GEHENNA
Mark 1: 9-15, Matthew 18:1-9
[Since spoken communication differs from written, some of the grammar and syntax of this transcript may seem awkward in written form. To keep integrity with the spirit of the original delivery, the transcript seeks to stay close to the exact words spoken.]
This morning is the first Sunday in the season of Lent, when we traditionally read the story of Jesus' 40 day sojourn in the desert, which corresponds to our 40 days of preparation for the festival of Easter, and the season of Easter. And it's also a Sunday when I am beginning yet another sermon series, the theme of which I am calling The End--the end of days. It's a theme that came from the suggestions I received from you, actually, when I handed out some 3x5 cards at the beginning of worship a few Sundays ago. Some of the suggestions had to do with questions about what happens at the end of my life...what happens at the end of days. What do we make of some of the prophesies about the end times that we hear about in our popular culture?
So this theme is meant to incorporate a lot of those ideas, which you suggested to me when I handed out those cards. And it's a theme that is meant to be deliberately a bit ambiguous. Because we can think of the word "end" in its temporal, chronological sense--as the thing opposed to the beginning. But we can also think of the end in terms of denoting the purpose of something. The Westminster Shorter Catechism has the question, "What is the chief end of man? What is the chief goal of humanity?" So we can think of that word in that sense, too. What is the end of my life, chronologically, as well as purposefully?
Another way of talking about this--maybe a simpler way than I've cast it--is to say that this has to do with a word that's been very important to us as Christians; and that is the word salvation. What does it mean to be "saved" as a Christian? Does it matter to us anymore, this idea of being saved? Who gets saved? What is it that we're being saved from? That is what I'm speaking about today. I'm going to be talking about Hell today--a very cheery subject to kick off Lent. Dangerous, I realize. Next Sunday I'm going to be talking about, "If we're speaking of salvation, who gets in? Who gets it, and who doesn't?" And the final week I'm going to be speaking about, "What do we mean by that word, salvation? In what does that consist?" And I hope that all of this will be relevant to you, and your life, and where you are.
So, "the end"--for today, and the next two weeks. And so perhaps it's appropriate for us to begin at the beginning, which is, of course, with prayer. And with our asking the Holy Spirit's help and guidance. So let us pray together.
O God, may the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, God our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
The Reverend Carlton Pearson, at one time, pastored one of the largest Pentecostal churches in the country. He had over 5,000 people attending worship every Sunday at a Church of God in Christ in Tulsa, OK. He was a one-time protege of Oral Roberts. At the peak of his professional career his church held conferences that attracted over 20,000 people. He was at the top of the heap professionally. Part of the message that attracted those kinds of crowds had to do with the theology of Hell...had to do with the idea that unless you believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior, you would go to Hell. Carlton Pearson thought it was his personal mission to prevent as many sinners as possible from being sucked into Hell because they don't believe in Jesus. "I'd get on a plane," he'd say, "I'd get on a plane and I'd sit down by the person next to me, and I felt like I had to tell them the Good News about Jesus so that they wouldn't get sucked into Hell."
One day, Carlton Pearson had a revelation. He was watching television with his two young children, and there was a news report on. It happened to be about the war in Rwanda. Hutus and Tutsis slaughtering each other. He saw the human carnage going on in that place. There on the television were children, just like his own children, being killed by machetes, the slaughter of the innocents--unfolding here and now. And all of a sudden, like a strike of lightening, he realized that Hell is not a place at the end of time, beyond the horizon of our lives. Hell is a place that we create right here on Earth. And so, in that moment, he stopped believing in Hell--at least the kind of Hell that he had been preaching about. And he realized that God is not trying to suck people into Hell--God's job is to suck people into Heaven. Everybody--Hindus, Jews, gays, Muslims, even Christians. That's what God is about. So he stopped believing in Hell.
