If you were wondering how long I would go on, you know how I felt at Super Target last week. I was wandering the aisles, pushing my little cart, checking my Kim list, looking for light bulbs and no doubt looking lost, when all at once I hear this little girl repeating her little mantra: I am not afraid. I am not afraid. I am not afraid …

I wondered what that was about. I wondered how her mother could stand not to shut her up, if only for the sake of fellow shoppers. And then it occurred to me that her mother had probably put her up to it. The store was decorated with Halloween-themed creatures and colors—lots of skeletons and ghouls; black, white and orange. It can be a “scawy, scawy” thing for a young child. Maybe her mother’s solution was to get her little girl to talk herself out of the fear by convincing herself that she was not afraid. I’m afraid it wasn’t working.

When things are scary enough, no self-talk will drive the fear away. And God knows the world and our lives in them are scary enough that the self-talk prescription isn’t strong enough to chase away all the ghosts and goblins that haunt our hearts.

The whole tradition of Halloween deals with this very subject. I know you hardly expect a Baptist preacher to go on in his sermon about the devil’s holiday, but one way to defang the devil is to take him on in the light before the night. The earliest pagan way of dealing with life’s deepest fears was the Celtic custom of Samhain, or summer’s end. The Celts divided the year into two seasons—light and dark, summer and winter. October 31 was their New Year’s Eve. The days were getting shorter and the harvest was in. Now they prepared for the long season of darkness when nothing grew but the cold of death inside and outside them. The Druid priests would light bonfires on hills to help restart the sun. They would take sticks and make torches to light fires in the hearths of each home throughout the winter. They believed that spirits wandered the earth, especially on Halloween night, seeking to plunder the living. So the priests dressed up in costumes with animal heads in order to trick the dead into thinking they were one of them. The trick-or-treat tradition comes from this. Spirits longing to be alive again would come looking for food from the harvest. Families would leave potatoes and turnips out on their doorsteps for the spirits in order keep them from coming into their houses. And they would leave ripe food, too, treats, don’t you know?! in order to ensure the spirits not feel tricked by rotten food and take revenge on them.

All in all, the customs of Halloween were meant to help people do something akin to the little girl in Super Target who just kept saying to herself, I am not afraid. I am not afraid. I am not afraid. Even when the church Christianized Great Britain and made November 1 into All Saints Day and November 2 into All Souls Day, they allowed for the Halloween traditions as a harmless way of staving off people’s fears.

The New York Times ran a story the other day by Susan Millar Perry. She told of how she and her husband and little son had bought an apartment in New York some years ago after its longtime occupant had died. They had lived upstairs from Mr. Schwab, who was a tall, thin, strange man who always appeared wearing the same long trench coat and had a Camel cigarette dangling from his lips. Gossip had it that he had been a U.S.spy during World War II. The Nazi papers and memorabilia the Perrys found when they moved in confirmed their suspicions. But in the months after they moved to the new place and started fixing things up, lots of scary things started happening. The dog did not want to be in the apartment. Susan’s husband, David, said he was shoved in the bathroom and nearly knocked to the floor while brushing his teeth one night. Then their five-year old son, Nick, woke up screaming and reported that he had seen a man looking just like Mr. Schwab, standing at the foot of his bed with outstretched arms threatening to grab him.

Susan realized something had to be done. She had recently attended a house blessing that had been performed by an Episcopal priest, and she wondered if her house needed an exorcism. A friend counseled that she didn’t need a priest, that she could do it herself. So one afternoon, Susan says, when all of my "boys" were out of the apartment, I sat in the master bedroom, the hub of devilish activity, and poured my heart out to Mr. Schwab, our ethereal nemesis, especially impressing the fact that as the new stewards of the apartment, we would see to it that its lovely old bones would stay sensitively intact. There has not been a bit of trouble for the 12 years thereafter. [“A New Home, Not Quite Vacated” (Oct.30, 2005]

Now, I don’t know what to think about ghosts, so don’t e-mail me. I have enough trouble with my own spirit, not to mention my own flesh. But people deal with their fears in different ways. A little girl repeats her I am not afraid mantra. A mother has a talk with a presence she thinks might exist in her apartment. A middle-aged man goes looking for a young wife to make him feel less afraid of getting older. Each of these is a kind of benign prescription for fear they hope will drive away their insecurities,, but there are more malignant versions.

