Is Jesus a Zombie?

 

Service of Worship

Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church

October 3, 2021

World Communion Sunday

Rev. Natalie Bowerman, Pastor

 

Prelude

 

Greeting and Announcements

 

Mission Statement: We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ.

 

Call to Worship

We gather today, seeking the peace Christ gives.

We gather, in spite of many a conflict, many a doubt, within our souls.

We gather, longing for the breath of God’s Spirit to give us courage and renewal.

Come, Christ Jesus, be our guest. Bless us through the power of your Spirit and give us the courage to live as your disciples day by day. Amen.

 

Hymn 519: Lift Every Voice and Sing

 

Lift Every Voice And Sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered;
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.

 

Prayer of Confession:

O Holy One, we call to you and name you as eternal, ever-present, and boundless in love. Yet there are times, O God, when we fail to recognize you in the dailyness of our lives. Sometimes shame clenches tightly around our hearts, and we hide our true feelings. Sometimes fear makes us small, and we miss the chance to speak from our strength. Sometimes doubt invades our hopefulness, and we degrade our own wisdom.

Holy God, in the daily round from sunrise to sunset, remind us again of your holy presence hovering near us and in us. Free us from shame and self-doubt. Help us to see you in the moment-by-moment possibilities to live honestly, to act courageously, and to speak from our wisdom. Amen.

 

Assurance

 

Friends, hear the good news: God sees you, God forgives you, God affirms you, and God loves you no matter what. Amen.

 

Anthem

 

Luke 24: 36-43

Jesus Appears to the Disciples

36While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”

37They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. 38He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? 39Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”

40When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. 41And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” 42They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43and he took it and ate it in their presence.

 

A Message

“Is Jesus a Zombie?”

 

Friends, after an absolutely wonderful summer of “Stump the Preacher”, here we are at the very end. We have only three weeks left of these delightful topics, requested by you, and researched by me. I love you guys. Thank you for your inventive minds, thank you for your deep and courageous faith, thank you for being you.

 

If you looked at this week’s bulletin, or just right up at the screen, and saw this Sunday’s sermon title, know that I intentionally pushed the envelope of comfort this week: Is Jesus a Zombie? If that sounds super sacrilegious to you, it is, but hear me out first. I’m going to explain what in the heck I mean by that in just a minute, but y’all need some deep context first.

 

There’s a lot of fuel behind the request for this week’s sermon. The man who suggested it in the first place last spring is a dear friend of mine, and a fellow Methodist clergy person. His name’s Joel, and he serves two congregations near Troy. In part, I’m taking one for the team for Joel, and exploring something he’s not in a position to because his two churches are quite a bit more buttoned up than this one and wouldn’t be able or willing to hear any part of this question. Not right now, anyway. But more than that, I’m inviting you all to hear a perspective that we rarely even think about in these walls, and that’s the perspective of those on the outside of them. The people we might call the “unchurched” or “dechurched” or “nonreligious” or “nonchristians” or even just plain “nones”. People who don’t belong to this or any church, and who don’t intend to join one. People who have all kinds of reasons for why they aren’t religious, or at least for why they don’t publicly practice that religion, and who aren’t part of this culture.

 

And you might not think of it that way, but we have a culture here in church. Each of our congregations has one of their own, United Methodists have one that fits us, and northern mainline Protestants in general absolutely have one. Things that fit right in among us. Our loveable quirks. And boy do church people have quirks. Wooden pews with plush cushions, and people who bring their own cushion from home on Sundays because they need that extra back support. Rummage sales that everyone gets really charged about. Bulletins that musn’t be changed lest you invoke the anger of that one person who really loves Times New Roman font. A hymnal with hundreds of tunes in it and yet oddly we have a safe list of 50-60 “good hymns” that we get shy about wandering outside of. Coffee hour. Even when we don’t have coffee because of covid, do you notice how we cluster in small groups and mingle after worship anyway? And of course, the one piece of church culture that describes us better than a single stroke of ink in the whole Bible, the ritual we cannot survive without, arguably the third sacrament of the United Methodist Church: the chicken barbeque.

