In our town, there is a growing congregation of young people coming from across the country to find and experience the work of the Spirit, as Bethel says. Something is happening there that, according to Bethel, is unique, powerful, and refreshing the church. So what exactly is that something that is happening, according to Bethel? What is that sign that the Holy Spirit is powerfully at work in and through their movement? 

Before I answer that question, remember what Galatians 5 teaches us is the sign that the Spirit is in fact at work in us:

“Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things, there is no law.

And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 

- Galatians 5:19-24

In light of that Scripture passage, how would you respond to the sincere question by a young person, taught by Bethel, who approaches you at Turtle Bay Bridge and says, "Are you experiencing a work of the Holy Spirit? Would you like to have a clear demonstration of that work in your life?" What would be your polite and honest answer to that question? 

Now take a look at what a young friend of N. posted on his public Facebook page a couple of years ago (I'm keeping that young friend's name private for modesty's sake); N. had alerted me to that post so I could better understand the thinking of those joining Bethel.

Your answer to Bethel Redding's question should confidently be this: I do have the work of the Spirit in me. I know that because I am growing in the fruit of the Spirit and learning to control my sinful desires. I am growing every year in self-control, gentleness, etc. and abandoning the habits of envy, anger, etc. 

The snare of the Bethel mindset is that they want you to think that the evidence of God’s work in you is in the dramatic display of feelings or ecstatic outbursts. This mindset sends you on a wild goose chase of looking for ever more psychologically bizarre experiences that substitute for spiritually learning to have more self-control.

The last big church I remember going down this road of searching for the signs of God’s work outside of the signs given to us in Scripture eventually wound up in a humiliating implosion of churchgoers imitating barking dogs and other animals: here’s a short description of that church https://www.gotquestions.org/Toronto-blessing.html 

Like Nebuchadnezzar, God turned them over to humiliating personal behavior: “...you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. And you shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and seven periods of time shall pass over you until you know that the Most-High rules the kingdom of men..." - Daniel 4:32

So, my sons, and daughters, remember your upbringing, remember your biblical Scripture, and trust your spiritually honed instincts to protect your dignity. 

Is the origin of Halloween pagan? I really like this article by my pastor friend Fr. Brian Foos explaining the history around the controversy and the relatively modern origin of the confusion in Christian circles. I'm reprinting his short essay here below.

https://earthandaltar.standrewsalmanor.org/halloween/

(Original text reposted with permission from the author Fr. Brian Foos and originally published in the blog "Earth & Altar" on October 31, 2016))

HALLOWEEN

by Fr. Brian Foos

Ghouls, ghosts, and witches, warlocks, and spooks of all kinds. These, along with every sort of Disney princess and comic book hero, seem to be the common theme of the average Halloween celebrations in American culture today. Of course, many rural places add a harvest theme to the celebration, and if you want truly scary stuff, it wouldn’t all that hard in our current culture to find a very active occult world on All Hallows’ Eve.

But for all that, All Hallows’ Eve is exactly what this evening is about, and apparently, always has been. Let me explain: October 31 is the eve of All Hallows’ Day. All Hallows’ Day is known more often as All Saints’ Day. Hallowed is an older word, and most people know it from the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed be thy name.” It means sanctified, or made holy (and comes from the Greek word, hagiázo). A related version of the word is hagios which is often translated as “saint.” 

So All Saints’ Day is the festival celebrating all the sanctified, or holy ones—those who were set aside by God as His holy children. This is not a reference only to “Saints” as in Saint Augustine of Hippo and all the other saints names that we have on Church calendars, but saints as in all those who have lived the Christian life and gone on to be with God to wait for the final resurrection of the dead. So Halloween actually comes from the Church. All Hallows’ Eve was contracted to Hallowe’en, and eventually, lost the apostrophe, and most now just spell it as Halloween.

Many today believe in pagan underpinnings of Halloween, and the often ghoulish trappings of the celebration—especially the occult activities happening on this night—help to solidify that opinion. In the 19th century, the academic opinion grew that Halloween was rooted in the Celtic Festival of Samhain. In turn, this academic opinion bled into the general public, particularly in America. Ronald Hutton, in his The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, notes that one 19th century English academic’s theory about Samhain being the Celtic New Year “was further popularized by the Cambridge scholar, Sir James Frazer. At times [Frazer] did admit that the evidence for it was inconclusive, but at others he threw this caution overboard and employed it to support an idea of his own: that Samhain had been the pagan Celtic feast of the dead.”

