Vampires for Jesus

I went to church with Rachel Beth on Sunday. The church that one of her aunt's go to was having luncheon after the service, and Rachel and I decided that it was only polite to eat the food if we also attended the service. But this was not any normal church going experience for Rachel and me.

It was a very small church. When I say that the church was small, I mean it could seat 100 people, maybe. And in this particular service, there might have been 20 people if you include Rachel and me. And it was mostly elderly people. Rachel, her cousin, and I were the only people there under the age of 40. And a majority of the people were over 60.

It was a Methodist church, and Rachel was raised Baptist while I grew up non-denominational. So, we both knew that it wasn't going to be like anything we were used to. Though the church I went to in Chicago had me better prepared than Rachel was. Methodist practices, in my limited experience, include portions where the congregation repeats or recites something along with or back to the preacher. It's helpful for visitors to pick up a program on the way in so that they know what to say and when to say. Rachel and I did not have a program. That coupled with her aunt bringing us right up to the third row five minutes after the service began really got us off to a rocky start.

When we finally found the right hymnal to sing from, we at least were able to keep up with what was going on even if it was a little awkward. Then came time for the sermon. This service was special because the former preacher came back to give the sermon on this particular Sunday. Now, I've heard a sermon, or thirty, about the Lord's Supper and the meaning of Communion. But never, in my 22 years of life, have a heard a sermon about Communion that so clearly allowed me to understand where the myth of the vampire could have come from. That's right, I think it came from the Bible.

Before anyone says anything, I am not trying to bad-mouth anyone involved. I'm not trying to make light of the Bible or Communion. I am telling the story of the sermon that convinced me that Christians who believe in partaking in Communion are basically Jesus vampires.

The preacher comes up to the podium, and he says he's going to read from John 6. He says he'll be talking about Communion. At that point, I'm fine. Maybe I'll learn something new about Communion. I'm really trying to get something out of this sermon. I mean, I haven't been to church in a few months, so I'm really trying.

Now, if you don't know anything about Harry Potter, then this will mean nothing to you, but this man talked slower than Snape. The meme on Tumblr where Snape takes two text posts to finish a sentence has nothing on this man. He read three verses, without doing anything but reading the words, in 7 minutes. The verses were not that long. So, I'm starting to get antsy. This is going to be a long one.



Then I start really listening to how he's reading the verses. And I have never heard scriptures about Communion read so ominously. This is when I noticed that my imagination was making the verses more of a dark fantasy story. Not only were the verses sounding slightly gory as he repeated that we need to eat the flesh and drink the blood, but I was starting to picture people trying to bite Jesus. What can I say, my brain had to make it interesting. And I don't really know what version of the Bible he was using, but it sounded like he pulled a little from a few different versions and hoped no one would notice. Rachel said that it didn't even really line up with the Bible that she picked up from the back of the pew in front of us. Anyway, then the preacher grabs my attention back from people trying to take a bite out of Jesus by suddenly bringing up cannibalism. Turns out, my imagination wasn't that far off from the direction this sermon was taking.

According to this guy, the early Christians were worried about being viewed as cannibals because the Bible talks about eating flesh and drinking blood (The Lord's Supper). So, according to the preacher, Martin Luther had this metaphor about why Christians weren't cannibals. This is my simplified and shorter version, and it goes something like this:

If you have a glass of pure water, you cannot truthfully call it anything other than water. But if you take a spoonful of sugar and add it to the water, you can no longer truthfully call it water. It is more than that. There is something distinctly different about the water. It tastes different, looks different. It's changed. It's more than water. It's sugar water.

Don't worry if you're confused. Everyone in the congregation was too. And we didn't get an explanation as to what it meant either. We were supposed to just know. When I realized that he just moved on with his sermon without an explanation, I began to unpack the metaphor. This is what I came up with:

The water equals human. The sugar is God. The sugar water is Jesus. Jesus was more than just water/human. He was God in human form, therefore he was sugar water.

I proceeded to try to figure out how this could possibly relate to the sermon. Then, it dawned on me. We aren't cannibals because we cannot eat humans. Partaking of human flesh and blood is not what the Bible is talking about. It's talking about partaking of Jesus' flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the sugar water, more than just a human Jesus. Partaking of human flesh and blood does nothing for us. But partaking of Jesus' flesh and blood does. So basically, we are not to be regular cannibals or even regular vampires. We have to be the Jesus kind. We have to be Jesus vampires.

Now, during the sermon, I kept thinking of vampires rather than cannibals or zombies, but with every retelling of the story, I can't help but think that vampire doesn't encapsulate the whole set of verses like zombies do. Nevertheless, Jesus vampires is the story that I came away with in the moment.

Needless to say, I don't really know where the sermon ended up after the Martin Luther metaphor. When the service ended, we had a good meal. The regular preacher tried to recruit Rachel and me for her congregation. She wanted to get some younger people in the church, but she never did come out and say it. And she wasn't successful. It's nothing against the church. Rachel is just too Baptist, and I will not be able to go into that church without thinking about Jesus vampires.

I hope you enjoyed the story of the Jesus vampires, and maybe even learned a thing or two. Oh, and I promise that I was completely sober when this story came about. This is truly what I took away from the service.

<3 Amber Marie