Halloween? About Death & the Devil

Halloween? About Death & the Devil

A few years ago my wife and I were fortunate to be able to take a week's vacation at Lake Chelan in Washington state, not that far over the border from where we live. As is often our custom when away on a Sunday, we visited one of the local churches. We have had many wonderful experiences doing this over the years.

This just happened to be the Sunday before Halloween. Now, as we all know, Halloween has become greatly 'überdone' as a special event in the calendar year. Indeed, most of what we see in our North American context is anything but hallowed. And if that isn't enough, many now have to include the day before Halloween to try and accomplish more wickedness. In fact, some call it 'Devil's Night', others 'Mischief Night'.

Halloween has also become a huge business, which is typical of anything in the USA especially. As soon as Thanksgiving is over, it's Halloween all the way, at least in Canada. In the US of course, Thanksgiving comes almost a month after Halloween, so, ironically, they may actually be spared some of the hoopla about Halloween we have here.

But I digress somewhat; I was not intending to write a feature about Halloween. We attended a Nazarene church that Sunday and the pastor spoke on the devil, which was appropriate, considering what was coming up the day after. He talked about how Halloween is about ghosts, goblins and other creatures we associate with the other world, particularly that of the world of those who have experienced death. He also spoke then of how the skeleton, gravestones, coffins etc. are such common motifs in all things to do with Halloween in the secular sense.

The points that the pastor made about all of this is that we should not be surprised. It is because of the devil that we have death. Indeed, one could say, as he basically did, that the devil is all about death. As the pastor said, that's all he can do. He can't create anything as our God does. Therefore, he can't make anything good. Indeed, from what we know of his intentions, they are just to make bad what God has created good.

So, next time Halloween rolls around, think of the devil trapped in his limitations. Not that we should feel sorry for him by any means. We do need to have certain respect for him in terms of acknowledging his existence and what he is about and, as Christians, with Jesus' power resist him. As I wrote in my other blog entry today, Jesus has defeated death and the devil. Jesus came to bring us life; the devil can only come to bring us death. So what does this really say about what Halloween in our modern society is all about?

The Devil Made Me Do It

The Devil Made Me Do It

Some of you who are older will remember the 1970s television comedy show starring Flip Wilson. Frequently, when caught in some prank, he would do a defensive little dance and say, "The devil made me do it."

I think that excuse was not original with him and has certainly proliferated since. But can the devil really make us do something? Think about it for a moment. Take a look at the other side, as we often categorize it. Can God make us do something? I think we more are more used to, at least coming from Christendom, believing that God can't make us do anything because he created us good with free will. As our Bible tells us, the misuse of that gift by Adam and Eve was what led to their downfall and the spoilage of the whole human race and earth ever since.

So, who do we think is more powerful? The devil or God? Again, according to Christian teaching, the devil is simply one of God's creations, an angel gone bad. If that is all he is and even God can't or generally won't make us do something, where does that leave the devil? When have we ever thought any other angel made us do something?

There is another significant aspect to this that I really had not given thought to until it was raised in a recent discussion I was having with my pastor, Tim Kuepfer. As he so obviously pointed out, again challenging the thought expressed in our title: as a creature, the devil is finite. He is not God who can be everywhere and anywhere at once, as we believe as Christians about our Creator. He would have to be doing a lot of lightspeed scurrying around if he was responsible for all the evil in the world. Now, of course, there has always been the thought that he also has a number of subordinate angels who serve him and delight to encourage us in evil directions as well. This is no doubt true, but again, how many of these angels are there? To be sure, they are spirit and can move around differently than we do, but they are still creatures and limited in their ability. If neither the devil nor his angels can be everywhere at once, it is also then impossible that they are directly responsible for all the evil deeds done in the world. Of course, we could argue that their influence was what led to evil in the world, but man still had to make a choice when offered those possibilities.

Of course, what happened with Jesus and what the New Testament also teaches is that the devil has been beaten at his own game. Jesus’ death removed for all of us and our earth the death that is the consequence of our making wrong choices, particularly choosing not to believe in God or follow the teachings of his son Jesus. So, if Jesus has overcome the devil with his death and resurrection, which demonstrated his power, as St. Paul says, what have we to fear (first Corinthians 15, especially 54-57)?

Now, that is not to say that we do not have to be on guard to a degree. St. Peter (I Peter 5:8) cautions us about that in his description of the devil as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour." On the other hand, if we are Christians, living in Christ as our Bible-based belief holds, we have access to Jesus’ power and as James says, if we "resist the devil, he will flee from us." (James 4:7).

