ACORN SUNDAY

*Preached at Grace North Church November 19, 2000.*

If you died tonight, do you know whether or not you would go to hell?

That used to be my mantra, back when I was in the youth group at Berea Baptist Church. We would load the church vans full of kids and cart us all off to the shopping mall, where we would accost total strangers with this insulting question, competing with one another over who could win the most souls in a single evening.

Never mind that most people we approached said whatever they thought we wanted to hear just to get rid of us. I doubt any of those people we coerced into bowing their heads and giving their lives to Christ actually had a conversion experience on those nights we went soul-winning. It did not matter; we were being faithful Christians, telling all the world about their imminent doom if they did not accept our peculiar beliefs.

If you died tonight, do you know if you'd go to hell? It's not a good way to start a friendship, and its an appalling pick-up line as well. And yet, for us at the time, it was an all-important question that demanded an answer; and we felt sure that it was--if you'll pardon me--a burning question for anyone, if you could just get them to stop and think about it.

After all, you have to understand that in the tradition I grew up in, almost every sermon touched on hell in some way, and many of them dwelt on that fiery netherworld for the entirety of the sermon. Especially difficult to endure were the DESCRIPTIVE sermons, that listed the many tortures of the damned, the sure end of anyone who did not surrender their all to Christ as the pastor defined Christ.

So imagine my surprise when I went to an inquirer's class at St. George's Episcopal Church in college. The rector, Fr. Gene, was talking about hell, and giving some novel perspectives on it that I had never heard from the mouth a clergyperson before. I had always assumed Hell to be a very literal place of physical torment, and yet Fr. Gene was describing the notion in more metaphorical terms. My head was spinning when Fr. Gene invited a question. "What do you need to be true on this subject," he asked, "In order to be an Episcopalian?"

"Well," said Bonnie, a middle aged black woman who was new to the church but already turning into quite a pillar of the community, "I can't BE an Episcopalian if there isn't a hell!"

Bonnie grew up Baptist like me and was no doubt reeling at some of these odd teachings Fr. Gene was giving us. So Fr. Gene took a big marker and wrote on a piece of paper up on an easel, "MUST BE A HELL."

Then my friend Margaret piped up. "Well, I can't be an Episcopalian if there IS a hell." Margaret had been a Unitarian before coming to St. George's and was no doubt horrified by Bonnie's response.

A few other people offered opinions somewhere in between, which Fr. Gene dutifully noted on the pad. Then Fr. Gene drew a huge circle around all of the opinions. "Fortunately," he told us, "The Anglican tradition is big enough to hold all of these opinions."

I was blown away. Here was a community that defined itself by its actions, not its beliefs. It was quite a new model for me at the time, and was a little bit mind blowing.

So how about it? Is there a hell? Is there a place of eternal suffering to which all of those who follow the devil and his angels, even unwittingly, must go?

Well the Jews never had such a concept. They believed in Sheol, the realm of the dead where the shades of the departed live on in some shadowy existence that wasn't really living, and wasn't quite dead. For the Jews, reward and punishment are meted out in this life, on this plane. It may take a few generations for justice to be done, but they believed that God is just and trusted that all would be made well. As for the dead, well, they all went to the same place, where there is no suffering, but no joy either.

By Jesus' time, the Jews had gone into exile to Babylon and returned. Along the way, they picked up an elaborate theology of the vast hierarchies of angels and demons, and of course, heaven and hell.

The Jewish concept of heaven at this stage is still very different from our own. For first century Jews, the departed still went to Sheol, but Sheol had subdivided by this time. The faithful went to the neighborhood of Sheol known as "Abraham's Bosom" and the wicked, well, the wicked didn't. They were resigned to the low-rent districts of Sheol, which could be pretty nasty.

But what did Jesus teach about hell? Much to the surprise of a lot of folks who grew up in traditions like mine, Jesus never said a word about hell.

Jesus used colorful metaphors and parables depicting Sheol, and ghehenna, and the outer darkness, but he never really talked about hell.

Now we know about Sheol, and it's easy to see the outer darkness as a poignant metaphor, but what is this Ghehenna business? Ghehenna was the name of the trash pile outside one of the gates of Jerusalem, the dump, basically. It was set fire to, and burned continually. It is easy to see how the later Christian imagination appropriated the imagery about Ghehenna as being about Hell, but we need to try to keep Jesus' original intentions in mind. He wasn't saying that there is a literal eternal Ghehenna in which human beings will burn. Ghehenna was a profound image that gets cheapened when we reduce it to a simple synonym for later theologies about hell.