 

This is our world, and we love it, and love one another within it. That is all as it should be. But it’s one that many veered far away from long ago and can’t see themselves ever fitting into again. And the disparity we can see sometimes between people who feel right at home here and people who don’t want to be anywhere near here can best be experienced by reading my Facebook feed on Easter Sunday. The majority of my “Facebook friends” are clergy, married to clergy, besties with clergy, or current and former parishioners. So my feed joyously fills up with pictures of the lilies adorning your church altar, pictures of your kids in the Sunday best, pictures of egg hunts and Easter baskets, videos of your choir singing, and many videos and posts celebrating prophetic Easter sermons.

 

And then there’s my friends from high school and college. My two sisters. Coworkers from previous secular jobs. And rather than all that fancy Easter talk, they share with me an inside joke of the unchurched that pops up every single year: “Happy Zombie Jesus day!” If you don’t live in this world, if you don’t belong here, and especially if you’ve been hurt here, then you don’t rejoice on one of the two days set aside by the whole world just for us. You share your grief by taking a giant stab at our theology that very boldly declares that a dead guy came back to life. Doesn’t that make our Savior a zombie? How ridiculous are we?

 

Do you feel that divide? If that zombie Jesus joke offended you, before you brush it off, or turn off your ears and stop listening to this sermon, hold on to that feeling of hurt for just a second. Just sit with it. That feeling of “Ugggh…I can’t believe she said that, that feels really bad. What’s wrong with her?” That feeling of contempt and disgust, that feeling of wanting to get far, far away from the source, is just a taste of what some of our unchurched friends feel when they see our buildings, when they hear our faith talk, or when we invite them to church.

 

It’s not surprising that we rarely hear the perspective of an unchurched person here. After all, many of us here, myself very much included, are so deeply entrenched in church life that the idea of not belonging to any church at all is just unfathomable. I’m a third generation United Methodist. I can hardly imagine what I’d do on a Sunday morning if I wasn’t here, and when I go on vacation and suddenly have no obligations on Sunday at 10am the void makes me so anxious I usually have to fill it with someone else’s church service. And in the days of online worship I’m the nerdy clergy lady who opens up my Bible to read along with the liturgist on my phone screen, and who opens up my personal copy of the hymnal and belts out the soprano line in the kitchen. My life is built around this life. My family rides the waves of change right along with this denomination. My kids have their own personal supply of cardboard boxes and bubble wrap because they’re so used to moving with their itinerant Mommy. And yet, that other perspective, that of someone who doesn’t come here and really isn’t super curious to ever check us out, is right there, just at the tips of my fingers. Because I’m a churchy girl. I’m a Wesley nerd. But I’m also a millennial. And, of course, we can’t paint any of this with a broad brush. But, by and large, the people who feel least at home here, the people most alienated from our fold, and the people most likely to ridicule us as zombie worshippers are millennials and those who came after us.

 

A research group called the Barna group conducted a study on the relationship between millennials—people roughly my age, born between 1980 and 1995 or so—in 2007, that they followed up on in 2015. They presented some sobering statistics. Among those of us who grew up in a church, 60% of us have left it. 30% of us believe church is not at all important in our lives, and 40% of us say church is only kinda important. 40% of us feel we can find better find God elsewhere. 35% of us experience church as completely irrelevant to our lives. 31% of us think church is just plain boring. And 20% of us feel like God isn’t here. Only 8% of us wish church was cooler and more hip. So before you start thinking that what we want here is a rock band and really cool lights and an atmosphere that feels more like a rock concert, that ain’t it. We want what you want. We want to feel the Holy here. And most of us don’t.

 

And our pain with the state of the Church runs rather deep. 35% of us grieve moral failings in church leadership. 87% of us think Christians are judgmental. 70% of us think Christians are insensitive to other people. And a whopping 91% of us have experienced homophobia in the Church.

 

That’s where we are right now. That’s the depressing news. And you already know most of that intuitively just from looking around you. This is the pain of the thinning pews, the empty nursery and Sunday school rooms, the people who are still here but aren’t getting any younger and who are feeling more and more burnt out as they take on more jobs, more committees, more of the weight of the institution with no one around to come in and help.

 

That’s where we are right now. But it’s not where we need to stay. Us young’uns don’t want to feel estranged from the Church. We don’t want to feel estranged from Jesus. Unfortunately, when you couple up your personal relationship with Jesus with your relationship with your church, and your church hurts you, it can feel like Jesus really hurt you, too, and drawing into his presence can feel like an invitation for more harm. That crack about him being a zombie is one of the softer jabs I’ve heard, there’s far darker, far sadder, far angrier words for the Divine ascending from the mouths and keyboards of those whose hearts were broken here. People need to voice that grief, however it comes out. Trust me, y’all heard me call Easter “Zombie Jesus Day” a few minutes ago and you’re ok. You can handle being the compassionate ear for someone’s story. Because sitting in the ashes of our institutional failings, seeing the mess the Church makes on its many bad days, and proving that not only can we face it but we’re willing to clean it up is how our Church is going to grow again.