He lost his church. Almost everybody left--he was left with about 300 people. Most of his staff resigned--all of the associate pastors, the secretaries, the janitor. He was called a heretic by his own denomination, because he stopped believing in Hell. (Again, at least the version of Hell he had been preaching about.) Well, as I said before, this is the question under examination for us today. What is Hell? Does it exist? And if it exists, how does it exist? And most importantly, perhaps, does it matter? Should we downgrade Hell, in our modern era, from hurricane to tropical storm, as Carol Zaleski playfully suggests? What do we think about Hell?
Well, as we begin exploring that, let's begin as we always do, I hope, with Scripture. And actually, today, I would like us to look at one word in particular. We're going to focus on one word, really, today--the word that appears in the passage that we heard from Matthew, which Jason read. It is the word Gehenna. Gehenna. It's not the stuff we put in our hair to turn it a lovely brown, or to apply temporary tattoos. Gehenna is the word in Greek for Hell. Again, the passage for today reads, "If your right eye causes you sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into the Hell of fire...the Gehenna of fire."
Gehenna. That is the word for Hell--at least, one of them, in the New Testament. It's not the only word for Hell that has been translated by that English word in the Bible. There are others. The two other most prominent words that are translated Hell are the word Sheol and the word Hades. Sheol in the Hebrew Scriptures, and the word Hades in Greek in the New Testament. But these other words for Hell, Hades and Sheol don't pack quite the same punch as this other word that we're examining today, the word Gehenna. They are older words. The ancient writers--those who wrote well before the New Testament was written--didn't have this concept of Hell that we do today. And so the words Sheol and Hades mean roughly the same thing. They refer to that sort of shadowy realm where people go after they die, which is neither Heaven nor Hell, it's just sort of the eternal sidelines, from which people watch the action going on, on Earth above.
Hell, as we think of it now, is a concept that emerged somewhat later, and was especially important in the time of Jesus. The concepts of Heaven and Hell were very important at the time when Jesus was ministering, and we'll talk about that a little bit more next week. But I think it's really interesting how this one word discloses and describes the way people thought about Hell. How it was cast in their imagination. Because their notion of Hell, based upon this one word, Gehenna, was tied to a very this-wordly reality and place. Gehenna referred to a place in this world. It's a translation of a Hebrew word called Ge Hinnom, and it refers to the Valley of Hinnom, which is a place southeast of the city of Jerusalem. It still exists--I actually saw it myself when I visited there. In ancient times, the Valley of Hinnom was the site where the cult of Moloch was practiced. Where Moloch was worshipped--an ancient Canaanite idol.
And Moloch was sort of famous for the practice of sacrificing children to the sacred flames. The ancient rabbis wrote that the priests and the worshippers would bang drums and sound cymbals to drown out their cries. King Josiah, in a period of Israel's history when reform was happening, destroyed that cultic place, and turned it into a garbage dump. It was a place in ancient Jerusalem where all the toxic waste would go from the city, where the carcasses of dead animals and executed criminals would be tossed, and they would light fires to burn the garbage. So the symbol for the eternal fire is a very this-wordly fire, a fire that was fueled by human garbage. And so this is the image that Jesus' listeners would have had in mind when Jesus used that word--the Gehenna of fire was a garbage dump on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
So with that in mind, we might ask the question, "Why Hell?" Why this other-wordly notion of Hell--why is Hell important as the church has reflected on this question, "What is salvation?" Why is Hell important in that formula?
Well, one reason that the church has found the conversation important is this--and bear with me, because I think this is a kind of strange reason, or it may sound that way at first. The reason the church has found this conversation to be important is because the love of God requires it. Now hear me out, here. This is not my teaching--this is the teaching of the church from ancient times. But the church has taught that an aspect of God's love is God's justice, which requires that we receive the consequences of our actions. It has to do with the fact that and aspect of our createdness in God's image includes the gift of free will. One of the endowments which God has bestowed upon us is the ability to make choices. That's what makes us human. And along with that is the possibility to make the wrong choices and to realize the consequences of those choices.
