I wrote and posted this originally in 2015, but I recently dusted it off and updated it to preach to a group of clergy colleagues. It's one of those sermons that is truly written for oral delivery with asides, facial expressions, and gestures, but it's still good in the reading._________________
The Top 10 Things to Know
about Hell
10. About 99% of the images in
your head of hell- the red demon with a pointed tail, the levels of suffering,
the pit of fire, the presence of those who never knew Christ, the darkness, AND
the eternal wailing and torment (plus the image of Judas in hell)- are all from
Dante’s The Divine Comedy (or The Inferno). His writing was a piece of
political literature that condemned powers of his day that he didn’t like. It
also was Dante’s way of confirming himself as a poet for the ages by using the
poet Virgil, who lived and died before Jesus, as his guide. Additionally,
Dante’s work was a distillation of Greek and Roman mythology, some alleged
gospels from the second, third, and fourth centuries, and one other work that
had serious influence in Dante’s lifetime. The majority of the artwork about
hell is not from Biblical interpretation, but is based on The Inferno- which takes very little from actual Holy Scripture.
9.
What was the influential work that circulated in Dante’s life? It was a work
that had been translated into Latin and was very popular in upper class Italian
household in the thirteenth century. Even if Dante hadn’t read this work, he
would have been familiar with its descriptions of a fiery hell, divided into
seven levels, and particularly populated by people who did not believe in God.
What was this book? The Koran.
8. Isaiah
14, when it mentions Lucifer, is not talking about Satan. It is a prophetic
statement against the then present-day Babylonian leader who brought suffering
upon God’s people. The punishment for the shining leader would be an ignoble
death and then to be completely forgotten. The prophecy also turned about to be
prediction as no one is quite sure to which king this passage refers. Dante, as
well as John Milton in Paradise Lost,
expounded upon medieval Christian ideas of the ruler of the underworld being an
eternal force that opposed God and was cast down. What force, anywhere, would
have the temerity to attempt to oppose an eternal God? God has no eternal
counterparts. Only God, as the Holy Parent, Holy Word, and Holy Spirit, exists
outside of time.
7. The
four horsemen in Revelation are not signs of the apocalypse. Apocalypse means
disclosure. The four horsemen, as the images in Revelation 6 are called, are
signs of apocalyptic literature. They help readers to know that they are
dealing with a story that seems to be about the future, but is really dealing
with present realities. The four horses and their riders are the gospel, war,
poverty, and death. These things struggle, but one will triumph. (Hint:
it won’t be war, poverty, or death.) Those who are believers or who wish to be
believers must remember to place their trust in what is truly permanent and act
accordingly.
6.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, the dead are dead. Period. Sheol is a place where the dead may be gathered and perhaps they
are shades, or shadows of their former selves in that place. Ancient Israelites
did not engage in ancestor worship, unlike most of the other regional religions
of the time. Furthermore, an attempt to contact the dead (as Saul did when he
used a fortuneteller to contact Samuel) is a sign of failure to trust in God as
the one who holds the future and in whom one should place all confidence. Sheol is sometimes perceived to be a pit
where one might descend spiritually- like the psalmist or the prophets Jonah or
Jeremiah. Yet the fear is of being forgotten and God does not forget God’s
children. Even in the deepest depths, God still knows the intimacies of
creation.
5.
Satan is an adversary in the Hebrew Scripture, but not an eternal being. When
Satan’s name is used in the New Testament, it is either a pseudonym for powers
and principalities or how the presence of evil, within one’s own heart or
outside of one’s self, is named. When contemporary religionists empower the
name of the enemy by attributing works to Satan or giving Satan characteristics
that are not biblical, they are engaged in a form of idolatry. Idolatry is not
only worshipping the wrong god. It is
also idolatrous to be afraid of the wrong power. The idea that there is a
force equal to God with evil intent and the power to lure us into
eternal separation and that we would be motivated by the fear of that being…
Nope. That is not the essence of the Gospel, which is about the good news of
the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.
