Sunday

Ps.46 / Jn.8:31-36 / Rom.3:23-30

I grew up in Anoka, Minnesota, which, back in 1920, dubbed itself, “The Halloween Capital of the World.”  It’s not because the town was taken over by witches, but because the shopkeepers were tired of their windows being soaped and the local farmers were tired of their outhouses being tipped over, so they co-opted the fun and made Halloween an institution.

On Halloween afternoon, all the elementary school kids march down Main Street in their costumes.  Each child is given a brown paper lunch-bag full of popcorn balls and those chewy peanut butter candies wrapped in orange or black wax paper.  But Halloween night is the big deal.  A beauty contest is held and the new Miss Anoka is crowned.  A huge parade of marching bands from surrounding towns as well as floats by 4-H, the VFW, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and on and on, march down Main Street.  The parade ends up marching around the high school football field in a stadium built into the side of a hill by the WPA during the Great Depression, followed by the biggest football game of the year which is called (wait for it) The Pumpkin Bowl.

The local Evangelicals boycott all this, of course.  Their preachers rail against the “evil” of Halloween.  So what is Halloween?  Is it really anti-Christian?  No.  Historically, it comes right out of Christian tradition.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that, without the Good News of Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection, there would be—could be—no Halloween.

We don’t say “hallow” anymore except when we say the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed be thy name”—it’s an Old English word for “holy.”  Just as we have Christmas Eve the night before Christmas, we have Hallow Eve the night before All Saints Day.  Yet every fall, Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network try to scare their viewers about the “paganism” of Halloween.  In 2009, he said that witches have taken over the American candy industry and they put demons into every piece of candy used on Halloween.  He even said that Baby Ruth candy bars are preparing our children to grow up and eat babies in satanic rituals!

If there are pagan roots to Halloween—I prefer to say “human” roots—those roots are the universal human fear of death.  That finds expression all over the world, but in Celtic Britain and Ireland 2000 years ago, there was a harvest festival called Samhain (or Sow-in) that marked the end of summer and the beginning of winter.  As the light of day shortens and the dark of night increases, we humans naturally associate this time of year with death.

Christianity came to Britain during the Roman occupation of England, 200 years after Jesus, so it was a very long time ago.  If those early Christians celebrated All Saints Day (and therefore Hallow Eve) in order to co-opt Samhain, it was with kind pastoral intentions.  The Druids believed that as the hours of daylight and darkness grew roughly equal—fall equinox—those who had died the previous year climbed out of their graves and wandered the earth, searching for a passage to the next world.  The thought of those dead spirits wandering around—maybe seeking revenge on those who had hurt them in life—was a scary thought.

But the Good News of Jesus Christ is that we don’t have to be afraid of death, let alone be afraid of the dark.  So it’s a good time of year to celebrate all saints and remember that death is nothing but the doorway into heaven and the glorious realm of God’s eternal light.  In fact, we Christians are so not afraid of death that we make fun of it.  On the night before All Saints Day, “Hallow Evening,” we dress up as ghosts and goblins and devils and demons and have a big party to make fun of all things death.  On the eve of All Saints Day, we celebrate that we do not live in fear, we live in faith.  That’s why I said that, without the Good News of Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection, there would be—could be—no Hallowe’en.

Now, Halloween is also Reformation Day, the birthday of the Protestant movement of which the UCC is a part.  It was on Hallowe’en that Martin Luther started his protest against the Catholic Church—I prefer to say the “Medieval Church”—by nailing his famous “95 Theses” on the cathedral door in Wittenberg Germany in 1517.  A thesis is a debating point—you present a thesis and challenge your opponent to debate it.  Luther was an ordained professor of Biblical Studies at Wittenberg University.  He nailed his 95 debating points to the door of the cathedral because he was challenging the bishop to debate.  He chose Hallow Eve to do it because he knew that on the next day, All Saints Day, everyone was required to go to mass, so everybody in town would see his 95 theses nailed to the church door.  And so the Protest(ant) movement began.

