36 Joseph, whom the apostles nicknamed Barnabas (that is, “one who encourages”), was a Levite from Cyprus. 37 He owned a field, sold it, brought the money, and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles.
However, a man named Ananias, along with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property. 2 With his wife’s knowledge, he withheld some of the proceeds from the sale. He brought the rest and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles. 3 Peter asked, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has influenced you to lie to the Holy Spirit by withholding some of the proceeds from the sale of your land? 4 Wasn’t that property yours to keep? After you sold it, wasn’t the money yours to do with whatever you wanted? What made you think of such a thing? You haven’t lied to other people but to God!” 5 When Ananias heard these words, he dropped dead. Everyone who heard this conversation was terrified. 6 Some young men stood up, wrapped up his body, carried him out, and buried him. 7 About three hours later, his wife entered, but she didn’t know what had happened to her husband. 8 Peter asked her, “Tell me, did you and your husband receive this price for the field?” She responded, “Yes, that’s the amount.” 9 He replied, “How could you scheme with each other to challenge the Lord’s Spirit? Look! The feet of those who buried your husband are at the door. They will carry you out too.” 10 At that very moment, she dropped dead at his feet. When the young men entered and found her dead, they carried her out and buried her with her husband. (CEB)
“What’s
Asked in Worship Stays in Worship: Banned Questions About the Bible,” Week Two:
How can God be All-Loving Yet Allows People to be Thrown Into Hell?
It’s
an old fable that many of you probably know, but it’s still a good one…
A
young seminary student comes up to his (or her) theology professor, “What
exactly is hell?”
(Assume
that the professor doesn’t do a double-take at this point at this student being admitted to seminary having apparently never contemplated
the idea of an afterlife. ;-) )
The
professor patiently explains, “It’s like sitting with everybody else on both
sides of a table that goes on in both directions forever. Everyone is hungry to the point of being
famished. And on that table is the
favorite food of every single person there.
They reach for their favorite food and pick it up, but when they move to
put it in their mouths, they realize that their elbows are locked up, and so despite
how hungry they are, they are never able to partake.”
The
student, who, like yours truly, thinks largely with his stomach, agreed. “Yes, of course, that would be hell. But then, what would be heaven?”
(Again,
suspension of disbelief that this student got into seminary!)
And
so the professor patiently explains, “It’s like sitting with everybody else on
both sides of a table that goes on in both directions forever. Everyone is hungry to the point of being
famished. And on that table is the
favorite food of every single person there.
They reach for their favorite food and pick it up, but when they move to
put it in their mouths, they realize that their elbows are locked up, and so
despite how hungry they are, they are never able to partake.”
This
time, the student does a double-take.
“Wait,” the student says, “that’s exactly the same as how you described
hell. So what’s the difference?”
The
professor leaned back and smiled. He (or
she) said, “In heaven, the people reach not for their favorite food, but for
the favorite food of the person sitting across from them. And they feed one another.”
This
is a four-week sermon series that takes us up to the week of Thanksgiving. Thematically, this new series does a lot, I
think, to build upon our previous sermon series, “They Like Jesus, But Not The
Church.” That previous series was based
on peoples’ impressions of us that they are sometimes afraid to share, and this
series is based largely on peoples’ questions for us that they—or even we—are
sometimes afraid to ask, perhaps because church is seen sometimes as a place
not to ask questions, only to receive answers.
But, in order to receive the right answers to begin with, we must start
by asking the right questions. And one
of my fundamental, non-negotiable beliefs about what church is, and what church
should be, is that we must be in the business of encouraging people to ask the
right questions, the tough questions.
Not the clichés, not the easy answers that you can recite the same way a
child recites their favorite McDonald’s order.
So for this and the following three weeks, we’ll be looking at some of
those big theological questions, guided by the book “Banned Questions about the
Bible,” which is edited by Disciples journalist and blogger Christian
Piatt. Last week, we began with the
question, “Is there a right or wrong way to read the Bible?” This week, the question gets even tougher:
“How can God be all-loving yet allows people to be thrown into hell?”
A
response in “Banned Questions About the Bible” puts it this way, in part:
(I)t’s hell when we reject God by living
like we were made in the image of something other than the Love revealed in
Jesus (1 John 4:9-12). Tolstoy wrote,
“Where love is, God is also.” It’s
equally true to say, “Where love is not—that’s hell.”…Hell is what happens when
we willingly decide to collaborate with the dehumanizing forces of violence,
injustice, and misery that will be no more when love is “all in all” (1
Corinthians 15:28).
