George Romero, the iconic founder of the zombie genre was once interviewed. In response to the question, “How long are you going to make zombie movies?”; he said something like… “As long as the American masses are swayed by the politics of fear and ignorance, responding like a mass of mindless zombies, consuming everything and all in their path, I’ll make zombie movies…”

Far from horror, zombies are about us!

“My stories are about humans and how they react, or fail to react or react stupidly.  I’m pointing the finger at us, not at the zombies.  I try to respect and sympathize with the zombies as much as possible.” – George Romero

One of my favourite zombie movies is Warm Bodies, a redemption story of humans and zombies at war.  It’s about a weird, unlikely relationship between a woman and a man who has eaten the brains of her boyfriend and is consumed by memories of her.  This relationship of love transforms both of them.

My favourite scence is where he rescues her from a zombie attack…

“Be Dead… Too much…”

It’s about being dead in order to stay alive.

Zombies are the ‘undead’. These are the unfortunates who have been zombified by disease.  Their spirit is dead but their bodies continue to function: they are helplessly driven to seek the flesh and blood of others, reducing them, too, to the dreary existence of the undead.  They are people in need of redemption but their only hope is to be allowed to die.

We who have been allowed to die in baptism have been redeemed from the world of the undead: we might style ourselves, to continue the metaphor, “the grateful dead.”

Today, as is our custom, we are invited to mark ourselves with the sign of death, the sign of the cross made with the waters of baptistry.  In doing so we identify with the death of Jesus.  Be Dead… to stay alive…  (too much!?)

Today we too come eat the body and blood of Jesus, we too consume a meal of memory.

To live the life after death, emerging from the camoflauge of lives lived quietly in an unbelieving world to be seen for who we are, the firstfruits of an age to come, the beginning of a new humanity set free from anonymous, impersonal, death denying processes, to serve the living God.

Friends, the death and new life which is the peace of Christ be with you… and also with you.