Halloween

 Next Friday miniature ghosts, goblins and superheroes will emerge at dusk to comb the streets in search of candy.  It is a long tradition in America, one I grew up with as a child and one I enjoyed as a parent. It is, perhaps, one of the few traditions we still celebrate outside with our neighbors. Manicured lawns are transformed into a mystical world of floating cobwebs, jack-o-lanterns and tombstones.

 Watchful parents huddle at the curb and visit while their little ghouls cheerfully threaten their neighbors with tricks for treats. Expectant children hold open hopeful bags and peer into their dark recesses trying to determine what luck they might have had at the door. 

 I always enjoyed taking our kids trick-or-treating. We had fun dressing them up and entering, at least for a night, into their fantasy world.  I liked watching them celebrate their growing assortment of candy gathered from well-wishing neighbors, until a costumed spook jumped from the bushes and convinced our five year old he had enough candy for one night. 

 I still look forward to answering our door bell on Halloween.  I enjoy trying to guess who is hiding behind the princess mask, what little boy is growling in the Ninja Turtle costume.  I like it when ET and Yoda drop by for a visit with their pet ghost-dog. They are polite ghosts and witches and extra-terrestrials. They almost always say, “Thank you.” 

 

Halloween, of course, has its dark side. Our nightly news reports of abducted children and maps dotted with sexual predators have erased the naïve world of Halloween past.  We are more aware that we live in a dangerous world where evil is real and present.   

 

Many churches are more than a little uncomfortable with Halloween.  On the one hand, it is enjoyable to celebrate community with imagination, fantasy and neighborly generosity.   On the other hand, there are demonic and destructive forces at work in the world that kill and destroy.  It is one thing to celebrate fall and indulge in imagination.  It is another to celebrate the occult, witchcraft, the devil and demons.

 Many struggle with addictions and impulses they seem unable to control.  They find themselves on a collision course with destruction.  Our world needs deliverance from evil.

 Jesus once met a man filled with destructive demons.  He lived among the tombs of the dead, often cutting himself with sharp stones.  Local citizens tried to control him by putting him in chains, but he broke the chains and escaped back to his home among the graves.  When Jesus ordered the demons that were destroying the man to leave him the demons entered a nearby herd of swine that immediately rushed into the sea and were drowned.  The man was healed.  When his neighbors found him, he was in his right mind, sitting with Jesus, no longer a threat to himself or to them. But it scared them. They asked Jesus to leave their country and not to come back.  (Mark 5:1-20). Forces that we cannot understand or control always scare us.

 This Halloween we will celebrate an occasion to enjoy our children and their imagination. We will celebrate the turning leaves, dry corn, pumpkins and harvest. And we will celebrate that we have a deliverer who can conquer evil in our hearts and in the world.

Celebrities and Mortality

The list of celebrities who have died this year is growing long.  February 18 Gene Hackman died in his New Mexico home.   April 1, Val Kilmer died.  August 7, astronaut James Lovell, commander of Apollo 13; September 16, Robert Redford died peacefully at his home in Utah. And October 11, Diane Keaton succumbed to pneumonia in Santa Monica.

 

Somehow we don’t think of celebrities as mortal.  Their images on the screen make them bigger than life:  Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, Little Bill in Unforgiven; Doc Holiday in Tombstone; Tom Hanks portrayal of Lovell in Apollo 13; the Sundance Kid, Roy Hobbs in The Natural; Louise Bryant in Reds, Nina Banks in Father of the Bride.Their cinema performances made them seen immortal.  But, they weren’t.    

 

The truth of Scripture appears stark.  “The days of our lives are but 70 years, or if by strength, 80, for soon they are gone and we fly away,” (Psalm 90).  “For the Lord God knows our estate that we are but dust.  For man is like the grass of the field that flourishes as a flower, and after the wind passes it is no more and its place remembers it no longer,”(Psalm 103).     

 

My grandchildren have no recognition or remembrance of some of the icons who shaped the world in my youth.  Paul Newman. (Did he have something to do with coffee?)  Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Ricky Nelson, Annette Funicello.  I’m not sure they even know who John Wayne was.  “… After the wind blows …”

 There is One who lived who remains. James Allen Francis captured his significance in a sermon in 1926: "He was born in an obscure village, a child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another obscure village where he worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty.  Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher.  He never had a family.  Or owned a home. He never set foot inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place he was born.  He never wrote a book or held an office.  He did none of the things that usually accompany greatness. While he was still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him.  His friends deserted him.

“He was turned over to his enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves.  While he was dying his executioners gambled for the only piece of property he had, his coat. When he was dead, he was taken down and laid in a borrowed grave.  Nineteen centuries have come and gone and today he is still the central figure for much of the human race. All the armies that ever marched, All the navies that ever sailed and all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned put together
have not affect the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as this One Solitary Life.

