Before I get into this sermon, let me just give you a bit of a background on what All Souls Day is.
And in the United States, you don't celebrate All Souls Day. Catholics just aren't that zealous,
so they do not celebrate All Saints Day or All Souls Day, but they do celebrate Halloween.
And all of these are actually very mixed together. Let me just give you a little bit
of a history on this. There was a holiday in ancient Ireland known as Samhain.
Samhain is a pagan religious festival originating from an ancient Celtic spiritual tradition.
In modern times, Samhain is usually celebrated from October 31st to November 1st to welcome in
their harvest and usher in the dark half of the year. Celebrants believe that the barriers
between the physical world and the spirit world break down during this festival, allowing more
interaction between humans and otherworldly creatures or spirits of the other world.
Ancient Celts marked Samhain as the most significant of the four quarterly fire
festivals, taking place at the midpoint between the fall equinox and the winter solstice.
And so basically, you could communicate with spirits, communicate with your relatives.
And so this holiday was right at this time of year. Now, in throughout history,
when the Catholic Church took over areas, they would Christianize or Catholicismize
a culture. And what that means is they would take the holidays that existed,
and they would kind of mix it with Catholicism, and then kind of make it into something that
isn't really godly or ungodly. It's kind of a mix. And that's kind of what they did here
with Samhain. And so Halloween gets its name from All Hallows' Eve. All Saints' Day was called
All Hallows' Day. So the day before All Hallows' Day would be All Hallows' Eve. So Halloween,
you see hallow in there. And that is October 31st. Then November 1st is All Saints' Day.
November 2nd is All Souls' Day. Now, a question people have oftentimes is,
well, what's the difference between All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day? Well,
you need to realize these are Catholic holidays. And so according to the Catholic Church,
what is a saint? Not just someone who's saved, but someone who's especially righteous,
like St. John the Baptist, St. Paul the Apostle, right? Now, according to the Bible,
what makes you a saint if you believe on Jesus Christ? If you're saved, you're a saint.
But not according to the Catholic Church. So All Saints' Day is about celebrating these great
people from the past. All Souls' Day is about celebrating or helping your dead relatives in
purgatory by giving them food, by putting candles, by whatever tradition you have, incense, songs,
prayers, or whatever. And so here's the thing. All Saints' Day is a more prominent holiday
than All Souls' Day. But what are people doing when they go to the graveyards and talk to their
dead relatives? What holiday are they really celebrating? They're celebrating All Souls' Day.
They're not really celebrating All Saints' Day, even though they think they're celebrating All
Saints' Day, because they're not remembering Paul the Apostle or John the Baptist. What are
they doing? They're leaving food for their dead relatives, right? And so of course, if you grow
up Catholic, there's a lot of traditions you do. You don't know why you do them. You just go
through the motions. But All Souls' Day is specifically about talking to your relatives.
There's what's known as a book of the dead in a lot of Catholic churches where you write the names
of your dead relatives, and you remember them at this time of year. And this is something the
Catholic Church supports. You can watch videos of Pope Francis, and he also believes this is the
time of year to communicate with the dead and talk to your dead relatives. And so the modern
day All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, it's kind of a mixing of, I guess, somewhat Christian things
and then this pagan society. But honestly, it's all wicked. It's all evil because, look, necromancy,
communicating with the dead is something that's sorcery. It gets the death penalty. I mean,
it's a wicked thing that God's people are not supposed to do.