Hunger

Old Testament: Deuteronomy 8:1-4

New Testament: Luke 22:7-23

People don’t live by bread alone.

There’s another kind of hunger – the hunger to connect – that pop culture explores with differing visions of a future apocalypse in which a few human survivors battle – you guessed it – zombies. “The Walking Dead” is one of the most-watched shows on television today, and it’s based on a very popular series of graphic novels. A Wikipedia list of zombie movies[1] shows countless films dating back to 1932, including several from the “Night of the Living Dead” and “Resident Evil” series, as well as “Abraham Lincoln versus Zombies,” “Ninja Zombies,” and one with the imaginative title, “Zombies, Zombies, Zombies!”

It seems our culture is experiencing a bit of an obsession with the undead these days. For example, everyone knows that, whether they are lightening fast or shamblingly slow, and whether they were created by a space invaders, ancient curse, or global pandemic, zombies are killing machines that feast on the living. They wander the earth, motivated only by a desire to eat, and to do so mindlessly.

At least, that’s what I thought until I saw the movie “Warm Bodies,” which came out a couple years ago. It’s the first movie I’ve seen that tells its story from the zombie’s point of view, through the eyes of its main character, R.

“I am dead,” he narrates at the outset, “But it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with it.” He is part of a group of zombies that have gathered in an airport and spend their days wandering from one terminal to the next, biding their time between hunting trips to the nearby city. R has a friend named M, and they have conversations that consist mainly of groans and awkward stares, infrequently punctuated by a question: “Hungry?”

R wishes he could speak more clearly. He wants to express the thoughts trapped within him. “In my mind I am eloquent,” he explains. “I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses. … it [makes] me sad that we've forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else's, because I'd like to love them, but I don't know who they are.”[2] This was not the mindless zombie I was prepared to see. This was a creature stuck in a meaningless life – or at least a meaningless “un-death” – motivated by hunger, yes, but moreso by the desperate desire to connect.

R is not unlike us in that way, we who hunger and thirst all too often for fame and glory and power; we who spend so much time glued to email and Facebook and iPods that we can easily forget the world – and people – around us. And yet there is someone reaching out to us, trying to get our attention, straining to help us experience a moment of grace in which we are filled by more than just bread alone.

Grace comes to R when he least expects it: in the middle of a feeding frenzy when he and his friends come upon an unsuspecting group of survivors. It’s there that his eyes fall upon a woman named Julie, and he suddenly feels something. The feeling stops him in his tracks, and he chooses to save her, rather than eat her, taking her back to the airport and protecting her from the other zombies. Over time, they come to trust one another, and R feels life – real life, not undeath – begin to return to him. Amazingly, his closest friends begin to experience the same thing.

Their hunger fades away as they discover that zombies do not live by brains alone. The color returns to their faces, they regain their vocabulary, their wounds begin to heal. The phenomenon spreads from zombie to zombie, and R realizes that, with the help of his friends – and Julie’s love – he may have discovered a way to heal the world.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, or what will happen when it’s done,” he says, “but at the very bottom of this rising siege ladder, at least I know … I’m not going to say good-bye [to Julie]. And if these staggering refugees want to help, if they think they see something bigger here than a boy chasing a girl, then they can help, and we’ll see what happens when we say yes while this rigor mortis world screams no.”[3]

I think there is something bigger to this story than a boy chasing a girl. Sometimes this does seem like a rigor mortis world. The news brings us daily reports of terrorist attacks, economic injustices, mass shootings – human frailty on an epic scale. One thing that makes Presbyterian worship services unique is that we always have a time for confession, because we recognize that our sin has reached epidemic proportions.

In the Old Testament, Isaiah says, “All of us, like sheep, have gone astray,” and in the New Testament, Paul says, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”[4] It can be hard to see the light, to make our way in all this darkness, to reach out and connect with God and with one another. One of the ways we fall short of God’s glory is by separating ourselves from each other.

At General Assembly this year, I was honored to vote in favor of adding the Belhar Confession to our Book of Confessions – the collection of documents that help guide us in our faith. This is the first document in that collection that comes from the Global South – it was written in South Africa, in the middle of apartheid.

It begins with a powerful witness to our continuing conviction that unity is central to our life together: “We believe in one holy, universal Christian church, the communion of saints called from the entire human family.” It goes on to affirm that Christian “unity must become visible so that the world may believe that separation, enmity, and hatred between people and groups is sin which Christ has already conquered, and accordingly that anything which threatens this unity may have no place in the church and must be resisted.”

We must resist the temptation to break away from others who look, act, or think differently than we do. We were created to be in relationship with all kinds of people, so that we could hear all kinds of voices, and thus, hear God’s voice more clearly. When we cut ourselves off from others, we cut ourselves off from God, and we start to get hungry. Because people don’t live by bread alone.

Jesus understood that kind of hunger – understood how people can starve to death – spiritually – and I think that’s why he decided that the last thing he’d do with his disciples was share a meal with them. He gathered them all together to eat the Passover meal – but he changed things a little. As he gave out the bread, he said, “This is my body.” And he blessed it and broke it. He told them that, every time they ate bread, they should remember God and remember how God feeds people. God feeds people by giving them food to eat, like in the scripture from Deuteronomy, and by giving them spiritual food – like Jesus’ teaching and presence and love.

We’re about to celebrate communion together, which means we’ll eat small pieces of bread to remind us of the ways God has fed us – the ways God is feeding us right now, in this place, in this act of worship together. Jesus tells us: “Where two or three gather together in my name, I am there among them.”[5]

Friends, we are gathered in Christ’s name. He is here among us – among us who sometimes feel like “The Walking Dead” – who are wounded, scarred, not sure we can go on. And in the midst of all this, he gives us his very self as food for the journey. In this rigor mortis world, let us dare to truly LIVE! In the midst of our fractured humanity, let us dare to connect. In the face of ravenous hunger, let us come to the table and be fed. This invitation is extended to all:

Those who have much faith and those who have little;

those who have been here often, and those who have not been for a long time;
those who have tried to follow and those who have failed.

Come, not because I invite you: it is the Lord.
And all who hunger can meet God here.

Amen.

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_zombie_films

[2] Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies. New York: Simon & Schuster, pps. 10, 4

[3] Warm Bodies, p. 106

[4] Isaiah 53:6, Romans 3:23
[5] Matthew 18:20