Hungry for God or Hungry for Brains?

This is my sermon from yesterday. The Scripture readings were Ephesians 2:1-10 and John 3:14-21.

There’s a popular TV show in its second season on AMC called “The Walking Dead.” Anyone here watch it? I have never watched it, but it is on every Sunday night at my house. My husband discovered that he can’t DVR it because his coworkers will be talking about it at work on Monday morning. Before I met my husband my knowledge of zombies was limited to “Scooby-Doo.” [Hold arms out.] Arrrgh! What I have since learned is that zombies are not people dressed up to scare away pesky kids, but are the living dead, usually infected with some sort of virus or bacteria that makes them a zombie. And to be a zombie is to always be hungry, traditionally for human brains; they are never full. And the only way to kill them is to cause major trauma to the head, and then that body is finally dead. There’s no going back from being a zombie to a human; the direction is human to zombie. Yet that opposite direction, from zombie to human, is what Paul wrote about in the Ephesians passage we read. Leaving out the prepositional phrases, he wrote that, “You were once the walking dead, walking in sin, doing whatever felt good and whatever you wanted, but God made us alive with Christ, if we choose to accept that gift.” So what we’ve got here is, dead in sin to alive in Christ. Zombie to human. Before we accepted Christ, we were zombies, always searching, always hungry. But God made us alive with Christ, we became alive when we chose to live with Christ. One of the early Church fathers from the 2^nd century, Irenaeus wrote that “the glory of God is man fully alive.” The glory of God is humanity fully alive. We were zombies but God is offering us the gift of life.

For just how that process works and an explanation of that gift, we turn to the scripture reading from John. Jennings just read the most well-known bible verse of all time. I think I saw a few of you mouthing it along with him: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.” Accepting this gift of eternal life, of being alive with Christ, means believing in Christ. And I want to distinguish between two kinds of believing, because there’s a difference between believing something with your head and believing something with your heart. You can give intellectual assent to something, and it doesn’t change anything. For example, a friend tells you her car gets 30 miles to the gallon, and you look at her Civic and say, “yeah, I can believe that.” You believe your friend, you agree with what she says. Or you can say you believe that the earth is round. It is, whether you believe it or not, and it’s simply a cognitive affirmation. You’re only using your brain(!) for these kinds of beliefs. Friends, believing in Jesus is not like believing the earth is round. It is not the same as believing that that Civic can get 30 miles to the gallon. If you are only giving lip service to Jesus and it’s an intellectual faith, that’s not faith in Jesus. Jesus calls for us to believe in him with our hearts, to know here [touch heart] that what he says is true and that he has come so that we might have eternal life. This is ‘believe’ as an action verb, a verb that you live out, that changes your life, not simply something you believe in your head that then doesn’t affect anything. The opposite of this kind of belief isn’t disbelief or unbelief, but disobedience. One of the prepositions I left out when condensing the Ephesians passage is that “once you were the walking dead, walking in sin, following the rule of a destructive spiritual power and this is the spirit of disobedience to God’s will.” When you were a zombie, you didn’t obey God. Believing God, believing in Christ Jesus and living with him, means being obedient to him. Being obedient means that your behavior changes, your life changes. Before you didn’t read God’s Word, now you do. Before you weren’t active in a community of faith, now you are. It means you believe it with your heart.

So if we believe with our hearts and obey Jesus, then we will stop living in zombieland and start living the eternal life God is offering us in Jesus. Jesus calls us to believe with our hearts and to repent, to turn away from sin and turn back towards God, who is already there waiting for us to turn back to him and offer us eternal life in Jesus. If we are listening closely and believing with our hearts and are obeying Jesus, it doesn’t mean that we never sin again. What it does mean is that when we are tempted to go back to zombieland, maybe even snack on a brain or two, God is still waiting there for us to turn back to him and that is the whole focus of this season of Lent. It’s recognizing we still mess up. It’s recognizing that even while God is offering us eternal life, sometimes we still want brains and we need to repent of that desire and turn back to God. A word about eternal life: it starts now. This isn’t something to look forward to in the future or that begins when we die (normally, not turn into zombies). Eternal life isn’t a thing that we receive but a way that we live. Eternal life isn’t a quantity of life but quality of life; it’s life lived in the presence of God. The eternal abundant life that Jesus wants to give us begins now, here on earth. It’s not a pie in the sky; it’s here and now. When we believe with our hearts that Jesus Christ is Lord, that he died for our sins and rose from the dead, then our lives change now. God’s waiting for us to quit being zombies, quit walking in sin and acting like most people of our world do, and for us to turn to him, to repent of our brain-eating ways, and to claim the eternal life that God wants us to live instead.

