This World With Devils Filled
Rev. Rich Smith
October 31, 2004 – First Thessalonians 2:17-20
Several years ago, as a part of their Halloween festivities, the First Congregational Church of Long Beach showed the Lon Chaney silent film classic, Phantom of the Opera, complete with live organ accompaniment by the renowned Gaylord Carter. It was supposed to be a lot of innocent fun, except that some folks took it a bit too seriously. The church received some "hate mail" accusing them of being devil worshipers, and discovered the inscription "Friend of Satan" in the front of one of their hymnals!
There are those who think that the church shouldn't have anything to do with Halloween, except to warn people against it. They see it as glorifying evil and Satanism or devil-worship, and schools that decorate for Halloween and have Halloween parties have been accused of teaching a perverse form of religion. What would they do with us, who have our own special Halloween concert, with organists dressed as witches, hold a pumpkin carving with our Youth, and encourage folks to come to church today in costume? (I see a number of you dressed as lawyers!)
Granted, a lot of bizarre people have used Halloween as an occasion for some sinister activities, ranging from poisoning trick-or-treat candy to animal sacrifice. If you have a black cat, keep it indoors tonight! A kind of high holy day for the demented. And some parents worry about the lesson children learn when they go around blackmailing the neighbors, in order to get a handout. But allow me to wax nostalgic for a moment, and recall how I really got into Halloween as a kid -- it never hurt me, was just good clean fun. I always invented creative costumes, baked orange cupcakes and decorated the house and had a party. I hated to have to give it up, but getting my height at an early age was a disadvantage. How painfully I remember going out in my Zorro costume, and one particular neighbor lady remarking, "Well, Richie, I guess this is your last year for trick-or-treating, isn't it...?" This happened three years in a row. And so when I was 28, I gave it up. But it was fun, all the songs and decoration and mystique, not to mention the candy. It was just plain healthy fun!
Halloween is a time when a lot of play and fantasy involved, and a lot of fascinating images are conjured up, ideas of evil spirits and witches and ghosts and goblins. We go out ad rent "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", or maybe “Harry Potter.” We try to carve the scariest pumpkin. The neighbors have tried to outdo each other with their elaborate graveyards and haunted houses and terrifying displays. And it's great as long as we don't take it all too seriously. In fact, I believe all the revelry surrounding Halloween can be very healthy and teach us to NOT take it all too seriously or too literally! It encourages us to laugh at the idea of ghosts and goblins and devils, which is a good way of disarming any power they may have over us.
Of course Halloween goes back to a time in Ireland when people were more literal in their beliefs about such things. What happened was, is that Christianity "took over" Halloween, then called the "festival of Samhain," from the Druids about 1600 years ago. They celebrated the beginning of their new year, November 1, by offering a variety of bonfires, animal and vegetable sacrifices, and well-wishing prayers to those that had died in the previous year. They believed that the souls of these departed friends and family members spent New Year's Eve being judged as to what form they should take for the next year (good souls entered other human bodies at birth, they believed; bad souls entered animal bodies -- explains my cat!). On November 1, New Year's Day, they traveled to their new abodes.
Christian missionaries quickly took over this pagan celebration, transforming it into "All Saints' Day" or "All Hallows' Day" -- a holy day to commemorate the lives of all the saints of the church who have no special calendar day of their own, and to recognize the individual Christians within every congregation who have joined the Church Eternal in the last year.
But it is hard to keep a good pagan down. And the Celtic celebration, its meaning and symbols newly enriched by layers of Christian theology, simply shifted the time that the soul's rite of passage took place. The events that used to transpire on New Year's Day (November 1) now occurred on New Year's/All Hallows' Eve, October 31. All of Halloween's traditions -- disguising ourselves in costumes, welcoming strangers at our doors with "treats," keeping special jack-o'-lantern vigil lights -- stem from this ancient need for humans to both recognize and greet the certainty of death, yet find a way to somehow keep its powers at bay.
So Halloween, as we might observe it, is still a time to ward off death's power and evil spirits, not so much in a literal sense by building bonfires, but by simply laughing at them -- by dressing up in outrageous costumes, by watching Phantom of the Opera, by constructing humorous graveyards. (Erma Bombeck: "Big Deal, I'm used to dust!" Johny Carson "I'll be right back!") For when we can laugh at anything, we take away any power it may have over us. We keep it from becoming an idol. An idol is not just something made of wood or stone that is worshiped as God; it is anything that is not God that we allow to have power over us. Or more simply defined, anything at which you cannot laugh, anything you are taking with deadly seriousness.
It is always the church's task to help us laugh at idols, to teach us that only God is God, the ultimate authority. That's why it's nice that today is also Reformation Sunday! It is simply a coincidence that on October 31, 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church. He didn't really mean to start a revolution; it was simply the accepted way of saying in those days, "Let's talk about this. Let's have a debate over these issues." And since he couldn't call Rush Limbaugh or appear on Larry King Live, or float them on the Internet as Bishop Spong often does, he nailed his ideas to the church door.
One of the major issues for Martin Luther had to do with what we call the Sovereignty of God. In his view, there were too many things that had become idols in the church. The church had set up too many roadblocks between the believer and God, had tried to usurp Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life. The church hierarchy had all the power to determine among other things who would get into heaven and who would not, so they insisted. The laity's only function in the church was to pay their indulgences and taxes to keep it wealthy. Even the word of God, as revealed in the scriptures, was kept from them. And the few who could read did not have access to the Bible itself. And even if they had, they would not have been able to understand it unless they were educated in Latin, the language it was rendered in. In matters of faith and practice, whatever the Pope said went. There was no such thing as a conscience or personal revelation -- at least they were not recognized as valid. There was a lot to protest, and so as a result of Luther's protesting, and eventually that of others, Protestants were born. And we have been protesting ever since, and reforming, and learning to laugh at our idols, and to say, "Only God is God!"
