"In the Midst of Wolves," the senior sermon of James Medley, Class of 2008 from the Diocese of Southern Virginia, given on February 7, 2007, in Christ Chapel

Luke 10:1-9

“See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves”.

When I was about ten, I discovered a program called “Shock Theater with the Bowman Body”. An overweight, balding, middle-aged man wearing black clothes, cape, and white converse tennis shoes played the Body, a vampire. The program came on Saturday night at midnight and ran until about 1:30 and the Body would introduce old horror movies, and have a little shtick at commercial breaks. Looking back on it, thirty odd years later, most of the movies were awful and most of the Body’s shtick wasn’t all that funny, but at the time I felt I had died and gone to horror movie heaven. Every Saturday night, I waited with anticipation to see the lid of his coffin open and his sneaker-clad foot stick over the edge and hear the Bowman Body say, “Hi, horror movie fans”! I can still remember it.

Now, I’m not talking about Jason, Freddy, Chucky, let’s throw a bucket of red paint on the camera and call it a day kind of horror movies. I’m talking about the good old black and white, suspenseful, let’s leave most of the blood up to your imagination, type of horror movies. Movies like, “White Zombie”, “Devil Bat”, “Cat People”, “King Kong vs. Godzilla”, “Plan 9 from Outer Space”, okay, that one was the worst movie ever, but you get the idea. My favorites were, and still are, the classic four of “Dracula” with Bela Lugosi, “The Mummy” and “Frankenstein” with Boris Karloff, and “The Wolf Man” with Lon Chaney Jr.

“Even a man, who is pure in heart and says his prayers at night, may become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms and the autumn moon shines bright.”

That quote is from The Wolf Man, a Universal Pictures release of December 12, 1941; a light-hearted, family film that premiered just in time for Christmas. It’s the story of a man who has been estranged from his family for a number of years but returns to his ancestral home after his brother’s death. He’s a nice guy, a good man and he wants to make peace with his father, with the memory of his brother; he sees his brother’s death as an opportunity for growth, for change. He gets more change than he bargained for.

You see, this man is taking a walk with a girl one night and a wolf attacks them. More accurately, a werewolf attacks them. The man, Lawrence Talbot (played by Lon Chaney Jr.), is infected and becomes a werewolf. Eventually, after he kills a few people, Talbot is hunted down and released from the werewolf curse by his death. It’s a great story. It’s about change, about things being turned upside down, about life turning out differently than anticipated, ultimately it’s about salvation. Talbot doesn’t want to be a monster, doesn’t want to harbor the monster within him; he wants to be saved. But he cannot free himself, through his own power; he must be saved by something outside himself. He can only be freed from the wolf by death.

“See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves”. We, all of us who are followers of Christ, not just seminarians, (I hate to break it to you but we aren’t that special) are sent out as lambs; defenseless, dependent, weak, to pronounce peace and proclaim the kingdom of God. Christ tells the seventy, tells all of us, to proclaim the kingdom of God. To do that, to proclaim God’s kingdom, means to take good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor; that is proclaiming God’s kingdom. We are called to proclaim release from the power of the devil and we are called to proclaim it among those that do the devil’s work, the wolves around us.

Funny thing is that, like Lawrence Talbot, we are lambs that have the wolf within; we are the wolves around us, we are monsters if we depend only on our own strength to free ourselves, to proclaim God’s kingdom, to pronounce peace, to heal the ills around us. Eventually, under the full moon of our fear, or greed, or lust, the wolf within us bursts out and we shed our lamb-like exterior to become ravening beasts whose actions do nothing to proclaim God’s kingdom. Instead, the wolf howls for the kingdom of this world and turns it’s back on the peace of God. When we depend on ourselves to be free of the wolf within, we become the beast we fear.

We cannot free ourselves. Like Talbot, our only hope of freedom lies in death, a death on a cross. Not our death, but the death of the one lamb that does not have the wolf within. If we allow it, that death frees us from the wolf, from the power of the devil, and we can be sent out as lambs in the midst of other wolves and proclaim to those still in the thrall of the beast that the kingdom of God has come near. We can proclaim to the wolves that they need no longer be imprisoned by the drives of the monster, that through Christ’s death and resurrection, the wolf within can be slain, so that the lamb in us may live.

Through the death and resurrection of Christ, our wolves are slain and we find salvation. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, our wolves die daily and we are reborn each day in the image of the lamb. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, we find strength in weakness, power in dependency, love in defenselessness. Through the death and resurrection of Christ, the kingdom of God is proclaimed.

“Even a man, who is pure in heart and says his prayers at night, may become a wolf when the wolf bane blooms and the autumn moon shines bright.”

There are wolves around us. There are wolves within us. But we are sent as lambs, weak, dependent, defenseless, into the midst of wolves, carrying nothing but our faith, through God’s peace made strong in our weakness, stronger than the wolf, because through the death and resurrection of Christ the kingdom of God has come near.