Month: February 2019

Order of Worship (3): Proclamation

February 28, 2019 / Trent / 2 Comments

If the liturgy is a dialogue between God and his people, in the Proclamation section God does most of the talking.

God speaks to us primarily through his word–the Bible. The sermon is an encounter with, not just the Bible, but God as revealed in its pages. What we find in the Bible is a collection of ancient texts that were written for us, but not to us. The Bible is a story. That’s not all it is, but it helps us to understand how to approach it. It is not our story, but it is the story in which we live, not just Christians, but all of humanity. It is a story centered on Jesus Christ–the Word as spoken of by John in the first verses of his gospel.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Prayer for Illumination

Rituals are not empty, they are full in the sense that they train us on the deepest level. What sort of training is provided by the weekly repetition of the prayer of illumination? It trains us how to approach the Bible. This prayer is an admission that we need God’s help, to understand what we find in scripture, an admission that we can’t rely on our own reason and knowledge to understand. This is an acknowledgment that the Bible is a book that must be read with spiritual assistance–the Holy Spirit.

This prayer focuses our attention beyond ourselves as readers, indeed, beyond the text to our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Word of God. In this prayer, we anticipate the working of his Grace through our encounter with the text. In a real sense, then, we are preparing for a supernatural event.

The Sunday Prayer of Illumination will change how we approach daily devotions on Monday, for it is a reminder that the words of the Bible are a site of miraculous encounters.

The Sermon

The sermon is, or ought to be, about the Bible.

What is the Bible?

What the Bible isn’t is an encyclopedia, or an instruction manual for life, or a rule book. It’s hard to resist looking at the Bible in these ways because our cultural default is set to view everything as an object that might have a use.

In a recent Tweet, Tim Keller said, “It is impossible to understand a culture without discerning its idols.” This applies to our culture as well. And one of our idols is Reason. Rationalism is the idea that the best, or even only, way to know things is through human reason. Our confidence in human reason has taken some blows in the last century, but we still stubbornly hold onto our faith in it. It is so powerful that it has effected how we read and understand the Bible.

As Christians, we believe that the Bible is true. As Westerners, we believe that truth is an object of human Reason. The Bible, then, becomes nothing more than an object that we study and use as rational subjects. We look for “applications,” instead of implications. We get too wound up about biblical inerrancy. But truth is much bigger than fact or useful information. The Bible becomes something more like an encyclopedia than a story, or a poem, or a painting. As Western Christians we must resist this limited notion of Truth.

So what is the Bible?

Rather than give a long rational treatise on what the Bible is, let me do what the Bible does and offer a picture of what a sermon, rooted in the Word, can be.

The image is found in Ezekiel:

37 The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. ²He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. ³He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.”

⁴Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! ⁵This is what the Sovereign Lordsays to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. ⁶I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”

⁷So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. ⁸I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.

⁹Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” ¹⁰So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army

We are dry and lifeless. The Word of God, preached by inspired human authors, brings life. God could himself speak directly to the bones, but he chooses an intermediary–Ezekiel. He uses the preacher before us.

This image presents the Word, not as an object that we approach as rational subjects, but as active agent. We are the passive pile of dry bones–we are the object; the Holy Spirit is the subject. He brings life though the hearing of the Word. God is active in the sermon.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Do we listen to the sermon to learn about life or to receive it? The former is a happy by-product. The sermon is not the reflections of a pastor. It is an act of Grace, and we receive the life that flows from it. #sermon #preaching #liturgy” quote=”Do we listen to the sermon to learn about life or to receive it? The former is a happy by-product. The sermon is not simply the knowledgeable reflections of a pastor. The sermon is an act of Grace, and we receive the life that flows from it.”]

Order of Worship (2): Confession

February 16, 2019 / Trent / 0 Comments

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

In some churches, there is only an occasional song of confession, but somebody usually includes a confessional element in a prayer at some point, but confession isn’t a very big part of what I call modern, non-liturgical church services.

Confession is important. It is about sin, and sin is a big thing in Christianity. We all sin more or less continuously, so we need to repent again and again. And when we do so honestly and regularly, we get a much better picture of who we are. And how much we need forgiveness.

