A Biblical Ghost Story

Scripture: 1 Samuel 28:3-20

When I was young, and would sleep over at a friend’s house, there was almost always a point in the evening when a certain book would make an appearance. It was called Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It also had sequels, Scary Stories II and Scary Stories III. These books contained all of your classic American kid-oriented horror stories like the story of the woman who always wore a ribbon around her neck and when she finally took it off her head fell off; or the story of people who kept hearing a scratching sound on the top of their broken-down car when a killer with a hook for a hand was known to be on the loose.

To be honest, I’ve never really been someone who enjoys scary movies or haunted houses or otherwise scaring myself just for fun. But I listened to my friends tell those stories and sometimes I told them, too. They were part of our childhood, maybe as we tried to process things about the world around us that we didn’t understand.

Recently in a Facebook group of pastors that I’m in, someone asked just for fun if we believed in ghosts. I was surprised at the number of people who said they did – or, in some cases, that they didn’t until they did. They shared stories of mysterious noises in their old houses, organs playing on their own at church, children speaking to relatives who had died long ago. One person had an experience where she saw a person in the middle of the road driving home one night, slammed on her brakes, and there was nothing. When she drove past again the next day, at that exact spot, she noticed a small cross on the side of the road, marking the spot where someone had died in an accident earlier that week.

I haven’t really had that kind of experience for myself, but I don’t know. I mostly try not to think too hard about these things – the theological, yes; the paranormal, no. My policy is that if ghosts exist, I won’t bother them if they don’t bother me. This has worked out reasonably well so far.

You wouldn’t think that the Bible would be the place to go for ghost stories, and for the most part, it’s not. Somewhere along the way in Israelite history it became forbidden to engage in any sort of cultic activity around the dead – so if that kind of stuff was happening, it usually didn’t make it into the Bible, or if it did it got edited out along the way. But we do get these hints, from time to time, that ghosts were part of at least the conceptual world that our friends from the Bible lived in – and not just the Holy Ghost. When Jesus walks on water, for example, in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, the disciples in the boat think they are seeing a ghost. In Leviticus (19:31), we find a prohibition against practicing divination and consulting dead spirits – and, as we all know, you don’t have to prohibit something that isn’t going on in the first place.

And, back in 1 Samuel, we get this story of a king determined to seek guidance from the dead.

You might remember the prophet Samuel. Samuel lived in a time when the nation of Israel was in transition, moving from an informal structure of governance by judges to a respectable monarchy. Samuel grew up in the sanctuary of Shiloh, before the Temple in Jerusalem existed, as assistant to the head priest Eli. As he grew God spoke to him, and he became known as a prophet, and he oversaw the anointing of Israel’s first king, Saul, and he advised him along the way.

Advising Saul wasn’t always an easy thing to do, because Saul had the tendency to make bad decisions. Sometimes, if you ask me, these decisions were well-intentioned enough, but not for Samuel and not, apparently, for God: and so eventually Samuel told Saul that God had rejected him as king.

That all happens before this story starts. Saul doesn’t stop being king right away. Rather, he goes on doing king things such as waging war on the Philistines, with whom his best frenemy David has joined forces. Meanwhile, Samuel grows old and dies, and is buried in his hometown of Ramah. And Saul, maybe because he’s trying to do the right thing by YHWH for once, has banned the mediums and diviners from the land – anyone who might cross that dangerous line between the living and the dead.

But then he realizes he’s put himself in a bind, because the Philistines are advancing again, and God isn’t answering Saul’s prayers anymore, and Saul is afraid. And he realizes it would all be OK – if only he could talk to Samuel.

So he says to his servants, “Find me a medium.”

“There’s one in Endor,” they whisper back.

Saul disguises himself and as night falls he sets out and makes his way to this medium in Endor, and he finds her and he says, “Call up a ghost for me.”

She looks him in the eye, testing him, and says, “It’s against the law to call up ghosts.”

“You won’t get in trouble,” he says.

“Who do you want me to bring up for you?” she asks.

“Samuel,” he says.

“Saul!” she accuses him.

“Don’t worry,” the king says to her, “just tell me what you see.”

“I see an old man coming up, wearing a robe,” she says, and Saul bows to the ground.

Samuel, for his part, is none too thrilled about being disturbed. “What do you want?” he asks.

“You have to help me!” Saul says. “You have to tell me what to do!”

