When I was growing up the term “Zombie” didn’t refer to a flesh-eating corpse, it referred to someone who was kind of zoned out. Like someone who was really tired, or lazy, or just kind of out of it. For instance our basketball coach might have said, “Quit acting like a bunch of zombies and get out there and score some points.”
But that is not what people are talking about when they mention zombies now. Zombies are kind of a big deal in our society today. Personally, I don’t really understand the appeal, but between video games, movies, books and television shows, zombies are all over the place. Fictionally speaking of course.
I guess our society has always had a bit of a fascination with things like zombies, vampires, ghosts and mummies. Back when I was growing up, the Ghostbusters movies were a big hit. And before I was born, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, and Boris Karloff made careers out of playing creepy surreal characters like Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolfman, and the Phantom of the Opera.
But we don’t need to turn to the movies or television to find a story about a corpse coming back to life. Actually, the Bible contains for us some of the most incredible, unexplainable, larger-than-life stories we could ever imagine.
For instance, this Sunday at The River we will be taking a look at the story of Jesus raising a man from the dead. When I picture this story, I actually picture the kind of scene we might see in one of those mummy movies, where the mummy comes walking out of the tomb all stiff and restricted because of the burial cloths. But this story is not just something we might see on a movie screen, it’s real. You can read about it in the Bible (John 11). And come on out to The River this Sunday to find out more about this amazing story.