Hey there. Welcome to another episode of Compass Finding
Spirituality in the Everyday. Do you have your
Halloween candy on hand? Is your costume put together? Are the
pumpkins carved? Have you started binge watching the 50 greatest
horror movies of all time? It's Halloween season, and while
Halloween celebrations are a bit taboo around
much of the Christian space, I have to admit that I personally hold a
fascination with things mysterious, strange,
unexplainable, or dark. So Halloween for me becomes a reminder
that there are still mysteries to our world. There are things
undiscovered and it inspires a sense of awe or
wonder. I think the world could use a little bit more awe and wonder.
So let's do this with this episode. Let's dive into the
awe inspiring and wonder inducing aspects of
Halloween. Let's look at some questions the season and its
themes may inspire from a Christian and I guess more
succinctly a United Methodist perspective, actually,
to be transparently succinct. We're
really going to approach these questions from a Reverend Ryan Dunn
perspective, which is United Methodist, met a Christian,
all that, because all of these are gonna be addressed from my personal
experiences and interactions with tradition, scripture,
and reason. Now I know that many of you tuning in might be
skeptical about faith. You may have doubts or questions, and that's
okay. Let's talk about some of the mysterious, spooky, and spiritual
topics with curiosity and
openness like this.
Do Christians believe in ghosts? This is a
question that has as many answers as there
are people. In theology, we utilize an ideal
called a hermeneutic to interpret sacred texts and
other theological ideas. Now, when I first heard that
word in my theological classes, I kept wondering why this
Herman individual was such a big deal. That's not
based on a person really hermeneutic just refers
to a method or principle of interpretation.
In the United Methodist Church, we often turn to a fourfold
hermeneutic referred to as the Wesleyan quadrilateral.
And there was a theologian named Albert Outler,
who looked at the writings of John Wesley, who is the founder of Methodism
and Outler noted that there seemed to be 4 factors that Wesley
leaned into whenever forming theological
theories or ideals. And the four factors were
1 scripture, 2 reason, 3
tradition, and 4 experience. Now as a Methodist
person, it's natural for me to take these four factors and to
try to employ them to answer a question like, do
Christians believe in ghosts?
So if we start with scripture, we might actually say, yes. We do
believe in ghosts. The bible does include stories that could be
interpreted as encounters with spirits or ghosts. For example,
there's the story of King Saul and the witch of Endor. This
is Star Wars reference number 1 by the way, or I guess this is reference
number 1 where Star Wars references scripture. Anyway, in
this story happens in 1st Samuel 28. In
the story, Saul speaks to the spirit of the prophet
Samuel who is deceased. There's also,
later on in scriptures, a moment when Jesus walks on water and the
disciples are terrified and they think that they're seeing a ghost.
That's our scriptural reference. And I want to add a personal addendum
here. I believe that the Bible makes the claim that Jesus is the word
of God. That's what John chapter 1 states. So
Jesus is the ultimate statement of God. We encounter
Jesus through the Bible then. And I note this as a suggestion
that the perfect word that God wrote was Jesus.
The Bible is God inspired, but human made. So it's bound
by our human limitations of understanding. I believe
the Bible is true in so much as the people who wrote it
believed what they wrote, but their ways of interpreting their
experiences may not be how we would interpret our
experiences today. They employed different
hermeneutics. Yeah. It comes back around to that. So it's
possible that how they recorded their experience may not be how we
would record our experiences today, especially when it comes to things
like spiritual mediums, such as the witch of vendor.
Now, if we want to lean into tradition in regards
to the existence of ghosts, and remember, tradition
is another one of our 4 fold quadrilateral
parts here. If we lean into tradition, we have a
fascinating, scintillating story from our
Methodist past. You see, John Wesley's childhood
home was reportedly haunted. In 17/16,
the family began hearing groans and knocks about the
house. The activity escalated to phantom footsteps and rattling
noises, and then to furniture being moved.
Ultimately, there was this exorcist movie type moment when
the beds of 1 of the children levitated.
