Happy Halloween! That might sound strange to hear, because we think of Halloween as connected with fear and dread. But it’s the perfect greeting for today: Because I want to show you that the Theology of Halloween actually leads us to hope and healing. After all, the word "Halloween" is just a contraction of "All Hallows' Eve"—the night before "All Hallows' Day," or as we now call it, All Saints' Day.
Halloween is the night we stand on the threshold, looking into the mystery of those who have gone before us. We are remembering all the "Hallowed Ones"—the Saints. And this, of course, raises questions that only Theology can answer. Where are the saints now? What are they doing?
And this, in turn, raises the questions we all carry in the quiet, somber corners of our hearts: What really happens at death? Is it a final, terrifying end? Is it just sudden oblivion? Or is it a doorway to something else? If it is a doorway, what lies on the other side?
For many of us, the traditional images are deeply ingrained in our cultural imagination: A blissful, boring heaven of clouds and harps, and a fiery, eternal hell of endless torment. But are these pictures accurate? Are they a faithful reflection of the God revealed in Jesus Christ?
I want to suggest to you today that the biblical story of the afterlife is far more hopeful, and far more focused on God’s relentless, loving mission to heal and restore every last corner of creation.
Death, Sheol, and Resurrection
The biblical picture of life after death evolved over time, as God progressively revealed more of the divine plan. In the earliest parts of the Old Testament, the afterlife was a bleak concept. All the dead, both righteous and wicked, were believed to descend into Sheol. This term simply meant “the grave” or “the pit.” It was a place of darkness and silence, the end of all meaningful existence.
Over centuries, this view developed. Sheol came to be seen as a shadowy, semi-conscious realm, and later, as a place with two distinct compartments: One for the righteous and one for the wicked. But even then, there was no concept of an eternal, conscious punishment.
It was only after the traumatic exile in Babylon and Persia that Israelite thinkers learned of a new, profound revelation: Sheol was not the final destination. It was a kind of waystation, an intermediate state where the dead awaited a future resurrection. The prophet Daniel gives the clearest expression of this resurrection hope: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame” (Daniel 12:2).
The New Testament builds directly on this foundation. There is a clear sense of an intermediate state before the final resurrection. As we heard in our reading, the Apostle Paul says that “to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). This means that at death, we step outside of time and into the eternal presence of God. At the same time, Jesus and the other New Testament writers frequently describe death as “sleep”, a temporary state from which we will all eventually “wake up”.
This two-stage understanding became the standard view for all major branches of Christianity: We die and enter an intermediate state in God’s presence, followed by "waking up" to the final judgment and the resurrection of the body at the end of all ages.
God’s Refining Fire
This brings us to our reading from 1 Corinthians 3. The Apostle Paul gives one of the clearest and most hopeful visions of our final judgment and purification to prepare us for resurrection:
He uses the metaphor of a building. Our lives are structures built upon the one true foundation, which is Jesus Christ. We can build on that foundation with good materials or bad ones. We can build with “gold, silver, precious stones”—acts of love, kindness, justice, and mercy. Or we can build with “wood, hay, straw”—acts of selfishness, greed, and sin.
In this vision, the final judgment is not about separating people into two groups, the saved and the damned. It is about revealing the true quality of each person’s life. The “fire” of God’s presence on that final Day will test everything. Our good works of "gold, silver, and precious stones," will survive. The builder will receive a reward. The selfish, sinful, and worthless parts of our lives, the "wood, hay, and straw," will be burned away.
And then Paul writes the most crucial line, one of the most hopeful verses in all of Scripture: “If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire.”
This is a profoundly redemptive vision of judgment. The fire does not destroy the person; it purifies them. This connects to a consistent theme in Scripture where God’s presence is described as a fire. God is a “consuming fire” (Deuteronomy 4:24) and a “refining fire” (Malachi 3:2).
In a metal foundry, the artisan knows the metal is finally pure when they can see their own face reflected clearly on its surface. In the same way, the Divine Refiner purifies us with the fire of His love until our character perfectly reflects the image of God. This process is not a legal payment for sin in a place apart from God, but a loving purification that happens in the very presence of Christ.
Protestant Dualism
So, how do we put all these pieces together with death, purification, and resurrection? Almost all Christians agree that our final destination is the Resurrection and the New Creation. But they disagree on how exactly we get there in the intermediate state.
Many of our Protestant brothers and sisters teach a form of Dualism: at death, the soul separates from the body. After judgment, it immediately goes to its final destiny. Believers go to a disembodied "Heaven"— either in conscious bliss or an unconscious "soul sleep"— to await resurrection. Non-believers go immediately to "hell" to suffer God's vengeance, either as eternal conscious torment, or by being annihilated.