It
is a testament to how difficult this question is that oftentimes, before we
even ask how one goes to heaven or to hell, we have to define what each exactly
is, and to make those definitions understandable to ourselves and to each
other.
It’s
a task even Jesus struggled with, communicating exactly what hell is like to
other people. He would point to
Gehenna—the valley just outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem where
people would burn their trash—as a metaphor for what hell is, which is partly
where we get our notion of “hellfire.”
But what I think Jesus may have been saying is that being in hell is like being told
you’re trash, worthy only of being destroyed slowly and painfully.
Regardless
of what hell is, exactly—though we’ll return to that question in a bit—it’s
something we don’t want. Yep, I studied
religion for four years in college and three years in seminary and that’s what
I got for you—we don’t want to go to hell.
Anyone could give this sermon!
Kidding
aside, anyone could—that’s the whole point.
If heaven is so universal that everyone wants it, hell is likewise so
universal that everyone wants to avoid it.
Which then necessitates the second question, after what heaven and hell
are, how can we go to heaven and not to hell?
There
is probably no other question that is at the root of more splits and schisms
within Christianity than that question, because it’s one of the big ones, right
up there with “How can I love the way that Jesus loved,” or “How many licks
does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?”
Which
is why stories like these, the story of Ananias and Sapphira, scare us so
much. Worshiping a god who strikes
people dead for giving only a partial tithe?
Pass. I’ll take my 10% to a
competing religion with a warmer, fuzzier god, thank you very much.
At
its core, though, the story should not be so shocking. Does the punishment fit the crime? No, not at all. But the moral of the story isn’t that lying
to a holy man gets you struck dead on the spot, for that would miss the forest
for the trees. No, the moral is that the
way, perhaps the only way, to sadden God is to demonstrate through your actions
that you are simply not at all interested in having a right and loving
relationship with Him and with all of His children.
Today,
in the church calendar, is All Saints Sunday, the day many churches set aside
for remembrances of the people we have loved and lost to their passing into
heaven. And there are many such people
connected to our congregation—I’ve performed four funerals in the past year,
all for either former members or relatives of members.
And
unless that person was a real son-of-a-gun, we want to, we have to, think of
them as being in heaven. We may walk
around thinking that we are members of this exclusive club, the club of
salvation, but when push comes to shove, we often want as many people included
in the club as we can. Especially if we
care about them. And since we ought to
care about everyone…well, you do the math.
Yet
it doesn’t always work like that.
Universal salvation is great, but does that mean that, say, Adolf Hitler
is in heaven? Or that Osama bin Laden is
in heaven? Honestly, I hope not, because
I think that their actions while they were alive showed they had no interest in
loving others.
But
I also believe, in the vein of the great C.S. Lewis, that such sentences are
usually reversible. In his novel, “The
Great Divorce,” C.S. Lewis’s narrator dreams that he can move between heaven
and hell almost at will after death, and can choose to live in either, so that
even if someone starts outside of heaven, it is always possible to join.
Jesus
says in the Gospel of John that judgment does not happen until the final day—it
does not happen when we die. Which means
that if a good person dies with a desire to reach heaven, I absolutely, 100%
believe that they’ll make it there.
But
that also means we have the choice to be in hell. And by that, I don’t mean eternal fire and
brimstone. To me, hell is, quite simply,
being separated from God. It’s what
Jesus experienced on the cross when He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you
forgotten me?” It isn’t being tortured
or inflicted with pain from the outside, it’s the pain of nothingness and of
loneliness.
But
like I said, that loneliness, that nothingness and emptiness…it’s always reversible.
God’s
love and grace is always possible, whether we feel near to Him or as far away
as possible, whether we are alive or dead.
All
we have to do is want it. We show we
want it in our actions, in how we treat one another.
And
that has absolutely nothing to do with anything we might associate with as God’s
anger, or wrath, or punishment, or anything of that sort. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote,
“Character is destiny.” And as C.S.
Lewis wrote—in one of his greatest lines ever—“The gates of hell are locked
only from the inside.”
It
is up to us to respond to a God who embraces us in love. May we have the courage to do so.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
November
4, 2012
No comments:
Post a Comment