A Five Day Long Post After a Three Day Long Book....

Two things have happened in the last couple days that have given me the opportunity to sit down and write something on here. The first is that I finished a book! That's really nothing to write home about I guess, seeing as to how I spent almost 8 years in some kind of college or another, but I so rarely finish a book I start reading. For example, as of right now I'm about half way through N.T. Wright's New Testament and the People of God, about a quarter of the way through Richard Foster's Freedom of Simplicity and Streams of Living Water, and about two thirds of the way through Dallas Willard's Renovation of the Heart. This summer I've also started Steinbeck's East of Eden and I've been slowly reading through the Philokalia during my lunch break at work. But yesterday I finally finished a book I started (I'm not counting Max Brooks' World War Z, although that was a fun read :)

The second thing that happened is that God, in His infinite mercy, finally sent that rain storm I've been asking Him for these last couple days. This allowed me to come home early from my job on the golf course because you can't run a weed whacker in the rain. Or I guess you could, but when it is thunderstorming I don't think you call it a weed whacker, I think you call it a lightning rod. As I was riding my motorcycle home and getting soaked I was thinking what it would be like if I got hit by lightning like the guy on the that old John Candy movie, The Great Outdoors, just before I started my first preaching job. One thing about it, I would only need about half as much content to make a 25 minute sermon :)

Anywho, I finished a book. My wife recently had a birfday and her grandma sent her a copy of C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce. It was sitting on the living room table and as I was on my way to have my afternoon meditations in the bathroom I picked it up and started reading it. As it turned out, this book was perfect for reading during my meditations because the chapters weren't too long for me to finish a chapter at a time but they also weren't too short so that I finished them before my meditation time was over.

For those of you who haven't read The Great Divorce, you need to read it (I know, I know, it's no 23 Minutes in Hell, or 90 Minutes in Heaven, but you should give Mr. Lewis a chance) but I will give a brief summary. Basically, C.S. Lewis finds himself in Hell in a dream. Hell is a dreary city where it is always raining and it is always almost sunset. This city is huge and sprawling but it is not densely populated because as people disagree with one another, they move farther and farther apart. In extreme cases, those who really can't stand to be around others wind up living millions of miles away. I think Lewis portrays Hell in this manner to give an idea of what it might be like if people are left to their own selfish devices. While Lewis left out all the good medieval stuff about the fire and the little demons tormenting people with pitchforks, he also left out any sense of joy or love from Hell. When people are left to their own selfish wants for long enough without the grace of God to help them to see past themselves, sufficient torment ensues.

I'm going above and beyond the stating the obvious when I point out that the idea of Hell doesn't get much attenion these days, even in most Christian circles. Part of the reason for that is an over-reaction to a previous generation's over emphasis on Hell. I remember growing up and being prodded into morality with the threat of eternal damnation. If you want to really mess with your six year old's head, put him or her in Sunday school and tell them there is an all powerful Deity who demands good behavior and will torment for eternity all of those who refuse to comply. I'm still struggling to understand God as a lover of His Creation rather than a sadist holding it over the eternal fires of Hell like a sociopathic 13 year old boy might dangle a live mouse over a bon fire. There's this little voice in the back of my head that warns me not to get too carried away with this whole "God is love" thing because that's only going to make Him more angry with me. Christ have mercy!

The bad thing is that I didn't go to a crazy fundamentalist style church! The crazy fundamentalist churches took it even further!

The history of Christian theology works a lot like a pendulum in a grandfather clock. Any time something is emphasied too long or embraced by too many people, the emphasis will inevitably swing back too far in the other direction. For example, take the trend towards universalism in liberal Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which helped to spur the fundamentalist reaction against it in the 20th century. Hell has gone through that same pendulum swing. First it was used as a club to beat people into submitting to becoming good "Christian" moralists, but then when the baby boomer generation came into power all of the sudden Hell got pushed to the back of the bus (after all, what room is there for Hell in a world where everyone is OK?).

I think a second reason Hell has become overlooked in most Christian circles comes from the way our culture is so darned egalitarian about EVERYTHING! Now I'm all for universal human rights and all that good stuff, but I think we've taken it a little too far. Our society pushes for every single high school graduate to not only have the opportunity to go to college if he or she is sufficiently gifted and financially capable of attending, but for everyone to attend college regardless of gifting and finances because it is their right to have a college degree. I spent four years as a TA in school and I've graded a lot of students' work; let me tell you that not every person should get to go to college just because he or she was able to sign their mark on a piece of paper. It's wasteful in that it brings down the reputation of the institution, devalues the degree that some people actually do earn, and it wastes the time and money of these square peg students trying to fit into the round hole of academia.

Our modern sensibilities have turned Heaven into a big egalitarian party and for the most part, the church in North America has stood by and allowed this to happen. First we conceded that people of other faiths will probably go to Heaven as long as they respond to the Light they are shown in their lives. Then we pretty much tossed out the idea that Christians could ever be denied Heaven as long as they kept their Sunday attendance up and stayed away from all the socially unacceptable sins. Now it's all the rage to concede that monogomous, practicing homosexuals will get into Heaven because after all, they can't help the way they are and don't some of them make the nicest little moralists? We're pretty much to the point where everyone shy of Hitler, Stalin, and the Westborough Baptist Church, are going to Heaven.

I really don't mean to sound like the older brother in the story of the prodigal son. I really do beleive that God's Grace is big enough to suprise all of us and we really will meet people in Heaven we weren't expecting to see. I'm just saying that not many of us believe, in a way that works itself out in our lives, that broad is the road and wide is the gate that leads to destruction and many are travelling that road.

Here's the reason why it is such a problem that Hell has been pitched out the window (and I'm preaching to myself as I think this out and write this down): we can't really take Heaven seriously if we don't take Hell seriously as well. If we don't take Heaven seriously, then we are not going to live out the fullness of the quality of the eternal life promised to us by Christ. I think this is why lukewarm Christianity is such a rampant problem in the U.S. today; we've lost the content out of what it means to be a Christian (again, the quality of eternal life now rather than the quantity of eternal life after we die) after we ceased taking seriously the gravity of the Christian message (namely that people have separated themselves from God and are therefore in desperate need of having that relationship restored).

The great thing about Lewis' book is that it reminds us that Heaven is not a reward given for being a "good" person, or even given for not being a "really bad" person. Likewise, Hell is not a place where a sadistic God gleefully and arbitrarily tosses His creatures in the name of something as cheap as "glory" or "justice." Rather, Heaven is a place where people who have chosen to submit their wills to the Will of their Creator, finding redemption and reconcilliation in a life of repentance centered on the Cross, find their relationship with their Creator growing deeper and wider for time eternal. Hell then is seen as a place where people who have chosen to live their lives apart from God, refusing to submit their wills to the Will of their Creator, are allowed to spend eternity travelling farther and farther away from the God who made them to live in relationship with Him. As Lewis said in Mere Christianity, in the end there are two kinds of people, those who say to God, "Your will be done" and those to whom God says, "your will be done."

Keeping a healthier view of Heaven and Hell forces us to acknowledge the role of our free will in this world. Free will in turn forces us to take seriously the call to live a life of repentance centered on following Jesus. While the gift of the Holy Spirit and heaps and heaps of God's Grace make it possible for us to live such a life, we are still called to play a role in it as well.

I'm reminded of the words of Cheech, "responsibility is a heavy responsibility." Maybe the real reason why we don't take Hell seriously is that it's just too much work!