The family gave the entity the name of old Jeffrey. Maybe
the naming would help diminish their fear, but the events
continued. They bought a giant dog, a mastiff in hopes
that the dog might scare the entity away, but the dog just hid
whenever Jeffrey acted up. Jeffrey wasn't all
that terrible though. John's mother, Susanna, told the ghost that she was
not to be bothered between 5 and 6 PM because that
was prayer time. And apparently, Jeffrey respected the
request. Then in 17/17, the haunting
abruptly stopped. Now, John was at boarding school during
the old Jeffrey infestation, and there's no account of him having
direct encounters. But John did believe in ghosts and thought that they
might be evidence of a spiritual world. And therefore
that might be evidence of God. I don't see a
lot of Christianity as a whole, including the United Methodist church
endorsing today, a belief in ghosts, at least not in the way that we think
of them in pop culture. Instead, we focus in
the Christian world on what happens after death. United
Methodist believe in resurrection and eternal life. We trust
in God's promise that death is not the end. And in that sense, our
belief in life after death, doesn't leave a lot
of room for lingering spirits on earth, at least
in not in the temporal moment
or the physical sense reading through Paul's thoughts
in the new Testament, we can infer his belief was that people
died and then they awoke in the resurrection. And to me, that sounds a
bit like what we might encounter under anesthetic we're
awake and then we're awake again. Right? Paul might say
we're alive and then we're alive again. Well, that
doesn't leave room for individual spirits to interact with the
living. In the meantime, that said there are
Christian beliefs about the spiritual or, I'm sorry about the super
natural things like angels, demons, and
spiritual forces. And it's important to acknowledge that for some people
feeling a presence or experiencing something supernatural
might be a way they process grief or loss,
and that doesn't make that feeling any less real. We carry
people with us. And so we do feel them even after they've
departed United Methodism, like much of Christianity leaves
room for mystery. Not everything is easily explained.
And that's okay. In my experience, the
closest I've come to a coastly encounter was staying overnight in
an old cabin and just feeling uneasy, but there were not
manifestations, no strange knocks, no levitating
beds in my experience, but I was afraid.
So let's talk about the spirituality
of fear.
Fear is a ginormous part of Halloween. Right? We tell scary
stories. We go through haunted houses and watch horror movies,
but fear is also something that we deal with in the everyday, whether
that's a fear of the future or a fear of failure,
a fear of being wrong, a fear of something supernatural,
or a fear of loss. So how does fear fit into a
spiritual life? Again, as United Methodists, we believe that fear
doesn't have to control us. There's a well known verse in the
Bible that says, there is no fear in love, but
perfect love casts out fear. In other words, when we trust
in God's love for us, that love is
stronger than any fear that we might feel.
But here's the thing. Having that faith in that
love isn't about pretending that we're never afraid.
It's about finding courage in the midst of fear.
It's about trusting that we're not alone even when life gets
overwhelming. Maybe the ghosts that we're really scared of
aren't the ones in haunted houses, but they're the fears that haunt us
every day. Things like insecurity, anger, or
regret. And in the Christian faith, there's a promise
that we're not facing those things alone. There's also,
again, the promise of resurrection, and that promise means that the thing that we're
facing right now is not the end thing.
Revelation talks about a reality in which there's no
more crying, suffering, or pain. All the old ways are gone
or the former things have passed away. It's a vision of
life set to rights. This is a very
hopeful vision.
Let's then consider death. One of these things that we might be
afraid of. Our question becomes, what happens after we
die? Our fear is centered on questions about what comes
next. Halloween often gets us thinking about death in
the afterlife, but in a very spooky shadowy way,
Christians believe that death is not the final word.
United Methodists hold onto the hope of resurrection
just as Jesus was resurrected. We believe in eternal life.
In other words, death is a transition into something deeper,
something beyond what we can see in the here and now.
Some may characterize that as living on in heaven. Some might
suggest that we will be resurrected physically just as Jesus was, but in
a perfected universe where all is set to rights,
but, and this is key for spiritual seekers like you. What
does that actually look like to be resurrected?