Catholic Purgatory
Our Roman Catholic siblings agree with this basic outline but add a third interim destination: Purgatory. This is for those who die in God’s grace but are still imperfect, and still struggling to Love. They wrestle with selfishness and sin. So, they must undergo a temporary, cleansing discipline before they can enter the joy of heaven.
Orthodox Purification
But the Orthodox tradition, along with many other ancient and modern Christians, teaches something different. It’s not about three different places (heaven, hell, and purgatory), but about three different relationships with one single Divine Reality: The all-consuming fire of God's Love. How we experience the Flame of God’s Love depends entirely on the state of our soul.
For a soul fully surrendered to Love, God's presence is experienced as the joy and bliss of heaven. For a soul still attached to selfishness and sin, that same fiery love is experienced as cleansing, purging, and purifying. For a soul twisted and hardened into hate, that same Divine love is experienced as the torment of hellish discipline, which turns them away from self-destruction.
But— and this is the most important part— the purpose of all three experiences is ultimately redemptive. All suffering, in this view, is Divine discipline intended to turn us from sin, to lead us to repent and receive God's forgiveness, love, and healing. Whether our experience is heavenly, purgatorial, or hellish, we all must confront the deeds we have done and failed to do, preparing us for the final resurrection.
Gehenna
This brings us to one of the most misunderstood and mistranslated words in the entire Bible: Gehenna.
In the time of Jesus, the Valley of Hinnom— Gei Hinnom in Hebrew— was a literal garbage dump in a ravine outside the walls of Jerusalem. It was a place where trash, filth, and even the bodies of executed criminals were thrown. Fires smoldered there constantly to consume the waste. It was a smelly, disgusting, perpetually burning place. But it was also a place where scavengers would sift through the rubbish, looking for anything of value that could be rescued and repurposed.
Jesus used this well-known location as a powerful metaphor for the consequences of a life lived apart from God. To be thrown into “Gehenna” was to be cast into the cosmic garbage dump. But even there, God is present. As it says in Psalm 139 “If I lie down in the depths of the grave, there you are O LORD”.
Tragically, ancient scholars mistranslated Gehenna as “Hell,” from the vengeful Norse goddess "Hel" who ruled over the realm of the evil dead. This disastrously mixed Jesus’s metaphor about a purifying, redemptive process with pagan myths about an underworld of eternal, conscious torture. God’s redemptive discipline was turned into the eternal retribution of hell.
Yet, in Jesus’ longest teaching on Gehenna in Mark chapter 9, he concludes with a startling statement: “For everyone will be salted with fire.” In the ancient world, salt was a preservative and a purifying agent. Jesus is saying that everyone, not just the wicked, will pass through God’s purifying fire, to be purified by the Flame of Divine Love.
Today, the literal Gehenna— the Valley of Hinnom— is a lush public park right outside the old city of Jerusalem. I’ve driven through it! You can see people walking their dogs and having family picnics. What was a barren wasteland of filth and death has literally been transformed into a little piece of paradise. This is a perfect metaphor for what God's Love will someday do through spiritual Gehenna to prepare us all for the final resurrection.
Halloween means Hope
So what does this theology of hope mean for us, as we celebrate All Hallows' Eve? It transformed how we relate to those on the other side of death with the power of hope!
What about the Saints? The great heroes of the faith are not gone. They have simply joined the “great cloud of witnesses” that surrounds us, as we heard in the letter to the Hebrews. They are alive in Christ’s presence, and they are praying for us now. Just as we would ask a friend on earth to pray for us, we can ask them to pray for us.
What about our Loved Ones? We do not need to fear for their ultimate fate. As Paul writes with soaring confidence, “neither death, nor life... nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). We can and should pray for them, asking God to continue their growth and healing in his presence. And because the Christian hope is for a resurrection where our unique identities are preserved, we can be confident that we will see and recognize them again.
And what about our pets? The Bible does not give a definitive answer, but the consistent vision of the prophets is not an escape from creation, but the renewal of creation. Isaiah's vision of God’s kingdom includes wolves, lambs, and lions. In Psalm 36.6 we are told “you save humans and animals alike, O LORD”. It seems entirely reasonable and probable that in the New Creation, the animal companions we loved and who loved us will be restored to us. After all, if you were a perfectly loving God, wouldn’t you want to give your children back their beloved pets?
This entire vision of the afterlife, from the intermediate state to the final purification of Gehenna, is a story of hope. It is a story that ends not with eternal division, but with total restoration and complete healing. In the end, we find that the Theology of Halloween leads us to the same conclusion of many of our favorite stories: "And they all lived happily ever after." Amen.
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