Interviewing a Vampire

This is a brand new series about the Vampires in our lives. A “vampire” as we know it in Twilight and Buffy and Blade may be mythological or folkloric; however, the literary idea of it isn’t. A vampire allegorically sucks the life essence of people, generally in the form of blood. If that is the case, then trust me, we all have vampires in our lives. I could probably name them, but I won’t. They’re not the ones with pale skin and blood-thirsty fangs – but they DO suck the life out of us. They live in your city, across the street and maybe even under your own roof. So how do you love the people who drain you? How do you handle your dysfunctional relationships? How do you make it work when all you want to do is run? It’s time to learn how to hug a vampire. There are some people who wake up in the morning and think about you, or try not to think about you and when they do, they feel more and more like they want to die or that they’ve died and gone to hell. I know most of you won’t believe me, so I take our journey to Facebook, the great sociological tool created to diagnose our friends with DSM 5 category social diseases. I read somewhere online, because I don’t have any real books anymore, that there are 16 types of people on Facebook. Luckily, I’m not there because I was hacked and lost control of my facebook and so had to deactivate it. If you get a facebook message from me, don’t click it because it’s probably a virus. But really, I’m not going to talk about the 16 types of people, just the ones that sucked the life of going into facebook in the first place.

1. The documentarian: Always updates us on what they are doing and who they are doing it with, no matter how arbitrary. I know, we can all deal with this, it’s not too bad. So let’s get going.
2. The Victim: Every post revolves around someone hating them, and they swear people are trying to ruin their life.
3. Foodie: They have made it. Now that the biggest dilemma during their lunch is the choice of an Instagram filter, life is good. We eat vicariously via their photos. Another take on this type is taking pictures of homemade food. Usually taken by single people, who are trying to convince the rest of us, they are datable after all.
4. First Time Parent: Don’t confuse it with someone, who is already on the Offspring no 2 or 3. The first time parents should have a network of their own, where they could swim in the juices of their own awesomeness. It always seem like they suddenly joined the sect of “we know something you don’t know”, and have a secret radio frequency only accessible to people with children.
5. The Close Ups Only Person:
6. The Creepy person
7. The Optimist: If life gives them lemons, they won’t talk about them on the Internet. They love their friends, they love their job, they love prancing in fields of flowers and sunshine, and more than anything, they love telling us all about it. Cue the rest of the Internet vomiting.

Yes, I categorized all these people as?? That’s right – vampires in my life. But really, there are real vampires in my life and I’m sure they exist in yours as well. Let me describe some to you:

1. Woe is me – you ask how he or she is doing and you don’t have the thirty minutes to spare to hear about how the muffin he or she left on the countertop last night was eaten by ants.
2. then there’s the person in your life that just keeps taking and never gives back. They just take all your resources and takes your resources and takes your resources.
3. To follow that up, there’s a third type of vampire – it’s the person that feels entitled to things and then complains about the entitlement that they never earned. What is that?
4. Finally, what about person in your life that want your time? They just want your time and they only want your time when it’s convenient for them, so they don’t value your time.
5. Let me continue, there’s that person that starts something but never follows through, so you’re left holding the bag and you have to do your work and the other person’s work.

