Preaching At The Church Center

Vigil of All Saints/Halloween
Chapel of Christ the Lord, Episcopal Church Center, New York, NY
Luke 14:1-6

The last time Miguelina asked me to preach, I got sick, so last week I started taking extra doses of Vitamin C. When she invited me to preach today, we both commented on the irony and the appropriateness of the staff person for Children’s Formation preaching on Halloween.

I grew up unchurched, for many reasons that aren’t particularly important here. Halloween was always a big deal. We planned for weeks ahead of time, because we always made our own costumes. There was no discussion in our house, or our neighborhood for that matter, about the origins of these customs or the appropriateness of participating in them. It was simply a time to dress up and run around the neighborhood collecting candy.

Flash forward a few years, when I had just started putting my foot back into church, and we started learning about the pre-Christian roots of All Hallows’ Eve and how the Celts believed that at this time of year—their festival of Samhain—is one when the borders that separate our world from those of the faerie and the dead become very thin. We also began seeing the pattern of how the Christian hierarchy renamed and took over many pre-Christian celebrations to aid the spread of their faith. And so Samhain and All Hallows’ Eve became All Saints Day and All Souls Day.

A handful of years later, after coming back to the Episcopal Church, and every year since then, this season brings conversations about the secular culture’s commercialization of Halloween and discussions about whether or not we should be promoting participation in what is essentially a non-Christian festival.

So when the question finally comes around, “Does dressing up and going trick-or-treating endanger our children spiritually?” My reply is often, “Does bringing an evergreen tree into the house around the beginning of Winter and decorating it endanger our children spiritually?” That usually brings the conversation up short.

Ultimately, however, we should be listening to our children. Children are innately spiritual, and children are not stupid. As they leave the shelter of the family home and enter into the neighborhood, the community, and the world, they see and hear things. We cannot shelter them forever. And they will ask questions. It is their questions we should be listening to and discussing. And frequently, as Jesus does in today’s Gospel reading, the best way to answer a question is to pose another question.

So today, my question to all of us is: Do we teach our children to be rigid like the Pharisees, or do we teach them to follow Jesus?

Amen.