Ghehenna was outside of the city gates. The wicked person puts him or herself outside of the community. That is why that person may be in Ghehenna. On a cold night, no one would want to be caught outside the gates. It wasn't safe--who knew what criminals were lurking about waiting to prey upon those foolish enough to be caught outside the gates at night? This, then, is the outer darkness Jesus spoke of. It is dangerous to be cut off from the community, for only in community is there warmth, and peace, and safety.

So Jesus did speak of the land of the dead, and he did use metaphorical imagery warning people of the dangers of not being part of the community. But hell? Jesus never said a word about hell.

"But what about the book of Revelation?" You might ask. "Doesn't it depict the lake of fire into which the devil and his angels and all those whose names are not found in the book of life are cast?"

Indeed it does, but we need to remember that the book of Revelation belongs to later Christian tradition, written almost a hundred years after Jesus' death. It depicts the teachings of the apostle John in the midst of some profound dissociative or even hallucinogenic state. It does not, however, depict the teachings of Jesus. Most scholars believe that the Revelation is an allegory depicting not the future, but contemporary struggles experienced by the early second-century church. Taken as such, the work makes a lot of sense. When you try to take it literally, you get crazy things like "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned" bumper stickers.

Plenty of great Christian thinkers have dissented from the standard mythology of hell. Origen in the fourth century taught that hell is not permanent. In fact, he taught that human beings reincarnate until they come to the father, and that at the end of time even Satan himself would be reconciled to God.

A thousand years later, an anchoress named Julian living out her life in one small room attached to the church in Norwich England wrote about a series of visions she received. She said that although she does not doubt the church's teachings on hell are correct, she did not see it in all of her spiritual travels. Instead, she held up a hazelnut--not quite an acorn, but close--and had a profound insight: the hazelnut exists because God loves it, supports it, is united with it in its innermost places, and as God supports and loves this most insignificant inanimate item, so God also loves us, supports us, and is united with us for all eternity.

The last word on hell, in my opinion at least, comes from the great Anglican writers C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, whose ideas are much closer to Jesus' own than the common Christian mythology of hell.

For Lewis and Williams, every soul is free, both in this life and the next, to walk towards or away from God. To walk towards God is to walk towards greater community, and intimacy. To walk away from God is to journey into greater and greater isolation and internal desolation. At any time anyone may simply turn around and walk the other way. But the farther you walk in either direction, the more difficult it is to turn around. This view, which is found most profoundly in Williams' marvelous novels and in Lewis' THE GREAT DIVORCE preserves Jesus' teaching on the radical freedom of each and every soul. Furthermore, Williams and Lewis' God is not a monster who resigns his own children to eternal torment. Their God is the Prodigal father, waiting at the gate, hoping against hope to see his errant child winding his way home. And the errant child is, of course, always free to head home or to continue to wallow in the land of pods and swine.

This view makes a great deal of sense to me. For it is not grounded in the idea of some great white throne of judgement where God will cast sinners into the undying flames. It is founded on the same idea of God that Jesus himself taught: the loving father aching for us to return to him.

And you can see it operative in the world as we sit here today. You can see this tug of war drama in your own life. Every day we wake with the choice: will I move towards community and wholeness, or will I make selfish decisions which will isolate me from the people I love? It is a question we deal with constantly, and how we answer it today determines to some degree how we will answer it tomorrow, and indeed, for all eternity.

Of course, walking towards God is not easy. Being in community is hard work: it means learning to feel compassion for people who we do not always understand; it means being kind to people that annoy us; it means we may have to expand our thinking, or even change, which is always a painful process. It is often much easier to retreat; to seek solitude and quiet, where no one will bother us or challenge our ideas or opinions. But be careful, my friends, for this easy way is inevitably the way of death.

The question that is put to us today and every day is this: will we live safe, like this hard little nut; cut off from everybody and everything, and doomed to be no more than we are?

Or will we plant ourselves in the rich soil of community, endure the pain of having our shell cracked, and know the joy of growing into a creature hundreds of times larger than we are now, digging deeper into the sacred earth, and stretching our limbs towards to warm sun?

If you died tonight, do you know if you would go to hell? Perhaps you are already there. If so I invite you to take this acorn home, and perform a profound ritual with it: plant it. And at the same time resolve to plant yourself in community, where you can be broken, held in love, and reach for the sun. After all, if you don't like it, you can always turn around and walk the other way. Let us pray.

Jesus, you tell us in your Gospel that all those who come to you will not be cast out. We hear and rejoice in this great promise. But that does not mean that we will not walk out under our own power and of our own accord. Teach us, we pray, to love the things you love, to cherish every person as your holy child, and to seek to live in harmony and blessed communion with all creatures. For in your blessed community there is life, and outside it is only loneliness and despair. Aid us with your grace to choose the harder road, to open ourselves to one another in love, and to embrace the stranger, no matter how strange. For we ask this in your holy name, you who embraced us in all our strangeness. Amen.