All Hallows Eve – Sunday 31st October

Here we are on All Hallows Eve, pausing to look toward a realm and life beyond Earth. Our readings speak of life beyond death and a New Eternal Heaven and Earth to come. And our hymns remind us that, as we raise our voices on Earth, we join the Heavenly realm in praising God.

But today is also Halloween. I discovered that Halloween evolved from two ancient festivals – All Hallows Day (Hallows meaning saints) and Samhain [Sa-wain]. The first is a Christian festival commemorating Saints and Souls. All Hallows Eve, or Hallowed evening, is the day before this. People used to dress up as saints and go from house to house! The second, Samhain, an ancient druidic – Irish, Gaelic – festival, was also on 31st October. It was a “threshold festival,” where boundaries between this world were believed to become thin, and Spirits of the dead enter our world. To hide from the Spirits, costumes were worn.

Halloween is different today. Little witches, vampires and ghosts turn up at our doors chasing a sugar high. Larger witches, vampires and ghosts haunt the streets in costumes, eating fish and chips washed down by alcohol. It’s a bit of fun. There is a notable Halloween house near ours: a goofy 10ft ghost, a realistic looking skull covered in black net, and a massive cobweb (if you’re phobic about spiders you don’t want to speculate on the likely occupant of that web). Pumpkins with fiery faces sit on doorsteps. I briefly considered something scary for our house: Gollum – the creepy pathetic creature from “Lord of the Rings” – or a terrifying Weeping Angel from Doctor Who. Sadly, I didn’t find anything suitable.

But today – whether the Christian All Hallows Eve, the Gaelic Samhain, or the modern Halloween – today is a time when the curtains of our world are drawn aside a little to look beyond into another world.

Why? Because humans have always been fascinated by the supernatural, by other worlds beyond our earthly existence. The vast range of science fiction and fantasy movies reflects this… Doctor Who, the Harry Potter franchise, Lord of the Rings all draw on that fascination. Humans have been intrigued by the supernatural, and longed for immortality – something beyond the chaos and darkness of life and death on Earth.

Think of the pyramids filled with possessions, animals and servants to help the Pharaohs in their afterlife. Burial rites across the world bear witness to this longing. In the US, Cryonics – finding ways to extend life through freezing – offers a Rip Van Winkle scenario of waking up decades later to live again.

Strangely, although we long for eternity and a world beyond the darkness and chaos of our own, paradoxically we are also a bit sceptical. We are children of a rational, scientific era. So we often file the supernatural and miraculous in the “I’m not sure about this” file. C.S. Lewis, in God in the Dock, suggests that if we “already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural,” we won’t believe in anything that looks like that. We find other explanations!

But the Bible is full of the supernatural: magnificent angels in Isaiah’s vision, strange, wheeled, heavenly creatures in the opening chapter of Ezekiel, heavenly visitors, pillars of fire, a burning bush that never burned up, a sea parted in two. In the New Testament: Angel visitations, Jesus’ miracles, Resurrection, visions. And our hymns, like today, remind us of other realms. In our opening hymn – praising the King of Heaven, with angels helping us to adore him, and the “Sun and Moon bowing down before him.” And our communion hymn talks of seraphs, cherubim and the host of heaven.

Today, both our readings directly address our longings and fascinations.

Lazarus returns to life from a place beyond.

In the story, we recognise the pain, mourning, and tears of the sisters, at the death of Lazarus. Many of us have stood in that dark place of grief. And Jesus weeps too… for us, with us, for our grief? Anger at death? But it is in the midst of that grief that we hear Jesus’ astounding declaration to the grieving Martha: “I am the Resurrection and the Life… if you believe in me, you will never die.”

It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Jesus is talking about “life after this life,” instead of “life after death.” You see, we are already people of eternity. And death, Jesus seems to imply, is but the gateway to another life. Lazarus returns through that gateway when Jesus calls him from the realm we cannot see.

This miracle is also called a “sign.” But a sign of what?

A sign that Jesus is God, and Lord of life? Yes! But perhaps also a sign pointing the New Heaven and Earth we heard about in Revelations. For there is a remarkable similarity between this story of Lazarus, and the vision described in Revelations. At the tomb of Lazarus, in that particular moment in first century Palestine, the words of Revelations 21 are fulfilled in Jesus’ presence.

“God will be among his people;
He will wipe away every tear;
death will be no more;
No more mourning or crying or pain.”

It is one of those moments where Jesus – on Earth – was showing, for a few special years, what eternity and a new Earth might be like. God was among us.

While Jesus lived on Earth, the ripples of that Kingdom spread around him in that earthbound location. He healed all who came to him, raised people from the dead, miraculously fed thousands, calmed the stormy sea.

But after the cross, the resurrection, and Jesus’ ascension, we still live with some of those Kingdom ripples – though it isn’t the same. Jesus is no longer walking among us on Earth, but his Spirit has come to be with us across the world. We are citizens of a Kingdom that spans Heaven and Earth, supernatural and physical, here and hereafter, now and eternity. We live in the “now of God’s Kingdom on earth and the not-yet of the Kingdom in eternity.” And so our world is beautiful and wonderful, but also broken, chaotic and painful. In Revelations we are told that the sea would be no more. The sea was a symbol of chaos and evil, of darkness – and this sea will be no more. At a time of chaos and darkness in our Covid world, what an exciting hope to have!

What is this new Earth and Heaven that Revelation describes? What does “new” mean? We can only imagine. Commentators suggest the Greek word here, Kainos, means better, fresh, new in nature – not newly created. Earth continues to exist, in a form we don’t know much about. This means that the Earth, our world, is worth caring for. In today’s Climate Crisis we should return to Genesis 1, and look again at our role as stewards of God’s creation, to care for the earth.

We now live in this “now and not yet” time, as Kingdom people. Much of the nitty gritty of that is found in what I call the Kingdom Manifesto – the Sermon on the Mount. Among many other things, each Sunday we are reminded that we should love God with all of our being, and love our neighbour as ourselves; we pray for the coming of God’s Kingdom on Earth. We already know how to live. We should just do it!

Till the New Earth becomes reality, I think we can also dream of it. I dream it has libraries and books, trees and wilderness, gardens to tend, Dogs. Coffee and conversations with friends and loved ones. Long walks. Delicious meals shared communally, amazing recipes. Music, art, laughter. Joy. Much more. I don’t know if all of this is exactly how it will be, but I do know that God will be among us, sharing our lives, face to face. And there will be much joy. This joyousness is found in our closing hymn, where Angel-voices ever singing in Heaven join us on Earth:

Yea, we know that thou rejoicest
o’er each work of thine;
Thou didst ears and hands and voices
for thy praise design;
Craftsman’s art and music’s measure
for thy pleasure
all combine.