When our two girls were growing up, part of our family’s Easter morning tradition was to hunt for the Easter eggs they had cooked and colored the day before. Debbie and I hid some in obvious places like on a living room end table or the dining room mantle, and we hid some in harder to find places, like behind the throw pillows or way up on top of a bookshelf. And then, only after all the eggs were found, Clare & Blythe looked for their Easter baskets, usually hidden in a closet or in a far corner of the room behind some plants. Occasionally they would come up an egg or two short, but that usually had less to do with their egg-hunting skills and more to do with Lily, our old black lab who had an appetite for, well, pretty much everything. But still, it was only after all the eggs were accounted for, more or less, that the girls could look for their Easter baskets; that was the prize for a successful hunt, and so while we made sure that the game was in the searching, we also saw to it that the eggs weren’t too difficult to discover.
This morning’s gospel reading from Matthew is kind of a resurrection sandwich. Matthew layers his account of Jesus’ resurrection with an unusual story, a story that only Matthew tells. A few minutes ago we heard AJ read the start of the story of the guards at the tomb, then Angie interrupted, as did Matthew, with the story of the resurrection, and then AJ finished telling us the rest of the story about the guards. It seems that in the years following the resurrection, rumors began to circulate that Jesus was not really raised from the dead, but that his body was stolen by his followers in order to give the illusion that he was raised. So Matthew tells us this story about Pilate’s placing extra guards at the tomb to ensure the body stays where it is. But even with the guards posted there, Jesus was raised, so in order to save face, the guards were bribed to say they fell asleep and the body was stolen. Whether it really happened this way or whether it was the product of Matthew’s active imagination, the point of the story is clear: even with armed guards posted at the tomb, Jesus was able to escape the bonds of death. An unusual way to tell it, to be sure, but Matthew’s point is taken.
Rob Bell is a rock star among evangelical Christians – there’s no other way to put it. You may have read about Rob Bell in Time magazine last week; he is a preacher, a speaker and a writer who has gained tremendous popularity over the past few years because he has a fresh way of presenting the gospel. Here at Second Church we have seen and discussed Rob Bell’s videos at Bible study, last Spring our seminarian Nathan Willard held a workshop on one of Bell’s pieces, and as Angie will tell you, Rob Bell is a cult hero to some of our youth. Just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Mars Hill Bible Church, where Bell is minister, attracts ten thousand worshipers every week. But the reason Bell appeared in Time last week is not because of his church, but because he recently dropped a theological bombshell smack in the middle of the evangelical world with the publication of his new book, Love Wins. Bell’s seemingly outrageous premise is that God loves everybody – pretty controversial stuff, right? Bell believes that God loves everybody so much that it is not God’s desire that even one human soul should be lost, but that it is God’s intention to bring every single human being to salvation – and since God is God, God succeeds. In other words, Bell suggests, in the end, not one soul is lost, not one soul is condemned for eternity, but every one of us eventually finds a way to God’s eternal presence and embrace. What this does of course, is it makes hell both unnecessary and superfluous. And for this outlandish suggestion, Bell has become the object of criticism and scorn among his colleagues. What is ironic is that most of his peers have decided Bell is going to hell because Bell says there is no hell. Hmmm: Bell’s compelled to dwell in hell, for Bell’s dispelled the knell of hell. There’s got to be a limerick in there somewhere...
But is this such an objectionable idea? That God’s plan is to save everybody, and that what God wants, God tends to get? I think what is really objectionable is that there are some church communities for whom hell is such a pivotal, indispensible notion, who can’t accept the fact that God desires everyone to come to love and faithfulness, that their whole theological system falls apart if Bell is correct. Think about this for a moment: a world without hell. A creation without damnation. For Bell, this makes a lot of sense: at one point he writes,
“When we get to what happens when we die, we don’t have any video footage. So let’s at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are... At the center of the Christian tradition since the [very] first church, have been a number who insist that history is not tragic... and love, in the end, wins, and all will be reconciled to God.”
You have wonder why this is so offensive. Why does part of the religious world cling to the idea of hell so tenaciously in the first place? It isn’t like any of us believes we’re going there. Hell is always for other people, right? It is the threat of punishment that the church has used for centuries to try to get people to behave, well, the way the church wants them to behave. Or to put it in clinical terms, hell has usually been employed as a kind of ecclesiastical avoidance therapy; the thinking is that we will do whatever needs to be done in order to avoid going to hell, so we turn to the church to learn what that is; and unfortunately, for most of the church’s history the simple answer has been, “If you don’t come to church, then you’re going to hell.” Am I right? Bell suggests this is, more than anything, an invention intended to pursue a given story line, like the story Matthew invented about placing guards at the tomb so Jesus’ followers can’t steal the body. But the body disappeared anyway. Placing guards at the tomb to prevent a resurrection makes about as much sense as threatening people with eternal damnation to get them to love God. God just doesn’t work this way.
