 | The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
"HALLOWEEN’S HOLY GHOST" | Daniel 7.1-7, 13-14 | October 31, 2004 |
In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream, and visions passed through his mind as he was lying on his bed. Daniel said, “in my vision at night I saw the four winds of heaven churning up the great sea and four great beasts, each different from the others, coming up out of the sea.
The first was like a lion and it had the wings of an eagle. I watched until its wings were torn off and it stood on two feet like a man. The second looked like a bear. It was raised up on one of its sides and it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth. The third looked like a leopard whose back had four wings like those of a bird. And the beast had four heads and it was given authority to rule. The fourth beast was the most powerful, most terrifying and very powerful. It had large iron teeth which crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. And it had ten horns.
In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. God had given to him authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and all peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion of peace that will not pass away and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
Romans 8.18-27
The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. The creation was subjected to frustration not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in the hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
This week there have been several articles in the paper regarding churches up in arms about Halloween being on Sunday. They are people concerned that Sunday is God’s day and we shouldn’t give any credence to the notion of witches and goblins, of ghosts and the paranormal. These things are not what the church should be focusing on.
But it seems to me that the church has had quite a bit of experience in dealing with spirits and the paranormal, and indeed imbedded in our code of belief is a ghost. We’ve qualified this ghost with a divine adjective, a HOLY ghost, but a ghost nonetheless, who inspires in ways unknown to the finite human mind and outside of the realm of explanation in many cases.
On Pentecost Paul said that a holy ghost would come upon the believers and inspire them with words and tongues of flame. Many biblical stories are as spooky as a ghost story, what with people inhabited by devils, people overcome by a spirit that causes them to talk in languages no one has heard before, or people so excited about their faith that they appear drunk to onlookers. After Jesus’s resurrection, he appeared to his disciples on several occasions as a ghost which at first frightened them. And we are told that God often dresses up in disguises that fool even people of faith: the homeless, the hungry, the prostitute, the prisoner, the powerless. The bible is no stranger to scary stories, to inhabiting spirits, and costumes.
If we take a close look, we discover that Halloween’s history is intertwined with the church’s history, and today of all days is one to connect the holiday to something grounded in faith.
Halloween is now this nation’s second largest revenue-producing holiday, second only to Christmas, generating more than $6 billion in sales each year. The history of Halloween, like any other festival, is a mixture of folklore and tradition, some of it centered in the church, much of it evolving as time marches on.
The holiday is rooted in the church’s celebration of All Saint’s Day on November, a time to remember those who have died. The night before was called All Hallows Even, or Hallowed Evening, and over the years has been shortened to our present day word. In the 5th century in Celtic Ireland, summer officially ended on October 31 with a holiday called Samhain (sowen), the Celtic New Year. It was also the harvest festival and the beginning of the cold dark months of winter, often a time associated with human deaths because of lack of food and cold days. Winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and people were afraid of the dark; the short days and long nights of winter were of constant worry.
Some Celtic traditions believed that all laws of space and time were suspended during this holiday, allowing the spirit world to intermingle with the living. It was believed by some that the spirits of those who had died during the past year would come back to possess a living body which was their hope for an afterlife. Faeries were imagined as particularly active at this season of the year, and if you’ve been to Ireland you know that the culture is even today steeped in a wonderful tradition of faeries and leprechauns, all in good fun.
In order to keep the spirits from finding them, people would dress up in all manner of ghoulish costumes and noisily parade around the neighborhood, being as destructive as possible to frighten away spirits looking for bodies to possess. As time went on the practices of dressing up became more ritualized. Belief in spirit possession waned, and the practice of dressing up like hobgoblins, ghosts, and witches took on a more ceremonial role.
The custom of Halloween was brought to America in the 1840s by Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine. They brought with them the tradition of the Jack O’Lantern. In the old country, there was a man known as Stingy Jack who tricked the devil a couple of times with his shenanigans. Once he tricked the Devil into going up a tree to fetch an apple, at which time Jack quickly cut the sign of a cross in the trunk of the tree preventing the Devil from coming down. When Jack died, God would not allow him into heaven because of his trickery and the Devil, upset by the tricks, wouldn’t let him into hell. He sent Jack into the dark night to wander the earth with only a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal into a carved-out turnip and has been roaming the earth ever since. He was Jack of the Lantern. The Irish carved scary faces into turnips or potatoes, placing them in windows and doorways to frighten away evil spirits. When the Irish came to this country, pumpkins were far more plentiful than turnips, with a lot more colorful, too, and the tradition took on a whole new aura.
