It’s Halloween again. My how it seems to come so quickly. Last year on Halloween, in this blog, I said of the big day;

“Every club, across America, on different nights throws Halloween parties, "Costume Balls", "Monster Mashes" , whatever you want to call it. It's a time when children go from door to door, dressed as their favorite superhero, collecting candy and other treats. Its a time when adults have the freedom to act like children, and get all dressed up in costumes and go to parties. It's a time when girls can dress like whores and nobody can say anything about it, and when men can dress like women and nobody bats an eye.

What is it about Halloween that makes so many people get so much "in the spirit". Even I - who publicly hates Halloween, when the night comes and I am in a costume, and slingin drinks behind the bar - I somehow end up "getting into it".

It certainly provides a nice distraction from our everyday life. We can forget our worries, our fears, our stresses, and enjoy a night of pretty much mindless fun with our friends. It's an opportunity we don't often have in our everyday lives, to let loose without concern, and make fools of ourselves. On the deeper level we re-connect with the child in all of us. We return to the days when we didn't care what other people thought of us. We re-gain a certain amount of innocence because we let go of our pride, and return to the days when life was simple.”

I really think that it’s true. We enjoy reverting for that one night to those old days when life was simple. When we didn’t have bills to worry about, or careers, or relationships, or rents or mortgages. The big worry was scoring the best candy, and what a friend thought about our costume. And don’t we deserve it? The reality of it is life is complicated. It’s VERY complicated. We burn ourselves out, if we aren’t careful, and we need that moment away.

It is all together appropriate that the Gospel on Halloween is the story of Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus was a tax collector, which in Bible times meant big time sinner. They were believed to have been men who stole from the tax payers, and were vapid of any values. Jesus was preaching in his town, so Zacchaeus climbed a tree and hid up there to watch Jesus pass by. When Jesus saw him, he called him down from the tree, and told him he needed a place to stay. The people all started talking “Jesus is staying with a sinner, with a tax collector”.

It fits in well with the Halloween message. Zacchaeus wanted to see Jesus, but he felt he couldn’t because of who he was. Halloween is a day when we all get to be someone else, and no one judges us. In a way, in the Christian life, we don’t need Halloween, because everyday of our lives, we can be who we really are - and Jesus doesn’t judge us. Maybe that’s part of the stress of our everyday lives. Because among all the bills, the relationships, the stress, etc - we are also constantly trying to purport some kind of image. It’s human nature. We spend our time trying to show the world that we are more then what we are, because we have goals of what we want to be, but we haven’t reached them yet. And we have flaws that we don’t want the world to see, so we hide them. We have stress that we want everyone to think we can handle, even when we can’t. Zacchaeus understood that, that’s why he hid in the tree. He knew that society thought certain things about him, weather they were true or not. He knew that he would be judged by the crowd if he stood among them to see Jesus, but Jesus Himself pulled him down from the tree, and in fact had dinner with him that very night. Zacchaeus was able to return to that childlike mentality, that the things of his current worldly life didn’t matter, he wanted to see Jesus, and he was granted that desire.

Every year on Halloween we wear costumes, we wear outfits that we know we would be mocked for wearing any other night of the year, and we say “Whatever, it’s Halloween.” The story of Zacchaeus teaches us that its ok for us to have that attitude all year round, because Jesus loves the REAL us. My father once said, “Hey, love it or shove it”. That’s a very true statement. We are who we are. We are who God made us, and we can never truly grow, we will never really achieve our goals, and our hopes and dreams, unless we present the real us. On Halloween we present a fake outer image, so that we can be our true inward selves. Maybe the rest of the year we can try to be our real inward selves more often, and forget the stress and nonsense of daily life. God, and the people who love us, love us for the real “us”, not the image we project. Its ironic that on Halloween, the external becomes just that, an external, and the internal becomes more honest then ever. Because the real internal “us”, is adults who suffer from the adult world, and long for the days of innocence, stress free living, and when life was much simpler.