Mark 15:33-39
When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o'clock, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sebacthani!" Which means, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" When some bystanders heard it, they said, "Listen, he is calling for Elijah." And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick and gave it to him to drink, saying, "Wait, let us see if Elijah will come and take him down." Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain in the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now, when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way he had breathed his last he said, "Truly this man was God's son."
When I was a kid, we had a giant pit of sand and dirt in our back yard – about the size of our fire pit, over there next to the labyrinth. We cleverly called it the "Sand Pile" and it was a cheap, tasteless, makeshift version of what more sophisticated people would call a sand box, and we used it for sand castles, mud pies, dirt-track races for Matchbox cars, and whatever else kids who play in the sand, do in the dirt. (I think the Sand Pile started out as some sort of home improvement project at the church parsonage where we lived, but never amounted to anything, so my brother and I, along with our friends next door, co-opted it as a great place for little kids to play.)
What made the Sand Pile cooler than your average sandbox, though, was that it wasn't self-contained. There were no sides, no cover, and no barrier underneath. One day, our neighbor friend had the brilliant idea that we should dig and just keep digging until we couldn't dig anymore. We knew this was going to take some time and I think the four of us decided to make it a summer project. Sometime after we started, I remember my dad coming home from work and noticing that we were up to something more ambitious than usual. When he asked what we were doing, we told him our plans and my friend declared that we were going to dig "all the way to Kingdom Come." We weren’t very sophisticated, but we were ambitious.
And so we dug a little bit each day, for days. We found worms and bugs and rocks of all kinds. We hit water one day, which meant we were really getting somewhere, so that was cool. And then one of us had the realization that if we kept digging long enough, we'd dig our way right into Hell and we wondered if maybe that wasn't such a great idea. We did keep digging, but the expedition ended shortly after that, either because we were scared or skeptical or just plain tired of shoveling. But that was the first time I ever remember considering something like the question someone offered up for this morning:
"Do we have to believe in Hell in order to believe in Heaven?”
When I was older, in High School, and learned about World War II and the Holocaust, I wondered if that might be Hell: the injustice and horror of concentration camps; the gas chambers, the torture, the attempted genocide. Elie Wiesel, likely the most famous survivor of the Holocaust asked once, "How [do you] explain or even describe the agony, the terror, the prayers, the tears, the tenderness, the sadness of the scientifically prepared death of six million human beings? … Six million human beings sentenced to death by an evil dictatorship not because of their faith or their circumstances but because of their very being." It sounded – and sounds, still – like Hell to me, even if it wasn't someplace you could dig your way into.
When I visited all kinds of jails and prisons in college, I wondered if the smell and the heat and the sounds and the danger and the circumstances that led and keep a person there might be Hell.
When I worked as a hospital chaplain for a summer during seminary, I remember a guy who had been burned on over 80% of his body. That looked like Hell, and I wondered if Hell was the sickness, disease, and disasters that consume and kill men, women, and children every minute of every hour of every day in the world.
When I traveled with my family and then with our high school kids a couple of summers ago to the Whitney Plantation, in Edgard, Louisiana, where enslaved human beings were used and abused and tortured and killed, like worthless animals, for generations – Hell seemed very nearby.
Is Hell the war in Ukraine? Is it the famine, starvation, and destruction in Gaza? Is Hell a cancer diagnosis or is the rigors of chemotherapy or radiation – even if they work, but especially when they don’t? Is Hell a broken or breaking marriage; the death of a child; any kind of unbearable physical pain or emotional suffering? Is it paralyzing fear; hopeless loneliness; utter despair?
With all of my questions, I guess you can tell that I don't think about Hell in the same way I did when I was digging around in the dirt as a child. But, from what I can tell, too many people – preachers, theologians, artists, and politicians – haven't moved beyond the sandbox. We hear too often, in my opinion, detailed images of Hell. You know them as well as I do: pictures of fire, deep dark places, chains and shackles perhaps, weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, for sure, and the little guy in the red suit with a pointy tail and a pitch fork with the capacity to inflict pain and suffering on his victims for all of eternity.
And these same people will tell you how to get there faster than any shovel can dig. Instructions usually include breaking the rules or not having enough of the right kind of faith or 'doing faith' differently than what's expected or accepted or, generally, behaving in ways that make God angry enough to send you ‘there’ instead of calling you home to the right side of eternity.
