I preached this sermon on Sunday, October 27, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary texts cited are Job 42:1-6, 10-17 and Mark 10:46-52.
Every year about this time, I come up against two things that are both true and yet are hard to reconcile with one another. The first is that Halloween was my absolute favorite holiday growing up and is still something I find great joy in. And the second is that 12 years ago, my father died on Halloween.
For a long time I didn’t really know what to do with that.
Even many years on, now, when this season comes around, that intersection of nostalgic pleasure on one hand and lingering sadness on the other strikes me as a very strange thing. But it also strikes me as a very true thing about life. It is the time of year when I’m reminded that the very good and the inexpressibly hard always brush up against one another–fairy princesses and ghosts both knocking at the door.
Halloween is when I realize that grief and joy are not a binary choice I can pick between, but two companions who have different things to teach me. We navigate the autumn, the three of us–grief and joy and I–and so I have found a new way of being in this season.
Because as much as I used to love it, I am well past the age of going trick or treat; instead I’ve come to that point when one learns that both treats and tricks arrive in our tentatively outstretched hands as the years go by. The key is to keep our hands and our hearts open anyhow; to trust that, with God’s help and with each other, we can sift through whatever is given.
That’s easier said than done, though.
We live at time in which the general tendency is to see grief and joy as enemies of one another, as a sort of zero sum struggle, and this false binary has all sorts of dangerous implications.
For example, we get caught up in partisan divisions which suggest our grief and grievance must be satisfied by destroying the joy of those who are different from us.
At times our public discourse cannot bear subtlety or compromise, as one group seeks to maximize its pleasure and discount its perceived enemy’s pain.
Or we find ourselves caught up a brittle, toxically positive culture that frames joy as the absence of sadness or weakness, suggesting that something is wrong with anyone who dares to weep or crack or mess up or show fear.
And when this happens, we become a shallower, meaner, more haunted society.
We have been here before, though. Just read the story of Israel. Read the Psalms, including the hard parts our Sunday lectionary leaves out. Read the Gospels. The wisdom of our spiritual forebears, the wisdom of Scripture, has always understood that fullness of life–this thing that Jesus speaks about and wants to invite us into–is a space which gives voice to every human condition, and that the only way to approach God is to move toward that strange crossroads where joy and grief coexist.
Consider, for example, the culmination of the Book of Job, which we heard today. At first glance, it might sound almost like a fairy tale, a sweet treat for frightened children—a tidy, happy resolution where this poor man gets back even more than what was taken from him.
Except when we stop to consider the fact that his questions to God never did get answered, and that his new wealth and his new children will never erase the pain of what he has been through, not really.
Anyone who has suffered loss will recognize this: that Job must learn to live out his days somehow with both grief and with joy, and it is only in the holy tension of these two that a new sort of blessedness is visited upon him, one that is deeper and wiser and more alive than that of earlier, simpler days.
We come to realize that Job’s story is the journey of the soul’s movement toward God through the ambiguities and complexities of life.
And something similar is revealed in the story of Bartimeus, the blind beggar, healed by Jesus just before his own final entry into Jerusalem. Unlike the rich young man and the ambitious disciples we’ve heard about in recent weeks, Bartimeus has no illusions about life. His experience at the margins of society and his close intimacy with sorrow have shown him what seeing eyes could not see—that the true disciple of Christ is no prosperity gospel status seeker but the one who is unafraid of darkness.
Like Bartimeus, the true disciple, though they cannot see God, calls out anyway, saying walk with me, God of grief and of joy, let me follow you wherever you might go, let me see everything, for the first time, as it really is, not just what I am accustomed to seeing.
Show me who you are, God, and reveal who I am, too, and though we are long past a transactional trick or treat sort of faith, let us see what good might yet be done as we go wandering together in this night strewn with tears and candy wrappers.
Because let’s be honest with ourselves—that is the world we live in. That is life, in all its bittersweet complexity.
I know, especially in this election season, a lot of us are struggling to manage a lot of feelings at once these days—fear, anger, anxiety, uncertainty, hope, gratitude, determination. We have many good reasons for this, personal and political and cultural. But one thing that we cannot lose sight of as we navigate the next few weeks or months or years is that no single one of these emotions is the whole story.
Beware of anyone who wants you to tap into only your anger, only your fear, or only your craving for the sweet things in life. The only way that we can be faithful, purposeful, authentic disciples of Jesus is to carry all of it with us: the sadness, the delight, the gratitude, the humility, the resilience.
Being Christian, following Jesus, means we aren’t trick or treating anymore—we don’t get to choose just one thing or the other—strength or compassion, patriotism or prophetic witness, righteousness or relationship. Resisting idolatry, whether of nation or party or religious institution or even of our own identities means standing in that crossroads of understanding with Job and Bartimeus and Jesus, guided into a deeper sense of empathy and connection with one another above all else.
If you haven’t realized this already, I hope you will understand that one point of a parish like ours is that it’s a place where we practice this together. Church is like a workshop for the heart and soul, where we try out this honest relationship with grief and joy, with each other and with God, so that we can go out and do that same thing in the rest of our lives, in this world that so badly needs it.
I am grateful that the church, that this church, can be such a place. I am grateful that Jesus in the fullness of his gospel makes space for everything that we are, and everything that we have lost, and that he does this for everyone.
It helps make the strange collision of all my Halloweens—and any other haunted seasons of our life in this world–a bit easier to bear. A bit easier to keep going, to keep hoping, to keep believing, no matter what comes next, whether trick…or treat.
By Another Road 