Happy Halloween
I have very mixed feelings about Halloween. Sure, all my kids got dressed up and went around the neighborhood collecting as much candy as they could. It was a contest to see who got the most and best handouts. Recently, Terri helped her daughter Leslie put up Halloween decorations for little Olivia, including setting up a graveyard in the front yard.
What is the source of my discomfort, I ask myself, am I just a party pooper?
Halloween means “All Hallows (Saints) Eve.” It’s basically a wonderful feast of living souls, joyful in God’s presence, praising God and interceding for all of us. It’s all about love and life and not about death at all, and yet, it’s evolved into a celebration of death or a preoccupation with death. God is God not of the dead, but of the living. (Matthew)
This doesn’t surprise me, because our culture exalts death and promotes the fear of death, all the while requiring the death of some to achieve peace. “Culture” is the operative word here, because all culture begins with a tomb, altar, or a pile of stones where a victim is buried. Stories are passed on about the victim, and culture then develops around the hero or saint.
Our first reading from Deuteronomy recounts the death of Moses and admits that “no one knows” where he is buried. Moses led his people to the edge of the Promised Land, but wasn’t allowed to lead them in. Maybe the lack of a shrine to Moses was because the conquest of the Promised Land was a bloody, death-filled undertaking. God wanted no part in the sacred violence that would ensue. The questions scholars ask: Was Moses’ death perfectly timed and carried out by God? Did God kill him? Or, not being able to see the Promised Land, did his own people kill Moses as a scapegoat at a time of crisis when they were completely exhausted, thirsty, and hungry, and then later after they did enter the land of milk and honey, look back, revering Moses, and memorializing him as dying at 120 years of age on the holy mountain with God? Did God plan and execute Moses’ death or did his own people? Since God doesn’t go about killing people (as we sometimes think), most probably it was the latter. God is all about life, everything that comes into life, lives to God even through what we call the moment of death.
Now when you visit Jerusalem, there is a Tomb of David. So when the Gospel calls Jesus the “Son of David,” it’s referring to the belief that the Messiah was to come from the House of David and “make Israel great again” by all means necessary, even death and destruction of enemies. So Jesus, instead of answering their question about the greatest commandment, asks what they think of the Messiah, and whose Son is he? They reply “The Son of David.” Jesus then quotes Psalm 110: “The Lord said to my Lord ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’” In other words, “Lord” David addressed the “Lord” Messiah who was living before he died. How can he the Messiah be David’s son if he existed before David?
Jesus is teaching the Pharisees and Scribes, to their puzzlement, that the Messiah they are awaiting already exists, and is cut of a completely different cloth than they expect. The Messiah will have nothing to do with death or destruction or “making Israel great again,” but only will have to do with Life. Only Satan fosters this “great again” business and the loss of well-being and death and destruction it brings in its wake.
For St. Paul the basic choice in all of this was: Do we want to go along with pleasing people (and fostering their hope for greatness over everyone else no matter the cost) or please God (and refuse to bow down to death)? Answer: We speak, not to please mortals but to please God who tests our hearts. (I Thes. 2) “Please,” anesko in the Greek, means “satisfying someone’s desire.” (Herodias danced for Herod to please him. Husbands and wives shouldplease one another. (I Cor. 7) The only other place the word is used is here in the context of the choice each of us has: to please and fulfill the desires of others or to fulfill the desire of God. This is the testing our hearts are always undergoing.
We might be here this morning to please other people, but because we are building a community that is learning how to please God, this is just fine. The Risen life we receive in the Eucharist is the Life the Saints enjoy. They died in a moment, before the eyes of their fellows, but every second and forever they live happy with God.
Amen!
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| St. Alban |
Saint Alban Episcopal Mission (English, Anglican Communion) meets for mass every Sunday at 10:00 A.M. (see welcome letter at sidebar) at Casa Convento Concepcion, 4a Calle Oriente No. 41, Antigua, Guatemala.
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| The Reverend John Smith, Vicar 5235-6674 cell telephone (502 country code) |
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