Hell

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Revelation Luke 16:10-31, Revelation 20:1-15

Many middle class Protestants are nervous and uncomfortable with talk about hell. There are good reasons to be uncomfortable with apocalyptic visions and millennial hopes, either religious or secular. One of the great dangers is a lack of humility which creates too hard a line between the good and the evil, as this may lead us to deny the dark, shadow side or our own unconscious, and lead us to transfer our shadow side onto others. We have seen this happen in the Church during the Crusades, in witch-hunts, and the conquest of the New World, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia in the secular world.

To some degree I think the denial of certain passions in Puritans led to the preoccupation with these passions in others, like Native Americans, African slaves, and immigrants. Rather than recognizing the shadow side within ourselves, and allowing for moderated healthy self-expression, repressed yet ever rising drives create shame and anger, which we project out toward those we perceive as spiritually weak. In the extreme, even taking time to enjoy or play with the pleasures available in nature becomes too big a temptation to bear, and piety begins to look like self-righteous melancholy. Since surfing, for instance, was coed and done with little clothing and took time away from the work of loading Western cargo ships, it was viewed by missionaries as a heathen sport that would die away as Hawaiians became Christian and learned the value of work. On the other hand, as noted in many diaries, as missionaries and Westerners began to take off clothes and enjoy the fun of sun and sea, they became healthier and felt more alive. Certainly healthy fun, sun and beauty would be a part of any heaven worth going to.

And today, while we recognize the high cost of disease, the tremendous difficulty of single parenting, and exploitation of women and children in a culture where all sex is permitted, almost nobody in the West would have us return to a day when even acknowledging our sexuality was taboo, and where those who would hope to be “Pure”, especially women, would have to deny sexual desire and fulfillment completely. The question for our society, it seems, is can we find a healthy middle ground.

Even the tendency to draw a hard line between good and evil can be projected onto others to justify our own evil. We see this, of course in the issues surrounding the Middle East, where Fundamentalist Jews, Muslims and Christians justify hatred, racism and war as means to avoid the temptations and justly attack the other. To maintain the “purity” of our community and the assurance that we will go to heaven while others will be sent to hell, we became the evil and created the Hell we preferred to despise.

In a world that seems to be hell bent on extremes, the holy way may be found in the loving center. Yet this is a convenient point of view for a middle class congregation, and we dare not become smug in our wisdom. John’s Revelation comes from a very different point of view. Jesus gives us a different point of view.

Even as we acknowledge the dangers of millennial extremes, we ought not assume that ours is the only perspective from which to see the world, heaven and hell. Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society points out why we are inclined to find more radical millennial hope irrational: “Evolutionary millennialism is always the hope of comfortable and privileged classes, who imagine themselves too rational to accept the idea of a the sudden emergence of the absolute in history. For them the ideal is in history, working its way to ultimate triumph.” The more radical apocalyptic visions tend to frighten or repel us, not because they are too irrational for us, though they are irrational, but because we “do not suffer as much as the disinherited from the brutalities of contemporary society, and therefore do not take as catastrophic a view of contemporary history.”(P.62)

What Niebuhr is saying, is that it is not just education, but our degree of comfort, and our faith in our own ability to affect our own lives in history which is a luxury that favors visions of gradual change, and makes us uncomfortable with radical visions like that of John’s Apocalypse.

When we contemplate history honestly, the fact that evil is so integrated in the human psyche and collective social life, and so many people, faithful and innocent, or at least hopeful yet seemingly powerless before the fate of suffering and injustice…When so many have had to die at the hands of despots and their frenzied or banal followers, tenacious human hope cannot help but ask, is there not something or someone who will redeem the dead and living? Have so many people lived and died in vain? Is there not in the Universe a God of justice?

We know the story of the Tums from Guatemala with whom St. John’s helps support a health clinic. Now flash forward through a few decades of dictators and civil war o the Tums. The Tums were common farmers trying to make a living in a small village named Los Platanos on a hillside deep in the mountains of the Mayan Quiche region. A military death squad besieged the village, burning houses, raping women, shooting whomever they pleased. The Tum’s father was shot 50 times with an M-16. The M-16 was a weapon, which was part of the aid the United States gave to the regime. The mother and children fled into the forest, living on roots and grasses until they made it to the refugee camp in Chiapas. Now this is just one of hundreds of thousands of stories like it from the violence of the 80s and 90s in El Salvador and Guatemala.

