Holy Ghosts

 

A Homily on All Souls

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Welcome to the Black Vespers on this night of All Souls—Evening Prayer for the Dead.

Ghosts have always been with us. We have not even one single civilization in the entire history of planet earth which denies the survival of souls after bodily death. Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, China, Egypt, India, Greece, Ireland, Scotland, Rome, it’s all the same. All of them maintained that the dead might return to visit the living in order to deal with unfinished business or improper funeral rites.

As of 1999, 42% of Americans reported having had some form of contact with the dead. 18% outright claimed to have seen a ghost, and that number is growing. In England, more people now believe in ghosts than in God. So either all of us are crazy, the whole darn human race, or there’s something to it.

Years ago, I was visiting Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and our tour guide for the night happened to be a student at Gettysburg College. “You know,” I said to her, a little mischievously, “the History Channel claims that 85% of Gettysburg graduates claim to have seen a ghost. Does that sound about right?” She leaned over to me with a little smile and replied: “The other 15% are lying.”

Heck, I could tell you a host of stories just in this town alone. New York Mills is a haunted place. Ghosts, it seems, simply will not go away. And one way or another, we must reckon with that.

For Christianity, the survival of the soul in some form after death does not pose a problem. By and large, Christians have always affirmed an afterlife, even if our hope culminates in Resurrection and the Restoration of all things to God. The problem for many Christians, Protestants especially, is the notion that ghosts might come back—or never fully leave in the first place.

“It is appointed to mortals to die once, and then the judgment,” according to the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews. What room is there then for hauntings? What room is there then for ghosts? Yet ghosts do appear in the Scriptures—famously to Saul and the Witch of Endor, but also when Christ says, “A ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” Now, note what He does not say: He does not say that ghosts do not exist. Rather, He describes what they are like.

The Church Fathers had no problem believing that certain souls lingered. In fact, in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, it’s assumed that all the dead remain on earth for a time, if only to say their fond farewells and oversee their funerals. An idea developed early on—which would eventually evolve into the modern notion of Purgatory—that many if not most people cannot simply be launched into Heaven.

They must be prepared, must be purified and purged, until they are ready to enter into the unfettered Beatific Vision of the Lord. And this was a blessing, not a punishment: a rising, as St Paul writes, “from glory unto glory.” The Jesuits, as I recall, refer to this period of purgation as the schoolhouse, the anteroom to Heaven, which might well be wrought upon the earth. Understandings such as these could explain ghosts quite readily: as poor souls in purgation.

Unfortunately, any tradition, any idea, can be manipulated and mishandled in order to make money. And that’s just what happened in Europe about 500 years ago. Bishops looking for ready funds to build cathedrals notoriously began to sell Indulgences: pieces of paper certifying that, for a fee, the Church could loose a soul from Purgatory, raising the ghost of your dearly departed aunt up into heavenly bliss.

Pretty slick, right? And also terribly insidious. Poor Germans thus paid rich Italians to release the ghosts of beloved relatives from purgation, holding hostage holy souls. And this quite rightly outraged pastors and Reformers such as Martin Luther.

Christ saves us by grace, Luther preached. There is no earning, no payment, no added suffering required in order to claw our way up and into Heaven. When we die, we rest solely in the loving and crucified hands of Jesus Christ, and no bloody bishop was going to tell poor people otherwise, not on Luther’s watch.

So the churches of the Reformation generally kept All Saints Day; kept the celebration of all of those who have gone before us and are at rest, the martyrs and apostles and confessors and monastics who had died in faith in Jesus. But All Souls—the day immediately thereafter, when people remembered their family members, their neighbors, those for whom we pray, that they might swiftly rise to Heaven—that fell largely by the wayside. Sometimes it was even suppressed.

It wasn’t that Luther was opposed in principle to praying for the dead. He thought it well supported enough by Scripture, or at least not outright condemned. Yet he said that we ought to be brief in so doing. It is of course only natural to pray for those whom we love, especially when they die. But we trust that they rest now in Jesus, who loves them, who saves them, and so they could be in no better hands, no holier hands than His.

Pray for the dead but be brief; because Jesus loves them even more than we do, even more than we ever could. We trust in Him, and so entrust our loved ones to Him.

The ghosts have never gone away. They haunt us still. I could point out some houses nearby. But we know, do we not, that no matter what the state of our souls, whether we live or whether we die, Christ is always with us? “If I fly up to the heavens, You’re there,” sings the Psalmist. “If I fall down into hell, You are there. Even there Your hand will guide me, Your right hand hold me fast.”

Remember what Jesus Himself said: that “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for to Him they are all alive!” The same God who marks the death of every sparrow surely marks the state of every single one of His children. And neither death nor life, nor things present nor things to come, can ever separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Do not fear death, O Christian. Do not fear ghosts, nor spirits, nor even the devils of hell. Nothing and no-one is beyond the love of God. Nothing and no-one will escape from His grace. So we proclaim with defiance that death has no dominion here.

O my Jesus, forgive us our sins. Save us from the fires of hell.
Lead all souls to Heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.