Trick or Treat

It's Halloween! When we celebrate, are we worshiping the devil? Absolutely not! So, does Jesus fit in anywhere? He does for Christians! Read my sermon to find out what I think about the holiday.

Halloween is almost here! Trick or treat here in Miami County is… what… Tuesday night? You can’t miss Halloween these days. It has become a really big deal in recent years. The stores start to display bags of candy and jack o’ lanterns just as soon as Labor Day is over. As the calendar gets close to October, newspapers start to advertise all kind of attractions guaranteed to make you scream: the House of Death, the Trail of Terror and the Corn Maze of Doom. Even the grownups have gotten in on things. Whole neighborhoods throw Halloween costume parties that are definitely not for the kiddies! Halloween has ballooned from being only one day to become an entire season for merchandisers! You might be surprised to know that retail profits during the two months before Halloween are second only to those during the Christmas season. Yes, Halloween is a big deal these days.

That’s a real problem for some Christians. These folks want to get rid of all the skeletons, ghosts and witches that are everywhere this time of year – in the stores, on the television, and decorating our homes – because they believe that all the Halloween hullabaloo is evidence that we have somehow become a nation of devil worshipers. They are afraid that by celebrating Halloween, we are inviting evil into our lives. I have to respectfully disagree with them. It seems to me that exactly the opposite is true! When we surround ourselves with scary things, I think that we’re actually trying to control the evil around us.

That’s actually how Halloween got started in the first place. People in ancient cultures were convinced that supernatural evil was all around them – ghosts and ghouls and evil spirits. At the time of the harvest, when the days got short and the nights became long and cold, they believed that those spirits grew stronger; and it was only by taking actions to protect themselves that they would escape the evil of those spirits. People disguised themselves so that spirits who might want to harm them wouldn’t recognize them. They carried candles in hollowed-out gourds so that they would always be in the presence of light. They even carried sweet treats with them – just in case they had to calm down an unfriendly ghost with a sweet tooth! Nowadays, we wear costumes for fun, we carve jack o’ lanterns for decoration, and we pass out candy to entertain kids in the neighborhood. But the people who started these customs weren’t doing them for fun. They were trying to control the evil that they saw all around them.

Evil spirits were certainly real for the writers of the New Testament. The story from Matthew that you heard this morning is only one of the many gospel stories that mention Jesus casting out evil spirits (Matthew 8:28-32). Jesus has crossed the Sea of Galilee and has arrived in Gentile territory. And who are the first people to meet him? Two men who are possessed by demons. They live among the tombs of the local graveyard; and they are so violent that they attack anybody who approaches them. But -- surprise! The demons know Jesus! “What do you want with us, Son of God?” they scream at him. “You’re going to drive us out!” And that’s exactly what Jesus does. It only takes one word from him – “Go!” – and the evil spirits rush out of the two men and into a herd of pigs, who promptly stampede down into the water and drown themselves. Now that’s a Halloween story for you! If you want to read more about Jesus casting out evil spirits, there are plenty of other stories just like this one in the gospels. (I counted over 20 of them.)

These days, of course, we don’t expect to run into an evil spirit on Main Street, or even in the local cemetery. They only show up in movies like Ghostbusters or The Exorcist. We may pull them out of mothballs for Halloween; but in November, we tuck them back into storage for another year. For most of us, evil spirits only exist in stories. Lots of people, in fact, not only don’t believe in evil spirits; they don’t even believe in evil! They think that “evil” is an old-fashioned idea that was invented by ignorant, superstitious people. Instead of blaming “evil” for the problems that surround us, they talk about “poor choices” and “inappropriate behavior.” They point out – and rightly so – that many of the behaviors that used to be labeled as “evil” were really due to medical conditions. Evil spirits don’t cause seizures; they’re the result of epilepsy. When people behave in odd or unexpected ways, we don’t call an exorcist these days; we call a doctor.

I can’t help wondering, though, whether we’re ignoring something important. Do we really believe that there is no such thing as evil? It seems to me that there is simply too much pain and suffering in our world to attribute all of it to poor choices and inappropriate behavior. Students of history point to the horrors of the Holocaust during World War II: torture camps filled with emaciated men and women; and ovens that burned the remains of those who were executed in gas chambers. Today, we point to Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Mohamar Khadaffi as examples of evil. The intentional suffering that these people inflicted on innocent men, women and children goes way beyond poor choices. What can we call it but “evil”? More to the point, what can we do about it? Witch costumes, jack o’ lanterns, and Hershey Bars can’t stand up to evil that starves, tortures and massacres. It’s way more powerful than all of us!