In fact there is a good deal to suggest that hell is primarily an invention of the Christian church. To begin with, it is a purely New Testament idea. There is no hell in the Old Testament, no eternal damnation in Hebrew scripture or tradition. In the psalm we read together this morning, we said, “If make my bed in the depths,” or more accurately, “in Sheol, God is there.” And we tend to assume that Sheol as a kind of hell for Old Testament folks. But Sheol is actually the place everyone goes after death, the good and the evil alike – Sheol is simply what comes after life; it is not a place, but rather the state of not living any more. There is no place of everlasting punishment, nor is there a place of everlasting reward, in the Old Testament. When you die – you’re dead. It is what you have made of life that makes the difference for the faithful Jew, not what happens to you once you are gone.
Our church has spent the season of Lent reading through the gospel of Matthew. And we have seen that one of the major themes of the gospel can be captured in the repeated phrase, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The kingdom of heaven is at hand. As we heard a couple weeks ago, Jesus is not saying the kingdom of heaven is what awaits you when you die, nor is it off in some distant future when Christ comes again; the kingdom of heaven is at hand: it is among us, it is both imminent and immanent, it is in our midst. The kingdom of heaven is among you: it is the community you make, it is the faith that you live. What if the prevailing cultural ideas of heaven and hell, which come to us more from Milton and Dante than they do from the Bible anyway, miss the mark? What if heaven is not up in the sky, or God’s way of greeting us when we die? What if heaven is not the reward for doing all the right things, in the same way hell is not the punishment for doing all the wrong things? What if heaven is not the great big Easter basket filled with goodies that we have earned by virtue of collecting all the pretty eggs we have discovered along the way? When Jesus said, time after time in Matthew’s gospel, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” what if he actually meant what he said?
What really surprises me about the reaction to Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins, is not that so many people in certain church communities are scandalized by the possibility that there might not be a hell, but rather that they have completely missed the corollary: that is, if there is no hell in the traditional understanding of eternal punishment for having made the wrong choices, then maybe there is no need for an eternal reward for having made all the right ones. Maybe this life is our blessing, and the presence of God in our lives, from this moment on through eternity, is what the kingdom of heaven is about. Maybe Jesus actually meant what he said, that the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Is it possible for us to choose the good without needing the fear of hell to scare us straight, or the promise of heaven to lure us to a reward? There was an article in the Ideas section of last Sunday’s Globe that revealed Rob Bell isn’t the only one who has earned the enmity of his peers. Eminent Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson is also taking quite a lot of flak from his own scientific community for an article he published in last August’s edition of the journal, Nature. For much of his career, Wilson has done some of the seminal work on the nature of altruism. What is it that causes people to choose to do good, even when it is sometimes to our own detriment? For many years, the scientific community believed, as did Wilson, that it was due to “kin selection.” That is, we are hard-wired to choose the good even when it sometimes goes against our own personal self-interest, in order to ensure the survival of our descendants, a kind of genetic Darwinism. But in rethinking his own theory, Wilson decided he was mistaken; he has rejected the conventional wisdom and come up with a new idea. The key, for Wilson, has become the community. Technically speaking, under certain circumstances, groups of people who cooperate for the common good out-compete groups of people who do not cooperate for the common good, with the resulting good serving to benefit the survival of the community. Or to put it simply, when we choose to do what is right, it is not for the goodies we get at the end of the game, but rather it is for the common good of everyone. To put this in biblical language, we love God, and we love one another, not because of the promise of the afterlife, but because it makes the world a better place. And because it is the right thing to do. And because the kingdom of heaven is among us.
The relevant question, I think, is not, Do heaven and hell really exist? John Lennon did not sing, “There is no heaven,” he sang, “Imagine there’s no heaven:” choose to do good because it is good, not because you’ll get a prize for making the right choice. The relevant question is, Does God really use the threat of punishment or the promise of reward in order to get us to do the right thing, to love God and each other? Or does God equip us and inspire us to do the right thing simply because God loves us? Which comes first, God’s love or our faithfulness? On Easter morning, the answer is right there at the empty tomb. God loves us first, and foremost, and a God who would send his son for us all does not require a system of punishment and reward in order to demonstrate that love. Or as another gospel writer put it, “God so loved the world that God sent the only Son, that whoever believes will have eternal life. God sent the son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia and Amen.
Let us pray.
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