Halloween and the Jack O'Lantern

As Halloween approaches my in-box begins to receive a popular “we are like pumpkins” email. I’m not sure when I started receiving it, but it has been a number of years now and it always causes me to pause to evaluate just what God has and is doing in my life to turn it around.

The email: Being a good person is like being a pumpkin. God lifts you up, takes you in, and washes all the dirt off of you. He opens you up, touches you deep inside and scoops out all of the yucky stuff -- including the seeds of doubt, hate, greed, etc. Then He carves you a bright new smiling face and puts His light inside of you to shine for all the world to see.

Now there is a lot of legend surrounding the pumpkins traditional use during Halloween and, within certain religious circles, a great deal of scare tactics as all sorts of misinformation is inserted to get people to be God-centered during this “evil” and “worldly” celebration. Oh, what silliness grips us in the name of religious purity. Here is a little history on the Jack O’Lantern. The next three paragraphs are from http://www.history.com/topics/jack-olantern-history.

People have been making jack-o-lanterns at Halloween for centuries. The practice originated from an Irish myth about a man nicknamed "Stingy Jack." According to the story, Stingy Jack invited the Devil to have a drink with him. True to his name, Stingy Jack didn't want to pay for his drink, so he convinced the Devil to turn himself into a coin that Jack could use to buy their drinks. Once the Devil did so, Jack decided to keep the money and put it into his pocket next to a silver cross, which prevented the Devil from changing back into his original form. Jack eventually freed the Devil, under the condition that he would not bother Jack for one year and that, should Jack die, he would not claim his soul. The next year, Jack again tricked the Devil into climbing into a tree to pick a piece of fruit. While he was up in the tree, Jack carved a sign of the cross into the tree's bark so that the Devil could not come down until the Devil promised Jack not to bother him for ten more years.

Soon after, Jack died. As the legend goes, God would not allow such an unsavory figure into heaven. The Devil, upset by the trick Jack had played on him and keeping his word not to claim his soul, would not allow Jack into hell. He sent Jack off into the dark night with only a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal into a carved out turnip and has been roaming the Earth with it ever since. The Irish began to refer to this ghostly figure as "Jack of the Lantern," and then, simply "Jack O'Lantern."

In Ireland and Scotland, people began to make their own versions of Jack’s lanterns by carving scary faces into turnips or potatoes and placing them into windows or near doors to frighten away Stingy Jack and other wandering evil spirits. In England, large beets are used. Immigrants from these countries brought the jack o’lantern tradition with them when they came to the United States. They soon found that pumpkins, a fruit native to America, make perfect jack o’lanterns.

The bottom line is this – at least from my perspective – that as Christians we need not get caught up in the foolishness of the legends and myths surrounding this seasonal event. All we need to remember is what the email illustrates and that is that God makes all things new. It is what in our heart that really matters and that God has changed replacing the “yuck” with his eternal light.

Quote for today: There is a fundamental sense in which evil is not something that can be made sense of. The essence of evil is that it is something which is absurd, bizarre and irrational. It is the nature of evil to be inexplicable, an enigma and a stupidity. Nigel Wright