Sermon Delivered at Church of the Good Shepherd
Fort Lee, New Jersey
Sunday, September 19, 2021, at 8:00 & 10:00 a.m.
By the Rev. Stephen C. Galleher
Hell, No!
“Grant us not to be anxious about earthly thing but to love heavenly…and to hold fast those things that will endure.” (Collect, Proper 20)
“The ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death.” (Wisdom of Solomon 1:16)
“Render evil to those who spy on me; in your faithfulness, destroy them.” (Psalm 54:5)
“He put a child in the middle of the room. Then, cradling the little one in his arms, he said, “Whoever embraces one of these children as I do embraces me, and far more than me—God who sent me.” (Mark 9:36-37, Message Bible)
How many of us, I wonder, even at our mature age, still believe, either deeply or superficially that there is such a place or condition as hell? Here we are, sitting in a house of the Lord, seemingly fairly comfortable, while at the same time perhaps believing that God consigns a goodly portion of his children to a life of eternal pain and that we, even we don’t live sufficiently righteous lives, may be joining them. Now I ask you, is this something that you can honestly say is consistent with the God of love whom we worship?
Let’s face it, we have a lot of history and tradition behind us on this most monstrous idea. Theologians have written about it for centuries. The poets Dante and Milton created a whole architecture of hell in their Inferno and Paradise Lost. And Scripture, while it is a little less explicit about the details, does lay out a system of justice where the good are rewarded and the bad punished, and quite severely. We unfortunately see this Sunday after Sunday in our readings of the Psalms. Today’s reading, for instance, warns, “Render evil to those who spy on me; in your faithfulness, destroy them.” (Psalm 54:5) Even the beautiful Old Testament reading from the Book of Wisdom intones, “The ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death.” Destruction and death may not imply being thrown into hell, but the passages do indicate that God’s wrath for our wrongdoing will mean at the very least our death. The rest is left to our morbid imagination!
And did you hear about the guy who was thinking about taking a vacation in hell.
“Why do you want to go there?” they asked him.
“All my friends keep telling me to go there!” was his reply
Of course, hell is a tricky idea, to say nothing of being a morally repugnant one. For justice, if it is to be rendered now or at some future time, requires a sense of punishment. Rewards imply punishments, like up requires down. Similarly, God’s anger would seem to be at the very least a reflection of our own outrage at those who have wronged us. But perhaps judgment and rage as attributed to God are projections of our own anger and do not represent any characteristic of the God we claim to worship.
Who was this Jesus whom we read about? He loved to be in the company of the lost. He had no problem going right up to the leper, the moral outcasts, those who weren’t orthodox Jews. He was more than casually acquainted with women, poor families and those lacking in social or economic status. For whatever reasons Jesus was executed, he challenged the social norms of his day to the point of total unacceptability.
Does this sound like someone who was in the business of condemning those who didn’t live right or think right or behave and think as the religious authorities dictated? Jesus tells us to love our enemies. Is this consistent with a God who punishes and punishes someone eternally? Jesus was in the business of loving, and his message of love so challenged all negativities that he is remains an affront to our sense of justice, even today.
We may need a hell to create a sense of justice and final reward, but it seems that God does not. For what is our image of God? And doesn’t our image of God shape us, create us? Seeing God as a cruel tyrant (for that is what he is if he punishes people so extremely) surely cuts off the channel of grace in our lives. If we were raised in an atmosphere of fearing punishment, it can traumatize us. Do we really think or want God to traumatize us?
How can we be encouraged to believe and trust in the goodness of God and that God loves all of God’s creatures and at the same time have any patience whatever with the notion of a hell? To hell with hell! Most human beings are more loving and forgiving than any God in the business of sending people to hell. Nobody or nothing can be more loving than God. It’s not possible. Such a punishing God is way too small. We must move from a moralistic God into the life of love. As the Inidan poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “The human soul travels from the law to love, from discipline to freedom, from the moral plane to the spiritual plane.”
And what do we think it means in our creed when we say that Christ “descended into hell”? Was he there to heap further coals of reproach on our heads? Or was he there to shut down the place, to evict its landlord and to send all its miscreants to a fairer place, into the arms of their loving creator and father/mother?
In conclusion, “Heaven” is essentially where God is. And since the reality some of us call God is absolutely everywhere, the kingdom of heaven is not pie in the sky in the sweet by and by. The kingdom of heaven is within you here and now. Heaven is always right where we are!
Amen.