IS HELL FOR REAL? A Sermon delivered by the Reverend Dr. Geoffrey G. Drutchas, September 27, 2015

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1 IS HELL FOR REAL? A Sermon delivered by the Reverend Dr. Geoffrey G. Drutchas, September 27, 2015 Earlier this year, hell was up for sale. Hell, Michigan, that is. As reported in the Detroit Free Press last January, the five acre town in Livingston, County, all owned by one man, was put on the market at a price of $999,666. The deal included a set of free-standing Gates of Hell, perfect for tourist photo ops; a convenience store with a postal window where you can have your letters postmarked Hell; a resident weather station because everyone wants to know when Hell freezes over; a wedding chapel for those who want to be married in Hell; and a mini golf course for those who want to play a game from Hell. Touting the proffered deal, the real estate agent for the owner, remarked that If somebody really runs with it, they could do with [Hell] what Bronner s has done with Christmas. I don t know if there were any takers. But today I can t imagine Hell, Michigan ever giving Bronner s in Frankenmuth a run for its life and money. When I was a kid growing up in Michigan, the town of Hell had its own Justice of the Peace and actually did do a very brisk business marrying couples, beating out by far the number of weddings performed in the neighboring town of Paradise. Watching my own parents sometimes struggle in their own marriage, I often wondered serious kid that I was--how and why people could be so flippant as to choose Hell, Michigan as the place to tie the not. My family didn t raise me in the belief that the hell which lent its name to the Michigan town was a real realm or domain in the same physical sense that you and I are real. Nevertheless, we were taught to show some respect for hell as an idea or concept and as a spiritual or existential possibility. As my parents used to say, some people go through hell. Sometimes, my mother and father explained, it s because of personal choices made. Yet in other cases, they noted, it s through no apparent fault on anyone s part. Hurricanes happen. So do terrible accidents where the victim hasn t done anything wrong. But the pain, suffering, and anguish, can still be immense and experienced as a private hell. Remember Job of the Old Testament? Faced with the loss of family and fortune he pleaded: Have pity on me for I have been touched by the hand of God! (Job 19:21) During my college and seminary years I ended up reading a lot of religious history. One of the persons I read about was a nineteenth-century theologian named Horace Bushnell who became a major leader of the Congregational Churches across America, a family of

2 churches that later helped form the United Church of Christ. In his own writings, Bushnell recalled being raised on a constant diet of fire-and-brimstone preaching. The local minister, plus preachers who came through town for periodic tent revivals, painted in words the most graphic possible images of the hell fire and eternal damnation awaiting sinners. This preaching, presenting God as fierce, angry, and punishing, scared Bushnell out of his wits. It terrorized and emotionally blighted his young life. Later, when Bushnell responded to the call to be a minister of the gospel, he made a profound discovery in his diligent study of the scriptures. Jesus acknowledges human sin and evil squarely and mentions hell a couple of times most prominently in the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man. According to the Apostles Creed, he even ventures to hell s underworld after his crucifixion, apparently to liberate and release to heaven those righteous men and women who lived too soon to have the benefit of his own earthly ministry. But Jesus is no hellfire preacher. He warns about the coming of a final Judgment Day. In fact, Jesus gives a very dramatic account of it in the Gospel according to Mark, urging every sinner to repent so that they can share in God s final kingdom. (Mark 13:14-37) Yet Jesus does not in his ministry obsessively dwell on hell or even Judgment Day. Instead, he is forever calling people to love God and to love one another. Yes, the love and forgiveness of God is his most constant theme. This insight revolutionized Bushnell s own preaching. As a minister and theologian he began to emphasize God s love as revealed through Jesus Christ. While Bushnell recognized that fear as in the fear of hell can be a great motivator, temporarily keeping people in line morally, only love as in the love of Jesus can transform hearts and minds so that folks want to do the right thing without any external pressure or threat. Bushnell began preaching this as the good news. It turned out that a lot of other people were also fed up with the excesses of fire and brimstone preaching. In fact, there was a large swath of New York State openly known as the burnt-over district because so many zealous and fanatical hellfire preachers had come through the local towns that no one believed them anymore. Bushnell s message stressing God s redeeming love caught on. He became one of the most respected preachers and teachers of his day. Without always being acknowledged, Bushnell s influence continues to loom large in Christian theology. It certainly shows up in a relatively recent book called Love Wins by the young and well-respected Evangelical Christian pastor Rob Bell who insists that God is

