HEAVEN OR HELL—THE CHOICE IS YOURS

FATHER JIM FOSDICK

ST. MARY OF THE SNOWS ANGLICAN CHURCH

SEPT.30, 2007

Lord of light - shine upon us. God of love fill our hearts with your wisdom. Holy Spirit, bring yourself closer to us in my words and how we hear them, in our thoughts and how we think them. Use this time - and use us to accomplish your good will. Amen.

It’s good to be back with all of you after my trip to Madison last weekend to be with my mother in the hospital. For those of you who haven’t heard, my mother had what they called a brain bleed and the build-up of blood on her brain made it so she couldn’t talk or walk. She was rushed to the hospital, but ultimately they decided not to operate and she seems to be making progress…she can talk a little and walk a little. Thanks for your prayers and please keep praying.

The possibility of your mother dieing leads to a lot of prayer as well as examination of some of the most important questions in life. Right near the top is the question of what happens when we die? The Bible’s answer is…That depends. Today I want to talk with you about one of the possibilities…Hell. Now two weeks ago I talked about sin and said it wasn’t popular to talk about sin anymore. Well if sin is unpopular Hell is virtually forbidden.  In fact, experts in church growth tell pastors and church leaders to steer away from this topic because even church people don’t want to hear about it. If you don’t want to lose your congregation, they tell us, don’t talk about this particular topic. I’m not sure why they say that. I think it would be like keeping it a secret that cigarettes cause cancer, or drinking and driving can kill you or promiscuous sex can kill you. Is it loving not to talk about something real in the hope that it will go away? I don’t think so.

I read a story this week about a young woman about to get married who said to her mother, "I can’t marry him, mother. He’s an atheist and he doesn’t believe there is a hell."

Her mother responded, "That’s all right, dear, marry him and between the two of us I am sure we can convince him."

Thinking about hell is not the politically correct thing to do in today’s world in much the same way as our modern society doesn’t like discussions about sin. As I think about it…if you want to pretend sin doesn’t exist it’s probably really helpful not to believe in hell because hell is the payment for sin. It’s sophisticated to joke about hell or to deny the existence of hell. Hell, however, is something that intelligent people aren’t even supposed to contemplate. It’s naive and old fashioned, some people will say, and many of these people are Christians.

Recently, a nationally syndicated writer ridiculed pastors and church members who teach about and believe in hell. He said it was not very appealing to modern folk, so therefore we should put it aside and not talk about it. Well, I suggest to you that AIDS and the devastation and the death AIDS brings is not a very appealing thing to talk about or think about either. But it’s real, nevertheless, just as hell is real.

We know that Jesus believed in hell because he spoke about it many times. Jesus believed in hell and he taught about it, and we do not have a higher authority to go to refute his claims. He’s the highest authority there is. Now here’s a common argument of our postmodern or you might say post-Christian friends. "Surely if God loves everybody, he won’t send anybody to hell." Now actually on the surface they’re right. They’re telling the truth. God does not send people to hell. God loves everybody. The cross of Jesus Christ proves that truth beyond a shadow of a doubt. But Christ died on the cross to prove to us how seriously God takes our sins. Our sins are serious enough to cause God untold suffering. The cross proves that. However, the cross also proves that God takes US seriously. He takes our free will seriously. He lets us make our own choices, but we have to accept the consequences of our choices. It’s true that God will not send anyone to hell. The Bible states this clearly. Let me ask again…what’s the most well known verse in the Bible…the one you see held up at Packer games? John 3:16. I’m sure you remember the beginning of the verse, but it’s the end I have in mind. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not PERISH but have eternal life.

In Second Peter 3:9 we read The Lord is not being slow about his promise, as some people think. No he is being patient for your sake. He’s not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance and newness of life. The promise Peter was talking about is the promise of Jesus’ return to reign over God’s Kingdom. He’s delaying so more of us can be saved. God does not send us to hell. If we go to hell it’s by our own choice.

Jesus preached the final judgment of the good and the evil on the last day. In John 5:28 and 29 Jesus says, "The hour is coming when they that are in the tombs will come forth, those that have done good to the resurrection of life, those that have done evil to the resurrection of judgment." He spoke of the door of heaven being eternally shut, and once it’s shut no one can open it. He described hell as a place, as a state of being, as a state of existence, "Where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth." He described it as "a place of outer darkness." It is a burning heap, a garbage heap, a Gehenna. He said, "It is a place of eternal punishment where the fire is not quenched." Very clear. The New Testament speaks some 200 times or more about that agonizing state, that place we know as hell.

