... or it could be just the movie’s plot.
That is how we tend to think of the “walking dead,” though: Zombies. How else would it be? Dead people do not get up out of their graves and just walk away ... like nothing ever happened to them.
Or do they?
In a week packed with Halloween, All Saints Day, Dia De Los Muertos, and the 500th Anniversary of Protestantism; what’s a person to write about? Well, I guess some people are going to write about Martin Luther, the Wittenberg door, and the Reformation. But, as you probably already noticed, I’m going to write about dead people ... and walking.
All of the All Saints Day Lectionary readings reference that time when Jesus will return, when we will “be like him,” when the saints will gather in heaven and stand before the Throne of God. This is “the resurrection” at which Martha believed she would once again see her dead brother Lazarus. But Jesus tells her, “I am the resurrection.” Then, he proceeds to raise her brother from his grave to rejoin the living, right then.
When “the resurrection” is standing right next to you, there is no need to wait for the last day for people to return to life. Throughout the New Testament, we see Jesus (and, later, the apostles) return dead people to life ... and those people walk. But the strangest resurrection episode takes place during the three days in which Jesus is dead (Matthew 27:50-53). Immediately after Jesus died, graves opened and the “holy ones” returned to life. But that’s not the end of it: after Jesus’ resurrection, these “holy ones” walked into Jerusalem and “appeared to many people.”
It was a for-real “dia de los [walking] muertos”; another miracle awaiting that first Easter morning to take a stroll.
Shocking!
I’m certain it was even more shocking, then, when some of them encountered people they had known in their previous life. Accepting that the power of Jesus to raise the dead was so great that it blasted out into graveyards at the moment of his death, I note that it wasn’t everyone who came back to life. Who, then, were these so-called “holy ones”? Don’t think of them as ascetics who had lived their lives in retreat from the culture of their day.
No.
The Jewish understanding of holiness was not a passive one, but rather a very active one. Yes, “holy ones” were to be separate and distinct. But they were expected to interact with their culture, permeating it like light ... or perhaps, salt. To be “in the world, but not of the world,” to borrow a phrase we often hear, even in these most post-modern times, to describe how christians are supposed to live out our spiritual walk —to walk the walk, nor just talk the talk— until we reach our destination.
To —in much the way we are to love God— love our neighbors as ourselves ... our holy selves.
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Table of Readings: https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu//lections.php?year=A&season=Season%20after%20Pentecost
READINGS FOR THE COMING WEEK
All Saints Day (November 1, 2017)
Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
1 John 3:1-3
Matthew 5:1-12
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PROPER 26(31) November 5, 2017
Joshua 3:7-17
Psalm 107:1-7, 33-37
Micah 3:5-12
Psalm 43
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
Matthew 23:1-12
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Photo credit: The link is to a fun zombie-based —and amazingly accurate— representation of how to actually manage your time while balancing the urgent vs the important. http://www.livehard.co.uk/important-vs-urgent-time-management-zombie-apocalypse-style/
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Can you join us Friday morning at Lectionary Breakfast? We gather at 8:00 in the “Waco “Egg and I” function room (at the back, around the side) for food, fellowship, prayer ... and some quality time hammering out how to use the scriptures to ensure we walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
Blessings,
Steve
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