“The King, the Witch, and the Ghost”
By Dayle K. Barrett
Sunday, November 2, 2025
Reading: 1 Samuel 28:3-20
A couple of days ago, it was Halloween, so we thought, why not a ghost story today? It really is a strange story, isn't it? A king, a witch, and a ghost. And it's not just a strange story; it's not just a spooky story. But it's also a bit of a troubling story because it messes with everything we think we know about life and death.
It raises questions we don't quite have answers to, like, is this a real story? Do we believe in ghosts now? Are there disembodied spirits of human beings kind of floating around on earth with us? And if it is a true story, then how did the ghost of Samuel come back? Do we believe in witches and necromancers too? Did a human being somehow have the power to bring someone back from the dead? Did God do it, or was it some kind of trick? Was she maybe pretending and using an illusion to make them feel like they were speaking to the resurrected person of the prophet Samuel?
Strange stuff. I'm not the only one who finds it difficult. When I was reading commentaries this week, pretty much everyone I opened said that people have been debating this scripture for hundreds of years, and none of us have figured it out yet.
So obviously, I get it. But don't worry, this isn't going to be the only head-scratcher we have this month, because we're doing a series called The Four Last Things. Now, you might have heard that term before, and it's because it's the way we used to do Advent in the ancient Christian tradition before we decided to make Christianity a bit more cute and fluffy.
You see, Advent used to be a penitential season, similar to Lent. Just as in Lent, we fast, we think about our mortality, and we prepare ourselves for the passion of the Christ, so in Advent, you would do the same. You would consider and prepare yourself for the coming of Christ. And not just the cute coming of Christ as infant baby Jesus, who we all love, rocking away in a manger. But the second coming of Christ, the one we're talking about in the Apostles' Creed where we say, “he will come again to judge the living and the dead.” Advent, way before it was peace, hope, joy, and love, was the last four things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell.
I guess Hallmark realized they weren't gonna sell many trinkets with those slogans.
Here we are on week one of the four last things thinking about death. Death is not an easy one to wrap your head around, is it? I mean, what even is it? We kind of know what it does to us a little bit. We experience everything that comes before it. We recognize that gaping feeling it leaves in our guts when it happens. But the rest of it is a bit mysterious, isn't it?
How do you speak to a mystery like this?
Well, there's another ancient tradition in the church when it comes to approaching mystery, and it's called the apophatic tradition. Particularly in the Eastern churches, they're very good at embracing things we don't know, and there's nothing we know any less than we know God. They believe that it's wrong to talk about God in terms of what or who God is. Rather, it's better and far more useful to talk about God in terms of who God isn't. By figuring out everything that God isn't, it kind of gets you to who God is just a little bit. So, I'm going to try that this week. Instead of trying to name what death is, I think it might be useful to pin down what death isn't.
One thing that's difficult for us to accept, friends, is that death isn't imaginary. I've done lots of funerals and I'm sure you've heard this poem at many funerals yourself that says something along the lines of, “do not mourn for me, I did not die.”
I don't want to fault you if you've used that poem. I've used it and I plan to use it again. It's a great poem. But sometimes when we adhere too closely to poetic language, we begin believing things that aren't really true. Because people do die, don't they? The lives they live on earth, the experiences we have with them, the bodies that we hugged, the person we know embodied in this mortal flesh ceases to be here the way they were before. And as much as we find peace in the idea that they're not dead, we know deep down inside that they are, and it cuts us. It hurts us deeply. It's something we spend weeks or months or years trying to come to terms with. Death is real. It exists. And it creates this great divide between we who walk the earth today and those who have gone before us.
In this text it doesn't say, “and Samuel stopped walking about.” It doesn't say, “and Samuel wasn't as lively as he once was.” No, it says clearly, Now Samuel had died, and all Israel mourned.