But I don't think any of this is what Hell is like or where it's at. Which is why I picked the readings I did for this morning. There are plenty of references in the Bible to Sheol and the Pit, to Hades and the Abyss. There's lots of talk about fire and punishment and the outer darkness – much of it from the very lips of Jesus himself.
But nowadays, when I think of Hell, I think about the crucifixion and death of Jesus on that Good Friday afternoon. And it's not because of the abuse or the spitting or the whips or the thorns. It's not because of the darkness or the nails or the cross itself, even. It's because of the way all of these things added up to leave him hanging there alone, crying at the top of his voice, "MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?" (Theologians call it Jesus’ “cry of dereliction,” and it’s why we say, as we do in our Apostles’ Creed, that Jesus indeed “descended into Hell.”)
It's at that moment when Hell becomes more real and more scary than any pitchfork or fire pit, if you ask me. It's at that moment when Jesus experiences what many of us have known – or what we fear – more than anything else: being utterly alone, utterly afraid, utterly out of control, cosmically lost, and entirely without hope or faith or comfort – even from God.
It's at that moment when Jesus himself knows fully the hell of every concentration camp victim, every prisoner, every enslaved person, every frightened soldier, every starving stomach, every struggling addict, every dying patient, grieving spouse, scared child, broken heart, and sin-sick soul that ever was or ever will be. "MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?"
So back to the question at hand. I was asked pointedly, if “we” believe in Hell, which seems to include the questioner, myself, and other leaders and pastors and theologians of the ELCA. I won’t speak for others, because I can’t – that’s part of the beauty of what it means to be an ELCA-flavored Lutheran, in my opinion. But I will tell you that, I don’t very much think about Hell anymore these days.
If it does exist, it’s not a concern of mine, because I believe it’s been conquered and undone, dismissed and destroyed by the work of God’s love in Jesus Christ – for me, and for you, and for all of creation. You can cite for me every Scripture and verse there is about Hades and Sheol, about the outer darkness and The Pit. But I believe there is a Hell the way I believe there are K Pop concerts, hot dog eating contests, and white pride parades. They may very well exist, but I don’t – and won’t – ever have to show my face there, thanks be to God.
We can find plenty of pictures in the Bible and elsewhere to scare each other into believing that Hell is as likely an option as Heaven or that damnation is as likely as grace. And there are lots of pastors and churches who will fan that fire with gusto and glee, but that's not what the Gospel promises.
To suggest that we can faithfully choose Heaven… To suggest that we can faith-LESS-ly opt for Hell… To suggest that we can reject God’s willingness to love us all the way through Hell and back and remain in our sin and death, despite God’s clear desire to win us back… is to suggest that God is powerless over evil, that God is powerless over death, that God is powerless over Sin, that God isn’t all God is cracked up to be and that the very death and resurrection of Jesus was a cosmic waste of God’s time. And I don’t buy it.
I don’t buy it because when Jesus cried, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,” he was quoting the first line of Psalm 22, which he knew well. So he must have known how Psalm 22 ends, just the same – with the hope of God’s promised dominion, deliverance, power and provision. Verse 24 promises, “He did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.” By invoking Psalm 22, what if Jesus wasn’t just announcing his despair and descent into Hell’s separation? What if he was declaring his hope for the Heaven that was to come, just the same?
My adventure in the Sand Pile as a kid that summer didn't end just because we were scared of what we might find. I think it ended because, even as kids, we realized our digging wasn't leading us anywhere but down – and that’s exhausting. It didn't take us long to learn that there was more life and fun and good news in the other direction – and that's where we chose to spend our days.
Which is why and how and what we believe about Hell matters for our lives in this world.
When our faith is motivated more by fear than it is by hope, we're heading in the wrong direction. When it comes to our journey of faith, I hope we'll remember and share as often as we can that the Gospel is about life conquering death. The story of Jesus is about God conquering Satan. The promise of our faith is that Heaven conquers Hell – whether we like it, would choose it, or not. And the call of our faith is to live and to love our way into Heaven, not to run away from a Hell that isn't ours to fear any longer, thanks to the God we know in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen for the sake of the world.
Amen