In the traditional liturgies of most denominations, we practiced confession weekly, and in this repetition, garnered long term beneficial effects. These benefits are derived from turning our love toward God, through ritual. Rituals have the power to shape our identities, and if we are not deliberate, cultural liturgies will shape them instead.

The Law

The liturgical worship service is structured around a dialogue between God and his people. God calls us and Greets us, we respond with praise. Then God speaks through his word; we are reminded of God’s expectations for us in the reading of the Law. This is often the Ten Commandments, but there are many suitable passages, like Micah 6:8. The point here is that we need to be reminded that God has expectations, and we have failed to live up to them. We are disobedient and rebellious.

Thus, we need to repent.

Call to Confession

We are called to confession. We have to be called because we don’t really want to do it. True confession is hard because we have to look at who we really are. An honest look at oneself does not happen easily. We might need some practice–maybe even a thousand cracks at it. But if you deliberately practice confession in church every week, it will begin to be a daily rhythm, and you’ll be good at it in less than 20 years.

The call to confession reminds us that what’s wrong with the world is not out there somewhere but within me. I need a reminder, especially if I look at social media occasionally. The sins of others are so obvious on Twitter. The call to confession repeated weekly can begin to remind me that I am the problem with the world.

Until we realize that our biggest problem in life is not out there, but in us, we haven’t really come to a Christian understanding of reality. The repetition of ritual helps us to accept this reality in ways far deeper than intellectual consent. This is the power of ritual.

Prayer of Confession

If confession is just a mention in a prayer by the worship leader, then I might quickly confess the first sin that comes to mind. I can usually remember one. But, this is inadequate. I have committed a lot more sins than this one. Then there are the sins of omission. Then there are the sins that I would have committed in different circumstances. All of these damn me.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Our appreciation of God’s Grace is proportional to the degree we understand our need for it. #Grace #Sin #Confession #Liturgy” quote=”Our appreciation of God’s Grace is proportional to the degree we understand our need for it. “]

Our appreciation of God’s Grace in Redemption is proportional to the degree we understand our need for it. The only way for us to understand our need for God’s salvation is to meditate on our sin, and then confess it.

This past summer I was in England and I worshiped in Anglican churches. Praying in unison each week a prayer of penitence from the Book of Common Prayer is a moving experience when you attend to the words. Here’s an example:

Most merciful God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we confess that we have sinned in thought, word and deed.

We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves. In your mercy forgive what we have been, help us to amend what we are, and direct what we shall be; that we may do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with you, our God.

Amen.

Ritual Confession

“But if you confess every week it is no longer moving, or special.”

We overemphasize experience in our culture–in church, we have a danger of emphasizing religious experience. Occasional experiences don’t shape us as regular ones do. The function of the liturgy is not to be new and special, but to shape us into a particular people. To conform us to reality, if you will.

It’s almost a given that we must avoid “empty ritual.” But what we must realize is that there is no such thing. Rituals are full. We give a child a quarter to drop into the collection plate every week. We insist a child say the words, “I’m sorry,” even when they clearly don’t mean it. These are important things to do, for they shape the identity of the child. The shaping isn’t intellectual–in the head–nor is it a changing of the heart. In Desiring the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith says that routines and rituals affect us in our gut or bones.

We are shaped into a certain kind of people by a liturgy of confession.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”The ritual of confession reminds us of two things–it reminds me that I am no worse than anyone else, and it reminds me that I am no better. #liturgy #Confession #Grace” quote=”The ritual reminds us of two things–it reminds me that I am no worse than anyone else, and it reminds me that I am no better.”]

Then, in the dialogue of worship, God speaks again.

Assurance of Pardon

As difficult as confession is, before we even start the confession, we know what’s coming. Amazing Grace. The assurance of pardon.

Human sinfulness is a big deal in Christianity, but God’s pardon and adoption into his family is the other half of the story. Both should, then, be a significant part of our weekly gathering.

