October 31 | Moments Almanac | Dead

Welcome to Moments Almanac for October 31st. And on this day in 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther was deeply troubled. He watched people reach into their pockets and hand over their hard-earned money in exchange for something they desperately wanted. Hope. Not for a better harvest or a longer life, hope for the dead. The church was selling indulgences, promising spiritual benefits that could include relief from punishment of purgatory. And grieving families were paying. Luther believed something was terribly wrong, and on October 31st he wrote a letter to Archbishop Albrecht, challenging the practice. Tradition tells us that he nailed those ninety five theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, though historians still debate whether that famous hammer ever struck the wood. But we know the letter was sent, and we know what followed. A reformation that would shake Europe and change the course of Christian history. At the heart of Luther's protest was a simple revolutionary truth. God's grace is not for sale. Now let's move forward four hundred and nine years to october thirty first, nineteen twenty six. In a Detroit hospital, the world's most famous escape artist was dying. His name was Harry Houdini. He had escaped handcuffs, chains, locked trunks, and tanks filled with water, but there was one thing that Houdini could not escape death. He died that Halloween at the age of fifty two following a ruptured appendix. But in the final years of his life, Houdini had been fighting a different kind of deception. He had made it his mission to expose fraudulent spiritualists who claimed they could communicate with the dead. He knew the tricks. He knew the hidden compartments, the secret signals, the slight of hand, and he knew that behind many of those performances were grieving people, desperate to hear one more word from someone they loved. A mother longing for her child, a husband longing for his wife, a family willing to pay almost anything for one more conversation. Houdini had little patience for those who turned sorrow into a business. And here is where those two remarkable lives intersect. Luther confronted people who were selling hope for the dead, and Houdini he confronted people who were selling messages from the dead. Both recognized how easily grief can become a marketplace, and both, in their own ways, pulled the curtain back. There's one more remarkable twist to Houdini's story. Before his death he and his wife Bess had arranged a secret code that he would supposedly use if communication from beyond the grave were possible, and for ten years after his death, she participated in seances, hoping to hear from him. Finally, in nineteen thirty six she abandoned the effort. The great escape artist had not returned, and perhaps that's where our story becomes something more than history because Christianity rests upon the claim far greater than any secret code, whispered from the other side. It rests on an empty tomb. Jesus Christ did not merely send a message from the grave, he rose from it. And the hope he offers is not something we purchase, earn, or bargain for. The apostle Paul put it this way, for by grace are you saved, through faith, not that of yourselves. It is a gift of God, a gift, not a transaction, not a performance, not a secret message, a gift. On this Halloween, when our imaginations turn toward ghosts and graves and things that go bump in the night, perhaps we should remember that there's something much more wonderful than all of that. The Christian's hope does not depend upon our ability to reach the dead. It depends upon the one who conquered death. Martin Luther couldn't buy that hope. Harry Houdini could not escape his mortality, and neither can we. But the gospel tells us that the grave does not have the final word. Christ does. And his grace is still free. Thanks for joining me for Moments Almanac. I hope you'll join me tomorrow, a new month. Until then, take heart. Notice the scattered moments and share the grace.