Halloween, Graveyards, and the Power of God

In the month of October, my entertainments moments often turn to horror stories. I recall the early Frankenstein and vampire stories. I still like to watch them on Turner Classic Movies. As I got a little older, I liked the classic stories as written. I read the stories of Edgar Allen Poe with intrigue and enjoyment. For some people, the stories of Goosebump by R. L. Stine or the stories of Stephen King provide the same type of enjoyment.

Halloween was a never a favorite American observance of mine. Going up to strangers asking for candy was just not appealing. I do not really like dressing up in horror costumes, although I get enjoyment out of the joy others seem to find in doing so. One congregation of which I was pastor had a wonderful party. One year, one of the members dressed up in a "bag lady" costume that stumped everyone.

I have been pastor of congregations that had a graveyard as part of their property. I actually like walking in them. People used to put sayings on tombstones. In one such graveyard, I saw a set of five stones from one family. The first four were children who died very young, and the fifth was the wife who died at the birth of her final child. The next stone, several decades later, was her husband. One easily imagines the pain in this family.

In the past, if you wanted to visit a graveyard, you would not go to one the cemetery of today or to a mausoleum, but you would go to church. The graveyards of the past were planted around the church, creating a community of the "quick and the dead" - quick inside, dead outside.

For believers it was important to be buried within the borders of sanctified ground from which rose both the church building - the center of the living saints' worship life - and the communal cemetery - the final resting place for all past generations of saints who had lived and died as believers.

Some congregations are recovering this tradition by having a memorial area where one can place cremated remains. When I first heard it, it sounded odd. However, one person, who had clearly bought a spot, found it comforting that her remains would be part of the church at which she had worshipped for decades.

Such a notion of placing the dead near a place of worship is the opposite of our usual experience of isolating the cemetery from our line of sight. Rather, when we worship near the dead, we have the constant reminder of the reality of death.

To whom do you belong?

You belong to God.

You do not belong to your parents. You do not belong to your community. You do not belong to yourself. You belong to God.

Steve Wilson of Meadow Grove Baptist Church in Brandon, Mississippi, shocks our sterile sensibilities by insisting that "God's power works best in a graveyard."

He invites us to look at the Lazarus story:

"It is never hopeless with God. God's power works best in a graveyard. What is happening in your life? Are you ready to give up? Do you think it is too late for even God to help? Are your plans dead? Are your dreams dead? Is your hope dead? God's power works best in a graveyard."

Or look at the Luther story: At one point in his flight from both civil and ecclesiastical authorities, Luther was forced to take refuge among the bats and owls of a cold, dark and dank Wartburg castle. Lonely and depressed, he wrote, "I had rather burn on live coals than rot here." Smoke was rising from the charcoal burners outside his room. But as he watched, a wind came up and blew the smoke away. In that moment his doubt dissipated and his faith was restored.[1]

Or look at the C.S. Lewis story. Lewis, an Oxford don and Christian apologist of the middle decades of this century, married late in life and then lost his wife, Joy, to cancer. In his graveyard of grief, he muses: 

"Meanwhile, where is God? When you are happy ... and turn to him with gratitude and praise, you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and who do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become."[2]  

Or look at the Jesus story: Wilson writes,  

"I wonder if in your pain, you have lost sight of Jesus. Can you not see that he is at work all around you? Do you not know you are in his presence? Listen, you can hear him calling your name! He wants to resurrect your hope. He wants to give you life. When life looks the worst, God is at his best. God's power works best in a graveyard" (swilson@ucmail.com, May 18, 1998). 

[Take a moment and reflect upon how the power of God works best in a graveyard.]

Where is your graveyard?

Where in your life are you most bereft of hope? Where do you feel most helpless? Where are you most at your wits' end? It is there, precisely there, that God can work best. Where life is worst, God is best. God does his best work in a graveyard.

In Lamentations 3:18, Jeremiah complains, "Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from the LORD." But a couple verses later (3:20-24), he affirms that, although his "soul ... is bowed down," he has not forgotten, nor has he lost all hope: "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. 'The LORD is my portion,' says my soul, 'therefore I will hope in him.'"

Hymnwriter Thomas Chisholm based the words to "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" on this text. But at one point Chisholm makes an error in his representation of the passage. Remember the chorus?

Great is thy faithfulness!