So, do we simply have to resign ourselves to living with it? No. No, we don’t. This morning’s story from Matthew points to our hope in the face of evil. It points to the one whose power is greater even than that of evil spirits. It points to the one who can conquer evil with a word. It points to Jesus Christ. If the gospels have anything to say about Jesus, they say that he has power over evil. Wherever Jesus went, he fought evil, bringing healing to those who were broken, freedom to those who were oppressed, and relief to those who were suffering. He even brought life to the dead. Jesus is the one who can rescue us from evil. It may still be all around us; but it has no power over those of us who call on Jesus’ name!

We began our worship this morning singing the great Reformation hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God: an affirmation that through Jesus Christ, God has broken the power of evil once and for all. God is our refuge from all the suffering that evil tries to bring to us. God is our mighty fortress, the One who keeps us safe. Oh, evil is still around; and we all have to face it. You do; and I do; and even little Skylar who was just baptized will one day come face to face with it. But those of us who belong to Jesus Christ don’t have to be afraid of it; because he has taken care of it for us once and for all.

So go ahead – enjoy Halloween! Play spooky music when the kids come by… light a candle in that jack o’ lantern sitting on the porch… hand out Kit Kat candy bars! Look at all the costumes as the children parade by – princesses, pirates, witches and ghosts. Listen to them cry, “Trick or Treat!” And smile – because we know that the trick is on evil. Because of Jesus Christ, its power has been broken. We don’t have to be afraid of it ever again! Although the battle against evil is still raging, the war is won; and Christ is victorious! Now that’s a treat that we can celebrate not just on Halloween, but every single day of our lives!

A Word of Hope

We need some hope right now. And who offers it but the "weeping prophet" Jeremiah, who is better known for his predictions of doom and gloom! God will not abandon us, he assures us. The darkness doesn't get the last word! Read on to find out more about it.

Jeremiah was never known as the life of the party. He was one of those folks who not only saw the glass as half empty; he would take a close look and announce that a dead fly was floating in the water! He has become known as “the weeping prophet,” because he was always predicting disaster for his fellow Israelites. Jeremiah was the prophet who stood outside the Jerusalem Temple on the Sabbath hollering that just going to church doesn’t make God happy, even if it’s the biggest church in town. He warned the people that if they thought they were better than their neighbors just because God had chosen them… well, they had another think coming! He finally told them that God was so tired of their behavior that God was going to take drastic action to get their attention once and for all! That made people so mad at him that they threw him into a well just to shut him up!

But it turned out that Jeremiah was right! The Babylonians swooped down on Israel from the north and conquered the whole lot of them; and they dragged all the nobles, the soldiers, and the merchants off into exile. They took the golden candlesticks from the Temple, too, and stripped the ivory beds and purple curtains from the royal palace. You can read about it in II Kings 24. After the Babylonians were finished with Israel, the only ones left there were the very poorest people. Then the Babylonians set up Zedekiah as the king of Israel, telling him that he’d better toe the line or things would get a lot worse! Now, you would think that Jeremiah would rub their noses in it at that point. After all, he had been right all along. God was tired of the Israelites and their talk-a-lot-but-do-nothing religion; and the exile was proof of it. You would think that Jeremiah would have said, “See, I told you so! You got what you deserve!” But he didn’t say that at all. Instead, he sent a word of hope to all those frightened exiles saying, “Don’t despair! Hang on! God has plans for you; plans to bring you back to your own land and get you going in the right direction again. This isn’t the end!” (Jeremiah 29:1-3, 10-14, 20) Old doom-and-gloom Jeremiah turned out to be the one who encouraged the exiled Israelites to believe that doom and gloom might not be the last word, after all!

