Christians And Halloween Quotes

In the past, when gays were very flamboyant as drag queens or as leather queens or whatever, that just amused people. And most of the people that come and watch the gay Halloween parade, where all those excesses are on display, those are straight families, and they think it's funny. But what people don't think is so funny is when two middle-aged lawyers who are married to each other move in next door to you and your wife and they have adopted a Korean girl and they want to send her to school with your children and they want to socialize with you and share a drink over the backyard fence. That creeps people out, especially Christians. So, I don't think gay marriage is a conservative issue. I think it's a radical issue.

New Rule: If an Evangelical tries to use Halloween to pimp Jesus to kids, they get to egg his house. On Halloween, the president of the American Family Association urged his flock to hand out a Christian-based comic book instead of candy. Excuse me, Halloween isn't a time to push your beliefs. You don't see me handing out pot to kids...Okay, well not the little kids.

She said Halloween is a British tradition and it has nothing to do with being a Christian. I almost said Why do you celebrate it then 'cos I always forgot she was born in England.

The sabbats mark the Wheel of the Year, the turning of the seasons. For Wiccans and Pagans of some other traditions, these are the spine of the Craft, and some fall on dates that are closely aligned with those of major Christian holidays: Yule, the winter festival from which we get the Twelve Days of Christmas; Ostara, the spring equinox and the source of Easter’s fertility symbols (the rabbit, the egg); Samhain,3 the time of communion with the dead, dressed up in mainstream culture as Halloween.

All Saints’ Day, however, reflected a profound devotion to the saints which was as deeply felt in Anglo-Saxon England as it was anywhere in the medieval church. For medieval Christians, the saints were the helpful and familiar dead, always only a prayer away, ready to rush to the aid of the living. Unlike the spirits of the modern version of Halloween, they were not to be feared or avoided, unless one had done something to offend them; they possessed a power that could be awe-inspiring, but they only ever worked for the forces of good.

Maybe it’s my tattoos talking, but this is my favorite missional mandate. Because the perception of Christians as self-righteous segregationists is so prevailing, it is such a pleasure to represent a new expression of faith. For me this is not hard, this is not work, this is not a sacrifice, this is not uncomfortable. A missional approach to a disoriented world has made discipleship fun again. To put it into highly intelligent terms, I get to skip all the church-speak and level with people authentically. I can accept a lovely glass of red wine at a neighbor’s house and later get an earful about her marriage struggles. Brandon organizes neighborhood Texas Hold ’em nights to show those men another face of the pastorate; consequently, he’s the first person they call in crisis. The eight families in our community group throw Halloween bashes and Christmas extravaganzas and potluck dinners and pool parties in our little subdivision. It’s the smallest corner of the world, but it’s the one we’ve been sent to, and we consider ourselves missionaries here.

Halloween comes down to us from the pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced saw-wind), held October 31, the last autumn night before the cold and bleakness of winter. On this night—considered the Celtic New Year—the Druids believed that the supernatural world drew closer to the physical world, so human beings were more susceptible to the power and influence of the unseen.

Peter is a very interesting guy.  He is one of Jesus’ favorite people and a trusted friend.  He saw most of Jesus’ miracles firsthand and was trained by Him.  Peter was a Christian who knew Jesus was God and served Him in full-time Christian ministry, yet we see him make some unbelievable blunders.  He lacked faith, displayed when he sank in the water (Matt 14:31). He was prideful and thought he belonged with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah (Matt 17:4).  He famously denied Jesus three times (Mark 14:29-31), and even after Jesus was raised and the Holy Spirit had come, and Peter had become a mature leader in the Christian church, he had to be called out by the apostle Paul for refusing to even eat with Gentiles.  That one is particularly interesting because it’s exactly what a great deal of modern Christians do.  They refuse to eat with Gentiles.  Translation: Hang out with Democrats, go to rock concerts, have a beer with their coworkers, go to their neighborhood’s Halloween party.

We went to classes. The teachers didn’t quite know what to do with us. It wasn’t exactly kosher what we were doing–but then punishing the “apes” by sending them down the hall to the Principal’s Office within full view of all the other classrooms would only compound the problem. So they shrugged and started the school day. Within minutes of “home room”, Chris and I were sitting in our respective classrooms, working multiplication problems like good little monkeys. I remember suffering a lot throughout the day, horribly burdened by a growing realization. “What kind of a world is this,” I thought, “if you can’t go to school dressed up like a gorilla?” The question haunts me to his very day.

A bubble is a fragile thing, and often in the evening the professors talked worriedly about its bursting. They worried about political correctness, about their colleague on TV with a twenty-year-old female student screaming abuse into her face from a distance of three inches because of a disagreement over campus journalism, their colleague in another TV news story abused for not wanting to ban Pocahontas costumes on Halloween, their colleague forced to take at least one seminar’s sabbatical because he had not sufficiently defended a student’s “safe space” from the intrusion of ideas that student deemed too “unsafe” for her young mind to encounter, their colleague defying a student petition to remove a statue of President Jefferson from his college campus in spite of the repressible fact that Jefferson had owned slaves, their colleague excoriated by students with evangelical Christian family histories for asking them to read a graphic novel by a lesbian cartoonist, their colleague forced to cancel a production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues because by defining women as persons with vaginas it discriminated against persons identifying as female who did not possess vaginas, their colleagues resisting student efforts to “de-platform” apostate Muslims because their views were offensive to non-apostate Muslims. They worried that young people were becoming pro-censorship, pro-banning-things, pro-restrictions, how did that happen, they asked me, the narrowing of the youthful American mind, we’re beginning to fear the young. “Not you, of course, darling, who could be scared of you,” my mother reassured me, to which my father countered, “Scared for you, yes. Vith this Trotskyist beard you insist on wearing you look like an ice-pick target to me. Avoid Mexico City, especially de Coyoacán neighborhood. This iss my advice.” In the evenings they sat in pools of yellow light, books on their laps, lost in words. They looked like figures in a Rembrandt painting, Two Philosophers Deep in Meditation, and they were more valuable than any canvas; maybe members of the last generation of their kind, and we, we who are post-, who come after, will regret we did not learn more at their feet.