Great is thy faithfulness!

Morning by morning, new mercies I see ...

Oops! Did the hymnwriter get it wrong? The Bible clearly states that Jeremiah did not see. He didn't see a thing! In the words of David C. Needham, who first brought this to my attention, Jeremiah had no visible evidence of God's mercies at all. Morning by morning brought horror, pain and dread, but not "new mercies." Jeremiah could not say, "I trust you because I understand it all - because I've got it all figured out." He could only say, "I trust you because you are God and you cannot lie" (Close to His Majesty [Portland, Oreg.: Multnomah, 1987], 94-95).

No, the hymnwriter did not get it wrong. God was working in Jeremiah's graveyard, enabling him to "see" what no one else could see. Like C.S. Lewis, he could only say, "We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least" (59). God was working in the Thessalonians' graveyard, giving them the courage to bear the name of Jesus. God was working in the graveyard of the early Church as they bore witness to the faith. God was working in Luther's graveyard, and God is working in our graveyards today.

God's power works best in a graveyard!

---

[1] (see Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther [Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950], 194).

[2] (A Grief Observed [New York: The Seabury Press, 1961], 9).

Optimism Comes Naturally?

Among the many things I appreciate about the apostle Paul is his elucidation of what Christian tradition came to call the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. Although he did this most famously in I Corinthians 13, it recurs in (I think) all of his letters.

Let us reflect on hope.

The movie Patch Adams has a young doctor treating his patients with humor. In one scene, Patch mourns the loss of the woman he loves. He argues with God and turns away, but suddenly, a butterfly appears on his medical bag and flits over to his chest. It flies away. A sign of hope arrived at just the right time.

George Bernanos reminds us that we must lose hope in the things that deceive in order to free ourselves to hope in the things that do not deceive.

Today, we often think of positive or negative thinking, or the thinking of the optimist or pessimist. I think Vaclav Havel is quite helpful when he separates optimism from hope.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. (Disturbing the Peace (1986), Chapter 5)

Many people would view themselves as pessimistic and as cynics. Yet, they get up each morning, and get on with their lives. I wonder if underneath the overt negativity is not some buried optimism that this day might contain a surprise. In fact, some research suggests that evolution has hardwired human beings for hope.

In a study published in the October 2011 issue of Nature Neuroscience, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London present evidence that optimistic people learn only from information that reinforces that rosy outlook. Now, think of that in light of this passage. Paul categorized all those troubles into the category of a "slight momentary affliction" that "is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure" (v. 17). The end was so bright that Paul could disregard his present troubles as indicating nothing about the future. Was Paul simply incurably optimistic? If so, the people at Wellcome Trust Centre would have loved to have had him as a subject.

The study actually suggests that many of us are hardwired for optimism. What this means is that in many of us, our brains do not make pessimistic updates to what we think. Some reporters call this a “brain defect.” If so, people seem to need the defect in order to make personal progress. The defect allows us to imagine better realities. Imagine our distant ancestors living in caves. They might still be there, dreaming of light and heat, if it were not for their ability to be optimistic and imagine a better future. Of course, individual exceptions are always there. Some of us may be among them. Yet, as a human race, this study suggests, we tilt toward optimism because, on balance, positive expectations increase our odds for survival. Here is a comment from one of the researchers, Tali Sharot,

"Without optimism, our ancestors might never have ventured far from their tribes and we might all be cave dwellers, still huddled together and dreaming of light and heat." ("The optimism bias." TIME, June 6, 2011, 38-46)

We may have some hard wiring, so to speak, that helps us take risks and imagine a better future.

Yet, the hope we find in the New Testament has a different basis, even if it may meet a quite human need.

The hope of which Paul could write and by which he lived had its basis in what he believed God had done and said in Jesus, whom God raised from the dead. Because of that, the afflictions he described in II Corinthians 4:7-12 became in verse 17 his slight momentary affliction gained a different perspective. In fact, they prepare for him an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure. He looks to what he cannot see, for what he can see is temporary, but what he cannot see is eternal. His hope extends to facing death, for the earthly tend we live in may die, but, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

As C. S. Lewis perceptively observed,

"The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good rapport with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last ... [and reveal] ... a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain."[1]

---

[1] ("The Weight of Glory," in C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975; First Touchstone Edition, 1996], 34-36.)