The last few days Lake Highlands High School put on a dramatic play entitled And Then They Came for Me. (Did I mention Jillian Mason had the female lead? Okay, just checking.) Anyway, the story recounts the time of Anne Frank, when the Nazis carted off Jews from Amsterdam, as well as all of Europe, to concentration camps like Auschwitz. The Germans fell prey to Hitler’s spell because they suffered serious blows to their national pride and their economy after World War I. You could say that the whole German Nazi hysteria was one big way of saying, I am not afraid, I am not afraid, I am not afraid. Hitler’s solution was to strengthen their sense of self by declaring war on anyone and everyone that was different from them. He dehumanized the Jews as well as blacks, gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped people, Communists, and of course, dissidents of any kind. By humiliating and killing their made-up enemies, they temporarily got to feel better about themselves. But hatred and violence only breed more hatred and violence. They never make you more secure.

The Jews, for their part, had to keep from letting fear strip them of their dignity. Those who survived the camps did so by helping one another. Those who only looked after themselves and stole the bread of their neighbors were often the first to die.

Fear stems from the feeling of threat. Someone or something means you harm. Somehow the life you know will be pulled out from under you, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Sometimes I think dealing with fear and helping others do the same are among the greatest challenges of the ministry. A week does not go by in a church our size that someone is not diagnosed with cancer or given news of job loss or served with divorce papers or shocked by a sudden death of a loved one or just generally beset by worry about an uncertain future. Life is precious but fragile. And we are all, as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. What affects you affects me and vice versa. And how shall we deal with these things together?

Today is Reformation Sunday, as Laurie [Taylor] has just taught our children. It recounts the hardly coincidental moment on Halloween—October 31, 1517—when a soul-tortured monk named Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the chapel church at Wittenberg, Germany. At its heart he was protesting the ways the church was adding fear to gentle souls of God instead of relieving it.

Luther lived with a deep worry at his core that he was not right with God and could never be. He sensed that God demanded more perfection than he could ever achieve, and this kept him in constant terror of divine punishment. But something extraordinary happened to Luther one day as he sat in a small tower room reading from the book of Romans. He realized from the Word of God that he had misunderstood the very heart of God. His eyes were opened to a God that had decided in favor of the world through Jesus Christ. Being right with God was not a human achievement; it was a divine gift. And in that bright shining moment the world changed for him. A flood of love that filled his heart replaced the fear of punishment. He came to see that God is love and nothing else. He would run to this truth and hide himself in it anytime he felt afraid.

A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing, Luther wrote in his great hymn that echoes Psalm 46. And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us,/we will not fear, for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us:/The Prince of Darkness grim, We tremble not for him;/ his rage we can endure,/For lo, his doom is sure,/One little word shall fell him.

And this is just what 1 John says over and over again. We have no cause for fear in this life or the next. God is love and nothing else. And God shows us what love is by not keeping love inside but by sharing it with the world. God sent the Son into the world to love the world to death, in order to bring the world to life. To know God is to know love.

But we must drink deeply of this goblet of goodness. This love of God is the secret potion that cures all ills. But it doesn’t come in a shot glass; it is served up in a communion cup over and over again. Just as we begin in salvation with the one-time event of baptism and are thereby immersed in the love of God, so the Lord’s Supper symbolizes our continuing growth in that love of God our neighbors.

Love is as love does. To know love is to love others the way God has loved us. And we can love, because we are loved. We love, John says, because God first loved us. And the beautiful byproduct of this loving and being loved is that fear fades away as we love. There is no fear of punishment in love, for perfect love casts out fear.

So you can repeat over and over again, I am not afraid. I am not afraid. I am not afraid. And that may help some. But you will find that you are not afraid when you turn from “I, I, I” to “we, we, we.” When you stop worrying about your fear and start loving your neighbor.

In the witches’ cave they were cooking up a secret potion … Double, double, toil and trouble./Fire burn and cauldron bubble./Fillet of a fenny snake,/In the caldron boil and bake;/Eye of newt, and toe of frog,/Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,/Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,/Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,—/ For a charm of powerful trouble,/Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

The witches’ brew didn’t work for Macbeth, and it won’t work for you. Love is the only potion ’twill do. Whip up a batch of love today and watch your fear slip away.