Still Here

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

May 29, 2011

Still Here

Mark 13:32-37

Well, we are all still here, aren’t we?

Six o’clock came and went last Saturday;

the Preakness was run;

familes sat down to dinner;

young folks went off to proms.

Did you stop, even for a moment on Saturday to wonder?

To wonder whether something might happen?

It was one of the few Saturdays

I wasn’t spending the day working on a sermon,

but I wondered whether there were

other pastors who were preparing for Sunday services

who might have stopped after lunch

and thought,        

“I wonder if I need to finish this?”

The man who predicted the end of the world

has, of course, backed off his prediction.

He now thinks it will happen in the fall.

He’s no less adamant that the End is imminent.

He was just a little off on his math he says.

When he originally sat down to do his calculations

he determined that the Day of Judgment would come

“exactly 7,000 years” after the Flood.

(Family Radio website)

Based on his calculation of the date of the Flood,

7,000 years brings us to 2011.

He picked the 21st of May because

he says that’s the day the Flood began.

Confront him with the words our Lord spoke in our lesson

“…about that day or hour no one knows,

neither the angels in heaven,

nor the Son, but only the Father,”

and the man brushes it off.

Yes, that may be what Jesus said, he argues,

but a passage in the Old Testament,

in the book of Ecclesiastes, says,

“Whoever obeys a command will meet no harm,

and the wise mind will know the time and way.”

(8:5)

He is quite confident that he has a wise mind,

And so he believes that he knows the time and the way.

And ominously, the Hebrew word we translate as “way”

can also be translated as “judgment”.

So: the wise mind can know

and will know the time and judgment.

Or at least that’s one man believes.

What do we do with this?

Much of the world dismisses the man as eccentric at best,

but he stakes his claim as a man who follows Jesus Christ,

as a man who reads and studies the Bible.

We don’t have to agree with him,

but we should not mock him or laugh at him.

He is after all, right about one thing:

there will be an end.

That we do take on faith.

We believe that Christ will come again

come again in glory,

ushering in a new age of heaven on earth.

But just when will that day will come?

Our Lord went to great lengths to teach us

that we shouldn’t waste our time trying to figure it out.

There are at least six different places

in the gospels where Jesus says the same thing

he says in our lesson: only God knows,

so just stay alert and ready.

Our lesson is so clear,

and yet so many have spent so much time over the centuries

trying to determine the year, the day,

the time, the place.

Why is it that we Christians seem so eager

to take what we read in the Bible

and make more of it than what is there,

than what is right before us?

                                   

We are so quick to take passages out of context;

quick to interpret the words we read

to suit our own beliefs,

our own pre-conceived notions.

The Word should shape our lives

but we prefer to shape the Word to fit our lives.

We’ve done that with passages about slavery;

we’ve done that with passages about women;

we’ve done that with passages about war and peace.

Biblical interpretation is at the heart

of yet another controversy that’s been playing out

even as we’ve been focused on whether the

Day of Judgment was looming.

Rob Bell, a pastor at a megachurch out in Michigan

has written a new book entitled,

“Love Wins: A Book about Heaven and Hell”

The book has become a bestseller,

but even before the ink was dry on the pages

people began to shout that Bell was a heretic

a blasphemer,

shameful, ignorant,

faithless.

The rants have been flying fast and furious

because of Bell’s thesis,

which is that the hell that comes to mind

for most Christians whenever we hear that word,

hell as a place of eternal damnation,

hell as a place of fire and flames to torment the doomed,

that hell is a fiction,

something that isn’t biblical,

something we’ve created over the centuries.

“Bell is wrong,”

shout furious hordes, waving Bibles,

pointing to passage after passage:

Jesus speaking of “eternal fire”

(Matthew 18:8)

Jesus speaking of a place of

“Outer darkness,

where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”

(Matthew 22:13)

Jesus speaking of “eternal punishment”

(Matthew 25:46)

                                   

Yes, those passages are there,

but Bell argues that the very notion of hell

as a place of eternal torment and punishment

simply doesn’t fit with the God revealed in Jesus Christ:

a God of grace, of mercy,

of forgiveness, of love.

Why, Bells asks, would this God

the God we worship,

want to torment anyone,

especially for all eternity?

Punish the sinner – yes.

But torment and torture forever and ever?

Yet, this has been the teaching of the church over the centuries.

Find chapter 32 of the Westminster Confession of Faith

in our Book of Confessions,

and this is what we read:

“… the souls of the wicked are cast into hell,

where they remain in torment

and utter darkness….

punished with everlasting destruction

(Chapter 32/6.177)

Bell is unbowed,

and I find his argument compelling

and persuasive.

The Old Testament doesn’t speak of heaven or hell.

When you died, you went to Sheol,

the place of the dead.

Sheol was neither heaven nor hell;

everyone went there, the good and the bad.

It was in the centuries immediately preceding the birth of Christ,

that we find the development of the idea of

separate places for the dead:

one place for the good, another for the bad.

When Odysseus traveled through the land of the dead

in Homer’s Odyssey,

written 700 years before the birth of Christ,

all the dead were in one place,

the good, the bad,

the honorable, the scoundrel,

all in the same place.