Halloween and Reformation Day are good days to celebrate together (we'll celebrate All Saints next Sunday, and remember the departed) -- because both help us to identify and laugh at our idols and recognize that only God is sovereign of this world.
These days come around yearly to remind us that we need constantly to be about the business of reforming and laughing at idols. We don't have Reformation Day simply to honor the courage and memory of Martin Luther, but to prod us into continual reformation, to move us to identify what our idols are and to laugh them out of power.
Some of us have a hard time laughing at ourselves. We take ourselves too seriously. That's why I need to give children's sermons occasionally. These kids don't just keep me on my toes, they deflate my ego when it gets too puffed up. Just 'cause I'm the minister and come here wearing these fancy robes and all doesn't mean I have all the answers. And it's not just kids -- A while back I was visiting a nursing home, where I took the hand of an elderly man walking the halls and asked kindly, "Sir, do you know who I am?" The man replied, "No, but if you ask the nurses they can tell you." (Actually this happened to former President Bush...) As someone once advised me, "Don't be so humble. You're not that great."
Why are there so many lawyer jokes going around? Because people have a concept of lawyers as being too self-important, and they need to be taken down a notch.
Some people get offended when comedians make fun of the President. It never used to bother me, back in the 80's, until I finally voted for someone who won, back in the last decade. I had to learn that we laugh at him not to belittle him or turn people against him or his policies, but to put him in perspective. We did this with all Presidents and always will. This week especially it helps to remember that a president is not God!
I've also heard a few good jokes about the Pope (usually at from my Catholic friends). Certainly he is given due honor and respect, but should never be given undue and unquestioning loyalty. His encyclicals usually convince me of that. Time and again for example, a pope had said -- authoritatively, in his view -- that any form of artificial birth control is a mortal sin. Never mind the over-population problems of a Mexico City. Never mind that the great gift of human sexuality is about far more than conceiving babies. Rome has spoken, it is said, and the matter is closed. I am sure that among American Catholics, at least, the matter is far from closed. And this is partly because in this country Catholics have been infected with the spirit of Protestantism. Vatican II unleashed such a powerful sense of reformation that it is not easily held in check by an infallible word from the Pope, as much as he is respected for being a gentle and spiritual human being. The Pope is not God, nor does he possess a private line to God.
But even in the church there are idols that need to be examined. Like those listening to Jesus take on the scribes and Pharisees, we may position ourselves so close to him that we think he is talking about someone else, that his words calling for reformation do not apply to us. We have our idols too.
There is the idol of the past, the golden age that if it could only be recovered, then we'd have a thousand members, two filled services, and four hundred in Sunday School. When we idolize a time that was we lose sight of the time that might be, an even greater era ahead. It may not look the same. It's successes won't appear as the successes of the past. But God continually calling us to move forward, not back.
There is the idol of our way doing things, the idea that our methods are better than what they use in other churches.
Clericalism -- even after 500 years of Reformation we're still dealing with that one. I've always said that the pastor's job is not to be the center of things, but to be more like the mechanic whose job it is to help the machinery of the church run more smoothly, and to take care of all the loose nuts, of which there are many. You know who you are. Give me lots of latitude and freedom to do my job, but don't confuse that with power. And remember that this church doesn't have just the three ministers up here leading worship: you are all the ministers of this church, all called and commissioned to be about the work of sharing Christ's love, wherever you are! So I don't mind if you laugh at me; it means you're taking me off some pedestal and inviting me to a more fitting role.
Even the building itself can become an idol. There is a difference between having a church and being a church. When you have a church, you are continually concerned about its outward appearance and are suspicious of anyone else who wants to use it, lest they spill something on the new carpet or soil the furniture. When you are the church, then the chief concern is mission -- sharing God's love in Christ with anyone and everyone who needs it. The buildings are simply a means to do that.
Well we could go on. Name your own idols. We've got plenty of them, I'm sure. But I want to recall that began with a discussion of Halloween and ghosts and goblins and devils, and I want to end with a further word about devils. I have never believed in the existence of "the" devil, at least as pictured in cartoons as a being with horns and tail and pitchfork. But there are devils about, at least in the biblical sense. For in the Bible, the devil, or Satan, is a tempter, the personification of temptation, the one who offers you the shortcut or the easy way out or the deal too good to be true. We're all tempted, all the time by a lot of things that would divert us from our best selves and from serving in the highest manner. Each and every one of the idolatries I have mentioned is really a temptation -- a temptation to put our own egos, or the church, or some authority above the ultimate authority, who is God and God alone. When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians that "I wanted to come to you, but Satan blocked our way", he may have meant that some evil force prevented him. But he may also have meant that he was sidetracked by some temptations that kept him from doing what he really needed to do. That happens to the best of us. We lose sight of our goals, of who we are and whose we are, and we lose our way. Temptations abound in this world. And one of the most tempting is idiolatry.
Looking at it that way, listen to those words of Martin Luther's, which we will sing at the end of this service: "And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us, We will not fear, for God has willed that Truth shall triumph through us....Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also; The body they may kill; God's truth shall triumph still, God's reign endures forever." May it be so!