Well, that's a mystery. We don't claim to have all the answers. The
United Methodist perspective is more focused on living a meaningful,
faithful life. Now it's about trusting that whatever comes
next, God's love holds us. So the only thing I
can claim with certainty is that God
continues to love us even after our time
in this temporal world is up. Now that
makes me wonder about planes of existence beyond what we
experience in the world. Are there other planes of existence on
top of this one where angels and demons and spiritual
forces are at work? These are real concepts in the Christian
faith, and you'll find them mentioned in the Bible, but they may often
be misunderstood or sensationalized. For example, there
are a couple words in the Bible that we translate into English as
angel. One of those words, Malick. Oh, this
is the 2nd star wars reference because in nights of the old Republic,
there's Darth Malick, which may mean
messenger. And in this case, one of the words that we translate out of
the Bible was originally written as Malek. And that
means messenger. We translate that often into angel. When
someone is receiving a message from God, then sometimes the suggestion
is that this is coming through an angel though. They may, that
may not have been the case. They just received a
message from God. But in other cases, the suggestion is
that real entities take action. Like when angels free
Paul from prison for United Methodist angels are
seen as messengers of God, sometimes playing a role in human
events, but they're not again, the pop culture versions with halos
and wings and then demons. Well, the Christian
tradition acknowledges the presence of evil in the world,
but it's not necessarily the horned creatures that you see on TV or that are
taking possession of people. Instead, it's the more subtle
insidious ways that hatred division and
cruelty take root in our lives and world.
Personally, I think attributing evil happenings to supernatural
forces sometimes becomes a cop out. It's like
comedian flip Wilson used to say the devil made me do it.
Truthfully, we're compliant in our own
acts of evil. When we ignore the needy among us or
we disparage the vulnerable, that's us. I don't think
that some evil personality is compelling
our behavior. The good news is that love
God's love is more powerful than any force of evil. United
Methodists believe in working for justice, peace, and reconciliation
as a way of overcoming evil in the world. So you don't
have to be a perfect person of faith to do that work. And, yeah, you
can also beat down the demons of the world.
Now many Christians abstain from Halloween because of the
proliferation of demonic imagery. So you might be
wondering, should Christians celebrate Halloween? Isn't it kind
of, you know, unholy? Well, here's the United
Methodist take. Halloween can be fun. It's an opportunity
for community, creativity, and connection. But we
also recognize that Halloween has its roots in the Christian calendar.
It's followed by All Saints Day, a day when we remember and celebrate
the lives of those who have passed on. People who have influenced in
faith, encouraged us and inspired us in our own spiritual
journeys. So from a United Methodist perspective,
celebrating Halloween, isn't about glorifying evil is about facing
our fears, honoring those who came before us and reminding
ourselves that love and life has the
final word. And also it's not compulsory
or mandatory. You don't have to do it. I want
to end on this thought. Many of us feel haunted,
not by ghosts, but instead by our past. There are regrets,
mistakes, things we wish we'd done differently. Right?
Those are the things which haunt us. Again, for United Methodist,
forgiveness is a central part of our faith. It's not about
denying what happened, but about recognizing that we can be
made new. In our tradition, grace is a big
thing. Grace means that we are loved not because we're perfect, but
because God's love is unconditional. God loves us. There's
nothing we can do about it. There's hope in that. Whatever might be
haunting you from your past, there's a way forward.
Now, as you celebrate this spooky season, I invite you to think
about these deeper spiritual questions. What's haunting
you? Where can you find hope and how might faith,
however mysterious it seems help you face the
unknown. Thanks for joining me in this Halloween themed
episode of compass. If you're interested in exploring more
questions like this, subscribe to the podcast. New episodes of
compass come out every other Wednesday. My name is Ryan Dunn.
Compass is a production of United Methodist Communications. Big
thanks to the whole team who make this possible. I'll chat at you
again soon. In the meantime, enjoy your fall season and peace to
you.