I remember one time a long time ago my Dad told me that he used to like to go to horror movies, until he started having bad dreams so he decided it was time to quit.
We spent many Saturday afternoons together watching all those classic B grade horror movies on television on Shock Theater.
I suppose that predisposed me to having an interest in the horror movie genre.
Every few years I get up my courage or stupidity and try to sit through a matinee.
The last one that I went to, that I shall not name, I lasted about ten minutes and I ran from the theater in a disturbed state.
Things have changed from the days of Shock Theater.
Part of my abiding interest in these kinds of stories has to do with how sin, death and evil are portrayed in the popular mind set, but more deeply I am interested with how we cope with and overcome sin, death and evil.
Sometimes the exaggerated nature of horror movies makes a point.
The subgenre of zombie movies is a good example.
That first great zombie movie from the 1960’s, the black and white film, Night of the Living Dead portrayed this infection that was spreading through the world where people who were dead become sort of alive, and people who were alive become all dead or mostly dead.
It imagined a world full of people who were barely alive, mostly dead wondering around aimlessly killing and eating.
It was a pretty tame movie by today’s standards, almost qualifying for Shock Theater. I have noticed a good number of zombie are still being made, but I doubt I could live through the opening credits, so I won’t be seeing them, but the point is still the same that death is spreading consuming the living.
These movies have been called parables of the modern world, a world where so many feel dead inside, wandering aimlessly consuming and spreading. A world where that certain something is missing, that something that makes for really being alive is absent.
A dead world.
That is how John’s Gospel sees the world, dead and dying, full of the living dead who are only half alive, the light has almost gone out.
The Light and Life of the world has been cut off or rejected or lost or forgotten.
Jesus walks into the story and a small group of people suddenly realize that they have been dead a long time and didn’t even know it, suddenly they see the world full of the living dead who have lost the essence of being alive. Like in that Movie the Seventh Sense when that little boy says, “I see dead people.”
The disciples of Jesus wake up from the fog of death and begin to live for the first time, because the light, the life, the essence has returned to the world. That is the world according to John’s Gospel, that is Jesus according to John, Life itself is paying a visit and Life is taking hold and spreading, sort of the anti-zombie story.
Today’s Gospel lesson is during Jesus’s goodbye speech, as the disciples have to face the prospect of Jesus leaving, a devastating thing to consider, life itself is leaving, how can they go back to being dead inside all over again, especially having known now what it is to be alive?
Jesus comforts them by saying that the Spirit of truth will be with them, the advocate, the comforter, the helper, the counselor, the encourager, the exhorter. He promises the Gift of the Spirit.
In John this is different than the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost in the Book of Acts, which comes fifty days after Easter, when there was the sound of wind and fire sparked upon the disciples, giving them the ability to speak and hear many languages.
In John Jesus first appears after his resurrection and he breaths on them, giving them the power to forgive sin.
When we hear of Jesus breathing on the disciples we are to hear and remember from the Creation in Genesis when God breaths into the man made of dust of the man comes alive.
When Jesus breaths upon the disciples he is breathing life into a dead world and the world comes alive, created anew, resurrected from the dead. In John the gift of the Spirit is the beginning of the resurrection of the dead, the dead begin to live for real and true.
Today he promises this life giving event.
And those who are fully alive are those who love and forgive, it is a dead infectious thing to do otherwise.
So here we are still caught up in a world that is so much like a horror film, praying for spirit, and breath and love and forgiveness, still waiting to know what it means to fully live, still feeling like a dead thing so much of the time.
We will celebrate the gift of the Spirit of Life in two weeks, we look forward to our liturgical observance of that event, we celebrate something in the past longing for it to be so in the present.
The life giving power of the Holy Spirit does not promise happy faces and sunshiny days, it promises conflict with the force of death at loose in the world, conflict with all that is not love, conflict with all that is not forgiveness.
To become alive in God is to be in conflict with a world that clings to death.
Do we want just a little spirit?
Just enough to feel good, to love a little, forgive a little, just enough to be a little alive without disturbing our comfortable sleep and life style, or is it a death style? We do cling to this dead thing don’t we?
Becoming alive can be a scary thing.
Like waking from a bad dream, when the night is almost spent, and the morning is just about to tumble across the earth.
That is where we are, on the cusp of a night mare and waking, on the cusp of the night and the dawn, on the cusp of being dead and becoming alive, on the cusp of indifference and love, on the cusp of resentment and forgiveness.
The tipping point, and God is pushing us over the edge.
It’s a great movie, we should all see it.
There are some scary parts, but I hope I’m not giving away too much, it has a happy ending.