All of this does not mean that we can take the casual attitude about the devil that much of our world nowadays seems to have. The devil and his minions are still our enemies. We still do need to be on our guard to a degree, but it is more about the choices we make when tempted, not that the devil or one of his impish angels is going to suddenly appear and make us do something evil that we cannot resist. Unless, of course, we have entirely aligned ourselves with him as others do with Christ. But that is another story. If we as Christians are confident in our salvation and our faith, we need to be ever watchful, but we do not need to be, indeed must not be, fearful. And we should not use the excuse, "the devil made me do it," as that is all it is.

Telling Our Stories II - The Ones We Have Told

In the previous posting, I emphasized how and why we as Mennonites have not told our stories. However, that is not entirely true, as I alluded to there.  In fact, our early history from the 16th and 17th centuries is well and tragically recorded in the large volume known as The Martyrs Mirror. In fact, next to Fox's Book of Martyrs, which gruesomely recounts stories of martyrs for the Christian faith from earliest times onwards, this is probably one of the most prominent such collections. Somehow, and perhaps this speaks to the suppression of our storytelling, we had a volume of the latter at home, which I read in as a child, but not the former! I must confess that I still have not read the former. It can be an inspiration to others to see how people were willing to die for their faith, particularly as it documents many of their testimonies prior to and as they were dying. These were not just the educated or radical leaders either. They included very average people such as housewives and mothers.

However, as I indicated, that persecution led to the suppression of our storytelling. It was not until we began to move from the USSR to other parts of the world beginning in the late 19th century, but especially after the Russian Revolution and World War II, that we Mennonites found ourselves in environments where we were more free to tell our stories. The result has been a fairly large outpouring of stories of individuals, families, and our leaders. Their suffering in the USSR and elsewhere and how they saw God at work in leading them out of these situations are dominant themes in many of these books. Others, including a couple of my uncles, have written about how they saw God move in their own lives and their work in this country and elsewhere in this century and the last.  There are also now books written by and about the spiritual leaders of our faith where we ethnic Swiss/German/Dutch-origin Mennonites mostly have found ourselves in North America. However, I do not think many of them are no one much beyond our own circle. 

Of course, we must now always keep in mind that because of our missionary efforts around the world, telling us that our storytelling has not been suppressed as much in some parts of the world as it is where we come from, there are more non-ethnic Swiss/German/Dutch Mennonites in the world by far than in the former and original category. Yes, with some of the religious freedom given in Russia and subsequently in North America, missionaries began to go out in the 19th century. Others actually also went from the Netherlands, where the Mennonite church was still quite active prior to World War II. Sadly, since then, along with much of the church in Europe, as people questioned where God was through all of the horrors of 2 world wars, the Mennonite church in the Netherlands is very much on the wane. that has been a stronger presence maintained, although to a small degree, in Switzerland, where are movement began. In Germany, with the advent of many Mennonites moving there who escaped from Russia/the USSR, during and after World War II, there has been somewhat of a revival of Anabaptism, although some of it very conservative and not that true to some of the original teachings and values.

Another form of storytelling, if we can call it that, that has become very prominent in Mennonite circles is collecting family trees and genealogies. However, too often, the majority of these volumes are taken up by pages and pages of schematic diagrams of who descended from who and who married who etc. I always have to think of a scriptural quote from Titus 3:9 in connection with this: "But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and vain." (KJV) What the writer is referring to here is a point that we need to keep in mind. We can say all we want about the wonderful faith of our forefathers, but if we do not make it our own, it loses its value for ourselves.  So, as much as I like to know my genealogy, and have even worked on it, I always have the thought at the back of my mind, that this interest is not something we should overdo. I have always wished that GE's genealogies contained much more of the space stories of the members whose names are on those many pages. That would have so much more meaning and hopefully impact on the descendants who even bother to look at those volumes nowadays. For too many of our Mennonite descendants, many of whom still like to call themselves Mennonite even though they openly say they are not members of a Mennonite church, these genealogies may pique their interest in determining their roots, but they don't really care about the faith stories either.

It is the faith stories that I am more interested in.

Telling Our Stories I - or - Why We Don't Tell Them

This morning's devotional in our Mennonite Church publication Rejoice urged us to tell our stories as witnesses where God has acted in our lives. This is something that I have also frequently talked and perhaps written about. Indeed, I have even given related sermons. Indeed, there are writers in society at large to mourn the decline of storytelling. Like so many things in our world, including music and sports, storytelling is something that is relegated to professionals as in movies and novels.

