Hosanna To The Lamb!

It was a dark, stormy and very windy night when disaster struck the cemetery. As a cold rain hammered against the sodden earth, a howling gale overturned tombstones, blew down branches and sent cobwebs flying into the dank night air.

Lying in bed, Paul Hopkins heard the savage roar outside and feared the worst. Sure enough, as dawn broke, the Toronto man realized that his collection of carefully wrought Styrofoam grave markers had been devastated by the tempest. The final toll? About $2,000 in damages.

“I set up my cemetery about three weeks before Halloween to set the mood,” Mr Hopkins explains. “This has never happened before.”

He may now have to extend the week’s vacation he takes every year … before Hallowe’en to prepare his haunted house display, but Mr Hopkins, a purchasing agent for an aluminum smelter, vows he’ll repair the battered props before October 31.

Despite the setback, the bulk of his gear remains unscathed. Mr Hopkins estimates that his collection of talking skeletons, animatronic corpses, zombies and ghosts has cost him about $20,000.

That’s an excerpt from an article I came across in the newspaper several years ago.

Hallowe’en is a multimillion-dollar business in Canada. According to one newspaper report, “Canadians have become so wild about Halloween we now spend more per capita on costumes, candy and décor than our U.S. counterparts do, with holiday-related spending that is second only to Christmas.”

Last year October candy and snack food sales topped the $400 million mark. And if COVID didn’t manage to put too much of a damper on things, the estimates were that four million kiddies should have been out on the streets last evening to fill their sacks with Hallowe’en goodies. And if your neighbourhood was anything like mine last evening, it was visited by dozens of strange miniature creatures: witches, ghosts, mummies, aliens, zombies—and perhaps a few little princesses and cuddly animals too!

Some people like to trace our Hallowe’en traditions back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. But since the eighth century it has been for Christians All Hallows’ Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day. So it is that today we celebrate what we affirm with our fellow believers around the world in last two phrases of the Apostles’ Creed: the communion of saints and the life everlasting.

If you have a Bible nearby, I’d like you to turn with me now to the passage that was read a few moments ago: Revelation 7:9-17. I know that for many of us the Book of Revelation is strange, if not uncharted, territory. Its array of multi-headed creatures, stars falling from the sky, plagues and fearsome horsemen, make Hallowe’en seem like the child’s play that it is. Yet I want to affirm that a careful reading of Revelation can lead to untold riches. To do that we need to take into account its historical context. And we need to be careful not to be led astray by the false teachings that have plagued the church in almost every century since it was written. So with that in mind let’s turn to Revelation, chapter 7.

The Crowd

As we begin reading, we find that we are surrounded by an enormous crowd—a multitude, John tells us, greater than anyone could number.

Now to put this in context we need to go back into the earlier chapters of Revelation. And as we do, we find that this multitude has been growing. It begins with just four strange creatures that John describes as “living beings”. Day and night they give thanks to the One who sits on the throne in words that are familiar to many of us:

Holy, holy, holy

is the Lord God Almighty,

who was and is and is to come!

The fours are quickly joined by twenty-four others, whom John describes as elders. They too fall down and, laying their crowns before the throne, they cry aloud,

You are worthy, our Lord and God,

to receive glory and honour and power,

for you created all things,

and by your will they were created

and have their being.

No sooner have they completed their refrain than John finds himself surrounded by an enormous chorus of angels, “numbering thousands upon thousands”—no, ten thousand times ten thousand. Now the word John uses here is “myriads”. In its literal sense it means ten thousand. But in fact it was the highest number in Greek and I think we could take it as the equivalent of our word “gazillion”. So we might say that what John witnessed around him was a gazillion gazillion angels chanting in unison,

Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain,

to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength

and honour and glory and praise!

And if all that were not enough, they are joined by every creature on earth, who join in thunderous chorus singing,