombie is killed by destroying their brain
(not that being mindless it was of any use to them anyway). Those who have received new life through
Christ have this promise: “I am the
resurrection and the life. Those who
believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and
believes in my will never die.”[viii]
With this known, my brothers and
sisters, will each of us count ourselves among “The Living Dead” or the
“Formally Dead, Now Living—Anti-Zombies”?
In the Name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[i] Zombie info gleaned from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_(fictional) and http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie
[ii] Philippians 2:5
[iii] 1st Corinthians 2:16b
[iv] John 13:35
[vi] Romans 8:11
[vii] Luke 6:36
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