Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. W. Mathew Broadbent

United Church of Christ Sunday Worship

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos, CA 94087 October 31, 2010

The Gospel of Halloween

Ephesians 1:11-19; Luke 6:20-31

So a pirate walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder….”

No, this is not another joke to start a sermon, but the beginning of a serious essay on the cultural implications of the Halloween holiday by Thomas G. Long of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Long writes, “It’s Halloween, and the ‘pirate’ is actually a youngish accountant – you know him well, the one who does your taxes – who has swapped his blue blazer, button down oxford, and rep tie for a sash, a rubber Macaw, an eye-patch, a hook, and a rare evening of revelry at a local [watering spot – Bailey’s] tavern.” It is estimated that about a third of all American adults will put on a costume today. What is this all about? When did Halloween get taken over by the adults?

I remember when Halloween was a harmless, fun, children’s night out before the really cold weather set in? We would dress up as cowboys or pirates, a princess, a witch, or Snow White. Or, grab a white sheet and become a ghost. My default costume was always a hobo. I was sure to find a lot of shabby clothes around the house, and my father’s over-sized old shoes. One year I was superman with blue ski pajamas and a red towel tied around my neck.

I remember living in Brockton, Massachusetts for a time. Halloween night was always dark and cold. We were already on standard time. We scoured the neighborhood with our friends, occasionally parents accompanied us, but mostly I went with my older brother. At the top of our street there was a small Victorian made into a haunted house where an old man, he must have been at least 40 years old, lived alone. He would decorate his house with all kinds of paper cut-outs of bats and goblins and flashing lights, and towards the end of the candy gathering time he would welcome in children, and adults, to watch silent picture “horror” movies on a 16 mm projector. It is still a cherished high-light of my childhood memories, and something I would have never allowed my own children to do.

Halloween has changed over the years. When we got to be twelve and thirteen we stopped trick-or-treating, that was for little kids. But not anymore, now it has been taken over by adults. And corporate marketers have fed our consumer hunger and realized huge profits. Do you know that even in this down economic climate we will spend about 6 billion dollars this year celebrating Halloween, making it second only to Christmas in consumer spending. There is even a company, Spencer Gifts - that own the Spirit of Halloween stores that sprout up seasonally – whose CEO is lobbying to change the date of Halloween to the last Saturday of the month and its name to HalloWeekend. He reasons the industry could instantly see an increase of 30% in revenue. This year, nearly as many adults (47 million) as children (58 million) will buy costumes at these Halloween stores at $25 dollars a pop, or more.

This is a growth industry and there are always dangers lurking about. In the 1990’s the American Public Health Association became alarmed by the connection between Halloween and the consumption of alcohol. Beer companies have done an especially effective job of linking the holiday with their product. Miller Lite developed a special glow-in-the-dark Halloween label for their product. Coors enlisted the character “Count Drakula,” and Anheuser-Busch launched a major “Fright Night” campaign for adult party-goers.

Halloween is not for little kids, anymore. It has become dangerous. There was a time in the 70’s and 80’s when Halloween turned violent. We heard stories of poisoned candy and razor-blades in apples, which have turned out to be urban myths, but now, no one will accept home-made goodies like we used to make for Halloween. It all has to be hermetically sealed. We fear the demons that walk the streets are all too human.

I remember, when we lived in Santa Cruz, that after the little kids got off the streets they belonged to the teenagers and drunken party goers. We would turn off our lights, hide the cats and dog and hope they didn’t egg our house, or destroy our mailbox.

But consumerism isn’t the only reason for this cultural upsurge regarding Halloween. Thomas Long writes about the reaction of extreme right wing Christians who have fanned the flames of popularity by making it particularly attractive to teens and young adults by portraying it as “the devil’s training ground,” in which the old Druids emerge from the shadows at Halloween to entice us to unspeakable acts. One Bible Belt newspaper headline read: “Halloween is Satan’s breeding ground.” Oooo! What could be more appealing.

