St. Paul’s United Church
Sunday, January 27, 2008
To Hell and Back -- Rev. David Mundy
Revelation 20:10
Matthew 25 31-36
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Many of you here this morning are old enough to remember the
CBC television program called Front Page Challenge. It was around
forever – thirty-eight years is a television eternity – before the show died of
old age.
The premise was quite simple. A mystery guest was on set every
week, revealed to the audience but concealed from the four panelists. Their job
was to ask questions of the guest who often disguised his or her voice while
providing the answers. The idea was to
amass enough information to guess the identity but sometimes a guest would
“stump the panel” as host Fred Davis would put it.
Front Page Challenge certainly wasn’t high drama and as the show got older it was
considered rather boring in a nice Canadian way. Actually, the guests were
often fascinating people. Both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X appeared. Some
of the first women to lead nations were guests, including Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi. Sports greats included Gordie
Howe and Wayne Gretzky.
There is a reason I’m telling you this! Among the “lesser
lights” were Canadian news-makers of the moment such as the newly elected
moderator of the United Church, the Rev. Wilbur Howard. Mr. Howard was invited
on the show in 1974 because he was the first, and it turns out the only black
or Afro-Canadian leader of our denomination.
Some of you will recall that one of the weekly panelists for
years was the old curmudgeon, Gordon Sinclair. During the question and answer
period Sinclair liked to ask guests how much money they made, but he had a
different question for Wilbur Howard: “do you believe in hell?”
The moderator of the United Church said that he did not
believe in a hell which was a total separation from God and a place of eternal
damnation. His answer didn’t appear to satisfy Gordon Sinclair and it didn’t impress a young
David Mundy either. I must declare my nerdiness here
and admit that as a teenager I watched this show. I was “tuned in” the evening
Mr. Howard was a guest and while I may have been a nerd, I thought our
moderator was a heretic. As far as I was concerned every true Christian knew
there was a heaven and a hell and those who loved Jesus wanted to go to one and
avoid the other. Howard’s answer was another indication of how liberal our
United Church had become. We were just too soft on sin and punishment.
Several decades later I am inclined to agree with Wilbur
Howard, although I must confess that I don’t give hell a great deal of thought.
At least I didn’t until I told you I would preach on the subject as the
conclusion of a three-part series on death, heaven and hell. Despite the fervour of my teenage years, this may be the first time I
have addressed the subject during twenty-eight years of ministry.
Do you think of hell much? You were asked to consider hell
last week in a modest questionnaire and the majority of you – about 80% – felt
that hell didn’t exist as a place of eternal torment. However, three quarters
of you did say that you figure hell is a state of mind. One of my favourite responses was that hell does exist but God
wouldn’t send anyone there. It seems very United Church that there may be a
hell but it’s empty!
Hell is a theological subject which has fallen out of fashion
in even the most conservative of churches. In a day when it’s a challenge to
bring in worshippers hell isn’t the most welcoming of topics. So instead of
being a place which we dread as our eternal punishment, hell is a form of
profanity and a fairly mild one at that although several parents have told me
that their children were wide-eyed to see the word “hell” in the church
bulletin!
You heard last Sunday that there isn’t much in scripture
describing heaven. There isn’t a great deal about hell either, although it
hasn’t stopped people from enthusiastic speculation through the centuries. Do
you know that the apostle Paul, often considered a hard-nosed guy, doesn’t say
anything about hell? Jesus was not big
on hell either, but there are a couple of places in the gospels where he does
speak of the prospect of eternal punishment. In the Sermon on the Mount, which
we know best for its series of blessings, Jesus also says that those who lust
after someone else’s partner will be subject to the fires of hell. That’s a
fairly strong threat!
Another is our gospel lesson today, the “sheep and the goats”
passage in Matthew where Jesus says that when we treat the poor and the
imprisoned and the rejected as though they don’t exist, our souls are in peril.
When we ignore the plight of others we are shunning Jesus and woe to anyone who
does so. There are a couple of phrases in this passage that are chilling: “You
that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil
and his angels” and “these will go away into eternal punishment, but the
righteous into eternal life.”
These strong statements don’t sit well with the image of Jesus
most of us hold. What we are told here is that there are consequences for our
actions and we are called to seek the face of Christ in others. If it’s any
consolation, when the word eternal is used here, it is actually referring to
“the age to come” rather than forever and ever, amen!