Frazer’s argument for this is a bit sketchy. He argues that November 1 had been dedicated by the medieval Church to be a festival of the dead, and therefore it could be surmised that this had “been a Christianization of a pre-existing festival.” Hutton notes that Frazer “…admitted, by implication, that there was in fact no actual record of such a festival”(1). In fact, we know very, very little about the Celtic Samhain.

We are more certain, however, that the Celtic peoples of the British Isles were Christianized by the 600s. Of course St. Patrick converted the Irish in the 400s. St. Ninian was the first missionary to Scotland in the middle 400s and converted the southern part of the land. St. Columba worked among the people of northern Scotland in the 500s.

All Saints’ as a Feast Day celebration was well established in the Eastern and Western Church by 400AD.  St. Chrysostom (d. 407) assigns it a definite day, the First Sunday after Pentecost (which is fifty days after Easter), and it is still observed on that day in the East.  In the West, the Feast day did not become firmly established until about 610. “From then on an annual commemoration of ‘All Saints’ was made on 13 May”(2).  The date was changed across the Western Church by order of Pope Gregory IV in the 800s.

The idea that the Bishop of Rome changed the date for the Feast of All Saints’, for all of the Western church, so that the very small Celtic part of the Church (furthest away from Rome, in fact) could take dominion of the Celtic Festival of Samhain, when that Festival or whatever elements of it were left to a culture that had been Christian for 200-400 years had never caused one complaint from Church officials(that we have record of), seems to be a very far stretch. 

Without getting into the extra evidence that Hutton points out, let me quote his conclusion: “This [evidence] makes nonsense of Frazer’s notion that the November date was chosen because of ‘Celtic’ influence: rather, both ‘Celtic’ Europe and Rome followed a Germanic idea….” Cambridge Historian Mary Beard writes that “a large proportion of [Frazer’s] The Golden Bough  is inadequate, as well as irrelevant…”(3). Essentially, Frazer’s arguments have been dismissed for a long time in the academic world, but are still the backbone of popular belief in the culture of our day, so that many Christians fear that Halloween is really pagan and that Christians should not be involved at all, or involved guiltily at best.  Many non-Christians are convinced that Halloween has nothing to do with the Church, and neo-paganism is pressing this point, often veering into the truly frightening world of the occult.

The simple truth is that the Church should reclaim her heritage, and own the truth with beauty and goodness, and should celebrate Halloween as the Church has always celebrated, with the liturgies and prayers and devotions associated with the festival.  How much and what kind of parties are up to the discretion of the Church and her people.  How many of the pagan traditions from the old world that still cling to All Saints should be used is also to be chosen wisely.  But really, who wants to ban apple-bobbing because it has folkloric roots in predicting future love, finding a husband, and likely in being a female fertility rite?

____________________

Endnotes:

1 Hutton, Ronald. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996, ch. 34.

2 F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Oxford;  New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 42.

3 Beard, Mary. “Frazer, Leach, and Virgil: The Popularity (and Unpopularity) of The Golden Bough.” Modes of Comparison: Theory & Practice. Ed. Aram A. Yengoyan. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2006. 161-87.

I was sitting next to an older lady at a recent church potluck when in the course of a conversation, the topic veered to the subject of talents emerging in the next generation of young people. 

This older adult reminisced how she once knew a young woman, who had been a Christian since youth, who was very talented in a particular field of expertise. But when at the full promise and vigor of serious talent to be put at the service of others, the young woman ultimately decided to abandon the gifts and resources she had up until then carefully cultivated. What was the reason given? The young woman had told my acquaintance that she wanted to "instead fully serve the Lord." The older lady relayed it to me in a completely neutral tone, where I could not decipher if she disapproved or admired the sudden abandonment of all that talent. I guessed that this older friend was not sure how to process that sudden abandonment in a woman who was poised to use her gifts and skills in service to others. Out of deference to my older church friend, I did not press the inquiry much further. But this sudden abandonment is something I have heard more than once. For whatever reason, it seems to peculiarly affect the thinking of young women here in the upper part of northern California where I live.

