At the beginning of Ephesians 2, St. Paul writes about the walking dead. “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live…” “Live,” translated literally, is “walk,” Paul’s favorite metaphor for daily life. Spiritual death was once part of daily life for the people to whom Paul was writing.

Just who are the walking dead? Those who are separated from the life of God. In what sense are they dead? They are dead in the sense that they cannot interact with God, cannot respond to him, nor can they sense spiritual stimuli.

Maybe this will help us get the picture. A greedy man dies, and his body is laid out in a casket at a local funeral home. Everyone knows that he was the greediest person in the county. Let’s say his son walks up to the casket and puts a Powerball ticket for the biggest lottery jackpot in history in his hands. Then he watches him closely. But he won’t bat an eyelash; he’s dead to it. Elon Musk comes to the funeral and offers him one hundred million dollars to get up; he doesn’t move a muscle. To be dead is to be unresponsive (and unable to respond) to stimuli. A dead book-lover won’t care if you put a Shakespeare first folio in his casket. A dead baseball fan won’t mind if you take the 1953 Mickey Mantle Rookie card out of his pocket. To be dead is to be unresponsive to stimuli.

A person or animal can be dead to one kind of stimuli and alive to another. A mouse can be alive to the cookie it finds lying on an abandoned math book, but dead to the calculus on which it sits. (So can a high school student.) A politician can be alive to you during the campaign and dead to you once he is in office.

When Paul says that people were “dead in transgressions and sins” he means that they were dead to God. They may have been alive to other things, but they were dead to God. They couldn’t respond to Him—couldn’t hear when he spoke, couldn’t receive the grace and mercy that he offered.

To the spiritually dead, spiritual things are invisible and inaudible. If you could put someone who is spiritually dead in heaven, he would not appreciate it. He wouldn’t see it, smell it, taste it or touch it. He would be utterly dead to it, like the greedy man to the lottery ticket.

(This, by the way, is why it is silly for people to blame God for not allowing everyone into heaven. It would be like someone blaming you because you refuse to allow him to bring the body of his dead friend to your next dinner party. How dare you turn people away!)

 Paul is saying that these people were spiritually dead. They were unresponsive to God. They couldn’t hear him, see him, feel his touch or taste his goodness. They were dead in “transgressions and sins.” Their transgression and sins were not the cause of this deadness, but its result; the way a stench is not the cause of physical death, but results from it.

Paul’s writing gets even eerier in Ephesians 2:2: the walking dead are under the control of a spirit that is at work in them. It directs them to walk “according to the age.” In other words, they don’t have a mind of their own; the age sets the standard for their behavior, speech, dress, relationships, generosity, goals. More alarming still, Paul writes that we have all taken part in this world, all moved by the “lusts of the flesh.”

Into this sinister world, the loving God, rich in mercy (v. 4) came, making the walking dead alive in Christ (v. 5). This is pure grace. He raised us out of the dust (v. 6) with the intention of displaying his kindness to us throughout the ages to come (v. 7).

What began as a horror story has been transformed into a divine comedy. Halloween has given way to All Saints. Lust is being replaced by love. The walking dead have been waked into life by the touch of gracious God.