The custom of trick-or-treating was thought to have originated in the ninth-century European custom called ‘souling.’ The ‘treat’ part very likely came from the time when poor citizens walked from village to village begging for ‘soul cakes’, a bread made with currents. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors to pray them out of purgatory.
The ‘trick’ part of the holiday may have come from the ancient custom of ‘mischief night,’ which occurred the night before Halloween. Gates were unhinged and hidden, ropes stretched across roads in the dark, outhouses toppled. The basis of the night is in the old belief in ghosts and fairies who roamed the roads on Halloween night curdling milk and riding people’s horses to exhaustion. Any practical joke could thus be blamed on these little creatures over whom no one had any control.
Today the holiday for the most part has become an innocent opportunity for children to dress up in costume and pretend to be someone else for a day. They ponder for days who they’d like to be, almost as if they were going on stage to actually become a hero, or a scary demon or an angel or their favorite tv character.
Pretending is an important opportunity for children to dream of being something other than themselves. The mind of the make-believe not only stretches the imagination, it often becomes the savior of many a person trapped in a world they cannot escape. Witness the popular Harry Potter books, which again have been condemned by some religious groups, but which have provided for many a child a chance to imagine in unimaginable ways. Scores of letters have been written to the author, J K Rowling, to tell her that by living in the fantasy of Harry’s world, they have been able to endure a home life that was as stifling as Harry’s and they were able to survive through the fantasy of having the extraordinary powers of Harry.
In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the young Francie is able to transcend her poverty by living in a fantasy that allows her to rise above the hunger and loneliness of each day with the dream that she may one day become more than all of this. The book reflects the need we all have to live into hope that some day things will be better, that poverty will die, that wars will cease, that peace and prosperity will be everyone’s lot.
The church since its inception has preached the good news of rising above the evils of the day, or the dream of a world to come in which everyone would be equal, and all would have food, and everyone would live in peace. We teach that we are sustained by a spirit, the spirit of God, by this holy ghost, and are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, the spirits of all who have gone before us in death but who surround us as angels to inspire and direct.
Indeed, Halloween can be a happy time of revelry, of letting down the proverbial hair in a world gone mad with serious concerns of terrorists and political campaigning that is full of scary rhetoric and unbelievable promises. Nothing could be more holy than a time to dance in the merriment of hope, of making sport of the power of evil which has no control over us.
On this All Hallows Evening I invite you to enjoy the beauty of the season, both in autumn’s crisp colorful costume and in the hope that pretending and revelry proclaim. In this is good news, in this is hope, in this is peace. Amen.
–Gary L. McCann
PASTORAL PRAYER
God we delight in seeing you in your autumn costume, dressed up in the gold of autumn leaves and the red of burning bushes, wearing the last rose of summer as the sun illuminates you in all your glory.
Today is Halloween, a time when children around the world will enjoy traditions of their own countries. In our church and in our neighborhoods, we see the kids dressed up in costumes that allow them to pretend in a delightful ways. The happiness that is generated by children dreaming about who they would like to be, and the thought of getting treats at the homes of neighbors is a holy happiness. We pray for safety as they enjoy the event, knowing that indeed evil does lurk in the shadows of those disgruntled by life who would use the holiday for evil purpose. May our kids know the unbridled joy that comes from this day and from an adolescent innocence that is all-too-soon stolen from them in today’s world.
May we find ways to redeem the purpose for the holidays that is so often usurped for profit. May we as parents, as grandparents, as a church community give to our children the sense of frivolity that holidays are meant to be, a time of respite from the cares that weigh even these little ones down, a time to just let go and enjoy themselves. May it be a time when they can just be kids. Give us the wisdom to create good space for their spirits to find freedom and in so doing teach them that all of this comes from you, from the one who gives meaning and purpose to life, and the one who makes holy days of holidays from the routine.
We are reminded today that all too often we ourselves wear masks, not to have fun, but to hide. We bury ourselves behind a facade to keep others from seeing who we really are, and in so doing we distort your image. You who are known to us in the flesh and blood around us, who have taken on the costume of human life are here to bring good news that who we are, with our masks and behind our masks, are people to be loved and to love.
We see you disguised as a hungry child; we see you in the costume of the grieving widow; we see you dressed up as mentally and physically challenged people or as a country ravaged by war. And yet the tragedy is that sometimes we don’t see you; we are thrown off by the costumes in which they are clothed. We tend to look only at that which can be seen on the outward appearance, and we forget that you are looking out at us through the eyes of the thief or the beggar on the street.
On this stage of life in whatever role we have been cast with whatever costume we have chosen to wear, may we be people of integrity in all that we do and all that we are. In the name of the one who comes to us dressed in the form of each person we meet, Amen.
| Copyright © 2004 by Gary L. McCann. All rights reserved. |