All Israel knew that something that was there before, somebody who mattered deeply to them before, was no longer among them. And during the process of grief that we all go through when we lose somebody, we hope eventually we come to this place of acceptance. It's hard, it's difficult, it's a long road, but one day you realize that person that was there with you just isn't anymore.
Death is not imaginary.
One of the reasons we find that so hard to accept, one of the reasons why it takes us so long to go through that journey is because the second thing that death isn’t… it’s not natural.
Death was never part of God's plan. Death isn't something that we're meant to experience. That's why it seems so jarring when it happens, because deep down inside your soul, we all long for eternity, don't we? We all long to live forever; and how do we know this? We know this because when God created us and placed us in a garden, He placed two trees there. One was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the other one was a tree of life.
If we'd chosen to eat of the tree of life, we'd live forever. But God warned us that if we ate of the tree of good and evil, we would die. We'd experience this separation from God. We'd experience this breaking apart from our life source. God gives us a way to be in relationship with Him, but we still have to experience the pain of this life. We still have to see people who we love dearly being separated from us. And we know every single time that happens that something has gone wrong. That's why it's difficult to accept. That's why it's difficult to come to terms with. It's not just your emotions. It's not just your body. It's your very spirit crying out: Something's not right here.
This isn't how it was supposed to be. People are meant to be forever. Death is not imaginary. Death doesn't seem natural. But the other thing we learn when we read this text is that death is not the end, either. You see, Israel mourns Samuel and they buried him and Saul goes to meet this medium woman and Samuel is brought back, which means, despite all the mystery and things we don't know about this story, one thing we do know, is that Samuel's death was not the end. Samuel continued to be after his body ceased to be. His death was the end of something, but it wasn't the end of everything. There was somewhere else his soul and his spirit were contained. Somewhere he could come back from.
This isn't just a Christian idea; this idea existed in pretty much every culture around the world, far before Christianity. The Jews called this place Sheol. The Greeks called it Hades. It's not the modern conception of hell we have today that we read about from Danté. But it's just an underworld - a place of the dead - a way of wrapping your head around the fact that we know people are forever, but we don't know exactly where they are after they've finished being with us. All these ancient cultures had different ways of thinking about it. The Egyptians thought you went to this realm of the dead and eventually you'd see somebody who had a set of scales to weigh your heart against your deeds. You may be punished, or you may have a good time in this underworld, depending on what kind of life you'd lived. It seems less clear what the Jews thought about Sheol. But we do know it was a place separate from the place we walk today, and it's the place that Samuel was brought back from.
Death isn't imaginary. Death isn't natural. Death is not the end.
I saw Neil deGrasse Tyson earlier this week doing an interview. Somebody asked him if he was scared to die. He said, “No, I'm not scared to die. Why would I be?”
And I think this thought originally came from Mark Twain, but they said, “What do you think happens when you die?”
And he said, “The same thing that happens before you're born. You don't exist. Didn't bother me then. Not going to let it bother me now.”
There's a kind of weird comfort you can get from that, isn't there? That if this is the end, if this is all there is in life, then you make it the best that you can and then it's over. There's no responsibility after that. There's no one to answer to. You can do whatever you want with the days you have, live it up to the fullest because one day you will fade to black.
That's not what anyone in the world has ever thought until very recently. We always knew that this life, as the call to worship said, is like a grass that withers. It's like a speck in a sea of sand. It's nothing when compared to the eternity that we'll spend with God or without God.
This is why Paul writes to Timothy, “bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that is now and promise of the life that is to come.” I want to tell you, my friends, that even if you get 80, 90, 100 years on this earth, it's nothing. It is but a breath. Life is but a dream. Just a speck of sand in the sea.
Eternity. That is what God has laid out for you.