“Why are asking me?” Samuel says. “You know God has turned away from you! You know God has torn this kingdom from your hands! You brought this on yourself, and now God will hand over you and Israel to the Philistines. [pause] And come tomorrow? You and your sons will be with me.”

I read this story and I can see every detail in my mind – the dark of the room, the face of the woman, the expression of Samuel as he’s brought unwillingly back from the dead. I feel the chill of those final words in the same way I once felt a chill when the scraping sound on the top of the car turned out to be the killer with a hook for a hand. This is, if you ask me, the perfect ghost story, and I am 100% sure that our ancient Israelite forebears sat around the campfire with the flames just barely lighting people’s faces in the dark and told this story.

Why? Why do we tell these stories? There’s something about bringing the things we’re afraid of out in the open, isn’t there? The author Stephen King once wrote that he sees horror movies as “lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man.”[1] In a similar vein, why do we tell stories that prey on our fears? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them from taking control of us. There’s something about speaking those fears out loud, especially together; there’s something about making them entertain us and laughing together after we scream. And that’s the beauty of Halloween, right, that besides the candy, once a year it lets us communally process things like darkness and death and monsters and spirits and a world we know we don’t quite understand and which we are frankly, underneath it all, sometimes very afraid of.

And, at the same time, in this story, Saul isn’t afraid of a ghost. It’s not that dangerous connection between the living and the dead that he’s afraid of. He’s afraid of the Philistines; he’s afraid of David rising in power; he’s afraid of those words of Samuel from long ago that keep echoing in the back of his mind: God has rejected you. God has rejected you. He’s afraid what he’s done in the past and he’s afraid of what’s inside him that caused him to do it and he’s afraid of what he might have to face next because of it. And when Samuel tells him that by this time the next day, Saul and his sons will join him in the world of the dead, Saul falls to the ground in terror, because like most of us, Saul is afraid of his own mortality too.

It’s not really about the ghosts and witches and monsters. It’s about facing the fears that are even deeper down than that.

I can’t say that the story has a happy ending for Saul. The next day, the Philistines attack. Saul’s sons are killed, and Saul himself is injured. He begs his armor-bearer to finish him off, but his armor-bearer refuses. So Saul takes his own sword and impales himself. And, as we know, David becomes king – a happy ending for those who continue on as part of David’s story. I hope, still, that from the God who knows and understands all things there might be some redemption for Saul.

But here’s what I do know: that there’s a happy ending for us, because Jesus himself crossed that dangerous boundary between life and death in a new way. He didn’t consult a witch or talk to ghosts; instead, he succumbed to the forces of death and then defeated them once and for all, and with death, all the powers and fears that come alongside it: that we aren’t enough, that God has rejected us, that our pasts will come back to haunt us, that bad things will happen in a world we don’t understand and can’t control.

We let ourselves feel the horror and we let ourselves scream (maybe internally) and then we laugh, together, because God is love and Jesus is risen and ghosts or no ghosts, we have nothing to be afraid of.

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[1] https://faculty.uml.edu/bmarshall/lowell/whywecravehorrormovies.pdf

A Time for Hope

Guest preacher: Kathleen Hugh

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Last August I went to Edisto Island, SC. to our family reunion. I’ve gone there every year of my life until Covid hit. Now it had been two years, and I sorely needed familiarity. I had become very sad at the prospect of my church building here disappearing and was feeling a great inability to deal with more change. Losing my husband, the isolation of Covid, and now my precious church. Just too much change. 

When I arrived at the house on Edisto, I didn’t find comfort at first. Eventually, I did find joy in seeing my family. But I had left Virginia thinking about this new loss I would be facing in 2022. I just wanted things to be the same here. And, now, as I looked out across the inlet-the reeds, I saw the Atlantic Ocean with its waves crashing on the beach. But that wasn’t what I was supposed to see!! The ocean was supposed to be hidden and far off!! I knew it was there all my life. But it was safely far enough away from where our house was that we had never seen it, unless we went around the island to that beach. 

I remembered my Grandma taking me on a walk around the island to the other side of those reeds when I was five. We were both wading in the calm surf waves. “What is that?” I asked her, as I saw something odd just past my feet. 

“Stairs,” she said. 

“Stairs!? What are stairs doing there?” 

She said, “That is all that is left of all the houses that once stood along this beach.” 