Now consider this: many of us here are involved in the business of parenting. Actually, when I was talking about this with my wife, she said, "Yeah, that is Hell. Parenting." No, I'm just kidding. Sometimes it's Hell. Many of us, though, are involved in the business of pondering: how do we respond to our children's destructive and often self-destructive behavior? What parent stands by to allow a child not to understand that those behaviors have consequences? That's our job as parents. And so we think of discipline--and I'm not talking about punishment, which is a very different thing--but we think of discipline as an aspect of love. Because our aim as parents is to try to train the will of our children to be able to choose the good for themselves. And so a God who is indifferent to our self-possessed self-destructiveness is not a loving God.
And so if we're going to think about Hell--whatever and wherever that may be--we must think of Hell, I think, as a place where we bear the consequences of the abuse of human freedom, which is a great gift. But it's the paradoxical concession that for humans really to experience life--to really experience God--we have to choose it. We have to choose life. And that also entails the possibility of choosing what is not life, and what is not communion with God. That is actually the classical definition of Hell: separation from God.
So as the church has ruminated about Hell--Hell is a place, or maybe more accurately, a state of being, that we choose. Whatever it is, it is a creation made of our own choices. C.S. Lewis describes Hell as the place where we get exactly what we want. And he says it this way...he says, in essence...after all attempts to try to woo human beings into communion, into loving relationship with God, God finally says, "OK, I've given up. I'm giving you what you want." And that's Hell.
In his book The Great Divorce--it's a wonderful tale about the residents of Hell being offered a bus ride to Heaven. So some of the souls in Hell get to go to Heaven on a bus, and the irony of this story is that they want--most of them--want to go back to Hell. They forsake the joys of Heaven because of the state of their character--and for them, Heaven feels like Hell. That's why they want to go back. Their character has become such that they are incapable of choosing the good.
In Dante's vision of Hell (and you realize I couldn't preach about Hell without mentioning Dante...somebody on Facebook said, "I dare you not to mention Dante!" And I said, "Tempting. Tempting me, are you?"). But in Dante's version of Hell, the bottom level is not fire, which is purgative--it's destructive, but it's also purifying--the bottom of Hell is ice, because Hell is a place where people are frozen. Their wills are frozen, and unable to choose the good. And so Hell is by definition a place where hope does not, and cannot, exist, because it makes no sense to the people there, by their own choice.
So God offers us a choice between Heaven and Hell, but the paradox is that God cannot make us choose it. God has chosen, in God's power and sovereignty, to allow us to make the choice. And we'll talk about this business a little bit of predestination, a little bit, next week. God gives us the choice. And the only thing God can do--I shouldn't say the only thing God can do, but what God does, is love us into making the right choice, or attempt to do so.
Now in all this abstraction, I realize this is a rather abstract exercise this morning. I think this is a very practical application of what all this might mean in our very real lives. Last weekend, the men of the church got together for our annual retreat on the Jersey shore. And the theme, which Rev. Tom Baker led us through, is 12 Steps for Everyone. And one of the men in the group spoke about his involvement with Al-Anon. Now one of the key principles in Al-Anon is this (it seems a very simple principle, but I think it's a very powerful one): I cannot change you. I cannot change you! You know, there's so much human suffering around the idea that, "I can fix you! I can make you stop drinking; I can make you stop taking drugs; I can make you a new person." You know what? You can't. You cannot do that. And the first step in Al-Anon is to stop trying to do that. Stop trying to fix someone. Often it gives us a much better way of loving them. Because that's what we can do.
God lets us choose between Heaven and Hell. And God loves us, hoping that we might make the right choice. Loves us--gives us the power of love that restores our will so that we can make that choice.
Is God's love powerful enough to melt the ice of Hell? We hear the voice of love incarnate say, "And when I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself." To me, that is a very important verse in the Scriptures. Is God's love powerful enough to melt the ice of Hell? We don't know. We'll talk about that next week. But until then, we get fed. We get fed not with ordinary food, but the food that changes us--that transforms our wills and restores our souls. Food that comforts us, and convinces us that there's no Hell where God has not been--and so if you're in Hell now, God is with you in it, offering a hand to lift you up. Because that is what God is about. I believe Carlton Pearson is right. God is not about the business of sucking people into Hell. God is about the business of lifting people up into Heaven.
May it be so. Amen.
March 1, 2009
The Reverend Jeffrey A. Vamos
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