Step, step, step, JUMP, step, step, step JUMP! Our advance down the steel steps amplified into Bam, bam, bam, BOOM, bam, bam, bam, Boom as it echoed mercilessly through the cement-walled stairwell. With gleeful greedy efficiency we made our way down the twelve stories of our apartment building—eight apartments per floor, “Ding Dong” followed by “Trick or Treat!” 96 times… by the time we reached the ground floor our costumes were wrecked, our faces streaked with sweat, but the weight of our trick or treat bags filled our hearts with inexpressible joy. We were rich! We struck the mother lode!
This frenzied excitement of Halloween led to a anciet mystical battle. Parents sought to limit candy consumption, and kids pressed to cast off all restraint. Regardless of whose will prevailed the results were eerily the same year after year— within a few days of our celebration all we had left were an empty candy bowls, and a gnawing desire for more.
According to the Chicago Tribune, in spite of “a moribund economy,” our nation is expected to spend an average of $72.31 per person on Halloween in 2011, including a total of $1 billion on children’s costumes and $1.2 billion on adults’ costumes. The scariest thing about Halloween is that after paying for costumes, candy, pumpkins, food for parties, decorations for haunted houses, we have made a multi-billion dollar investment in empty candy bowls and a gnawing hunger for more.
Halloween should spook us because it is our lives in microcosm. From the dawn of self-consciousness we don costume after costume trying to be something we are not, desperately hiding our truest selves. At the same time we begin devouring one brightly colored, fabulously decorated “sweet” after another hoping that “this one” will finally satisfy. We find ourselves haunted by the creeping fear that this is all there is to life— an infinite line of see-through costumes and ultimately empty candy bowls. But, it does not have to be this way.
The way of escape is found in the frightening yet freeing act of owning who we really are. Messiah Yeshua said it this way, “It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”1 As long as we clutch at costumes and candy, convinced that we have everyone fooled, we place ourselves among the “healthy” who seek no help for their condition. But, at the moment we do the scary thing (the very thing we desperately, religiously, pride-fully, and frantically avoided) and own who we really are, we take our place among “those who are sick…sinners” and the Divine Doctor calls us to freely receive His loving and redeeming care. At once we find ourselves costume and candy free and graciously clothed with Messiah’s righteousness, satisfied by His grace.
I will rejoice greatly in the LORD, My soul will exult in my God;
For He has clothed me with garments of salvation, He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness,
As a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,
And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.”2
1. Luke 5:31-32
2. Isaiah 61:10