“What happened?” 

She said, “Hurricanes.” 

“I don’t understand, Grandma.”

She said, as we continued our stroll, “There is a time and a season for everything under heaven. A time for endings and a time for beginnings.”

Two weeks later, On the drive back to Virginia from the beach, I turned on the radio and heard the song Turn, Turn, Turn by the Byrds. Beautiful. And actually, the importance of that adventure with my grandmother and my recent visit to the beach house didn’t really register with me until I heard Turn, Turn, Turn. 

When I got home, I looked the song up on YouTube and saw in the notes that the lyrics came from Ecclesiastes. “There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven.” All of these memories, places, and songs converged. All together they dislodged my sadness at all the losses, and made me feel, actually, excited. I remembered that I was a case in point. I came here after my husband died, and though I still grieve that loss to this day, I could never have expected to find a level of happiness here that I had never had before. I know I’ll still grieve for our church building: the unpredictable elevator, and the temperamental air conditioning. But now I see what an amazing opportunity we have ahead of us! We will be stripped down to our basics – just us – the people. And we will have that rare opportunity of rebuilding from there.

I think that our church is amazing! And I am not personally desiring change in how we do things. But when I think about the charge Pastor gives us each Sunday: “Who are we and what do we do?”  It reminds me that Jesus didn’t just give his 12 disciples all love and light and tell them to just enjoy. They were to go out and spread that love and light. And that is our challenge as Christians, to move beyond our own comfort in order to bring comfort to others.

I recently learned how this congregation tried many ways of reaching out over the years: weekday services for our businesspeople in the area, a community picnic in the park. Some were great ideas that have had success in other parishes. I gathered that all that effort here did not seem grow the congregation. That had to feel discouraging. And my brief time as the head of our outreach committee led me to feel the same frustration. But now we will be stepped down to our basics, as we rebuild our aging building. Perhaps we can move beyond our expectations and discover together just who those in our community who do not attend a church really are, and why they do not attend. 

I believe our biggest audience is a growing group of people now referred to as the “Nones”.

Not catholic nuns, mind you. N -O -N -E-S. 

Many in this group were raised in one of the Christian traditions, but walked away from it as adults. Many baby boomers also walked away as young adults, but returned when they got married and had kids. But now more young adults are leaving and not returning, even if they have families. Currently, This group exceeds in size all Catholics and Evangelicals in America. The current estimate is there are 60 million Nones in the United States, and 60 million reasons why they left organized religion. Yet 40% say they still believe in God and may even still identify with a religious affiliation. And many of the Nones will, in fact, return, if and when invited in a way that is meaningful to them as individuals.

I know a bit about Nones because, until I found this congregation, I was a NONE.

I was longing to belong to a spiritual community. And I had just about given up trying, after 64.5 years of searching, having never found a church that accepted me as I was, on my individual journey. I had tried many different denominations and churches. I had no idea that by not giving up, I would finally find my spiritual home here.

There is no bigger challenge or charge facing Christians today. Churches are trying many approaches, just as this congregation did. And when it doesn’t work, it is so easy to give up trying. But I am a case in point why it is important to never give up.  

Perhaps many of you have heard the story of a grandmother and her granddaughter who take a walk along the beach. (A different grandmother and a different beach.) They come upon hundreds of starfish washed up on the beach, drying out. The grandmother picks one up and puts it back in the Atlantic Ocean beyond the waves. The child calls out to her grandmother! “Don’t bother. There are so many. It won’t make a difference!”  The Grandmother points to the water where she placed the starfish. “It will make a difference to THAT one!”

I am that starfish. 

You made such a huge difference to me. You changed the trajectory of my life. You greeted me that first Sunday, and every Sunday after that. Pastor invited me to take communion at God’s table, and even though I still didn’t know what I believed about Jesus, all doors and hearts were opened to me here. Every step of the way, you made me feel that I belonged, even when we didn’t believe exactly the same things.

How did you do that? You greeted me warmly each and every Sunday, you accepted me as I was, and supported me as I became. And every step of the way, you helped me get involved in activities I love. You never made me feel less than or unwanted, just because I was on a different part of my spiritual journey. You made me feel that my difference was a strength to be valued. And there are so many more of me out there! 

On my way back to Virginia I had hoped to be able to find and visit an old family friend.  

