Locked On the Inside

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
March 13, 2005

Locked on the Inside
Psalm 130
John 8:21-30

The passenger woke up to the thrumming of the jet engines.
The plane lurched about like a car on a bumpy road,
not enough to cause concern, but enough to be annoying.
The cabin was dark; in fact the only lights in the cabin that were on
were the three reading lights directly above his seat,
and the two seats adjoining his.
He was in the middle seat,
with a man on his left and another man on his right.
Both men were enormous, really small mountains more than men.
He didn’t remember seeing them get into their seats,
but they both must have needed shoehorns to have squeezed in;
their shoulders, elbows and knees oozed over into his tiny space.
The two seemed to be competing with one another
for which one could snore more ferociously.
The man on his right clearly had the edge,
but the man on his left seemed to be gaining.

He often wondered who designed the seats in the coach section of airplanes.
They were uniformly awful, small, stiff,
uncomfortable for anyone taller than five–foot-four,
or weighing more than 120 pounds.
He envisioned the seat engineering department at each airline
staffed with men and women who got up on the wrong side of the bed
every morning; cranky, curmudgeonly people who never flew,
never wanted to fly, but loved to laugh at the thought
that someone would actually pay hundreds of dollars
to sit in one of their seats for hours on end.
In another era they might have been valuable employees
of the Spanish Inquisition.

He was foggy with sleep;
He had no idea of the time, or where the plane was.
In fact, he couldn’t even remember where he was headed.
Just then, the captain’s voice crackled over the PA system:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have been informed
that our landing will be delayed another hour.
We have been asked by the tower to remain in our holding pattern,
circling the field.
Because of the turbulence, we must ask you to remain
in your seats with your seatback up, your tray tables stowed
and your seatbelts securely fastened.”

Neither of his seatmates stirred, each snoring away,
busily sawing giant redwoods.
In the darkness of the cabin he could see nothing.
He tried to turn off the lamp above him,
but no matter how many times he pushed the switch next to it,
the light continued to glare fiercely at him.
He shielded his eyes from the brightness
and glanced around the cabin.
As his eyes adjusted to the dimness
he realized that all the other seats were empty;
he and his seatmates were the only people in the coach section.
In fact, there didn’t even appear to be any flight attendants.
He could see the curtain separating coach from first class was closed,
A sliver of light shined through,
and he could hear the muffled sound of voices talking and laughing,
along with the tinkling and clattering of glassware and china.
Where was he, and where was he going?
Everything seemed to be hazy, foggy, dim as the cabin.
The plane continued to bump along in the darkness.


I don’t know what your perception of Hell is, but I have just described mine.
I used to fly regularly on business, and I always dreaded flights.
Not because I feared flying,
but simply because airlines seem to have made it their goal
to make passengers as uncomfortable as they possibly can.
even as they advertise that they are something special in the sky.

The very notion of Hell is one that is loaded,
larded, really, with mythology.
The Bible provides us with so little information,
confusing more than clarifying,
with stories that seem to conflict with others.
The images that we have in our minds have come from the stories,
the legends, and the myths that have been passed down over the centuries.

In Old Testament times, there was no distinction between Heaven and Hell.
Our ancestors in the faith accepted the notion
that the dead went to place called Sheol.
The Greeks called it Hades, which is the term
Jesus tends to use in the gospels.
It was neither Heaven nor Hell,
simply the dwelling place of the dead,
good, bad or indifferent.
The notion of a Heaven and Hell began to develop
in the centuries immediately preceding the birth of Christ.
Sheol evolved in the minds of many as a place for those who died in sin,
while Heaven became the final stop for the faithful.

The imagery for Hell likely came from Gehenna,
which was a real place outside of Jerusalem.
It was the garbage dump, a place as foul smelling
and as awful as one could imagine
with a piles of rotten garbage, food,
and even dead animals fueling the flames day and night,
the stench strong enough to overpower
even the strongest stomach.

Two thousand years later, the image of Hell
as an inferno deep within the bowels of the earth
is firmly embedded in our minds.
Novelists, artists, filmmakers and others have found it fertile ground
for their imaginations.
There is a cartoonist from the “New Yorker” magazine
who loves to play with the imagery of Hell.
In a recent cartoon he picked up on our security-minded times
and had a long line of newcomers waiting their turn
to go through a metal detector before being admitted
into the fiery depths.