There are those in our Mennonite circles who have written and continue to write about where God has acted in their lives. Much of this has focused on their deliverances from untenable living situations in the USSR. Many of those storytellers are passing on, and many untold stories with them.

Sometimes stories are not told because the telling is too painful. At other times, it is because we think our stories are such that no one else would be interested in hearing, or understanding them. Some people are not sure they have a listener.  When it comes to we as Mennonites telling our stories, we have sometimes talked about how this function has declined in our circles because, in order to live peaceably, we agreed, in essence, at various places and times in our history, as we moved about to escape persecution, not to tell our stories, at least not to those beyond our circles.  The larger world and the dominant church in the world in those days in particular, meaning either Catholic, Reformed or Lutheran  denominations, was not interested in our version of how God worked in the world and in our lives.  So, we became known, amongst ourselves at least, as "Die Stille im Lande,"  "The quiet in the land."

In our Western society today, with its emphasis on pluralism and tolerance, religious freedom and separation of church and state etc., telling such stories continues to be frowned on. It is one thing to have one's own belief, and that is accepted, but it is not accepted to tell others about it, particularly if there is a motive of wanting them to convert to your religion. We often hear the expression in our society that religion and politics are 2 topics that are kept out of polite conversation. Indeed, in many parts of the world, such activity is outlawed and Christians are put to death for breaking those rules. 

A prominent Canadian lawyer recently epitomized the view in Canada when he clearly stated, as a well-trained lawyer would do, that in Canada we accept the right of people to believe what they want. However, when it comes to acting on those beliefs, the laws of the land supersede because those actions might impinge negatively on others. He was speaking about a recent situation in BC where Trinity Western University (TWU) continues to fight for the freedom to educate professionals in a Christian setting where they are requested to abide by certain covenants that govern behavior. The one in question here was to refrain from homosexual activity. A number of lawyers and provincial law societies do not want TWU-trained lawyers to be able to practice simply because their training is in a school where that is part of the code of conduct. As representatives of the school have said, that does not mean that homosexuals cannot attend their school, and indeed due in graduate. 

This lawyer's attitude, in my mind, illustrates a basic misunderstanding of the role of religion in a person's life. Indeed, sometimes I think we should leave the word religion to refer to certain faith-based practices, rituals and celebrations, that the religious can do amongst themselves, without really at risk of infecting others. Indeed, sometimes these aspects have come to be seen as more cultural and accepted as expressions of that, then arising from religion.  For such reasons I have sometimes said that we really should not use the word religion when we are talking about our faith and way of life.  

True religion, as we Anabaptists know, includes a way of life. That was one of the big differences between our spiritual ancestors and the church at the time. There was little emphasis on living a life of discipleship as Jesus taught. Some have pointed to how the accepted creeds of the day fostered this by referring to the Trinity, God is creator, then Jesus' miraculous birth at the beginning,  before jumping to refer to his death and resurrection, saying nothing about the years in between and all of his actions and teachings and what the meaning of all of that was.

The White Man Says Walk

Gabor Mate, in his book In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts (Vintage, Canada, 2008) recounts how he happened to arrive at an intersection in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside where he works, at the same time of as one of his aboriginal patients. When the light changed, she said with typical indigenous humor, "The white man says walk." She probably didn't realize how much one could read into that statement, especially when you match that with the red hand that first flashes a warning and then becomes solid, saying "Don't walk."

Our aboriginal hosts, when we as European settlers first came here, and now as our neighbors, our ancestors and ourselves having extensively settled what was their land, have often held up flashing red hands of warning. They told the new arrivals what was safe to eat and not. They told them what was good to use for medicine. They even advised our forefathers where not to travel and where not to settle, e.g. in the flood pains of our rivers. However, we did not heed them so now you have extensive floods threatening our cities and rural lands such as Winnipeg and the Red River Valley on a regular basis.

Today, the flashing red hands are more likely to refer to government and business plans to exploit natural resources such as with mining, or to build pipelines across their lands to transport oil. More recently, the hands have been held up to try to get government to reconsider legislation that no longer protects our water supply as it once did.

