Tricks, Treats and 95 Theses

It's that time of year again. Stores all over town are stockpiling candies, costumes, treat bags, plastic jack o'lanterns, and pumpkins--lots and lots of pumpkins--to prepare for Halloween. For the past few years in our area, year-round Halloween and costume retailers have set up shop in empty storefronts to sell all manner of Halloween costumes from August through October, then stay open until Thanksgiving offering deep discounts on the costumes that didn't sell. Halloween is now second only to Christmas as the most profitable time of the year for retailers.

And with this time of the year comes that kind of a dilemma: should Christians celebrate Halloween? Or even the many so-called alternatives or "Harvest Festivals" that offer the same costume and candy fun without the horror emphasis?

Here at Immanuel First, our youth group Lost and Found (LaF) will be having its second annual Haunted House on the church campus October 29 and 30. The first Haunted House, held in the youth room, was an overwhelming success and so it has been expanded to two nights and moved to bigger digs (no pun intended) in the courtyard. Meanwhile, our sister church Loving Savior Lutheran in Chino Hills is hosting a Harvest Festival as a fundraiser for its school, as is Salem Lutheran in the city of Orange. Meanwhile, we are also had a traditional Lutheran Oktoberfest on October 16, as will Mt. Calvary Lutheran in Diamond Bar on October 31, which is also Reformation Day.

However, given the origins of Halloween, or All Saints' Eve, as a pagan Celtic festival called Samhain and the successful attempts by non-Christians to put the guts and gore back into October 31, some Christians have stopped getting involved with the holiday because they are concerned they may be endorsing witchcraft, Satanism or pagan mayhem. They won't even attend a church-sponsored Harvest Festival or "Trunk or Treat" event because they're worried fellow Christians have become stooges and handmaidens for the devil in organizing such events.

Even pastors within the same church are split over the issue. Chuck Smith, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in Southern California, has long been against Christians taking part in Halloween because of its pagan origins, producing an apologetics DVD entitled "Halloween: Innocent Fun or Spiritual Deception?" However, assistant pastor Michael Smith (no relation)--from that same church--says that Christians should not put themselves into a "bubble" that keeps them only with each other and away from the unbelieving world that we are all called to preach the gospel to. Doing so, he says, tends to make us "inbreed" and become hyper-spritual, legalistic weirdos that unbelievers rightfully run away from. I can only guess that diversity of opinion within Calvary Chapel on secondary theological issues is why the latter Smith hasn't been fired by the former Smith for disagreeing with him on Halloween events.

So why is the church divided over Halloween, and for what reason? There are actually good arguments on both sides, and I hope to present them fairly and respectfully.

Back the days of the early church, the ancient Celtic peoples celebrated Samhain, a time of the year when the boundary between this world and the spirit world was breached, allowing both good and evil spirits to cross over from the afterlife back to the living world. Family ancestors would be honored and welcomed back home while evil spirits (or maybe weird Uncle Connor who enjoyed his drink a wee bit too much) would be warded off. By wearing costumes and masks of a scary nature, the Celts believed evil spirits would be fooled into thinking the disguised people were one of their own and leave them alone. This has evolved into the modern Halloween tradition of dressing up in costumes, both scary and unscary.

The name Halloween is a variation of "All Hallows Even", or All Saints' Eve. That is a result of the early church fathers taking Samhain and turning it into a celebration of victory over death rather than of death itself.

In the early 7th century, on May 13, 609 or 610 AD, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon of Rome to the virgin Mary and to all Christians who were martyred for their faith in Jesus Christ. The day chosen for that dedication, May 13, coincided with a pagan festival for the dead called the Feast of the Lemures. What later became known as the Feast of All Saints was moved to November 1 later in the century by Pope Gregory III, thus connecting the Christian celebration with Samhain. In both cases the church deliberately replaced a pagan ritual with one that remembered the lives of the Christian martyrs and the One for whom they died.

In the Lutheran church as well as in many other Christian denominations, we observe All Saints Day on November 1, where we remember and celebrate the lives of loved ones who died in Christ over the past year. This is the modern version of what the early church in Rome began 1400 years ago.

But even with the evangelistic tone of the original All Saints Eve/Halloween, many of our brethren in Christ will still not have anything to do with it because of the Samhain connection. They understandably feel that all the occult and horror trappings of the secular holiday are not fitting for those who believe in the One who rose from dead, and that the early church was wrong or compromising in setting up a Christian alternative to it. (Sound familiar?)

I will be honest. As a 21st century Christian looking back almost 2,000 years, I too sometimes want to ask the church fathers "What in the world were you thinking? What in the world were you smoking? If you idiots only knew that down the line the pagans would work their darnedest to claim their holiday back, and succeed!" But that is my mind working from a contemporary, conservative, American cultural mindset. And such a mindset is not really Christian at all, but rather prideful and isolating... the very attitude that Calvary Chapel's Michael Smith warns us not to have.

In the end, I understand what Popes Boniface and Gregory were trying to do in witnessing to the unbelievers in their midst. It is no different than when the great apostle Paul appealed to the people in Athens about a shrine dedicated "to an unknown god" and proceeded to tell them that Jesus was that God they were seeking (Acts 17:22-26). While the intellectuals of the Areopagus largely mocked Paul for his testimony, a few of them believed and became followers of Jesus, and still a few others wanted him to share more about it at another time (Acts 17:32-34).

In the end, it is a matter of conscience if you choose to dress up and hit up places for candy on October 31. If it offends your conscience, then for you to do it anyway is a sin (Romans 14, 1 Corinthians 8). And we should not criticize, condemn or ridicule those who choose to trick-or-treat or not with a clear conscience, either. And of course, you are free to tell me I'm up the creek, as long as you don't say that literally. :)

And speaking of one's conscience, a young Augustinian monk and scholar named Martin Luther was so driven in his own conscience to speak out against the corruption and heresy of the Roman Catholic church of his day that on October 31, 1517--Halloween--he nailed a document on the front door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg outlining 95 points of contention with Rome over grossly unbiblical practices and heresies. Those points, better known as the Ninety-Five Theses, was the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, in which the biblical truth of salvation by grace rather than good deeds--a free gift from God instead of something that we must work for--was recovered and proclaimed to the body of Christ. And for that I am grateful that Luther didn't cave in to the criticism and condemnation of others.

Enjoy your candy on October 31. Since I'm diabetic, have a second bite-sized Snickers for me.

Rich Rodriguez
Webmaster

New Look, New Home, New Name... Same Blog

Welcome to the new home of my church blog here at Immanuel First. For the past year and a half it has been an unnamed general blog at Tangle.com with my comments and posts on current events, issues and news items from a Lutheran theological perspective. However, it has never received any replies or even criticisms during all the time Tangle has hosted it. Chronic software glitches have also tested my patience in even posting one entry on the blog.

Tangle has recently been purchased by another company, which has its hands full trying to fix all the glitches it inherited. With the new look and design of our church website, I felt that it was also time that I moved the blog from Tangle to another service, and I chose Blogger from Google. Along with a new home, I have finally given the blog a name: "The View from the Pew."

I also hope to set up a second church blog that will serve as the home for Pastor Okubo's monthly columns, as many church members enjoy reading them each time our newsletter comes out. More on that in a later post.

In the meantime, enjoy the new blog.