See, all these people I’m talking about are vampires! They suck the living souls out of you. But at the same time, if you look at these things carefully, they also serve as an accurate self assessment of me, sucking the life out of you. Today’s message is entitled: “An Interview with the Vampire.” If you don’t get where I’m going with this, I’m talking about me. I’m the vampire. I suck the life out of people by my sheer existence. And guess what, so do you! You’re somebody’s vampire. I want you to hear this and say this with me: Loving the people who suck the life out of you starts with realizing how much you suck too. Tell your neighbor right now, “you suck the life out of me, and I suck too!” ²¹ So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²² For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; ²³ but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.²⁴ What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?– Romans 7:21-24 Let me tell you something about vampires. When I say vampires, I mean you and me, as individuals—sometimes we don’t realize why we do the things that we do, and if we did realize that the things we do were life draining, we may be inclined to stop, but alas, we’re too ignorant to realize this, so we just suck the lives out of ourselves and the lives of the very people around us until they hate us. If you don’t think its true, the person next to you is lying! Worst of all, the person within yourself is lying to your superego. How did I get to that conclusion? That’s very simple, not only is that what’s being said in verse 21, but it’s being referred to in this entire chapter. Verse 8 says, “But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.”  Further in verse 11, “For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.” The translation of this is simple: the reason we’re vampires, sucking the life out of ourselves and of the people around us is because we realized that we’re entitled to live by some type of code of ethics and laws and rules. The thing about know that is that we try our best to live by it and in living a life trying not to break the rules, we find ourselves bending all of them little by little because we can! Not because we want to, but because we can do so without “hurting” people and that’s what hurts people intrinsically. Does that make sense? Let me bring this back to the Garden of Eden because there is shadowing here of the fall from the Garden. Genesis 3.  ⁴ But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. ⁵ For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” ⁶ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. ⁷ Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. This is what is going on in our hearts every single moment. We allow ourselves to be deceived, number 1; but number 2, we get this attitude, because we learned something, thinking the college degree that was printed on an overpriced piece of paper gives us independent latitude or some nonsense like that, makes encroaching upon territory not ours to begin with a little bit easier! This is how we suck the life out of people. Let me bring this back to the passage in Romans we were looking at, verse 22. What we want is to be protected from other people by God’s law, and at the same time we don’t want that law to be applied to us because we’re knowledgeable and wise. This is a double standard that makes us vampires. This is why so many people hate religion and having faith because they want to hold the double edged sword and double standard that they hold against everybody but they themselves fail to realize see what they’re holding. We’re all vampires because we all are born with this defiance mechanism by which we thrive by sucking the life out of people because of how we emote hazardously. We’re vampires because like verse 24 says, “we’re wretched!” The description of conflict between grace and corruption in the heart becomes the fight of our lives in our every day. I want to tell you one thing, because I know this is what you’re thinking because I’m thinking the same thing: why does evil prevail? It prevails, and this is post-modernist thinking: because that’s what life is. There is no happy ending for the masses and the idea of religion is outdated and flippantly disrespectful of people because a saved person suffers too handedly and too easily are we found to be guilty. Nobody wants that perfection. This is why all of us are strangely drawn to share or not to share or illogically share our lives on social media. Because we are aware of the insecurities within ourselves but we poke fun or we minimize it by fanning it to the rest of the universe. Knowing all this in verse 24, Paul concludes: Who will rescue me from all of this? Let’s go to 1^st Timothy 1. ¹⁵ Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. ¹⁶ But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his immense patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life. ¹⁷ Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. – 1 Timothy 1:15-17 If we are the worst offender. If we would accept the fact that we are the premiere vampire in our own lives, then just then, maybe can we realize that we need to love others because we were loved despite of it. Paul tells Timothy that he was loved, not because he was perfect, but because he was sucking the life out of God’s people, and that’s why God loved him and chose him. The reason he tells this to Timothy is because if this is the example God wanted to give to people whose lives are being sucked out by the people around them, then it’s pretty obvious that they would look within themselves and realize before their salvation and their current failure of a regeneration, they were bad. Maybe not murderously bad, but bad in other ways. As a result of this badness that we are being saved from, we are being saved ever so more. We love others best when we realize we were loved by God for being a vampire. This summer, we’re beginning the summer and I want to try this fresh and new and start changing our community, can we love others without any hesitation or grumbling? Knowing that they are putting up with you in love so you treat them with real love. I’ll tell you this because some of you know, deep down inside, you don’t deserve the treatment you receive, and it’s not because you’re better than the treatment you receive, it’s because you’re really worse than you want to give credit for. You are the vampire sucking the life out of everybody around you. It’s about time you and I realize that. Once you realize that, you do just like Paul did—cling to the hope of God through Jesus Christ because he saves you in your wretchedness. Let’s pray.