However we might describe it,
Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, the underworld, or Hell,
it is the place where we go if we die in sin,
if die unrepentant,
if we die with our minds focused on the things of this world,
if we die with our focus anywhere but God.
What makes it Hell is not the fire or flame;
what makes it Hell is that we are separated from God:
separated from God’s love and God’s grace.

In fact, we don’t have to die to make our way into our own versions of Hell.
We walk in an close the door behind us
when we turn away from God
when we are selfish, nasty, jealous, envious,
unkind, merciless, arrogant, thoughtless,
when we don’t follow Christ’s teachings,
when we are unrepentant.

That’s the point that Jesus was trying to get across to his listeners
in the passage we heard from John’s gospel.
“You are from below, while I am from above”:
below in the sense that they were so focused on worldly matters,
on the things of the earth, and not on God.
Power, money, prestige,
fine food, expensive clothing, opulent houses.
The religious leaders Jesus spoke to could not have cared less
about the people who came to the Temple with their sacrifices;
the leaders just wanted their offerings, their money.
They wanted people to do what they told them,
to think as they thought, to interpret Scriptures
they way they thought Scriptures should be interpreted.

Jesus was telling them -- and us –
that if that is where our focus is,
then we will surely die in sin.
We will die in sin even while our hearts still beat,
and our lungs still breathe;
even as we walk this earth, otherwise fully alive.
We will be dead in Spirit, even as the flesh continues to live.
And if we die in sin, we will be cut off from God,
cut off by our own words, our own actions.

But Jesus doesn’t want us to have endure even one day
separated from the grace and love of God.
So he preached and taught,
exhorting all to focus our hearts and minds on our Heavenly Father,
and to seek redemption and forgiveness now, and not later.
He wants us to turn our focus from the things of this world
to the world of our Heavenly Father.

Thomas Talbott, a professor of theology and philosophy out in Oregon
suggests that God’s love for us is so strong,
his hope for our redemption that powerful,
that redemption is ours even if we should die in sin,
Now we know redemption is available to us
in our mortal life, no matter how far we might stray from God.
We have only to look at the parable of the prodigal son to know that.

But Talbott goes further and suggests that God’s love for us is so strong
that redemption is still available to us
even after our mortal lives have come to an end.
In his fascinating book, “The Inescapable Love of God”
he propounds the thesis that if indeed there is a Hell,
the roaring flames and burning fires
are not there to torment the unrepentant sinner for all eternity.
Rather, the fire and flames are there to purify,
a refiner’s fire for even the most recalcitrant,
to bring even the most unrepentant person eventually to God.
That’s how strong God’s love for us!


As we read in the Second letter of Peter,
“the Lord [does not want] any to perish
but all to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)

But of course, Jesus tells us again and again
that God would rather have us come to repentance now in this earthly life.
We simply have to decide where our focus is going to be:
above, or below, on God, or on the things of this earth.

C. S. Lewis has written, “It we insist on keeping Hell,
we shall not see Heaven; if we accept Heaven,
we shall not be able to retain even the smallest…souvenir of Hell.”
(The Great Divorce, p. 9).
Lewis is right: we keep ourselves in our hells by not focusing on Heaven.
Lewis goes on to remind us that the one thing that we fail to realize
is that the doors to Hell are locked on the inside,
and that we can open them at any time and walk through them.
The key to the lock is repentance,
repentance, turning from those things that lead us from God
and turning back to the grace given us by God through Jesus Christ.

The Psalmist cries out to God for redemption:
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord, hear my voice!”
And God will hear our voices, no matter where we are in our lives.
God will redeem us – that is the promise that God has always made to us,
the promise given life in Jesus Christ.
We need not fear Hell –
for Hell is a place of our own making.
We put ourselves there.
and we can open the door that lets us out.
All we have to do is seek the face of God,
seek the grace of God, the love of God.
seek the redemption that is always, always
there for us from God through Jesus Christ.

Where is your focus?
Are your eyes, your minds, your hearts fixed firmly
on our Lord, our Lord above
or are they fixed on the things of this world?
If your focus is on the wrong things,
then you are in the wrong place
In these final days of Lent,
in these final days of our season of repentance,
take a good look to see which side of the door you are on,
confident that even if you are on the wrong side,
repentance is yours through the grace and love of God
that is our Savior and Redeemer, Jesus Christ.
AMEN