 Job asked the question, “If a man die, shall he live again?”  After a long ordeal of sorrow, disappointment, doubt and despair he arrived at his answer, “Yet as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last, He will take His stand on the earth.  Even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I will see God, whom I, on my part, shall behold for myself, and whom my eyes will see, and not another,” (Job 19:25-27).

Practicing Kindness and Compassion

 I like to read. Always have. As a kid I rode my bike to our local library with my friends to browse and check out books. When I met my wife, we spent our evenings together in the library at Baylor University and, across the years, libraries have remained one of our favorite places to visit on our “dates.”

  Once in awhile, a book sticks with me. Same Kind of Different as Me is one of those books that stuck. Based on a true story, the book was made into a movie in 2017 starring Renee Zellweger.

Same Kind of Different As Me is two stories. One, the story of an illiterate black man named Denver who was raised in the cotton fields of Louisiana and ended up homeless on the streets of Fort Worth. The other, an upwardly mobile white man named Ron Hall who graduated from TCU and made a fortune in the art world. They each tell their story, and the remarkable intersection of their journeys.

Maybe I was drawn to the book because Ron Hall spent his childhood summers on a farm near my boyhood home of Corsicana. His descriptions of Corsicana resonated with my memories growing up on Collin Street, one of the signature brick streets that reflect the glory days when the city boasted more millionaires per capita than any other town in Texas. Maybe I was drawn to the book because Ron and Denver intersect in the slums of Fort Worth east of downtown where my wife started her teaching career fifty years ago.

But the true stories of Ron Hall and Denver Moore are not the main stories in the book. They represent other stories: the story of our country and its culture. Ron represents those who rise from middle class with professional opportunities that can lead to great wealth. He also represents the dangers of that path that include temptations for greed, materialism, shallow and broken relationships. Denver represents the alarmingly huge segment of our population that falls between the cracks, victims of prejudice, oppression, injustice and neglect. He also represents the dangers of that downward spiral that includes temptations of bitterness, anger, isolation and despair.

The greatest story underlying and connecting all of these is God’s story. Ron’s wife, Deborah is the entry point for His work, one person who was open, willing and obedient who became the catalyst for connecting these two broken men from different ends of the social spectrum.

In a day when many look to government to heal our wounds and solve our social problems, Same Kind of Different As Me serves as a reminder that the real solution to our personal and social problems lies within us. It is often buried beneath our own prejudices and fears, but it can be unlocked and released with the keys of acceptance, trust, faith and love, all the things Jesus demonstrated and talked about.

God wants to use each of us, whatever our race, whatever our circumstance, whatever our background to make a difference in the world. “Thus has the Lord of hosts said, ‘Dispense true justice, and practice kindness and compassion each to his brother; and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another,” (Zechariah 7:8-10).

How Immense Is God?

In the 1960s J. B. Phillips wrote a book entitled, Your God is Too Small. The title can apply to all of us.  Our understanding of God is always too small.  Our finite minds have limited comprehension of the infinite power and presence of God. In his introduction Phillips wrote, “God is immeasurably ‘bigger’ than our forefathers imagined, and modern scientific discovery only confirms their belief that man has only just begun to comprehend the complex Being who is behind what we call ‘life.’”

 Once in awhile science gives us a hint.   Voyager 1’s almost 50-year-old journey to the edge of the Solar System does just that.  Next year, November 2026, Voyager 1 will achieve a literal “milestone.”  Launched in 1977, traveling at 38,025 mph, Voyager 1 will reach 1 light day from earth, the distance light travels in one day.  50 years and it is just now on the doorstep of interstellar space.  Of course, one light year requires 365 light days.  So, it will take another 17,500 years for Voyager to travel one light year from earth. 

 The nearest star to earth is Proxima Centauri, 4.25 light years away.  Since Voyager 1 has already been traveling 50 years, it should reach Proxima Centauri in another 74,325 years. The most distant star from earth, that we know of, is 28 billion light years away.  Our universe is incredibly immense.  That being the case, consider how immense the Creator is.  This is why the Bible says God is “from everlasting to everlasting.”  To God “1,000 years is like yesterday when it passes,” (Psalm 90). 

 In his book, Rumors of Another World, Philip Yancey wrote, “I find more of a spirit of reverence among secular science writers than in some theologians.  The wisest among them admit that all our widening knowledge merely expresses our more-widening pool of ignorance.”

 Albert Einstein stated, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.  He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

 C. S. Lewis cited the source of intelligence as his turning point from atheism to faith, and eventually Christianity.  The intelligent source of all creation wrote himself into His own creation when “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”

 John expressed the immense mystery of God and incarnation in this way, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him not even one thing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of mankind.  And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not ^[grasp it,” (John 1:1-5).