One of the more innovative responses to Halloween by some of these independent evangelical churches was the development of “Hell Houses.” Where a haunted house, like the one’s our youth sometimes create here at Foothills, is meant to scare the bejeesus out of you, a typical Hell House aim to scare you to Jesus. Demon tour guides take the audience through a series of bloody staged tableaux depicting sinners whose bad behavior – homosexuality, abortion, suicide, and above all, the rejection of Christ’s saving grace – leads them straight to hell. Wow! Shades of medieval morality plays.

Fortunately, for most of us who don’t want to get into the cultural wars of this simple holiday, Halloween is still a night of child’s play. “In fact,” writes Thomas Long, “it is precisely the non-controversial, non-ideological character of Halloween among my neighbors that may point to another reason for its rising appeal. In our ideologically contested society, other holidays can be divisive. It provides a seemingly safe and neutral public space for festival. Everyone can put on vestments and dance before Halloween’s godless altar without fear of making a politically incorrect gaffe or doing something that will tick off Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, or Agnostics down the street. Halloween is a demilitarized zone in the culture wars. It’s Mardi Gras without the burden of Lent.”

What made Long’s essay such compelling reading for me was his insight that “the emerging rituals of Halloween in our culture form both a critique of and a hunger for the Christian faith.

The origins of Halloween are rooted in the Celtic agricultural festival “Samhain” (Gaelic for summer’s end). It was the time of the final harvests of the year when the sun was waning and the killing frost were encroaching. It was a time of celebration and uncertainty. Had they gathered enough food to hold them through the winter, and would the winter be longer and harder than usual? Who knew? You did your best and lived on faith in an uncertain world. Samhain was the in-between time – between light and darkness, between the warmth and the cold, between succulent abundance of summer and the killing power of winter, between life and death, between this world and the next. Some, especially the old and the infirm would not make it through the winter. On Samhain the tissue between the natural and the supernatural was thin, and the spirits of the dead and the creatures of the other world were thought to roam the earth. As Europe was Christianized, Samhain was tied to All Saints Day and All Souls Day and thus became All Hallows Eve, Hallowe’en.

But what is interesting about Halloween, is not its pagan roots and archaic rituals and myths, “but that it emerged out of that social and personal anxiety that exists on the border between summer and winter, between life and death, between that which is fully visible in the light of day and the forbidden that lies hidden in the shadows. At is roots, Halloween allowed people to draw close to that which they most feared: to the dead, to their own death, to the powers of darkness.

So is it any surprise that Halloween is not just about children’s make-believe. What was once a festival for adults and became a festival primarily for children, is being reclaimed by grown-ups, who can dress up, and cross boundaries, at least in imaginative play, and add a touch of mystery, a little “safe” danger to their otherwise rather humdrum lives. This is a holiday of transgression,” writes Long, “I think this gets to the heart of it.”

Here is our accountant, then, with a rubber parrot on his shoulder. He is playacting as a “manly man,” swashbuckling and brandishing a fake sword down at Bailey’s Tavern on “Halloween Fright Night.” He walks up to a young woman, who is a nurse in a geriatric ward, but tonight is dressed as a tart, and harmlessly flirts with her. It’s good fun. Everyone knows that tomorrow, come 9 a.m., she will be feeding stewed apples to her patients, and he will be sitting at his computer entering some client’s long term capital gains into Excel.

But tonight, here he is downing a few more Miller Lite’s than he should with their glow-in-the-dark label. “For this one night, as the killing frost of November threatens, he has made a joke of death…(Long)” It is as if he is saying, “I am weary of the boring life I lead. I am weary of my domestication, even my timid and conventional church. I yearn for adventure. I want to be summoned to a life bigger than I now inhabit. I want to venture into that place where everything is urgent and a matter of life and death, where life is a dangerous risk worth taking.”

Down at the pub they make it a joke, but over at the real church, hopefully a church like ours, this hunger for an adventure, this yearning for a life of size and urgency, this desire to come close to death and to be unafraid is called gospel. It is where we identify the blessings and the woes, the challenge of living – not playacting - an authentic life, a life that listens as we walk the streets filled with demons and desires to be less than you can be. Listen! Here is the challenge: You know you love those who love you, but now “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you…. Do to others as you would have them do to you.” You do it first. That’s the risk we are asked to take. It is as simple and as hard as that. We call it discipleship.