 

And there’s a lot of room for growth. Millennials want it. They want a safe experience with the Divine. 44% of us, when we give church a chance, are here to feel closer to God. 37% of us want to learn more about God. 65% of us want our church to provide us “a place to find answers to live a meaningful life”. 54% of us still believe a relationship with a church matters. There’s strong evidence that the Church is finally starting to reach millennials after a few painful decades of alienating us—49% of us feel like we can be ourselves here. And 60% of us believe it’s ok to have doubts here.

 

There’s a huge opening here for healing, for reconciliation, for your kids and grandkids and their friends to start coming here again. But we need y’all to hold that door open and take a step outside of it to help us up, because, to quote Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, “that first step’s a doozy.”

 

When asked what images of a church felt inviting, and like something we’d be curious to check out, 48% of us liked a picture of a small group of people at a Bible Study. Personal connection to faith, real relationships with other believers, room for exploration and curiosity. That’s what we thirst for here. 33% of us liked a picture of a growing flower for our church. It’s like what we sing in “Hymn of Promise”, “In the bulb, there is a flower…unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.” We don’t want to think we’re perfect here, we want to think we’re all growing together, or “striving toward perfection” in the words of John Wesley. Interestingly, we don’t relate to popular images of the church as a hospital for sinners, or a health club where we’re all on faith tread mills together. We don’t have to heal our sicknesses or shed pounds of inadequacy, we want to grow into our identities in Christ, and to love the beauty within us and our neighbors that God always knew was there. That is the Church we want to be part of.[1]

 

To answer the actual question that Joel posed, no, Jesus is not a zombie. Jesus is not an undead scary monster that wants to devour your brain. More to the point, the Church, and our collective faith in it, is not a zombie. Not yet. Our Church has not descended to the point of being the monster, the villain, the antagonist, the one who eats your brain instead of letting you use it in the sanctuary. Though there’s plenty of room for well-deserved criticism, Jesus isn’t done with us yet. He’d just like to see us act more like him, and love more like him. He doesn’t want us prim and poised, holed up in our pews with our hands neatly folded in our laps, believing that the people who aren’t here will find their way in eventually as long as we pick the right bulletin font, make the pew cushions fluffy enough, warm up the coffee, and announce the date for the next chicken barbeque in the local paper. He wants us to pick up the chicken barbeque, bring it, and the love we put into it, to the person who’s still scared to give us a chance, and meet a new friend where they are. This day, which happens to be World Communion Sunday, is the perfect day to remember that Jesus didn’t draw any boundaries around where the work of the Church should begin and end, and neither should we. We only grow when we, like Christ, rise up from our demise and show our neighbor something they’ve not seen before.

 

Amen.

 

 

Hymn 560: Help Us Accept Each Other

 

1.     Help us accept each other as Christ accepted us;
teach us as sister, brother, each person to embrace.
Be present, Lord, among us and bring us to believe
we are ourselves accepted and meant to love and live.

2. Teach us, O Lord, your lessons, as in our daily life
we struggle to be human and search for hope and faith.
Teach us to care for people, for all not just for some,
to love them as we find them or as they may be come.

3. Let your acceptance change us, so that we may be moved
in living situations to do the truth in love;
to practice your acceptance until we know by heart
the table of forgiveness and laughter's healing art.

4. Lord, for today's encounters with all who are in need,
who hunger for acceptance, for righteousness and bread,
we need new eyes for seeing, new hands for holding on:
renew us with your Spirit; Lord, free us, make us one!

 

Offering, doxology, and prayer of dedication

 

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

 

Gracious God. God of Love. God of Comfort.

You are indeed our Everything – you’re a shelter in times of storm,

You are the Alpha and Omega,

You are the God of the angel armies.

Thank you for your pure goodness toward us.

Thank you that you did not just arrive to meet us on this Sunday, but you have been with us all week long.