There are parallels between the beginning of Protestantism and the Occupy Wall Street movement today—mainly about money and the powerful elite.  In those early years of the 1500s, Pope Leo X was building (to his own glory) Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which is still the biggest church in the world.  He came up with an innovative way to finance his building project, which was to sell indulgences.  The idea was that, when you died, you went to Purgatory where God tortured you to purge you of your sin until you were pure enough to go to heaven.  Pope Leo’s great fundraising idea was to sell grieving widows and orphans a get-out-of-Purgatory-quick card for cold hard cash.  It worked like a charm.  Ignorant peasants lined up to buy indulgences to get their loved ones out of purgatory.  The pope commissioned indulgence salesmen who stood ringing hand-bells on street corners all across Europe—sort of like those people outside supermarkets at Christmastime with their big pots or “coffers” where you toss your coins.  The indulgences were certificates, suitable for framing, that said, “The Pope certifies that Granny has been released from purgatory and is now happily in heaven.”  The indulgence salesmen even had an advertising jingle that they’d bark on the street:

“As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,

a soul from purgatory to heaven springs.”

As a professor of biblical studies, Martin Luther knew that purgatory is not in the Bible, let alone indulgences.  He was so disgusted that his 86^th thesis reads, “Why does the pope, who is by far the richest man in the world, build his basilica in Rome with the money of poor believers instead of with his own money?”  Them’s fightin’ words.  The Church was so corrupt at the time that Pope Leo was not even ordained; he was part of the powerful Medici family that ruled most of Italy, and he had muscled his way into the Vatican through politics and armed force.

Another one of Luther’s 95 Theses attacked a special form of indulgence just for rich people—for the big donors to Pope Leo’s cathedral.  For a big donation, the rich could buy a relic that was said to have magic powers to heal you from sickness as well as get you out of purgatory.  These relics included straw from the manger and even little bottles of Mary’s breast milk.  With such corruption, you can see why Luther called the Vatican, “the whore of Babylon.”

Bad as indulgences were, they were just the symptoms of a deeper theological sickness that Luther wanted to debate about the meaning of sin and grace.  He wanted to have this debate on All Saints Day because he wanted to debate the definition of a saint.  The Catholic Church said that saints were special dead folk who, by following the rules of the Church, had achieved a better place in heaven than regular dead people.  That is different from what the word “saint” means in the Bible, which is that everybody who believes in Jesus is a saint, whether dead or alive, and not by virtue of good works, but by virtue of our faith.  That’s why, in the Bible, Paul ends all of his letters to the various churches by writing, “Greet all the saints for me.”  He’s not saying, “Greet all the dead people for me.”  He’s saying, “Greet all the church members for me.”

The deeper issue at stake here is how we are saved/healed/liberated/justified or made whole—whichever of those words you prefer.  Do we save ourselves by the number of good deeds we do?  (If so, how many good works are enough?)  Or are we saved by the grace of God, which we access through faith?  Even though this debate started in 1517, I assure you that the most frequent pastoral problem I face in my work is people who don’t get what the Good News of God’s Grace is, and so they are racked with guilt and fear that they are not “good enough” to earn God’s love, to earn a place in heaven, or even to be worthy of human love.  It’s a real psychological problem…this issue of “Am I worthy?  Am I good enough?  Is my karma okay?”

I was wrong when I just said that this debate between salvation by grace or salvation by works of the law started with the Reformation in 1517, because it really started as the debate between Jesus and the Pharisees, and it’s what Paul’s Letter to the Romans is all about—a piece of which we just read together.  Remember this part:

There is no distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous since all have sinned

and fall short of the glory of God.  Rather, everyone is saved by God’s grace as a gift…

effective through faith.  …  For we hold that a person is justified by faith quite apart from

works prescribed by the law.

The “law” that Paul is talking about is not secular laws like the speed limit.  He’s talking about religious laws and whether we earn our salvation by following religious laws or we simply receive our salvation as a free gift from God.  Many of us grew up in churches with a lot of religious laws like don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t dance, don’t go to movies, don’t use birth control, don’t be gay and, for God’s sake, don’t celebrate Halloween! Whatever lip service such churches pay to Jesus and Amazing Grace, the truth is that they preach that you must earn your salvation by obeying their religious laws or else God will torture you eternally in hell.

