Zombies on Ash Wednesday

Notes from the Pastor...

At Lent our minds and spirits are better aligned to the tragedy of life and salvation that comes through the God who so loved the world that he could not stay away.  Through spiritual disciplines of confession,
prayer, and fasting we examine our existence to find something beyond ourselves; desiring the growth of faith within ourselves.  Wilfred Cantwell Smith defines faith as “an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one’s neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles; a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendent dimension.”  More simply, faith is pledging love and loyalty to God.  Therefore, if God so loved the world, then our love and loyalty, while aimed to God, is faithfully directed to the world, or at least the small portion of the world in which we inhabit.

Ever since George A. Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, zombies have a popular role in North American folklore.  A zombie is an animated corpse brought back to life through mystical means.  Irish theologian Peter Rollins defines a zombie as “a person devoid of anything but desire.”  It is something less than human, something that lives solely for the object of infatuation.  Without faith, we are zombies.  Without an orientation to something beyond ourselves we can only live for ourselves – devoid of anything but desire.

Yet God so loved the world that he could not stay away; taking on the form of true humanity, Jesus infected us zombies with humanity.  By means of Jesus, Godincarnate, we are no longer left to wonder through the tragedy of life, arms outstretched, desiring things, people, and ideas to fulfill our infatuated zombie hunger.  Now, through God’s love, our total response, our world-view, and our ability to see, feel, and act are set on faith – pledging our love and loyalty to God.

At Lent, we examine our lives, find the tragedy of our zombie-like existence, and confess that we can do nothing on our own to fix it.  At Lent, the humanity of Jesus’ fidelity infects us with human faith and the world we inhabit is changed.

Grace,
Pastor Ryan