Reforming the way we think about Oct. 31

MICHELE MARR

In some parts of the country, when Halloween falls on Sunday it’s

celebrated Saturday evening, so as not to conflict with the

community’s Christian worship. Not here.

In Huntington Beach, when a secular holiday falls on a holy day,

the holiday holds the trump card.

Last Sunday, many homes in my neighborhood -- and no doubt yours

-- were cloaked in cobwebs overhanging a gaggle of jack-o-lanterns

and trick-or-treaters; lawns were gardens of skyward-reaching

skeletal arms and lopsided tombstones.

If you listened, you might hear the occasional cackle of a

secreted witch or the screech of a fleeting ghoul. Above one gloomy

doorway, I glimpsed the feverish beating of the wings of a mechanical

bat.

With its sales of candy, costumes and decorations pushing $7

billion last year, Halloween has become a commercial success, second

only to Christmas, since early Irish immigrants are said to have

imported the festival to our shores.

Centuries ago, it was known as Samhain, a Celtic name pronounced

sow-in. It heralded the end of summer, soon to be replaced with a

harsh, cold winter, threatening death from such things as starvation,

exposure and disease.

Because these calamities were frequently credited to marauding

spirits of the dead, the living -- often wearing disguises fashioned

from animal hides and heads -- sought protection by burning offerings

of grain, produce and animals in huge bonfires.

But Halloween doesn’t take its name from Samhain. Halloween is a

contraction of Hallows’ Evening, which precedes the Roman Catholic

and Anglican All Hallows Day, hallow being an archaic word for saint.

Nov. 1, as designated by Pope Gregory IV in 835, became the date

for the Western Church to universally observe the Feast of All

Saints, a day that remembers and gives glory to God for all, commonly

called saints, who have died in the faith.

That was nearly 17 centuries before Martin Luther -- an Augustine

monk, doctor of theology and professor of Scripture at the University

of Wittenberg -- nailed 95 statements protesting the Roman Catholic

Church’s practice of selling indulgences (promises of the forgiveness

of sins and sure, expedient entrance into heaven for oneself or a

loved one) to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on All

Hallows’ Evening in 1517.

Each year now in the United States, although it’s not widely

known, Reformation Day joins Halloween and the eve of the Feast of

All Saints on Oct. 31, as Lutherans worldwide continue to commemorate

Luther’s act, largely credited with instigating the Protestant

Reformation.

It wasn’t Luther’s design to leave Rome, however, to start a new

church, as it’s often believed -- he only wanted the church to

reform, to return to its teaching that salvation could not be bought,

negotiated or earned, but received solely by God’s grace through

faith that Jesus Christ died to pay the debt of every human being’s

sins.

In Luther’s day, church doors were regularly used as community

bulletin boards. The ideas he posted on the door of the Castle church

were an invitation -- an invitation to debate the convention of

selling the forgiveness of sins through indulgences.

The way the debate, and its inescapable consequences, quickly

spread throughout Europe and England is sometimes compared to the

spread of the Holy Spirit’s tongues of fire in Jerusalem on

Pentecost. In fact, the altar color for Reformation Day is red,

symbolizing the Holy Spirit and fire, and many who attend worship

services in Lutheran congregations that day wear red as well.

We now tend to take much of the legacy of the Protestant

Reformation for granted, but Daniel Harmelink -- a pastor at Redeemer

Lutheran Church and an adjunct faculty member at Concordia University

in Irvine, with a doctorate in missiology from Concordia Theological

Seminary -- points out that when we do something as ordinary as read

Scripture and worship in our native language or sing a hymn in

church, it is as a product of the Protestant Reformation.

He recalls a feature story in “Time” magazine, which described

Luther as “a man who had one foot in the Middle Ages and one foot in

the modern world,” and says, “Not only in a religious sense, but in a

cultural sense ... in a historical sense ... what began [with the

Reformation], whether we acknowledge it or not, is part of our

identity ... as people in the modern world. Everyone has to come to

terms with the man named Martin Luther and what he did on Oct. 31.

People need to have an opinion about that if they are to understand

who they are.”

Others have gone as far as to suggest that, without the Protestant

Reformation, we might never have known democracy as we know it in

this country today.

In its finest moments, Harmelink said, the Lutheran Church has

been and continues to be the conscience of the whole church.

“As far as theology goes and things like that, we’re always the

group that says, ‘Yea, [well], have you thought that through?’ So

much spirituality today is half an inch deep,” he said.

Sunday, while much of the community was preoccupied celebrating

Halloween, Redeemer Lutheran Church marked the 487th anniversary of

the Protestant Reformation with a worship service featuring organ

music played by Charles Bennett, who, with brass horns and a hand

bell choir, accompanied the church’s vocal choir. Among the hymns

they sang that morning was Luther’s well-known “A Mighty Fortress Is

Our God.”

William Duerr, the church’s senior pastor, preached a sermon

entitled, “The Just Shall Live by Faith.” At the heart of his message

was the heart of Luther’s theology of the cross and the message of

Paul in his letter to the Ephesians (2:9-8): “For by grace you have

been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift

of God.”

Nothing less. Nothing more.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].