God’s pardon is really good news. In the Old Testament, regular blood sacrifice established a pattern of purification. Sacrifice was God’s way of removing human uncleanness so that people could be restored to fellowship with God. The sacrifices reinforce the idea that death is the penalty for sin. But it’s clearly an act of Grace that God even allows for a substitute. Old Testament animals functioned as a substitute death. The inadequacy of these sacrifices is evidenced by the need for repeated sacrifice.

The death of God himself on our behalf is a once and for all sacrifice for our sake. We do nothing to earn it. It is a free gift. We do nothing but open our hands and receive it.

At this point in the liturgy, God gives pardon. And we receive. Repeated every week we become persons and a people of Grace.

In the prayer of confession, we come to realize and admit that we are in a hard place. We cannot save ourselves. We are unworthy to be anywhere near a holy God. When we get honest about our sin, we come to an understanding of how much I need Jesus, and then we experience his Grace.

Response of Thanksgiving

We confess, God pardons, and then we express gratitude.

This is to be the pattern of the Christian life. Like inhaling and exhaling.

But in order for this to become the pattern, it needs to be reinforced.

If we don’t practice it weekly, we won’t ever get the hang of it. We will spend a lifetime not knowing ourselves, and worse yet, not knowing the extent of God’s Grace.

Occasional confession is a liturgy of omission. A church that occasionally confesses is not much better than one that never confesses. The repetition is where the shaping occurs. The church that has a significant confession element every week will more effectively disciple the people into experiencing a pattern of confession and forgiveness that will alter their lives. The Sunday confession models the prayers we can offer on Monday and beyond.

If your church does not practice regular Confession and Assurance, is it time to consider including it in our weekly worship services? If it does, allow the power of ritual to turn out love towards God.

The Order of Worship (1): The Call to Worship and Greeting

February 13, 2019 / Trent / 2 Comments

pixagod / Pixabay

When I was a kid, Sunday church services were interminable. I thought that it might be a lot easier to endure if I had some idea as to where we were in the service. So I asked my dad, the pastor, if he could write out the service elements, in order, onto a piece of paper so that I could track along. I reasoned that the long bits, like the congregational prayer and sermon, might be easier to suffer if I knew where we were in relation to the end.

Being the child of the pastor, I thought I had privileged access to this information. He chuckled and showed me last week’s bulletin. There it was–The Order of Worship–a list of all the elements in the worship service. It had been there all along, for just anyone to follow. So every Sunday, I followed along and found that the church became less arduous when I knew where we were.

I discovered something else–every service followed the same pattern. The order of worship wasn’t this week’s order. It was every week’s order. Eventually, I didn’t need to look at the bulletin. I always knew where we were and the pattern became a comfort.

The Pattern of Worship

For a long, long time, all Christian church services were liturgical. They followed a regular and predictable pattern. Even after the huge disruption of the Reformation, services were still governed by a liturgy regardless of denomination.

I am only speaking from my own experience, but I began noticing some congregations were abandoning formal liturgies in the late 80s. I started seeing church signs announcing “Liturgical Services” at a different time from the “Regular Service.” Now we have lots of these modern, non-liturgical churches.

These have a very simple order of worship. If they did publish one, it would look something like this.

Songs

Sermon

Songs

I’m being a little facetious because there are a few prayers and an offering, but these events have been shortened and are now rather streamline. It should be noted that the songs will sometimes connect to elements of the old liturgy they’ve supplanted–songs of praise certainly, sometimes confession or Thanksgiving or even a re-worked apostles’ creed–but when we rely on songs to carry these liturgical elements, they are no longer weekly occurrences and this is significant.

I suppose we’ve simplified things so as to avoid confusing visitors to our Sunday service. After all, many of our neighbors are no longer familiar with church. This may be reason enough to keep the Order of Worship simple.

But perhaps we’ve lost something. Through the liturgies we practiced and learned together important patterns that are meant to shape the way we live out lives.

An Active God

What does God do during the church service?

In the modern, non-liturgical churches it is easy to get the idea that God doesn’t do very much. At least little is implied about his actions. During the songs, he might be sitting there listening and smiling. And what does God do during the sermon? He is of course speaking, but do we frame the sermon in such a way as to leave the congregants no doubt that it is not just the preacher who is speaking? Are the faithful are allowed to think God is listening indifferently–after all, he knows it all already. How many people would say that His attention is drawn to another church somewhere else in the world that happens to be singing at the time because God likes the singing part the best?