Here's my interpretation of why the young woman was concluding that it was time to abandon what she built up:

• The young woman was afraid of failing and being rejected by others so she decided it was safer not to do anything with her advanced talents. It's hard to fail at sweeping the parish floor after a potluck, but it's possible to fail, for instance, in a music ministry, where the working out of talent gets more complex. Someone might get frustrated with her for not getting everything precisely right.
• The young woman was confronted at a stage in the growth of her talent that required her to find a way to serve others truly. As long as she was officially a student, she didn't have to serve anyone. As a student of her talent, she had been benefitting from constant affirmation by a paid teacher. As an active steward of talent, outside of a school environment, it is the impact on others that counts, and you can fail to be a good steward.
• The young woman sat under a local church ethos that focused on valuing only the basic milk of the faith. By working out her talents in the context of building up the Kingdom of God, in a self-disciplined consistent manner, she was inadvertently distancing herself emotionally from a community of local believers who only want to preach the basics of salvation. The application of her exceptional talents requires exercising mature Christian wisdom for the Lord. Her local church was probably not ready to graduate to a more mature outworking of the faith in the context of the congregational life.

The above attitude is one of the reasons I am sure that Jesus gave the parable of the talents. 

14 "For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property.

15 To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.

16 He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more.

17 So also he who had the two talents made two talents more.

18 But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master's money.

19 Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them.

20 And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, 'Master, you delivered to me five talents; here, I have made five talents more.'

21 His master said to him, 'Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.'

22 And he also who had the two talents came forward, saying, 'Master, you delivered to me two talents; here, I have made two talents more.'

23 His master said to him, 'Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.'

24 He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, 'Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed,

25 so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.'

26 But his master answered him, 'You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed?

27 Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest.

28 So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents.

29 For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.

30 And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.' - Matthew 25:14-30

Yes, he, in effect, says, you are all given different starting advantages in life, and you will not be judged for that difference in beginning circumstances. But, He says, I will judge you if, when given so many talents, you refuse to work hard and take risks in an attempt to multiply them far beyond what your starting life circumstances gave you. And what especially grieved our Lord in that parable is when he heard the excuse from the one who buried his talent. According to that unproductive servant, it was because he was afraid our Lord would blame him for circumstances beyond the steward's control.

In the parable of the talents, Christ refused to give a definite promise of an exact one-to-one correlation between effort and performance. He made it clear that if you sit on your talents, He will judge you very harshly. In essence, He would have told that young woman, if you are indeed so afraid to fail, go diligently find a more courageous person under whom you can be told what to do specifically with your skillset. He would have said, allow yourself to be directed day-by-day on how to support that other person in their of Christian service, rather than let the talents go to waste. But whatever you do, don't just bury your talents. It matters to God.

Our family reading in the Book of James triggered a discussion about promises, commitments, oaths.

I researched the topic briefly and came to this conclusion:

The clarification by Christian lawyer Brent Winters that the correct translation of the warning about oath-taking that Jesus gave in Matthew 5 was that of the excessive or frivolous use of the solemn oath. It is clearly NOT a prohibition against taking an oath, but the wording of the original text says it prohibits the general use of the oath. The Old Testament did, in fact, have oath-taking as part of God's economy, but it was not used in everyday circumstances and usually in very formal situations, with formal verbal expressions, and with restrictions that oaths were not binding if done by a minor or wife without the husband's consent. In the New Testament era, the oath is allowed, but we are reminded again that it is not be used frivolously. Therefore the Christian is in fact allowed to and recommended to take an oath before God in a modern court.

The passage of the Rich Man and Lazarus gives us an interesting insight into the afterlife. That passage combined with other New Testament writings give us the following insights:

• Both the righteous and the unrighteous went to Sheol after they died here on earth during the time before Christ.
• There is already a separation in Sheol between the righteous and the unrighteous, even before the advent of the Messiah.
• Hades is the Greek word for the Hebrew for Sheol, which is basically the designated term for the realm of the departed spirits. It is also is the word for the old English word "hell". Hell is NOT, in the original old English sense (and at the time the ancient creeds were translated from "He [Christ] descended into hell"), the same word we often now use confusingly for the place of eternal final judgment. That latter place was differentiated in the Greek language of the New Testament as a place called "gehanna". 
• Both the righteous and the unrighteous are aware of each other's presence in the nether world and they are conscience that there is an ongoing realm of the living. They still understand and process the meaning of right and wrong and are fully cognizant that there was a past and that there is still a future.
• The righteous in Sheol were already being comforted before the arrival of Christ in the world. The unrighteous were already in discomfort, but not in a place of eternal suffering.
• The righteous people in Sheol before the resurrection of Christ had not yet been translated to another upper realm of comfort and well-being.
• After the resurrection of Christ, the righteous who were in the righteous comforting zone in the place of Sheol were then moved up into an even better place in heaven, awaiting the full end of history. The righteous are still not in a final place as they will still get a new body and be fully resurrected at the end of human history. The end-state for the righteous is not a place where they exist only in spirit, but rather in a fully restored glorified body.