Jump ahead more than 650 years

to shortly before the birth of Jesus

and read of Aeneus’ travels through the land of the dead

in Virgil’s Aeneid,

and here we find the honored and honorable

in a part of the underworld known as Elysium,

the Elysian Fields, a beautiful, peaceful place.

Thieves, criminals, and the just plain bad

were sent to a different place,

a place called Tartarus,

a place deeper in the bowels of the earth,

a place ruled by the Titans.

Tartarus is described as

“An enormous fortress

ringed with triple walls and raging around it all,

a blazing flood of lava, a River of Fire,

whirling thunderous boulders crashing about…

and groans resounding from the depths,

the savage crack of the lash,

the grating creak of iron,

the clank of dragging chains.”

Imagine: a Roman poet gives us one of the very first images

of what we now think of as hell.

In the second letter of Peter we learn that

it is Tartarus to which sinners are sent!

(2 Peter 2:4)

This should not be as surprising as it first sounds, though.

The land of Judah was dominated by Greek thinking and philosophy

and of course governed by the Romans.

Cross-cultural sharing of ideas has always been common. 

A careful reading of the gospels

shows us that each time Jesus’ made a reference

to a place we think he called “hell”

the word was “Gehenna”

which was a place - the garbage dump just outside Jerusalem,

as foul, as frightening, as fearsome a place,

as anyone could imagine,

where the flames burned constantly,

and noxious smoke darkened even the brightest day.

Live a sinful life, and the end that awaited you,

was to have your body thrown into the flames of Gehenna.

The place made for powerful imagery for a teacher:

“You don’t want to wind up here, do you?”

 A man named Origen,

one of the earliest church fathers,

writing in the third century argued that

when Jesus spoke of flames

he was speaking metaphorically, hyperbolically,

the teacher making his point.

And the flames he spoke of were a purifying fire,

not a punishing fire:

“The fire that is brought on the world is purifying,

and it…is applied to each individual

who needs judgment by fire together with healing.”

(Contra Celsum,V-15, 275)

Fire as a refining fire,

its purpose to burn out the bad,

so that nothing remains but the good.

This is just what the Bible teaches us

through the Old Testament prophet Malachi

who spoke of God as “a refiner’s fire…

he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver,

 and he will purify and refine like gold and silver…”

(Malachi 3)

This makes sense, doesn’t it?

This fits with our notion of God

as a God of mercy,

of love,

of grace,

of forgiveness.

This is the God the Psalmist wrote of:

Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones,
 and give thanks to his holy name.         

For his anger is but for a moment;
his favor is for a lifetime.

(Psalm 30)

God’s anger “is but for a moment”.

God may punish, as an loving parent will,

but like any loving parent,

God punishes to reform,

to turn the bad to good,

to bring repentance,

for what God wants is reconciliation with all his children.

“Bosh and nonsense,” said Augustine a century later.

Augustine thought Origen was just being soft,

coddling the sinner.

Augustine went so far as to argue that those in heaven

would find themselves delighted

by the eternal torment of the doomed.

(City of God, Book 21)

Augusine’s view won out

and we built on it for the next 1500 years:

Dante, Milton, Jonathan Edwards

and to many others adding to the picture of hell

that we now find so frightening.

It is any wonder that we get caught up

in predictions of The Day of Judgment,

the imminent Rapture,

the coming Tribulation,

a time of weeping and gnashing of teeth,

eternal punishment in the flames of hell

awaiting the lost:

“O Sinner! Consider the fearful dangers you are in:

‘Tis a great Furnace of Wrath,

a wide and bottomless Pit,

full of the Fire of Wrath…”

(Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”)

                 

But the good news is that,

the title of Bell’s book is right: love wins.

And the one who is love,

our Lord Jesus Christ guides us and teaches us

so that we can live our lives not in fear

but confident, grounded in God’s grace and love.

                          

Yes, stay alert, be attentive,

for Christ will come again,

will come “like a thief in the night.”

But as long as we live faithfully following Christ,

we have nothing to worry about.

As that passage from Ecclesiastes reminds us,

as long as we obey the commands of our King,

no harm will come to us.

And here’s the ironic part.

It is a passage in Matthew’s gospel

where Jesus speaks of eternal punishment,

of separating the sheep from the goats,

that helps us to understand how we are to live our lives.

We miss the lesson because our focus is on

the eternal punishment,

the separation of the sheep and goats.

But if we listen to what Jesus wants us to learn

then if we live this way, we can live fearlessly:

if we feed the hungry,

if we give the thirsty something to drink,

if we welcome the stranger,

if we clothe the naked,

if we take care of the sick,

if we visit the prisoner,

then we’ve nothing to worry about.

(Matthew 25)

That’s it.

Live that way and there’s nothing to fear.

Nothing to fear when that day does come,

nothing to fear about what lies ahead.

Our call is to put all our efforts

into creating heaven on earth here and now.

That’s how Bell ends his thoughtful book.

That way, we will be ready for God’s heavenly realm

whenever that day comes.

So we can put away our calculators

if we just go out and serve the Lord.

That way, love wins. 

AMEN