In modern, non-liturgical churches, it’s easy to think that the people are the main or only actors in the Sunday service. We arrive, we sing, we pray, we listen, we eat and drink and then we leave. (There is another scenario, which is a concern for worship leaders, were only the worship band is active, and the rest passively consume, but this is a topic for another day.)

God merely receives human worship.

Passivity is not a characteristic of God as presented in the Bible. The passivity we attribute to him is a product of secularization. In the West, we have created artificial categories between physical things and spiritual things and then we marginalize the spiritual things. The Western church is not immune to secularism. Lot’s of people still believe that God is there, but they aren’t really sure what he does. It seems like he’s a long way off, no doubt hearing our prayers, but is he really acting on them? Christians influenced by Modernism experience a narrowing and weakening the presence and power of transcendent things in the immanent frame.

By stepping away from traditional liturgies, we’ve not eliminated liturgies, we’ve just adopted new ones. If we haven’t been deliberate, we’ve simply replaced tratitional liturgies with secular ones. Thus promoting and perpetuating secular ideas through corporate worship.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Some churches are promoting secular ideas through corporate worship because they’ve replaced traditional liturgies with secular ones. In secularized Christian worship, God is passive. Agency lies primarily with people. #worship #liturgy ” quote=”Some churches are promoting secular ideas through corporate worship because they’ve replaced traditional liturgies with secular ones. In secularized Christian worship, God is passive. Agency lies primarily with people.”]

Habits and Rituals

Habits, rituals, and liturgies are important. They shape how we think and they shape who we are. We can ritualize God’s passivity and the weekly repetition will eventually shape how we think, and even who we are. God’s passivity won’t just stay in church, we will eventually come to think of God as passive in our lives and in the world as well.

The converse is also true. If we shape our worship service around God’s active interaction with his people, this idea will leak into Monday and beyond.

Traditional liturgies shape worship as an active dialogue between God and his people–(all his people, not just the ones with instruments.)

The Call to Worship and God’s Greeting

The first words the worshipers hear in the service are important. At one service, the first words I heard were,

“I want to thank you all for coming to church this morning.”

Seriously?

Who greets us? This greeting is all about the actions of the worshipers. We have decided to come to church this morning. Apparently with some inconvenience, for we have earned gratitude from somewhere. Who owes us this gratitude? The worship leader? God? Does God owe us something because we chose to come to church instead of watching the first half of the football game?

The Call to Worship suggests that someone is calling. It is God himself who draws us to church. He gets the first word. We are not there because we chose to be there; we are not there because our parents made us come; we are not there because we are trying to impress that cute girl with our religious zeal; we are not there because this is what we always do on Sundays. We are there because God has drawn us there.

Our bodies are there, but where are our hearts and minds? The call to worship marks a turning toward worship, toward the throne of heaven, toward God. The preceding week was full of joys and challenges involving relationships, obligations, worries, and diversions. In the call to worship we are turned from ourselves, toward God.

And The Greeting is his.

What kind of people do we become if we are regularly thanked for deciding to come to church? What kind of people do we become if we repeat, week after week, God’s active calling to corporate worship?

Acts of Praise

Next comes an act of praise. Our action follows God’s action.

Importantly, this act of praise is not the result of the worship leader asking us to stand and sing nor is it caused by the first cords of music. Praise is the result of our attention being directed toward God.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Praise is not the result of the worship leader asking us to stand and sing. Praise is the result of our attention being directed toward God. #Worship #PraiseandWorship” quote=”Praise is not the result of the worship leader asking us to stand and sing. Praise is the result of our attention being directed toward God.”]

This may not be automatic for everyone. But it’s what the liturgy teaches through repetition. With ritual repetition, this will eventually come to be our natural response.

To make the Sunday worship service just a bunch of human activity, well, that’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit without Roger Rabbit. Our Sunday worship needs to show God’s activity because he is active. If we can’t see what he does in Church, how can we see him as active in our lives, let alone the world?