By the end of the war, it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been killed.^[12]

In a report in 1999, the UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) stated that the state was responsible for 93% of the human rights violations committed during the war, the guerrillas for 3%.^[13] They peaked in 1982 during the presidency of the evangelical Efraín Ríos Montt. 83% of the victims were Maya. Tens of thousands fled to the United States, and because we didn’t want to acknowledge there was a war we were helping to fund, train and supply, refugees were considered illegal immigrants and sent back home to the threat of death and torture. It is into this story, where stockholders can overthrow a democracy and direct a war that costs thousands of lives is legal and where the poor who flee for their lives are considered illegal that St. Johns stepped forward to declare a sanctuary and a vision of a new way where God’s love and justice would prevail.

Now this is just one story of one small country. Include the suffering of those in El Salvador, Sudan, Syria and so many other countries and so many people throughout history. Think about those born and stuck in dead end neighborhoods of Richmond or Oakland whose cries at the city gate seem to go unnoticed.

From a comfortable, rational point of view we have a hard time with the book of Revelation. From the perspective of the widow and ten year old boy whose father’s is shot 50 times, we can understand the view that this world is under captivity to Spiritual darkness. We understand the desire for a God of justice, for a righteous judge, for an apocalyptic denunciation and annunciation.

In our position in our culture, we tend to think the primary task of theology is to ask and answer the question, how can we have faith in God in a world of rational thought and science. But liberation theologians have pointed out, that from the perspective of the disinherited and the poor, the question is, in the midst of all the suffering and injustice of the world, where is God? The biblical answer sneaks up over and over; God is on the side of the poor and oppressed.

Gustavo Gutierrez, in Theology of Liberation, notes that apocalyptic visions are characterized by denunciation and annunciation. It denounces the existing order under which people are marginalized and exploited. It announces the coming of a new age, of what is not yet but should and shall be. This tenacious and audacious hope comes when men and women are discontent with their discontent, with the discontent of waiting for justice to evolve. And even as the powers of the world seem out of control, there is a force of good which will finally have its day. Not only is this a force worth dying for, this is a force worth living for, today.

So apocalyptic vision challenges us in the present tense. When the wealthy man asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus doesn’t answer, as many Christians would lead us to believe. He doesn’t give the man a doctrinal or theological statement to regurgitate. He doesn’t say, “Confess that I am your Lord and Savior and you will inherit eternal life.” He doesn’t leave the man with a belief that he can carry with him in whichever lifestyle. He says sell all you have and give to the poor. But the man can’t do it because he has many possessions.

I have noticed something about growing wealth. The more we get the more we become accustomed to, the more we think we should and could have. Where once we may have wanted to survive, now we want simply to have more. We fear and fight loss, not because we are threatened with death but simply because we are threatened with less. We simply don’t think of ourselves as having a lot because we could have so much more. So almost nobody thinks they are rich, and even fewer think they have too much. Even if we see that others do not have enough, we do not think their plight has anything to do with us and what we have or do.

The plight of the immigrant has nothing to do with us; the plight of West Berkeley doesn’t have anything to do with the hills. The plight of Lazarus has nothing to do with the rich man. Yet when the rich man finds himself in torment, then he wants Lazarus to bail him out.

In this parable, the one with the most toys doesn’t win. The rich man dies, is buried and find himself tormented in hell and asks Abraham to send Lazarus to give him a drink. Funny that he doesn’t ask Abraham for a drink but, as Rob Bell points out, he still assumes Lazarus is below him enough to be his servant. He is still so focused on himself that it seems natural that Abraham and Lazarus should see he needs help and offer it. Even though he didn’t give Lazarus the time of day when he was accumulating more and more, he expects a bail out from Lazarus now that he is in trouble. He still doesn’t get it. He wants Abraham to send Lazarus back to warn his family. If someone goes from the dead, they will repent, he thinks. But now he can’t get across the chasm that makes heaven a safe sanctuary for Lazarus. He doesn’t have the power to get his way anymore. He is just stuck in the torment of his own self-centeredness.

What is clear is that we the hearers do have the benefit of the prophets and Jesus who was resurrected and is to come. If we have suffered like Lazarus we are assured there is a God who loves us and will come that we might know justice, comfort and peace. To the degree we are like the rich man, we are given the opportunity now to die in our self-centeredness, and be resurrected, to have Christ resurrected in us as one who lives for love and justice. So apocalyptic vision speaks about eternal life becoming alive now, here, in us today.

Hope for the future with a just and gracious God gives us the courage and stamina to face a dark present within ourselves and society with both humility and power, and to act as if we and the world can be what we should be. This is both denunciation and annunciation. Mythical eschatology speaks truth and gives life eternal today. Those who have ears to hear let them listen.