And on this trip back I happened on a bit of luck. She was 94 now, and in a nearby nursing home. I scheduled a visit, thinking it would be a short one, as I was told she tired easily.  

I was so glad to see how well she was taken care of there. To my surprise, for two hours we had shared tales, reminiscing about our two families’ times together. Oh, we laughed and laughed with shared memories, combined with those pesky little rest-of-the-story tales.  

When it was time and I got up to leave, she got up and gave me the biggest bear hug I had had in years. She whispered in my ear,” Thank you for bringing it all back to life!” We promised to stay in contact, and I cried all the way to my car. 

That day and that visit reminded me how important it can be – how important it IS – to be mindful of the many small ways in which we can be God’s people in the world every day; how easy it can be to make a BIG difference to just one person, just by doing what might seem to be a small simple thing, and how important that effort can be. 

The United Methodist Church has seen the proverbial writing on the wall, as membership in all Christian denominations continues to drop, even while belief in God does not. Some of these approaches may take more planning, and more discovery as we find out who our community members are, as individuals. In the meantime, and for the rest of our time, we can work together and encourage one another to remember the many ways in which we can go out to be God’s people in the world. And we already do this when we smile at one another, listen to each other, pray for each other. 

Surely if we plan and work together we can learn both old and new ways to reach out to find out what the Nones in our community want and need, even over and above what we think they should want and need. People have so many reasons for having given up on organized religion. But I know one thing for certain: if any congregation can bring Nones back into the fold, this congregation will be able to do so in beautiful ways. Believe me, if you could get me to come in and stay… 

If any congregation can make a difference, WE CAN! We can make a difference to Nones in our community, while still serving those we aim to serve, and do serve, now. This congregation has exactly what is needed to make a difference to each and every person. 

There is a time, a purpose to every season – turn, turn, turn – which means to me that we keep beginning and keep starting over as we try new ways, and we never stopping trying. I know we will find many new ways to reach out to people in our community. I am so looking forward to all the little ways in which, together, we will continue to grow as a congregation, in either people or in deeds.

Turn, turn, turn.

Amen.

An Invitation to the Banquet

Scripture: Luke 14:15-24

A book that changed my life in seminary was called Take This Bread, by a woman named Sara Miles. It’s the story of how she became a Christian and what happened next. Sara Miles wasn’t someone you would have called a “seeker.” She was an atheist who wasn’t “seeking” anything, at least not consciously. But for whatever reason, she happened to wander into a church while she was taking a walk one day, and she took communion, and that’s when everything changed.

I like this story because of what it says about the significance of communion – it’s not just a churchy ritual for churchy people. It can be, as John Wesley put it, a “converting ordinance” – something that invites people into life with God and invites us into deeper life with God each time we participate in it.  This understanding of communion was a big part of what helped me discern that I was called to ministry in the local church instead of somewhere outside of it, and that’s why I say this book changed my life.

I also like this story because of what happened after Sara Miles met God that day in the bread and the wine. She became a member of that church she walked into, and then she started a food pantry there. People from the surrounding neighborhoods came for both food and community right there in the sanctuary, because Sara saw this as a way to extend the communion table outward, into the world. And that was life-changing for me, too, to think that communion is the starting point for how we live our lives as Christians in the world. The grace and mercy and welcome and unity and abundance we practice and receive at the table becomes, hopefully, how we live when we get up from it.

Jesus knew that sharing meals was a thing that could shape people’s lives. Who we eat with, where we eat, how we share, how we interact around a table, all of those things have the power to become muscle memory for how we live each day. It’s why he shared meals with people – people labeled as traitors and sinners, as well as his friends – and it’s why he told stories about sharing meals, too.

This particular story we heard today is a story Jesus told about a dinner party, at a dinner party. It was the kind of Roman-style dinner party where you try to grab the best seats near the host so that everyone knows you’re the most important. Jesus sees how the people are scrambling for the good seats at the table and he has some advice for them: Never take the good seats. Always sit in the least important seats, and then you’ll be honored when the host tells you to move up – rather than the other way around.

Then, Jesus adds: And also? when you have a party? Don’t invite the people who can repay your hospitality. Instead, invite the people who can’t repay, the people who never otherwise get invited to dinner parties.

And then he tells a story.