God doesn’t just sit up in heaven waiting for Sunday when some people will sing songs at him. A weekly reminder that God calls us to worship will begin to change how we view ourselves, the world and the God who sustains it all.

The Meaning of Monsters

February 1, 2019 / Trent / 0 Comments

jplenio / Pixabay

I have this theory about monsters and what they mean.

Although they are antagonists, they are not the same as villains. They are much more interesting. Heroes are about what we want to be. Villains are what we don’t want to be. Monsters are what don’t want to be, but we might be anyway whether we like it or not.

Heroes and Villains

Heroes are our ideal. They represent our best selves. They stand for what we want to stand for as a group. They have the characteristics that we value, and wish we had more of. Heroes are always courageous because this is a universally admired characteristic. Heroes tend to defend the innocent and the collective good. We normal humans don’t always do these things, but we like to think of ourselves type of person who would. We project all this awesomeness onto our heroes.

Our heroes change because we change. The great hero Beowulf bragged about his heroic exploits. Today, we’d find his sort of arrogant pride to be villainous, but Anglo-Saxon listeners loved boasting if you could back it up. When the great Achilles wasn’t harvesting Trojans, he could be found weeping by the seashore. For Greek audiences, this wasn’t a sign of weakness, but passion–a virtue, until he took it a little too far; the Greeks also liked a tragic flaw.

Villains are the opposite of heroes. They have qualities and characteristics that we castigate. Villains break promises or they are cowards or they threaten the lives of the innocent and the virtue of women. They possess the characteristics for which we punish our children. Not all otherness is a threat. Villains represent the bad side of “otherness.”

And so we have a fence around our identity. Within the fence, we find our people and the values we espouse. What lies outside the fence is otherness–other people and the values that we don’t hold, some of which we reject.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Heroes are how we see ourselves, villains are the opposite, and monsters represent the nasty bits of ourselves we’d rather not admit to. #Heroes #Villains #Monsters ” quote=”Heroes are how we see ourselves, villains are the opposite, and monsters represent the nasty bits of ourselves we’d rather not admit to. “]

Narrative Identity

Philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) describes the relationship between narrative and identity suggesting that when we tell our stories, we are clarifying our identity. Stories constitute the identity of individuals, but the mechanism is the same for collective identities.

Ricoeur suggests that identity is revealed through the interplay of two competing forces within narratives. The first force presses on the narrator to represent his role in the story in a way that is consistent with his view of himself—this Ricoeur calls the “demand for concordance.” We like to think of our identity as having some permanence, so we are compelled to tell our stories in a way that is consistent with this idea we have of ourselves.

The second force at work in the recounting of past events is what Ricoeur calls the “admission of discordance.” This force presses the teller to accurately represent himself in thought, word, and deed.

These two forces are not always in concert. Sometimes how we think of ourselves is inconsistent with reality. A small divergence can be easily suppressed, but small divergences can build up and large ones are not easily ignored. The discordant force threatens the supposed permanence of the teller’s identity. The competition between these stories can create tension in our narratives. It is out of this tension, says Ricoeur, that his identity is shaped and expressed.

Let me tell you a personal story that which illustrates this dynamic.

A True Story

When I was around 19, I went to a midnight movie with three friends, Jim, Marylou, and Stewart—I think the movie was Animal House. After the show, I stopped briefly to chat another friend in the theatre lobby, so I left the theatre alone a few minutes later. As I stepped outside, four guys in an old car aggressively pulled up to the curb and, completely unprovoked, flipped me the bird. Without thinking, I responded in kind, then turned to walk down the dark alley in the direction of the car.

I sensed that I might be in some danger when I heard the car doors slam behind me. I knew they were coming when I heard the sounds of pursuit behind me. I picked up my pace, just a little. I didn’t need to go any faster because I saw that I would make it around the corner before they caught me.

My friends were ready. Jim had already told MaryLou to get into the car and lock the door. He stood leaning against the car, waiting. Stewart had taken off his jacket and was lighting a cigarette. I don’t know how they knew what was happening but, I was glad they did. I turned and prepared to meet the threat, with fists if necessary. It’s all we had, and I hoped it would be enough.

