Spirit

More Americans believe their home is inhabited by someone or something that isn’t a living being. A study from the company Vivint found that nearly half of the thousand surveyed homeowners believed that their house was haunted. Another survey of 1,000 people found similar results, with 44 percent of respondents saying that they’ve lived in a haunted house.

One researcher offers the following explanations for this phenomenon. Haunted houses can be “a way to connect to the past or a sense of enchantment in the everyday world. [Younger generations in particular] might be searching for meaning in new places. If the modern world they live in isn’t providing food for the soul … it’s not hard to figure out that younger people will search elsewhere for that and find the idea of an alternate world — of ghosts, aliens, et cetera — to be enticing to explore.”

Another researcher claims that the pandemic also played a role in society’s relationship with houses and ghosts. The presence of death in our culture increased, igniting a desire for evidence of an afterlife for some people. “Think of all the sudden, and often not-sufficiently-ritually-mourned deaths during COVID. Many times, people lost loved ones with no last contact, no funeral.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

When people stop attending church or believing in Christianity they don’t stop seeking “spiritual experiences.” The spiritual hunger is still there.

In the early Twentieth Century, Spiritualism was very popular. Mediums and fortune tellers claimed to be able to make contact with the dead and their claims were given legitimacy by such well-known supporters as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series. However, there were also individuals who worked diligently to debunk the claims of these spiritists, among them the famous magician Harry Houdini.

Houdini was one of the most popular performers at the time and he would travel and give live performances across the United States. Part of his magic act involved recreating some of the illusions used by so-called mediums. He would reveal to how slight-of-hand and simple tricks could be effectively used to make people believe they were being contacted by their dead loved ones.

Houdini himself had previously investigated the legitimacy of these practices in part because of his own desire to reconnect with his deceased mother. After a failed attempt to contact her spiritually, he realized the vulnerable position of grieving people. Houdini became disgusted with the way spiritists took advantage of those in mourning.

A handful of individuals were employed by Houdini to go into cities prior to his performance there. Included in these “ghost-busters” was Rose Mackenberg. She would attend seances and meet psychics wearing various disguises and pretend to want to contact the dead. She would then report back to Houdini. On the night of the performance Houdini would call out specifically the local spiritists and disprove their supernatural claims.

Houdini’s actions were motivated by a desire to expose fraud. He knew that many people were comforted by their interactions with these mediums, but he also knew that those mediums were hucksters looking to take advantage of them. He believed it was more important to take away the comfort provided by the deception in order to reveal the truth.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Error; Truth - It is important to know the truth even when it hurts. Many unbelievers may be comfortable in their ignorance of the truth, but ultimately their worldview is a deception. As Christians we have the truth and it is our responsibility to share it with others even when it is uncomfortable. 2) Afterlife; Occult – This illustration could also be used when preaching a text that involves spiritism, such as the medium of Endor.

Scott McKnight writes in “The Hum of Angels”:

I was visiting a bird-supplies store when I mentioned to the owner that my wife and I had owned a hummingbird feeder but had never once seen a hummer at the feeder, so we tossed it out. I concluded that there were no hummers near our home.

The shop owner asked where we lived, I told him, and then he said, "They are there. Not only do some of your neighbors have hummers on their feeders, but hummers are all over the village." What he said next was the take-home line: "You just have to have eyes to see them. Once you do, you will see them everywhere. They are small and fast and camouflaged, but they are not that hard to spot."

Eventually we bought a new feeder, filled it, and waited until our eyes got accustomed to the sight of hummers. We now see them everywhere. When other people go on a walk with us, we often observe a hummer—but it is rare that our friends spot one. It takes experience. You need to learn to spot them out of the side of your eyes and acclimate to their habits of zooming and darting and taking shelter on obscure branches and even on telephone lines. But once you've learned to spot a hummer you will see them everywhere because they are everywhere.

Like angels. They, too, are all around us. Few of us have seen one because we first have to learn what we are looking for. In a good book about angels, Martin Israel, quoting a friend, wrote this: "Eternity lies all round us and only a veil prevents us seeing it." The hum of angels surrounds us, and we only need ears to hear it or eyes to see them. Or perhaps a special sense for them. After all, the Bible tells us that Balaam's donkey could see an angel that Balaam himself could not see.

In a Bible study entitled It Had to Be a Monday, Jill Briscoe writes about the death of a Christian friend. During the funeral visitation, the deceased man's wife and sister stood by the casket, greeting people. The sister kept motioning to her brother's body, saying to each person who came to greet her, "There he is. There he is." After some time, when the wife could stand it no longer, she turned to her sister-in-law and, in love, said, "If I believed, 'there he is,' I would be miserable." Then she added, "Do you know what enables me to get through this day? What gets me through is that I know the truth: 'There he isn't.'"

We live in a time when people have become extremely conscious of nature, its beauty, its wonders, its indescribable value. We appreciate our planet more than we did before. We realize that in a very real sense, the earth gives us physical life. It's not surprising, then, that some people take this truth one step further and regard the planet as somehow giving them inner life as well.

This worldview is reflected in one sad news story. The story called attention to an increase in the number of suicides that occurred in U.S. national parks. The article cited several examples of people who had committed suicide that year in a national park, including a 65-year-old university biology professor who "disappeared into Utah's Canyonlands National Park, telling relatives in a note he was returning 'body and soul to nature.'"

The idea of returning the body to the earth has a long Christian history. Dust to dust. Notice, however, that this man also viewed his death as a way of returning his soul to nature, as though nature had somehow given him a soul in the beginning and at death his soul would be reunited with nature.

How different a worldview this is from that expressed by Jesus, who as he neared his death on the cross said, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."

A sad soul will kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ.

—Author John Steinbeck

"You cannot play the piano well unless you are singing within you."

—Concert pianist Arthur Rubenstein (1887–1982)

Long before the term "ecology" was discovered by the environmentalists, Joseph Sittler employed it to suggest the interconnectedness of all of life. One of his more provocative images is that of a spider web--touch one part of it and all parts quiver. Just so, spirit cannot be separated from life, but must be understood and received in the midst of all of existence.

The spirit of Christmas needs to be superseded by the Spirit of Christ. The spirit of Christmas is annual; the Spirit of Christ is eternal. The spirit of Christmas is sentimental; the Spirit of Christ is supernatural. The spirit of Christmas is a human product; the Spirit of Christ is a divine person. That makes all the difference in the world.