'What are we waiting for?'
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on 6th November 2011 by Rev Dr Stephen Holmes
On Monday - in St Andrews, and in a hundred hundred other places - people were dressed up as witches and skeletons, ghosts and zombies, bats and vampires. Children were out guising (or trick-or-treating if for some reason you prefer the American vernacular to the native Scots). Weekly TV shows took on a mock horror theme and played with it. It was Halloween, and we wanted to celebrate.
But why? Halloween, the way we know it now, is not something to celebrate; it is, quite simply, a tragedy.
Not because we have been comprehensively duped by a commercial invention of a festival out of nothing - although of course we have. Not because the themes are dark and unwholesome and often border on the genuinely dangerous - although they are, and they do. Not because masked parties and children roaming the streets unsupervised after dark are invitations to the worst sorts of criminal abuse - although they are, and this year saw the usual sickening slew of news stories coming out of our halloween celebrations.
No, halloween as we celebrate it is a tragedy because it isn’t true.
It doesn’t matter how often we dress up as the restless dead, how many ghosts and vampires we paint across our walls, how often, even, we toy with ouija boards and other unwholesome gadgets, the truth remains that the restless dead do not stalk the earth, and those we have lost cannot be found and heard by sliding glasses or by knocking tables. The dead are dead and gone; and we cannot change that; and it is a tragedy.
I say this not because the thoughts of streets filled with zombies appeals to me - although if the witness of video games is anything to go by, there is some entertainment to be had in such a situation - but because any one of us who has said goodbye to someone we loved knows the aching regrets, the pain of things unsaid, the longing to end things better, that remain. I can still see, a frame frozen forever in my mind, my own father, his hand raised in farewell as I walked out of the hospice for what we both knew was the last time, my mind full of all the things I desperately wanted to say, but couldn’t find a way to. If only the halloween myths were true - if only we could find a ghost or spirit to speak to...
Last Sunday I preached in a little village church in the East Neuk. A woman spoke to me there of a friend, her husband recently dead, who had found her way into the grips of a local medium. The trade of the medium is not hard to discover: studying clothes and conversation and jewelry for clues; cleverly-phrased question and comment, suggesting that more is known than in fact is; fishing subtly for information that is then paraded as revelation - a hundred similar tricks to dupe the vulnerable person desperate to contact a lost loved one. If only the halloween myths were true.
But they are lies. And so halloween remains a tragedy, a reminder of all those we have lost, business forever unfinished, conversations that can never be had, truth that will always remain untold. The tragedy that is halloween.
Space is not the final frontier, despite what Star Trek wanted to tell us. Death is the final frontier. The immovable barrier. The unbreakable boundary. All of our myths, from Orpheus in ancient Greece to the poetry of TS Eliot, imagine crossing this line. But it remains uncrossed. Halloween remains a tragedy.
They did not dress up in ghoulish costumes, or go door-to-door, but the recipients of Paul’s letter to the church in Thessalonica - whence we took our first reading - knew this same tragedy. Paul had come to them preaching the resurrection of Jesus. Paul had told them that, in their day, just around the coast, the line had been crossed, the boundary broken, the barrier moved. Jesus of Nazareth, prophet, political revolutionary, preacher, had been killed - and had returned! Seen by one, then another, then eleven, then five hundred. Evidence and proof - not a medium’s tricks, but something real. The promise that the tragedy could be a comedy. Because of Jesus. Because of what He had done.
But now - the theory needs to become practice. Some they knew had died. And words remained unspoken. and conversations remained unfinished, or unbegun. And truth remained untold. If this Jesus had broken the barrier, if death was now defeated, then - what difference did it make?
And so Paul writes: ‘we do not want you to be ignorant, confused, about those who have died - we certainly don’t want you to grieve like others do - they have no hope; you do…’ Jesus died and rose again; and so friends who have died have only walked the path that Jesus walked first. He promised that He would return, and with Him they will return. And then, and then, the wall will come down, smashed to the ground as a wall in Berlin once was. ‘We - meaning both those who have died and those who now live - will be with the Lord forever’ writes Paul.
And so now we wait. Wait for the wall to be finally broken. Wait for the coming reunion. Wait for the tragedy of halloween to be turned into comedy, when the dead rise, and together we live with Jesus. We wait.
We wait - but there are ways and ways of waiting. Our second reading, from Matthew’s gospel, pictures a choice. Ten virgins - they had a ceremonial role in a Palestinian wedding of the day, called to greet the bridegroom and escort him into the celebration. The way Jesus tells the story, he was late - it happens - all those waiting fell asleep. But some had stored up provisions against a late arrival; some had not. Waking in a panic as the cheer goes up, five are ready; five are not. Five do their duty; five run to find oil. Five join the feast; five are shut outside. There are ways and ways of waiting.
Wise waiting: here, and earlier in Matthew’s gospel, wisdom is about being prepared for what we are waiting for, about living in the light of what will inevitably happen, about shaping the present in the light of the coming future. Wisdom, here, is no more than planning your semester knowing that there are exams at the end of it, being aware of the future that will come.
The tragedy will become comedy; the dead will rise; the Lord will come. We can choose to live, knowing this to be true, shaping our lives by the future that is promised; or we can live ignoring what will be, hoping nonetheless that somehow it will turn out OK in the end. Wisdom. And foolishness. The choice is ours.