The death I want us to get our heads around today, isn't the physical death. Maybe there's two types of death we need to start thinking about. There's a physical death, one we all experience, the one that leaves us feeling separated from our friends, the one we mourn when it's all over. But there's one far deeper than that, isn't there? There's a spiritual kind of death; one you might experience while you're still walking around on the earth. One that might make it difficult to get out of bed in the morning. One that Saul was experiencing in this very passage we just read. Because though Saul was alive and kicking, and he could eat and drink and be merry, and he could command armies and had all sorts of earthly power, the Bible says that when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord did not answer him. Either by dreams or by Urim or by the prophets. His body was alive. He was connected to the earth, to the water, to the land, to the streams, to the fruits on the trees. But his spirit was disconnected from its life source. He called out to God and could not hear God reply.
He'd walked away from his source of life, from his source of vitality, and was dead on the inside. Saul was physically alive, but spiritually dead. So instead of doing what he should have done and going to God in repentance; instead of turning around and realizing that he'd wronged the Lord and trying to see what he could do to make things right with God, he did what many of us do, and he doubled down on his sin.
When God said that he would take the throne away from Saul, instead of turning back to God in repentance, he pursued and tried to kill David, the one who would be king next. He went to the land of Nub and slaughtered all the priests there because they were saying the things he didn't want to hear. Saul was alive in his body but dead in his spirit.
He goes looking for answers. Don't we do that sometimes? Our prayer life has fallen apart. We're not in relationship with God anymore. We're wandering around, confused about what to do next. When we have a problem, instead of going to our knees, we ask Chat GPT or Google Gemini. Surely Google will have the answers to my problems. Surely my friend who's completely miserable will know what to do about this situation that I'm in. We'll do anything to avoid going back to God, going back to our source of life, going to the person that we need and saying, God, what is it that you want me to do?
Saul was alive in his body and dead in his spirit. Isn't that a great contrast to the prophet Samuel? Samuel who knew God's word, who spoke what God had to say to him all the way to the end, was dead in his body, but alive in his spirit. Connected to the source of his life all the way so that even in death he was able to proclaim to somebody what it was that God had to say to him.
This is what Paul said in his letter to the Romans. He said,
“For he who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ having been raised from the dead dies no more. Death no longer has dominion over him. For the death that he died, he died to sin once for all. But the life that he lives, he lives to God. You also reckon yourselves to be dead in deeds to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
I want to let you know, friends, that if you're feeling a bit dead when you wake up in the morning, if you go through each day wondering if there's more to life than this, if the accolades and the awards and the relationships and the things you've stacked up in your life just aren't cutting it for you, I want to let you know that Christ wants to offer you an eternal and abundant life in Him.
You can be alive in your spirit today. You can know what it means when he says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me though he dies, yet shall he also live.”
We can be alive in our spirits. And the reason why we can have this, friends is because Jesus has abolished death.
Another thing that death is not… death is not victorious. Paul says in his second letter to Timothy.
… do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, but share with me in the sufferings for the gospel according to the power of God, who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began, but has now been revealed by the appearing of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
I want to let you know, friends that if you live in Christ, you live forever. That you have a life where all things have passed away, and old things become new. It's not imaginary. It's not the end. It's not natural. And it's not victorious. So, what is death?
We read in the call to worship this morning, as it says in Psalm 104.
You hide your face, and they are troubled;
You take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
You send forth your spirit, they are created.
And you renew the face of the earth.
God breathes out and by his word there is creation. God takes of the dust of the ground something inanimate, breathes into it the breath of life and we become human beings, we become souls. But then one day, God breathes in. Ecclesiastes 12 says that when God breathes in, your body returns to dust and your spirit, your breath, returns to God who gave it.
What is death for the person in Christ? What is death for the person who will live forever? It's your spirit, my friends, returning into the lungs of the Most High God. It's you being fully integrated with the Creator who gave your life being and vitality. It's not the end and it's not victorious. And so, take heart today that those who we love, those who have lived in Christ and have gone—their life has not ended. Rather, they worship with us every single time we pray.
May God's Spirit now breathe upon us all. Thanks be to God. Amen.