3 so loving that he is determined to leave no soul behind. Like Bushnell, Bell describes a childhood emotionally oppressed by the sheer fear of hell. And he has since turned away from it, believing that Jesus really does seek us out by the different path of love. In light of the experiences of both Bushnell and Bell, more than a full century apart, I am grateful that I wasn t subjected as a kid to the threats of hellfire. I was frightened enough as a young boy and then, later, as a young man, without worrying about what an angry and punitive God might do to me. As it was, without invoking hell, my parents managed to instill in me a strong sense of moral responsibility. They taught me that, though God is forgiving and we, in turn, need to be forgiving as well, there are consequences in this life for everything we do and that we are accountable before God eternally even if nobody else is around to notice our behavior, good or bad. This kept me on the straight and narrow. If I strayed, it was never very far. I never wanted to do something that was going to put me on the wrong side with God. My wife and I sought to raise our son with a similar outlook on both divine forgiveness and our moral responsibility and accountability before God as our ultimate judge. So far at age 28, he s turned out pretty well too. And now he s also a dad with a son to raise. For the sake of this new child, I hope that my son as father can strike a healthy balance in his own family household between the image of God as loving and forgiving and the understanding that God is also our judge, holding us morally and spiritually accountable for everything we say and do. In the midst of this balance, faithlessness to God here and now means that at life s end we face the grim prospect of an eternity where there is no spiritual communion with God or Jesus or with any other righteous, caring person who matters to us. When the unrepentant evil-doer dies, he or she dies for good, as if locked away like a prisoner in solitary confinement, deprived of all company and without any enduring legacy upheld or cherished by God in heaven or by those who remain behind on earth. Yes, those who commit evil without repentance and remorse are dead-enders. For me there s profound metaphorical truth in the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus that Jesus tells. As much as the Rich Man in Hades wants his former servant Lazarus, who abides in heaven, to bring him a cup of water or warn his rich brothers about their spiritual peril, Lazarus can t do a thing for him: the chasm and divide between heaven and hell can t be breached. (Luke 16:19-31) Once we die to this life our fate is sealed for good

4 or bad. If we haven t gotten our act together before drawing our last breath, no one can help out of what comes next. Likewise, the words in the New Testament Letter of Jude about sinners committed to an eternal fire are also powerful metaphorically. They underscore that the grave sins of someone like Hitler may take forever to be purified. In figuratively consigning them to eternal fire, God expresses his determination to ensure that such evil does not contaminate anyone or anything else. (Jude 5-7) Of course, there are some people today who, looking around the world as it is, regard life without hellfire as too tame for most people s good. They re convinced that the world has gone to hell in a figurative sense because too few folks believe in hell in an explicitly literal sense and have consequently lost any deep and abiding fear of the Lord. Not surprisingly, they are the avid fans of a book that first came out about eight years ago, entitled 23 Minutes in Hell. Basically, it s a personal testimonial about a professional realtor and Christian named Bill Weise who on November 22, 1998 finds himself knocked out of bed one night and thrust into the bowels of hell for 23 horrible minute before being retrieved to safety by Jesus. Now sometimes, folks, you and I complain about a bad night s sleep! But Bob Wiese s tale sure tops anything any of us have ever experienced. His 23 minutes in hell after being seized from his bedroom by a mysterious force includes assaults by two monsters, ten to thirteen feet tall, who are the embodiment of evil and fear. As Wiese describes them: The creatures weren t animals, but they weren t human either. Each giant beast resembled a reptile in appearance, but took on human form. Their arms and legs were unequal in length, out of proportion without symmetry. The first one had bumps and scales all over its grotesque body. It had a huge protruding jaw, gigantic teeth, and large sunken eyes. This creature was stout and powerful, with thick legs and abnormally large feet. It was pacing violently like a caged bull, and its demeanor was extremely ferocious. The second beast was taller and thinner with very long arms and razor-sharp fins that covered its body. Protruding from its hands were claws that were nearly a foot long [They were] speaking to each other awful words terrible, blasphemous language that spewed from their mouths expressing extreme hatred for God. One of the beasts threw him against a wall; the other flayed him with his claws. Remarkably, Wiese survives though wracked with pain. Somehow he also manages to escape the monsters clutches to wander a little farther afield in hell. He has to brave a