My would-be assailants, thinking they would catch a vulnerable victim, rounded the corner at a run, eager for blood. When they saw that it was going to have to be a fair fight, they slowed to a walk, nodded, said “Hey,” and kept walking past us.

The Demand for Concordance

I’ve told this story many times, and it’s the same every time. When I analyze these events, it’s not to hard to find some tension between the demand for concordance and the admission of discordance.

I think of myself as a nice person and a peacemaker. I am good at navigating around conflict. In my recounting of the above story, I suppressed those little things which were inconsistent with this identity as I saw it. I didn’t really behave like a peacemaker when I returned the obscene gesture, but I soften this inconsistency by describing my attackers as aggressive and my role in this altercation as, merely unthinking. But there is an even more powerful challenge to my identity than the one against my peacekeeping ideals.

Am I a coward?

In my narrative, there is no mention of the fear I felt at the time, but I was scared. This omission is a result of my reluctance to admit the possibility of cowardice. I don’t remember if there were four or three attackers, but I went with four because it excuses the fear that still clings to this memory. In the retelling, I emphasize that I picking up my pace was strategic, and not out of any fear. Their unwillingness to fight even with numerical superiority transfers cowardice onto them. Lastly, I don’t know if Stewart calmly lit a cigarette and, although I think Jim leaned against the car, I’m not sure he was that casual. These details suggest a calm in my friends, which is transferred to me by association. I also remember trying not to hurry, but was I as successful as my story recounts? There is no lie here, just nuance that comes from the demand that my story concords with my held identity.

It is conceivable that new experiences would reveal that I was not a peacemaker, or I was in fact, a coward. If this turned out to be true it would have gotten harder and harder to admit this discordance relative to me self-understanding.

This can happen on a collective level as well.

Here is where the monsters come in.

When Monsters Attack

Monsters show up–with any kind of strength–only under particular circumstances—when our collective identity is in crisis. When the stuff we’ve been suppressing begins to create weak points in the boundaries between the “us” and otherness. The monster is what prowls around the fence and attack it at its weakest point. The weak points of our identity are those places in the boundaries of our collective identity where we begin to lack certainty about who we are. The parts that are getting harder to suppress. Discordance that is beginning to demand admission.

The fascinating thing about monsters is they don’t simply represent otherness. This is too simplistic. Monsters are the projection of uncomfortable possibilities. The monsters that intrigue us, the ones that, again and again, find their way into our stories, are the ones that most directly challenge our understanding of ourselves. By their very presence, they ask us the questions that, deep down, we have already been asking ourselves—Is this really who you are?

[click_to_tweet tweet=”The hero is what we are, or at least want to be. The villain is what we are not. Monsters are the embodiment of what is perhaps the truth that we want to suppress. They appear as the suppression begins to fail. #Monsters #Heroes #Villains” quote=”The hero is what we are, or at least want to be. The villain is what we are not. Monsters are the embodiment of what is perhaps the truth that we want to suppress. They appear as the suppression begins to fail.”]

Our Monsters

The Greek’s had the Minotaur and Medusa. The Anglo-Saxons told stories about the monster of the moors and marshes, Grendel and dragons. Demons and witches terrorized the medieval identity. Later came Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman, and the vampire who attacked the boundaries of Modern identities.

Each of these monsters terrorized a particular cultural identity that was in crisis. If Anglo-Saxon storyteller had conceived of Frankenstein’s monster and, the next night in the mead hall, told his story about a creature made from corpses, he’d receive an awkward silence and some puzzled grunts from his Anglo-Saxon audience. Such a monster would not have intrigued them, and the first telling would also have been the last.

Monsters scare and fascinate a people because the monster is tailor-made for that culture. Its form is the embodiment of particular doubts about who we are. It attacks the fence that surrounds our identity at exactly the point where it is the weakest. This is why we can learn a lot about a culture by studying its monsters.

This is why we can learn a lot about ourselves by studying our monster—the zombie horde.