So, we were once the walking dead, walking in sin, but God made us alive with Christ, if we choose to accept that way of life. Did you notice what the most important two words were in the sentence? We were the walking dead, BUT GOD. God changed things. God made us alive with Christ. Why? God had mercy on us. This is all God’s action, God’s initiative. This is the opposite of zombie-ology where you can’t turn back to a human again. This is turning from a zombie to a human. God made us alive! Why were we dead? We were walking in sin, being disobedient, doing what we wanted when we wanted where we wanted. But God. God has other plans for us. Plans for a life lived with him. Therefore… what? Therefore: repent, turn to God, apologize for eating brains and whatever other things you’ve done wrong, believe with your heart and live what you believe, don’t just simply mentally agree that Christ died for your sins and rose from the dead, but live like it. Turn away from eternal hunger and death and start living eternal life now. God made us alive. Would you rather stay among the walking dead, mindless, shambling about, and always hungry for something that can never fulfill you? Augustine of Hippo was a bishop in the 4^th century church. You want to read about some serious sins before becoming a Christian and believing with his heart, read his Confessions some time. He did everything, got into everything, and yet found himself always restless, always hungry. Nothing satisfied him. The most famous line from his Confessions, directed toward God, says, “our hearts our restless until they find rest in you.” If you’re looking in zombieland for fulfillment and satisfaction, you’re going to always be hungry. You’re going to stay restless. But if you look for it in God, if you’re hungry for God, then he has promised to fill you with good things. And that promise is always there. You will find rest in him whenever you look for it. There’s no time limit. “Come to me, all you who are heavy-burdened and struggling hard, and I will give you rest.” It’s a promise. You don’t have to live in zombieland. You can come live in the presence of God, made alive with Christ, thanks to God’s love and mercy.

Let us take a moment to surrender to God whatever part of zombieland we’re holding on to, whatever bad habits we’re still doing. Let’s take a moment to confess them to God, ask forgiveness, and receive forgiveness and eternal life.

Dear God…

My First Ash Wednesday as a Pastora

This past Ash Wednesday (just over two weeks ago now) held a new series of firsts for me as a pastor. First time planning, leading, and preaching at an Ash Wednesday service. I had never been involved in one before from the non-congregation side. Nor did Unidos por Cristo have one last year; Ash Wednesday seems to be about where most Hispanic Protestants draw the line as one service that is still too Catholic. (I blogged about the Protestant/Catholic divide in Hispanic Christianity before: http://pastoraheather.blogspot.com/2011/01/great-divide-in-church.html ). In Nicaragua, my co-worker (who is Anglican) and I went to Mass in order to attend an Ash Wednesday service; there were no Protestant services.

At Orange for the past couple years, the responsibility of the Ash Wednesday service has fallen to the Associate Pastor. Since it was all brand-new to me, I began by looking up recent Ash Wednesday bulletins to see which Scripture lessons and hymns had been chosen in the past couple services. Between the bulletins and the suggestions in the United Methodist Book of Worship and the United Methodist Music and Worship Planner, I figured out which readings, hymns, and prayers I wanted to use. Starting about two weeks before Ash Wednesday I began spending time in the sanctuary and sacristy area seeing what items were available to put on the altar and what looked best. I found ashes from at least three different years plus last year’s palms (which I did not burn since there were plenty of ashes already)! And I found a beautiful three-piece candle set which I arranged around the bowl of ashes on the altar.

Another component was the schedule. I knew that before I became a pastor, both as a grad student and as a teacher, I had rarely been able to make my home church’s 7 p.m. Ash Wednesday service. There was often a conflict of some sort such that I had to find a church with an early morning service. So I suggested that we hold two services, one at 7 a.m. and one at 7 p.m. Folks liked my idea and the senior pastor just wanted to make sure I could do the 7 a.m. one by myself!

The last piece was the sermon. Last year’s bulletin had it listed simply as a “meditation” with no title and I repeated that for this year. However, I was stuck on what to say, whether to focus on sin or mortality or spiritual disciplines or repentance, etc. Inspiration (a.k.a, the Holy Spirit) struck when I taught Confirmation class the Sunday before. The topic was Epiphany and baptism and one student asked, “What about people who are baptized as babies or kids but who aren’t Christians as adults?” That excellent question became the starting point for my meditation about how John Wesley believed we can backslide and fall away from God. He did not believe “once saved, always saved.” Lent is a time when we’re intentional about turning back towards God and away from whatever is drawing us away from God. While the Gospel reading (Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21) talked about doing your pious works in secret, I explained that while we don’t boast about whatever we’re giving up or adding for Lent, we do live in community and sometimes we need that community to hold us accountable. So please ask someone next to you or one of your pastors if you’d like them to follow up with you during Lent to see how your spiritual discipline is going. We’re not in this alone.

Both services seemed to go well. I was at the church by 6:35 a.m. unlocking doors and turning on lights. 20 people came to the 7 a.m. service, including 7 under the age of 18. I promised we’d be done by 7:30 so folks could get on their to way to work or school and I was invited by a couple folks over to the coffee shop across the street because they knew I didn’t have anything I had to do at the church at 7:30 in the morning! I took a nap in the youth suite in the afternoon. 90 people came to the 7 p.m. service. Many people said that the meditation and the services were meaningful and holy. Two folks asked for accountability for their Lenten disciplines. I arrived home about 8:45 p.m. ready for bed!