Hell is not a pleasant topic. God never planned hell for humankind. Hell was instead planned for the devil and his angels who revolted against God before humankind was created. But many people will go to hell because they will reject the Gospel of Jesus Christ, his love and mercy which reaches out to them from the cross. Let me say that again just to be clear. People will go to hell because they reject the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We have many questions about hell, and the Bible doesn’t tell us everything we want to know. But in this parable, as Jesus talks about the rich man and Lazarus, we gain some understanding. He tells us enough to cause us to shudder in revulsion at what hell will be like and to resolve in our hearts to do everything that God requires so that we can escape that eternal punishment. Now that I have you down in the dumps…I guess literally… let me give you the Good News. The Bible declares joyfully that if you will put your trust in Jesus Christ, if you’ll give your life over to his direction and control, then you will enter into a state of bliss. Joy and peace and hope, power and love will come into your soul. You’ll get a little taste of heaven right now in this world. In fact, we might say that each of us already has a taste of heaven or hell right now in this world. It all depends on how we respond to Jesus Christ and his offer of salvation. If we respond positively, we have a taste of heaven; and when we leave this world all that love and joy and bliss will be magnified immeasurably. You’ve heard me say before that the Kingdom of God starts now for those who believe. Eternal life begins from the moment you accept Christ as your Savior.  But if we reject him in this world, we’ll experience hell here and when we leave this world. Don’t we all know someone who is going through a hell of their own creation? They’re suffering the effects now. Our choice makes the difference. Jesus asks for a yes or no, an up or down, a clear answer. Jesus says in Matthew 12:30, Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.

Let’s look for a few minutes now at this parable’s perspective on hell. Hell, first of all, is to live without love. It is to know abject loneliness and alienation. God’s love is the greatest joy, the greatest satisfaction any of us can ever know. It’s the answer to the deepest yearnings and longings of our heart. It’s the fulfillment of all of our dreams if we’ll simply respond to it. Love is the essence of God’s life in us both now and in eternity. The opposite of love, this lovelessness, is the greatest sorrow that anyone will ever experience. A home without love is hell. Wealth, riches without love is hell. Life in general without love is hell. Does it seem strange then to imagine that eternity without love will be hell?

The Bible tells us very plainly God is love. In Deuteronomy we read, “Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, and repays to their face those who hate him, by destroying them.” God is love but God is serious. If we reject him we cast ourselves into darkness. Hell is separation from God; hence hell is loneliness. A poet put it this way: "He that shuts out love in turn will be shut out from love, and on her threshold will lie howling in outer darkness." The poet is talking about that terrific sense of isolation and loneliness which describes loveless hell. The Bible tells us in I John 3, verses 14 and 17, "He who does not love abides in death . . . If anyone has this world’s goods and sees his brother in need and yet closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?" That’s a very penetrating question. And wasn’t that the sin of the rich man here? He had no love for God and therefore he had no love for his fellow man. Jesus said that this rich man lounged around all day in his fine clothes, in his linen and his purple. He feasted sumptuously at his table every day, and all the while he was ignoring this destitute, sore-ridden, starving beggar, Lazarus, there on his doorstep. He lived in selfishness, he lived in lovelessness and he died and was buried. And he entered into the full and final consequences of his selfish choices not to love and to serve God, and not to love his fellow man.

Many people live lives of lovelessness today. Teenagers cry out for love. They get into all kinds of trouble, they get on drugs, they become sexually active, they destroy property, they do all they can to embarrass their mother and dad because they want love. They cry out to their parents: "Mom and dad, notice me, love me!" And sometimes it is a matter of the mothers and dads being caught up in their own lives, centered on accumulating things or achieving status in life. Of course, they’re giving their children all kinds of things-- "See how much I love you, take this and be gone--take that--be happy." And then they wonder why the child does what the child does. The parent scolds and says, "After all I’ve done for you, you ungrateful child."

Wives cry out for love from husbands who get busy with their own lives. This kind of hits close to home but we can get consumed by our favorite form of recreation whether it’s hunting or fishing or golf and piled on top of work there’s no time left to love our wives. We can end up spending more time at the tavern after our softball games than we do taking our wives out and showing them we love them. Regardless of why we are too busy for our wives, we’re surprised at angry outbursts from our spouses.