It’s the story of a man who hosted a banquet. He invited all the right people, all the important people. But when it was time to show up, they didn’t come. They were busy with all the various things life demanded. The would-be host was angry, but he wasn’t about to let his feast go to waste. Instead he sent his servant back out to invite the poor, the beggars, the people who never got invited, and anyone and everyone he could find.

There are some different ways we could read this story: like maybe it is about the opening up of the church to Gentiles, the people who had never been invited into this kind of relationship with the God of the Jews before. But Luke tends to mean it when he talks about money and status, the rich being brought low and the humble poor being exalted. To me this story has always been less about the people who don’t come than about who gets invited in the end: and that is everyone. Everyone, all the riffraff and random passersby out on the street, everyone who never expected to be invited.

And so as we think about what it means to live out our daily lives shaped by our practice of communion, I find myself wondering about this part, about invitation, about sharing God’s wide-open invitation to the table.

It’s been on my mind especially this past year, because I think it’s been easy for us in the past to let our church building do the inviting. It’s here in the middle of a busy neighborhood, and it’s unique looking, and so people who are in the area and looking for a church will come. And that’s great – we’ve met a lot of really great and interesting people from all over the world that way. But I think we also saw the limits of this during the pandemic, because even as we ourselves found that we could stay connected over sometimes vast distances, once we no longer had a building that was open, we saw a lot fewer new people coming in.

Our physical doors are open again. But sometime in early 2022 this building is going to come down and we’re going to find ourselves in transitional space for three years while a new church building is constructed. And once again, we won’t have our own building for people to just find and walk into. And so we’re going to have to think: how do we extend the invitation?

And maybe that’s a chance to think, also, about who’s invited.

I have always thought that Arlington Temple is a church that’s truly welcoming to all different kinds of people. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, I don’t know a lot of churches where you can walk into the fellowship hall after worship and find a Foreign Service officer having coffee with a homeless person, but I’ve found that here. And at the same time, there are people who are going to be comfortable walking into a church, and people who would never dream of just walking into a church. And yet in the story Jesus tells it’s the people who weren’t going to be part of the party in the first place who end up finding their seats around the table.

I don’t think that the answer is just a big sign or a snazzy website or a well-timed mailing, though those might all be tools to use. Where I think the answer lies is in being present and engaged in service to our community – not just “advertising,” but sharing the love and welcome and justice of God, getting to know the people around us, finding out where they are experiencing brokenness, letting them know they can do this with us.

One of my big hopes for this upcoming time out of our own building is that it will give us new opportunities to connect with the community around us, and maybe even that having to think again about space will help us to think more creatively about how we’re doing church and who we’re inviting and engaging. Over the next few weeks we’re going to be hearing from a few different guest preachers who are going to help us start imagining some possibilities, and during our Charge Conference on October 24 after worship we’ll start to have some conversation about what these possibilities might be.

The author Enuma Okoro tells the story of traveling to South America when she was in her 20s. She rode on the back of a motorcycle with a missionary who lived there and delivered meal packets to people on the street. She was hooked, and she kept going on these mission trips, trips where she found herself “working in the hot sun, not bathing for days, and sleeping on the floors of dirty rooms.” She thought this hardship and adventure made her a real Christian.

Eventually Enuma was offered a job working with street children in Honduras. It was her dream job. And yet as she prayed about it, it didn’t feel right. Maybe, she realized, God was actually calling her to serve her neighbors right where she was.

And so she started getting to know people in her own neighborhood in North Carolina. She played with the kids on her street and cooked them pancakes. She got to know the homeless guy who always stood her exit off the highway. She started learning to be attentive to the needs right in front of her. When we do that, she said, “It’s almost like Christ takes on flesh all over again.”[1]

As we begin to envision our future as a church in transition, even after all the transition of this past year and a half, what are the needs right in front of us? How might God be calling us to be the church in new ways as a part of this community? How is God calling us to extend the invitation to God’s table to people who might never have walked in these doors?

As we gather around the table today, in person or virtually, as we celebrate the diversity of all the different stories we bring to the table, as we celebrate our connection to Christians around the world who gather around similar tables – let’s then live and serve in a way that is shaped by the table. Let’s receive God’s grace and offer it to others. Let’s invite them to join us in both receiving and offering. Because the Kingdom of God is a banquet. The Kingdom of God is a communion table. And everyone, everyone, is invited.

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[1] Enuma Okoro, “Service,” in the Animate: Practices study series by Sparkhouse.