George Pitcher

This is a transcript of a sermon delivered by George Pitcher at St Bride's on All Saints' Sunday, 4th November 2007

I was listening to an interview on Radio 4 other day with one of the Angel family, who run Angels, the stage clothing and fancy-dress hire-firm on Shaftesbury Avenue. She was saying one of her favourite times of year, commercially and socially, is Halloween. And she was saying that one of the most popular costumes for Halloween parties for men this year is the body-bag, which is what it says on the bag - a bag for a corpse with holes for the head arms and legs and a zip, for easy access.

Is that sick? Is it in bad taste? And, if we think so, is Halloween sick and in bad taste, as some would hold. Or is it just a bit of harmless fun? We deal badly with death as a society - we sweep it away. Is this a time of year when we acknowledge our mortality, celebrating the lives of the saints and our loved ones, gone before us. Or are we just making fun of death.

Today, All Saints Sunday, falls between last week's Halloween and tomorrow's Bonfire Night. Halloween - All Hallows' Eve - was a pagan festival originally, the Irish/Celtic Samain, the end of summer, that was adopted by Christianity and has more recently been hijacked again by the commercial, ghost-busting consumer society.

It always involved bonfires, which may have fuelled the Guy Fawkes tradition too. At the festival of Samain, the spirits of the dead were said to appear in the smoke of giant fires, lit to warm them ahead of the coming winter. Later, the pagan fire was adopted for the ritual burning of bones (i.e "Bone-fire") from overcrowded churchyard ossuaries, to make room for the next batch. The burning of effigies of Catholics on Guy Fawkes Night was a natural development of the tradition. This year, they're burning an effigy of Cherie Blair at Edenbridge, near where we now live - the burning of Catholics remains a big issue in Sussex.

Three Faces with Venus (The Hollow Men) Joseph Donaldson

The development of Christianity is entwined in this tradition of paganism, superstition and popular spirituality. And it remains so today. The Da Vinci Code, the works of JK Rowling, Philip Pullman's Dark Materials and the revival of dramatic spiritualism in The Lord of the Rings sees to that.

This makes us uneasy. We tend not to like the association of our Christian faith with the pagan and the superstitious. But I suggest there is also a deeper - and often more secret - uneasiness. Let me name that uneasiness. It is this: If we don't believe in the faces in the bonfire smoke, in ghosts and ghouls and all that supernatural nonsense, then why do we profess to believe in a God we cannot see, in a Jesus we've never met, in miracles and walking on water, healed lepers and multitudes fed on a few fish and loaves? Why do we believe in a (literally) mysterious God, when we grow up and out of belief in the Green Man, or for that matter the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus?

It's my belief that these questions are built on a flawed premise. Because, while God is clearly supernatural - he could not be otherwise, existing before and after our creation, beyond human comprehension - our understanding of him, our faith, is not supernatural. It is human, flesh and blood, natural. The Christian faith, uniquely, understands God through the entirely human experience of God meeting us in the Flesh, in the incarnation, in the Christ.

What separates us from the supernatural and the superstitious is that we understand God not through what is beyond us, but through what came among us, in real, touchable, holdable human form. Not a spirit, but a person. Not a face in the smoke, but our smoke in his face.

It's why the author of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us today that we're not called, like Moses, to Mount Sinai, "the mount that might not be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest" but to Mount Sion, to the new Jerusalem, the city of the living God, where the Christ mediates for us. It's why at the beginning of Matthew, on another mount, the summary of the teaching of Jesus in 12 verses is rooted in normal human experience - blessed are the poor and meek and merciful, not because they have earned God's blessing but because God now knows and shares their human experience.

This is what separates our Christian faith from the superstitious and supernatural. And paradoxically, it is its very human ordinariness that makes it so wondrous. As we approach Advent and our hearts and minds turn to the wonder of the incarnation, God made vulnerable flesh, we can reflect on the miracle through which God joins humankind - and in so doing does something infinitely more wonderful than, in David Jenkins' memorable phrase, "a conjuring trick with bones", elevating our human existence, through his sharing of it, to something so remarkable and mysterious that it authenticates itself in human history even as it changes the course of that human history for all time.