4. When
Jesus talks about hell and says, “hell”, he is referring to an actual
geographical location outside of Jerusalem. There, outside the city, was a
horrible trash pit that burned constantly. The place was called Gehenna and it is the word that we have
translated in the gospels as “hell”. Gehenna
had once been the site of child sacrifices, the very sacrifices that were
forbidden to Jews, but were practiced by other religions to appease their gods.
It eventually became the place of the very worst trash and it was where Roman
soldiers would dump the bodies of people who were crucified. It was this
horrible place- a place of ignominy, terror, and avoidance- that Jesus urged
people to avoid by encouraging them to care for one another, to tend to the
sick and the dying, and to practice a radical kind of welcome. The Way of
Christ would have meant being a community that saved one another, and the
outcasts of society, from being burned with trash and forgotten.
3. In
the fundamentalist Christianity in which I grew up, I understood the following:
“Baptism, praying in the name of Jesus,
and the King James Version of the Bible are all magical talismans against
suffering in hell. Not drinking, dancing, swearing, or getting caught wanting
to are also important.”
If
“I will draw all people to myself” (John 12) AND “Nothing can separate us from
the love of God” (Romans 8) and “I have seen the Lord” (John 20) are true, then
which of God’s children will be cast into an eternal separation from the
presence of grace? We are not all traveling up the same mountain. We are
not all feeling different parts of the same elephant. But if God is God
AND God is love AND God has been revealed in the person of Jesus AND the Spirit
intercedes for us in a variety of ways, then we cannot confidently make
predictions about anything that comes after what we know, except to say, “God will still be God and, therefore, in charge.” Is
it in keeping with how God has revealed the Divine character to the world to
punish people for an infinite amount of time for bad decisions made during a
finite period of time?
2.
He descended to the dead. Everything from Acts to 1 Peter to the Gospel of
Nicodemus to The Inferno written
about Holy Saturday- the day between Good Friday (when Jesus was crucified) and
Easter (when he was known to be raised from the dead)- everything written about
this is an attempt to answer the question, “Where the hell was he?” Truth: no
one knows. We are comforted by the idea that Jesus took the message of his
triumph over death to the spirits of those who had died and brought them (or
those who believed) to heaven. It makes great artwork. We don’t know. Theologian
Yvette Flunder says, “Religion is violent because we insist on making the
uncertain certain.” Trying to
create a definite answer for what happens on Holy Saturday is, essentially, an
attempt to nail Jesus down. Again. So that we don’t have to live with a little
mystery.
1. Hell
is not a geographical location. It may be a spiritual location. Hell, if it is
anything, is a perception of the absence of God. A perception that is patently
false, but that appears when our own experiences, ideas, certainties, or doubts
attempt to make gods of themselves through confidence or through fear. That
perception is transformed through our acceptance, with Christ’s help, of the
height and depth and breadth of grace. People need hell to exist as a reality
because they don’t trust that there’s enough of God’s love, grace, or mercy to
go around. If there’s not, they want to be sure they’re on the receiving end of
it.
When
we open ourselves to the hopeful truth that God’s grace overflows- in terms of
time, space, context, materiality, and spiritual revelation- we then become
more rooted in the joy of our salvation and the good news of freedom in Christ.
Rejecting hell as something that must
exist removes the scales from our eyes so that we can see how the kingdom of
God is at hand.
Living
faithfully, through God’s grace, means separating what we have ingested
culturally through literature, art, theater, movies, and television and
actually examining the written Word and the revelation that can come from tradition,
reason, and experience. We reflect on those things in community and with the help of the Holy Spirit. Anything else leads us away from the grace that is amazing, transformative,
salvific, and eternal. What can be said about anything that leads us away from
the fear, love, and trust of God? Resurrection grace says, “To hell with that.”
Amen.
