Scripture Texts: Ezekiel 37:1-14
The ancients said of this day that the barrier between this world and the next grew thin and allowed the dead to walk among us. Traditions grew up around that myth and folklore, traditions that the Church later adopted when it made these days the celebration of All-Saints and All-Hallows. We don these costumes as mockery of those ghosts and spirits. What have we to fear of them? The lot of us are a lot scarier than they are. Or so we’d like to think.
But let’s be honest. Death is scary. It’s one thing we all face in life that there is no overcoming on our own. We can dodge it, avoid it for a time, but eventually it comes for all of us. What is it? What is it like to die? What’s on the other side, if anything? None of us really knows. Those are questions we don’t have answers to and they are questions we won’t have answers to until that moment it comes for us. Death is the true unknown and the truly unknowable.
But there is one thing we do know about it. We know that it hurts. Not necessarily for us when we experience it ourselves, but it hurts for those who are left behind. Those who grieve. Those who mourn. Many of us have had to say good-bye already to beloved grandparents or friends or someone else who mattered to us and if we haven’t yet, we will. The questions about what happens to us echo in our curiosity about their fate. What becomes of those who matter most to us when they die? Will we see them again? Will we be reunited? Again, those are questions to which we have no solid answers.
What we have instead is faith. Faith in a God who tells us time and again that death is his problem to solve and that he will take care of it. Faith in a God who says that we will be with him in eternity. Faith in a God who has sent his son into our world to live, to die on a cross, and to rise again on the third day. Faith in a God who has claimed each of us as his own through our baptism.
Just a few minutes ago, we heard the song Tourniquet by Evanescence. It’s a song that asks many questions, many of these same questions that we’ve heard in this sermon. Will God be there for us? Or is death really the end? Amy Lee’s lyrics sound like a fanciful paraphrase of Ezekiel. “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.”
God’s answer to that is to bring bone together with bone and to breathe life where there is death. “Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people...I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.” That is his promise to us. That is what Jesus was about. That’s why he came. It’s why he died. And it’s why he rose again.
That’s what tonight is about. The light still shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.
At its core, that is what Halloween is about. This day is a remembrance of the dead, a remembrance that death is real. Much like Ash Wednesday, we are reminded that we are dust and to dust we shall return. And yet, we also remember in the midst of that reality that Christ has conquered death through his own death and resurrection. That life is stronger than death and life is what we are promised in the end. Eternal life. Life with God.
That is our faith. That is what we believe. It is why we are here on this night and every time we gather in worship. We gather to remember the promises, to celebrate what God has done for our sake. To remember that there will come a time when he will bring us home to be with him forever. Amen.
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