Does Jeremiah have a word of hope for us today? There seems to be precious little hope to go around these days. Wherever we turn, we hear people predicting disaster just like Jeremiah did over 2500 years ago. Global warming is causing climate changes all over the world; and scientists predict that drought, wildfires, and category 5 hurricanes will become common. The worldwide inequality of wealth keeps billions of people in grinding poverty. Will wars, famines, and epidemics be the result? Some people think so. Even here in our own little church, things don’t look good. We are small and getting smaller, with few visitors and even fewer new members joining our congregation. Are we going to have to close our doors in the future? Oh, yes, things are bad all over! But Jeremiah, in the middle of situations that could lead to despair, offers a word of hope. He says that conflict and oppression and suffering won’t get the last word. God’s unfailing love, says Jeremiah, has the last word! The end won’t be disaster, but renewal.

Now, we need to be careful when we talk about hope. There’s plenty of wishful thinking around today that calls itself hope; but it really isn’t hope at all. We hear it all the time. “I hope that the weather will be nice tomorrow.” “I hope that I lose some weight so I can fit into this dress again.” “I hope that I win the lottery.” But although those statements may use the word “hope,” when we look closely at them, they aren’t really about hope at all. They’re just wishes that we make when things aren’t the way that we want them to be. Hope is something very different. Hope isn’t a wish; it’s a certainty: the certainty that God’s love, wisdom, and power will transform any situation into something good, even if we don’t see any evidence of it right now! Hope doesn’t deny that things are bad; but hope believes that the good will ultimately triumph. When the night is darkest, hope bravely declares, “This will not last forever. Even though I may never see the light, I believe that in the end, the darkness will be conquered.”

One of my favorite descriptions of hope is a poem that was written by the great American poet Emily Dickinson. It begins this way:

“Hope is the thing with feathers

that perches in the soul

and sings the tune without the words,

and never stops at all.”

Hope is like the birds that come to my feeder in all kinds of weather. Sun, rain, or snow, little feathered bits of hope arrive every day to gobble up sunflower seeds or peanuts and to peck at cakes of suet. They sing their songs even in the most dreadful weather! On some days those songs are very quiet. But sing they do; just as we proclaim our hope whether times are good or bad.

“But,” some folks ask, “how can you possibly have hope? I see no evidence at all that things are going to get better!” And if we’re honest with ourselves, lots of times we have to agree with them. Many situations in our world bring us to despair; all we see is a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end of it. But, you see, that’s why hope is hope. Hope springs from our faith that believes that God can and will redeem any situation, no matter how bad things might be. And there’s no way to prove that. No scientist can find God’s love in a test tube or in a Petri dish or under a microscope. We need faith to believe it. But if we do believe it, then we need not lose hope, not in any situation that we may encounter.

People who have hope are like the boy who always found an opportunity for good no matter what happened to him. When the weather was rainy, he reminded his family that the rain helps the flowers to grow. When he got a low grade on a test, he declared that his mistakes helped him know what to study so that he could improve. When a fellow classmate was rude to him, he said that the experience helped him to learn patience. His neighbor was a grumpy fellow who was annoyed by the child’s unfailing optimism. “That kid needs to grow up,” he declared one day. “I’ll show him that not everything turns out well in the end.” So he ordered a huge pile of horse manure one day, and he had it dumped right in the middle of the boy’s front yard. When the child came home from school that day, his neighbor called to him. “Hey, I’ve got a present for you!” and showed him the enormous manure pile. The boy ran right to the pile of manure and began to dig into it happily. “What in the world are you doing?” the neighbor asked. The boy looked up with a shining face and answered, “Well, with a pile of manure this big, I know there must be a pony in here somewhere!”

Hope believes that the sun will rise no matter how dark the night has been. Hope refuses to surrender to despair. Hope believes that God will redeem everything in his own time.

“Hope is the thing with feathers

that perches in the soul

and sings the tune without the words,

and never stops at all.”

May you hear that word of hope today – and believe it!

Storm Warning

What would you do if you knew that a hurricane was coming? You'd get ready for it, right? Jesus tells us that sooner or later, a hurricane will blow into our own lives, and we should prepare for it right now! This sermon explains what he meant; and how we can get ready.

There’s a hurricane coming; and it’s a big one! Jesus says that we’re all going to be caught in the middle of a terrible storm, one that will threaten everything that we have and everything that we are; so we’d better get ready for it (Matthew 7:24-27). We don’t get many hurricanes here in Ohio, but we all know what they’re like. We’ve seen quite a few of them on the Weather Channel recently. They last a lot longer than the tornadoes that pop up here every summer. Tornadoes are fast; they can pass by almost before we have time to take cover. But hurricanes can seem to last forever! First the rain falls. It falls in buckets, and it drenches you to the bone. Then comes the wind: wind that is so strong, it’s like a gigantic fist that picks you up and throws you off your feet. And finally, the storm surge: water that floods in and carries you away from every security you thought you had. Oh, yes, Jesus says: there’s a hurricane coming; so we had better get ready for it.