Even though we don’t consider hell very much anymore, there
was a time when it was a hot topic, if you’ll excuse the pun. Hell is central
in one of the great works of literature, Dante’s Divine Comedy. It
inspired many paintings through the centuries. One of the most famous is by the
medieval artist Hieronymus Bosch who was given the gift of a dark imagination
which resulted in the triptych or three-part painting called the Garden of
Earthly Delights. The right panel is Hell and it depicts a burning city in
the background with those unfortunate enough to end up in hell being tortured
in the foreground.
Perhaps the most popular evangelist and theologian of 19th
century America was Jonathan Edwards and he loved to stoke up the fires of
hell. Listen to this “if you cry to God to pity you, he will only tread you
under foot. He will crush you his feet without mercy; he will crush out blood
and make it fly and it shall be sprinkled on his garments . . . ” Awful!
Fortunately hell has been the source of a great deal of humour, as subjects which make us
a little nervous tend to be. There is a Far Side cartoon which shows
newcomers marching past the devil into hell underneath a sign on the wall
saying “this is the first day of the rest of your life.”
As is often the case, the cartoon prods us to ask the big
questions of who would be in hell, if it does exist, and if this could possibly
be the place of punishment forever. Who would actually go to hell if we could
choose the guest list? Mass murderers would probably be there, tyrants such as
Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot. Those who incited the butchery in Rwanda a decade ago and Saddam
Hussein. On our questionnaire one
person wrote in that they would send Paul Bernardo and Karla Holmoka to hell. But once we get past the big names, who
would we include? Someone suggested paedophiles and
others who abused children. Of course some would say that anyone who wasn’t a
Christian, including the billions of Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and Jews
would be consigned to hell.
Who else goes to hell? Atheists? Terrorists? Religious extremists of any
stripe? Bad accordian
players? As frivolous as that sounds, there is the temptation to use the
prospect of hell as a form of revenge, usually aimed at others. Surveys have
shown that while a fair number of people still believe in some form of hell,
they assume that someone else is going there, not them.
Last week we considered the question: “What’s the good of
heaven?” Today we can ask: “What’s
the good of hell? “ I could put it another way. If I were on the high
school debating team, how would I respond to the challenge, “why would God
create and fill a place of punishment called hell?” The surprising answer I
would begin with is that I believe in a God of love. That love is not vague and
unfocussed. It results in justice and compassion, as we heard Jesus say in the
Matthew passage, and those who refuse to be just and loving risk separation
from God. The evil of this world is real and we are commanded to resist evil
and seek justice.
But in the debate I might also argue that God does not send
people to hell. Some individuals choose to distance themselves from God and
that gulf could be called hell. While I am still an agnostic when it comes to
the nastier images of hell, if it does exist, I would side with C.S. Lewis who
was convinced that hell’s doors are locked from the inside and that God
continues to knock on them in the hope of setting people free. Separation is
never the desire of a reconciling God.
Supposedly every sermon has some element of hope and
encouragement – the Good News of Jesus Christ. It’s difficult to do when the
subject is hell!
First of all, we can reject the hell which is a form of
spiritual terrorism. It may be that the apostle Paul never spoke of hell
because he was convinced that in Christ all things were made new and that death
and hell have ultimately been overcome by the cross and resurrection. Even the dark and ominous book of Revelation
claims that the forces of evil will be crushed by the power of Christ the
Redeemer. Our focus is on the light of redeeming love, not the darkness of
evil, even though it may be real.
There is also good news in the freedom of choice we all have
which allows us to draw closer to God’s truest intention for our lives. Perhaps
the best news of all is that we have been given the opportunity to accept the
gift of eternal life that is offered to us. We have no control over the choices
of others and scripture tells us God is the ultimate judge, not any of us.
When we accept this, we live as though heaven is our reality
now and our positive, generous actions today and tomorrow and the next day will
make a difference to the sorrow and personal hell experienced by so many in
this lifetime.
If we choose to live as faithfully as possible, we do not need
to fear the prospect of death. Nor do we need to fear what lies beyond this
life because Christ holds the light for us which shows us the way.
Thanks be to the Christ of abundant
and eternal life. Amen!