5 place with walls lined with thousands of fiendish, demonic creatures. Gigantic snakes, rats, spiders, and worms some three feet wide and two or three feet tall scramble everywhere. Meanwhile, the stench of the place, combining the smells of Sulphur, spoiled food, and rotting animal flesh all magnified a thousand times over--leaves him nauseous. The hot, smoky atmosphere is also suffocating, making him insatiably thirsty. Wiese soon encounters the source of the smoke. Just as legends tell, at hell s center there is a terrible, black, flaming pit. Wiese goes on to report: I could see the outlines of people through the flames. The screams from the condemned souls were deafening and relentless. There was no safe place, no safe moment, no temporary kind of relief. For Wiese it was understandably overwhelming to be a witness to all this. As Wiese explains: I experienced the misery of total exhaustion in hell. The continual emotional, mental, and physical trauma feeds this vicious cycle of sleep deprivation. You desperately long for even a few minutes of rest, but you never, ever get that privilege. In help you never sleep, rest, or find a quiet moment. Any form of rest is completely nonexistent. Even though I was only there for twenty-three minutes, the torment and trauma was so intense that I felt like I had slept for weeks [There was no] rest from the torments, the screams, the fear, the thirst, the lack of breath, no sleep, the stench, the heat, the hopelessness, and the isolation from other people. Suddenly, just as he had been so quickly and mysteriously thrust into hell, Wiese experiences himself being yanked from it through a hole and tunnel above the pit. It is space filled with light. As Weise reaches the top of it, he is blessed to encounter none other than Jesus Christ who informs him that hell was made for the devil and his angels and that he has been only temporarily dispatched there to become a witness for the fact that hell is real. Wiese shares more of what Jesus said to him. But it s mostly about Jesus sorrow that anyone should be in hell and his desire that we should be warned against falling into it through sin. Conversation done, Wiese and Jesus soar together in an incredible flight beyond earth s atmosphere and then descend back towards earth. I remember, Wiese says, passing through the roof [into my own house]. As he does so, the Lord [leaves]. Weise is discovered by his wife, Annette, lying in a fetal position on the floor, screaming with fear about hell. In the days that follow, Wiese comes to peace with what happened to him and begins to preach about hell as he says Jesus asked him to do. His book is the ultimate outcome of his ministry.

6 I don t begrudge Bill Wiese his claim that he experienced hell as real. But I think it stretches things to say that his 23 minutes was anything more than a personal dream or vision. And I don t, can t, and won t take it literally. Contrary to what Wiese wants to insist, his vision of hell is not faithfully biblical. In its vivid and gruesome details it is more in line with fictional literature like Dante s famous Inferno, a novel about hell s nine concentric rings written way back in the fourteenth century. Like many others who go on and on about hell, Wiese definitely borrows notions and images from pseudo-scriptural works from the early years of the church that were excluded from the Bible because they were held to be inauthentic and false as a representation of God s word. For me it particularly beggars the imagination that Jesus Christ, who died on a brutal cross, should be portrayed as endorsing the physical torture of men and women--even in hell. If this is what the church of Jesus Christ really teaches, who in this day and age is going to want to become a Christian? Sad to say, in the past, some of the church s notions about hell have gotten us into trouble. Killing others who were deemed spiritually wayward was actually justified as a way to save them from deeper sin in this life and a worse punishment in hell. This was the outlook that fed the Inquisition which has been a stain on the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church for last five hundred years. It also gave witch-hunting Salem, Massachusetts a bad name that still haunts it today. Without sacrificing the truth that God is going to judge us and our need to set aside sin is always urgent, it s important for us as Christians to emphasize all else God s love and forgiveness and Jesus command that we should love God and love one another. Terror and fear may put people in line and keep them there for a time. But as every dictator eventually discovers, it doesn t last. Only love can transform hearts and minds in an enduring way. A call to love and accountability before God, rather than threats of hell, will always be the best way to draw men and women to salvation. May this always be the message of our own church. Amen.

Biblical Perspectives from God s Word Eternal Judgment of the Righteous & Unrighteous Ken Birks, Pastor/Teacher

Biblical Perspectives from God s Word Eternal Judgment of the Righteous & Unrighteous I. Introductory Remarks. A common question that has risen in mankind from generation to generation is, "What happens