First Parish Bedford UU

A Christmas Reflection
“Rise, Zombies, Rise!”
by Rev. John E. Gibbons
Delivered on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2010
At The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

UU minister Clarke Wells once devised a 12-point quiz on how to tell if you are dead.  If you agree with the sentiment expressed, use your fingers and toes to keep score.

I don’t like the city
I don’t care what happens as long as I’m left alone
I don’t get angry
I don’t get excited by beautiful women or men
I don’t like conflict
I don’t judge other people, no matter what
I don’t feel guilty
I don’t feed birds
I don’t like children
I don’t feel overwhelmed by anything
I don’t like the country (I assume he means the countryside not the nation but whichever)
I don’t sing

Now count ‘em up.  “If you checked all 12,” Clarke says, “or more than 7, Congratulations! You’re dead!  And without all the added fuss and expense of going to a mortuary.

If you checked between 3 and 7, Congratulations anyway! You’re comatose, on the way!

If you checked 2 or less, sorry, I offer condolences.  You’re alive, with all the inconvenience that entails.  To improve your score you might try hanging around doornails or sleeping in a refrigerator.”

A quiz to tell if you are dead is, of course, absurd and I suspect most of you failed this quiz but it is a nagging human fear – and awareness - that we too often but pass for living and only appear alive.

Please forgive the persistent absurdity but one of the oddest of popular fascinations – something that boggles my mind - is our contemporary cultural – is it a love affair? – with vampires and with…zombies.  Sadly, you heard me correctly.  I promise you I’ll get back to Christmas Eve, but this is all the rage.  Someone went into a bookstore last week and reported to me that many featured books are about vampires and, especially, zombies.  I really do not want to get into it but zombies, I’m told, are the new vampires. 

Just last Sunday here I introduced myself to a newcomer, the partner of someone who has often been coming to church.  “You haven’t seen me before,” he explained, “because I am a zombie.”  He offered no further explanation…his expression was deadpan…and, yes, I took this in stride – this is, after all,  Bedford – and I assured him we have an affirmative action program for zombies. 

But what is this about?  (This just in: The Walking Dead, a TV program on AMC, has been renewed for next season.  How could it not be?)

Some suggest that we live in a deadened sleepwalking culture, inured to violence, with nameless faceless dangers, prolonged morally ambiguous wars, deep ecological anxieties, inexplicable malevolent economics, and a mean and predatory politics that is immune to reason and to human agency.  In this world, Time Magazine reported recently, “zombies are sort of familiar territory.”

There is a nagging human fear – and awareness - that too often we but pass for living and only appear alive.

Whatever the contemporary zeitgeist, this fear is timeless and personal.  Another colleague in ministry, Max Coots, reminds us:

It’s the little deaths before the final time we fear.
The blasé shrug
That quietly replaces excited curiosity,
The cynic-sneer
That takes the place of innocence,
The soft-sweet odor of success
That overcomes the sense of sympathy,
The self-betrayals
That rob us of our will to trust,
The ridicule of vision, the barren blindness
To what was once our sense of beauty –
These are the deaths that come so quietly
We do not know when it was we died.

We gather tonight because, knowing as we do how fearful and deadened we can be, we need assurance that the birth of that which is new, good and hopeful in our lives and world is yet possible.

In their book Proverbs of Ashes, UU theologians Rebecca Parker and Rita Brock recount how Christian theology has perverted the Christian story, the story of Jesus.  In the first centuries after Jesus, the birth narratives – you know, tonight’s Christmas story – were far more prominent than the crucifixion story, that of Jesus’ death on the cross.  The crucifixion story, they explain, has been used to justify violence and used to sanctify suffering, most often the suffering of women.  What would it be like if the birth story – the Christmas story – were the preeminent story of Christianity?

Religion is not always enlivening:

Unitarian minister Theodore Parker once remarked that it took the Egyptians only 70 days to make a mummy out of a dead person, but that it only takes Harvard Divinity School three years to make mummies out of the living. His friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, added that it took only a few Sundays to mummify those forced to listen to their sermons.

Whatever your affliction or condition, tonight is a night of, for and with the living.

Last month, with the UU Service Committee, I traveled to northern Uganda where was waged a 20-year war, elsewhere mostly forgotten.  Now in the aftermath of war, much of what I witnessed testified to the persistence of life and the human spirit, how amidst unbelievable and seemingly unforgivable atrocity, hope is yet born again. 

In Kampala, we visited the UU church that has stood in courageous opposition to the Ugandan government – heavily influenced by right-wing American evangelicals – that would make being gay a crime punishable by death.  Meeting with LGBT members of that church, we heard of the jobs from which they have been fired, the homes from which they have been driven, and the beatings they have suffered.  The name of the Kampala UU church is the New Life Church.
Would that be our name as well.

New life is what we celebrate tonight, what we know breathes – not just in Jesus but also in us.  Folks, sometimes we all feel deadened and zombie-like, numbed and mummified, that our best days are behind us, that what we do does not matter or signify, that against the panoply of empire, crises foreign and domestic, imprisoned, afflicted, outcast and stranger, our heartbeat is faint and our breath shallow.

We are waiting for a rebirth of wonder….  But how?

It is told of a Zen Master who had done a painting for the King’s palace that when the King wanted to see it, he would say, “Wait a little longer.”  Years passed and the King repeatedly asked, “Isn’t the painting ready yet?”

The Master said, “The painting is ready, but you are not.  Existence is always ready.”

But the King insisted.  They entered the room and the painting was breathtaking! – three dimensional – the hills, the valleys and a small path going somewhere inside.

“Where does the road lead?” asked the King.

The painter said, “I will go and see.”  And he entered the path and disappeared beyond the hills.

That is how wonder is reborn.  You move into life.  You don’t stand outside it and ask where it goes.

A small snail set out one winter morning to climb the trunk of a cherry tree.  As he moved upward, a beetle poked his head out of his hole and advised him, “You’re wasting time, my friend, there aren’t any cherries up there.”  But the snail did not stop moving a second.  “There will be when I get there.”

And the last words are those of the great Howard Thurman:

All around worlds are dying out, new worlds are being born. 
All around us life is dying and life is being born:
The fruit ripens on the tree;
The roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth
Against the time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms, green fruit.
Such is the growing edge!
It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung,
The one more thing to try when all else has failed,
The upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor.
This basis of hope in moments of despair,
The incentive to carry on when times are out of joint
And [people] have lost their reason; the source of confidence
When worlds crash and dreams whiten into ash.
The birth of a child – life’s most dramatic answer to death –
This the Growing Edge incarnate,
Look well to the growing edge!

Wait no longer for a rebirth of wonder.  Move into life.  Don’t stand outside and ask where it goes. 

Oh, and recall that last item on the quiz to tell if you’re dead.  Even and especially in the bleak midwinter, you’ve gotta sing.  Rise, zombies, rise!