Our First Nations neighbors have always had a different understanding of their relationship to creation and the land then most of the rest of us who have come to this land have. They see themselves as an integral part of the web of creation. Europeans and their descendants who settled the Americas, coming from what was then regarded as a major bulwark of Christendom, inherited a worldview based on a certain interpretation of passages from the Bible that formed the basis of their beliefs of what it means to "subdue… and have dominion over" the earth and its other creatures (Genesis 1:26-28). Unfortunately, we have not done a very good job of taking care of what has been entrusted to us. It seems we have instead chosen to exploit the earth to its fullest and use up resources that are there as fast as we can, especially nowadays when our society seems to have become even more materialistic and greedy. As my colleague's patient said, "The white man says walk." In other words, the white man has chosen to understand "subdue and have dominion" as giving them free license to  "walk all over" the earth in the negative sense in which that phrase is often used in our vernacular these days. From the middle centuries of the first millennium of The Common Era, the white man has been "walking," exploring and pushing the limits around the world. Now, of course, some are even extending that into space.

Sometimes, the flashing red hand has become a solid red hand, and government and business plans and projects have been delayed or even stopped. My sense is that this is going to increasingly become the case if our governments and their business supporters do not change the way they view our relationship to the earth. My hope and prayer is that the open redhead that says stop, will not become the clenched red fist that we have already sometimes seen, including with arms, weapons, in it. Sometimes I fear that our government's policies towards our First Nations neighbors, who are in too many cases still being kept in Third World conditions in a country that is otherwise rated around the world as one of the most desirable to live in, will drive them in that direction out of sheer frustration. We have to be thankful that it is part of First Nations temperament to be patient and wait, but everything has its limits.

My Morning Prayer

 A few years ago, I don't remember if it was New Year's or not, I was thinking about how I start my day.  Specifically, I was thinking about what I prayed in the morning. Then I reasoned that if King Solomon, seen by some as the wisest man who ever lived, at the start of his reign, when the Lord appeared to him in a dream by night giving him the privilege of asking what he should give Solomon, asked only for wisdom, or as the RSV has it, "understanding" (I Kings 3:9; 2nd Chronicles 1:10), that I should do no less. God was so pleased with  Solomon's response that he promised him a "Wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you." (I Kings 3:12) He also promised whole lot of other things, including "both riches and honor all your life; no other thing King shall compare with you [ and] if you will walk in my ways... than I will lengthen your life." (I Kings 3:13-14). That was not what I was thinking about when I made this decision.

I quickly realized though to that I also wanted to ask for knowledge, particularly when it came to my career. Even when it comes to our faith, there are many references in both the Old and New Testaments extolling the virtue of knowledge and encouraging us to ask for knowledge. Indeed, knowledge also figures into the original creation story with a reference to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which figured in the downfall of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2:17, 3:1-7). God is also referred to as a God of knowledge (I Samuel 2:3).

Then I also reasoned that I needed love. God is described as love (I John 4:8) and if I would follow him, I would need to love. St. Paul also writes tellingly in that famous passage of I Corinthians 13, verse 2: If I... understand all mysteries and all knowledge... but do not have love, I am nothing."

Somewhere along the line subsequently, I realized that another quality that is necessary, both in my professional and personal life, is compassion. This is something that is emphasized in the New Testament is a quality of our Lord Jesus Christ, with no less than 9 references to his having compassion on the people he related to.

Indeed, from that it was not much of a leap to be reminded that I need to exhibit all the "fruits of the Spirit" in my everyday life.  These are described in Galatians 5:22 as including "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control."

No matter how much one may enjoy one's occupation or one's life at times, there are always those moments and even mornings or days when one does not waken with the best of feelings or the greatest of motivation. Recognizing this and some of my own particular weaknesses, I began to add to my prayer requests for energy, efficiency and efficacy. I often have to remind myself of the other passage of Scripture were Paul encourage us not to be "weary in well doing" (Galatians 6:9). Along with that, I have learned that I need to ask for help with prioritization, self-discipline and even memory. The last may be a bit of a reflection of my age.  With respect to some of the preceding, it is so easy to fall back on things of selfish interest, pleasure, particularly when so much is now available at our fingertips with the computer. We really need self-discipline to resist the temptations around us and focus our energies on what we need to do as followers of Jesus. 

Of course, all of the above does not even include requests with respect to particular individuals in my circle and their needs. Anyone who is moving into my age bracket will know that that lists can be pretty long given what happens to our health when we age. So, given all of the above, what could be a simple morning prayer has gradually evolved into a much broader exercise of spiritual discipline.