But it’s easy to ignore his storm warning. “That’s no problem,” we think, “we’ll just evacuate when the hurricane threatens! We’ll move to higher ground; go visit our relatives in Tennessee; head for an emergency shelter if we have to. We can avoid a hurricane easily enough!” But the kind of hurricane that Jesus is talking about isn’t one that we can outrun. It’s a storm that life sends us when we are least ready for it. And we usually don’t even see it coming. The rain starts when you hit a patch of black ice on the roadway; and suddenly you’ve careened into the guardrail and the front end of your car is torn apart. The wind starts to howl when your doctor notices a suspicious lump during a routine checkup; and before you know it, you’re facing a whole slew of medical tests. And the storm surge? That’s the midnight phone call from the Sheriff’s department with the chilling message, “I’m so sorry; there’s been an accident.” Rain, wind, and flood. We’re going to have to deal with them. Jesus was absolutely right about that.

But if that’s the bad news that Jesus has for us, he also has good news for us: there is a solid foundation on which we can build our lives so that we can withstand even the worst hurricane that life throws at us; and he even tells us what that foundation is. It’s Jesus’ own words – his teachings about who we are, how we should live, and how valuable we are to God. “These words of mine,” he says “all the things that I have just taught you – they are the solid rock that you can rely on through any storm.” And “these words of mine” are none other than the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ first great teaching in the gospel of Matthew.

Maybe it would be a good idea to review what Jesus said in that teaching. He starts by telling us that everything the world tells us is suspect; and that there’s a better way to live. Then he says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Although the proud may be proud now, someday they will find that they have nothing left to be proud about; but the poor in spirit are a part of God’s kingdom forever. He goes on to say, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” We shouldn’t rely on violence to accomplish anything, because it never does; hitting somebody in the eye only makes him want to hit you back. He even says, “Blessed are the ones who mourn,” because if you mourn, it means that you care deeply about something; and not caring about anything is a terrible way to go through life! He tells us not to hate; because if we do, it will infect our whole lives. He tells us not to run after what we don’t have; because if we do, we won’t enjoy the things that we do have. He even tells us to love our enemies, because God loves everyone, even those folks who don’t love him back.

That last teaching of Jesus is the most important one of all. God loves everyone; and that means all of us. That is the solid rock on which we can stand through all the storms that life throws at us. God loves us no matter who we are or what we do! “Don’t worry,” Jesus says. “You are incredibly important to God, more important than anything else!” God’s love is the truth on which we can base our lives. If we base our lives on money, or on status, or even on our own accomplishments, we’re just like that fool who thought that the beach was a good place to build his dream house! When the stock market crashes, or the biopsy comes back positive, or a pink slip is enclosed with the paycheck, all our plans will be washed away just like the sand on the beach. But the love of God that we see in Jesus Christ will never be washed away, not by all the troubles that life throws at us!

Now, I know that it’s easy to lose sight of that love when the hurricane begins. It’s like driving down I-75 in a cloudburst. You know that there are trees and billboards and road signs along the highway; but you can’t see them through the rain. Sometimes you can’t even see the other cars that are on the highway! But you know that they’re there; and you know that when the rain slows down, you’ll be able to see them again. When troubles start raining into your life, the very same thing happens. You can’t see Jesus’ love through the cloudburst of pain and grief and fear that’s all around you. But it’s there. It’s there when a friend holds you while you weep, and listens while you pour out all your built-up anger and sorrow and fear. It’s there when people around you help you without your even having to ask for it. And it’s there when, every now and then, you feel a little bit of the peace that Jesus promises us, even though the world around you may be lying in ruins. Jesus is the rock on which we can stand, the certainty on which we can rely, the foundation that cannot be washed away. When the rain beats down and the wind howls around us and the flood rushes in, the love of Christ is our solid foundation.

So, where are you building your house? Of all the choices that we make in life, that one is the most important. Choose wisely!