We confess that we have not loved you with our whole being, nor have we always loved our neighbors as ourselves. Forgive us for how we have judged our neighbors, cursed our enemies, been critical in ways that are unloving, been silent in the face of injustice, and put more confidence in ourselves than in you. We ask for your forgiveness when we have said cruel and unacceptable things in certain settings that we hoped would never be heard by those outside of those settings. Forgive us for our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Draw near to those who are brokenhearted, doubtful of your power and presence and in need of healing this morning.

As we embrace this season of autumn, may we not only be mesmerized by the changes in the colors of the leaves, but we plead that you would heal the eyesight of the colorblind.

Set the captives free; please give us beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and a mantle of praise for the spirit of heaviness.

As time is filled with swift transitions and disheartening death,

Teach our hearts to find rest and comfort in you.

Give us strength to submit to your pruning – trusting that you cut away at our lives that we might bear more fruit unto your glory.

May your Spirit blow afresh upon us in this season – moving us not simply to the right or to the left but forward in hope, peace, and justice.

Cover and strengthen our pastor. Give him/her wisdom and a word, protection, and peace.

Bless your church – that we may be the people you've created us to be and do the work that you have called us to do.

Teach us to be the people Isaiah prophesied about when he said, " hey shall build up the ancient ruins, they shall raise up the former devastations; they shall repair the ruined cities, the devastations of many generations” (Isaiah 61:4, NRSV).

In your mercy O Lord,

Hear our prayers.

In the name of the one who gave his life, so that we might know God, abundance, and life eternal. Amen.

 

Our Father, Mother, Creator God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen.

 

The Lord’s Supper

 

The Lord be with you.
And also with you.
Lift up your hearts. .
We lift them up to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give our thanks and praise.

It is right, and a good and joyful thing,
always and everywhere to give thanks to you,
Father Almighty (almighty God), creator of heaven and earth.
You formed us in your image and breathed into us the breath of life.
When we turned away, and our love failed, your love remained steadfast.
You delivered us from captivity, made covenant to be our sovereign God,
and spoke to us through your prophets, who looked for that day
when justice shall roll down like waters
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,
when nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.

And so, with your people on earth and all the company of heaven
we praise your name and join their unending hymn:

Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

Holy are you, and blessed is your Son Jesus Christ.
Your Spirit anointed him to preach good news to the poor,
to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
and to announce that the time had come
when you would save your people.
He healed the sick, fed the hungry, and ate with sinners.
By the baptism of his suffering, death, and resurrection
you gave birth to your Church,
delivered us from slavery to sin and death,
and made with us a new covenant by water and the Spirit.
At his ascension you exalted him
to sit and reign with you at your right hand.

On the night in which he gave himself up for us, he took bread,
gave thanks to you, broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said:
"Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you.
Do this in remembrance of me."

When the supper was over he took the cup,
gave thanks to you, gave it to his disciples, and said:
"Drink from this, all of you; this is my blood of the new covenant,
poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.
Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me."

And so, in remembrance of these your mighty acts in Jesus Christ,
we offer ourselves in praise and thanksgiving
as a holy and living sacrifice, in union with Christ's offering for us,
as we proclaim the mystery of faith.

Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.

Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here,
and on these gifts of bread and wine.
Make them be for us the body and blood of Christ,
that we may be for the world the body of Christ, redeemed by his blood.

By your Spirit make us one with Christ,
one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world,
until Christ comes in final victory, and we feast at his heavenly banquet.

Through your Son Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in your holy Church,
all honor and glory is yours, almighty Father (God), now and for ever.

Amen.

 

 

Hymn 617: I Come with Joy

 

I come with joy, a child of God,
forgiven, loved, and free,
the life of Jesus to recall,
in love laid down for me.

I come with Christians far and near
to find, as all are fed,
the new community of love
in Christ's communion bread.

As Christ breaks bread and bids us share,
each proud division ends.
The love that made us makes us one,
and strangers now are friends.

The spirit of the risen Christ,
unseen, but ever near,
is in such friendship better known:
alive and among us here.

Together met, together bound,
by all that God has done,
we'll go with joy, to give the world,
the love that makes us one.

 

Benediction

Our God, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer, will guard our going out and coming in from this time on and forevermore. And as all God’s people we say together, Amen.

 

Postlude

 

 

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[1] The Barna Group. “What Millennials Want When They Visit Church.” www.barna.com/research/what-millennials-want-when-they-visit-church/. First published March 4, 2015. Site visited October 2, 2021.