Martin Luther wrestled with this because, like most of us, he wanted to be a good person and do the right things.  But he became so obsessed with following the religious laws—and by his fear of death and hell—that he ended up going to confession every hour on the hour, so fearful was he that he might do an impure deed or think an impure thought and die in an accident without confession and go to hell.  But one day, as he was preparing for a lecture he was going to give to his students on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, he read right there in the Bible: “Every one²⁴ is saved by God’s grace as a free gift.  For we believe that a person is justified by faith quite apart from works of the law.”  Suddenly Luther was at peace.  It was as if he had had 10 years of therapy just by reading that simple sentence: “We are saved by grace through faith alone.”

Suddenly he realized that there was no need for indulgences because there was no need to fear death, let alone hell.  Suddenly he realized that there was no need to worry about not being good enough to go to heaven, no need to fear that he hadn’t followed the religious rules perfectly enough to earn God’s love.  Because it’s not about us.  It’s about God!  And the Good News from Jesus Christ is that God is not a mean judge; God is a loving Mother, a loving Father, who does not condemn, but forgives.  [That motivates us to respond with good deeds out of gratitude, not guilt.]  This is the Good News of Jesus that can set us free…if we have faith in it.

There are many images and metaphors in the New Testament that try to explain how Christ sets us free, but one of the images Paul uses in Romans is that Christ is our Passover.  In the Exodus story, when God is working to set the Hebrews free from slavery, the Pharaoh is so mean and stubborn that finally God has to resort to an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.  Just as Pharaoh had ordered the midwives to kill every male baby born to the Hebrews, God sends a plague to kill the first born sons of the Egyptians.  But the Hebrews were instructed to sacrifice a lamb and cover their doors with its blood, and then Death would pass over their homes.

So Paul writes that, when it comes to judgment, for the sake of Jesus, God passes over our sins.  When I was a boy, my dad used to say that when God looks at us, God doesn’t see our sins; all God sees is the goodness of Jesus covering us.  So we don’t have to worry, even when we make mistakes, because it’s not about our goodness, it’s about God’s goodness.  God doesn’t love us because of our goodness, God loves us because of God’s goodness.  That is what Jesus taught us: that, in God’s goodness, God loves everybody, whether we break a church’s rules or not.  (Bad news for churches that boast they’re more “righteous” than others!)  If we believe this good news from Jesus, then it’s at work in our lives and, in a sense, God passes over our sins.  So in the Episcopal Church, during communion, when the priest breaks the bread, she or he says, “This is Christ our Passover,” and the congregation replies, “Therefore let us keep the feast.”

You may not like the Passover image for Christ because of the sacrificial blood aspect. That’s okay; the New Testament is full of images and metaphors to try to help us understand: Christ the good shepherd, Christ the great physician, Christ the son, Christ the woman who lost one of her ten coins, Christ the pioneer of our faith.  One of the good things about the image of Christ as our Passover is that it keeps us tied to our mother faith, Judaism, of which Christianity is a branch [Rom.11:18].  But the most important thing in the image of Christ as our Passover is that just as the Hebrews passed over from slavery to freedom, Christ sets us free psychologically.

I’ll leave the Afterlife to another sermon, but in terms of this life and the psychological healing and health of having faith in grace, Christ sets us free from our fear of a judgmental God, and therefore from our fear that we are not good enough, and therefore from our fear of death and hell, ghosts and goblins.  It only makes sense, psychologically, that we receive this grace, this freedom by having faith in it.  As I said before—and I’m sure Lucas has the same experience as a hospital chaplain—there is no more basic issue in life than sin and grace and if we are worthy, if we are forgiven, and if we can forgive others, so that we can live—and die—in peace.

The gospel says, “If Christ sets us free, we are free indeed.”  The good news from Jesus is that it’s not about us, it’s about God…and God is gracious.  All we need to do is have faith in God’s grace.  Since simply believing that makes us all saints, and since all saints go to heaven, we are set free from our fear of death.  Hurrah!  So let’s party on Halloween like it’s 1999!

Pastor Dan Geslin

6th Avenue UCC

Reformation ‘11