Wives sometimes don’t love their husbands. They develop distorted priorities. Sometimes it is something as simple as keeping a perfect house, and they don’t want their husband around because he messes up that house. Fault-finding becomes incessant. Compliments are few and far between. Or it may be that the children become such a priority that there’s no time for the husband. Husbands can come to resent their own children because they’re competition. The most requested program in the history of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family was a series on relationships between husbands and wives. The series was called Love and Respect and its simple message was that men are wired to need respect from their wives and the wives in turn need to be loved. I think of course that both husbands and wives need love, but the program was about what they need most. I said in a marriage homily this summer if you want a better marriage, love your spouse more. Don’t focus on what you’re not getting out of the marriage, focus on how you can love your spouse more…how you can do more for your spouse. Love is the best medicine for relationships.

Someone described hell this way: "Hell is where loveless people are always dying but never die. It’s where people are critical and never compassionate, where people are always complaining, yet never consoling, where people are hard and never helpful, where they’re greedy but never gracious. Hell is what we are without love and without God in our lives, but that magnified immeasurably throughout eternity. It’s the misery of eternal loneliness and lostness and lovelessness."

Christ died to save us from a life of hell here and hereafter. If we enter into hell it will not be his doing, it will be our doing, because we chose to reject him and his gracious offer of salvation. Hell is the only place where those who do not love can be, because heaven is pure love. If you are miserable in the presence of love, hell is the only place you can go in God’s universe. So hell is lovelessness and supreme loneliness and alienation. Hell is also memory and regret. It’s the memory of lost opportunities to do good and to love God and to love others. Gian Carlo Menotti was a contemporary composer who died earlier this year. You might have heard of his classic Christmas opera, “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” Menotti wrote these words about his understanding of hell. He says, "Hell begins on the day when God grants us a clear vision of all that we might have done that we did not do. For me, the conception of hell lies in the words too late." Too late. Hell is coming to see that we’ve missed the whole point of life, that we have lived our little lives and done those things that pleased us, ignoring God’s will and His purposes. This is why I think our current adult ed can be so valuable. Experiencing God is all about learning to recognize God’s purposes and getting involved in His work. Hell, on the other hand, is going our own way, devoted supremely to ourselves and our concerns, and then coming to the end of life and realizing, I’ve missed the whole point. I was put here to love God and serve Him and to love others and serve them and I didn’t do it. I missed the whole point and it’s too late to remedy the situation.

I found a quote from a poet who was unidentified. Maybe one of you will remember him or her. The poet wrote, "Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: It might have been." It might have been, had I made different choices, had I done things differently, had I been responsive to the leading of the Holy Spirit, had I lived the way Jesus wants me to live with his help. It might have been different, but it’s too late and I can’t go back and change. I can’t remedy the situation. It’s over.

In hell, the rich man lifts up his eyes in torment to see Lazarus there in the bosom of father Abraham, and he pleads with father Abraham: "Let Lazarus put the tip of his finger in the water and come and touch my burning tongue that I might have some relief from this agony. Oh, father Abraham, please let him do that." And Abraham with love (I think he represents God here) says to him, "Son, remember that you in your lifetime received good things and Lazarus in his manner evil things. Now he is comforted and you are in anguish." Then this rich man realizes that he is doomed to remember and to regret forever his lack of love for God and his lack of love for his fellow man. He’s lost the opportunity forever to be what God made him to be, to know the kind of life he could have had if he had listened to the voice of God.

The worst part of hell I think will be the memory, the regret of those who have rejected Christ. What I think this parable is telling us is that we will remember what we did in life and we will remember the missed opportunities. We will remember that we were taught about Jesus. We’ll remember maybe that some priest told us about Jesus and encouraged us to follow him. We’ll remember lessons from Sunday school. We may remember that we failed to love and trust Jesus in this world. We chose to ignore his pleas, his invitation to come and to find rest, refreshment, find newness of life in him and supreme joy. We’ll know that we lived selfishly, and never fulfilled our potential in this world or God’s intention for us.

The light and the joy in the rejoicing of heaven which people could have had, I think they’ll realize it when it is forever taken from them. Just as the rich man in his torment experienced that impossible gulf between Lazarus in his joy and he in his misery, so they too will experience that impossible gulf between God and all his love, and hell and its loneliness. The picture of Christ with outstretched arms as he reaches out to them, pleading with them to come to him and find his life, find his rest, find his salvation--that memory will be indelibly printed upon their hearts. Again and again, flashing before their eyes will be that picture of that figure with arms outstretched and that pleading voice as the scripture says, "How often I would have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings and yet you would not; and now your house, your life is desolate and forsaken."

Hell is a memory of the lost opportunity to do good to others, to serve and love God; it’s understanding that, "I missed out on the big thing, the major thing, the thing I was created for in the first place." Hell is to live without love, to live in abject loneliness and alienation for eternity. And hell is guilt. The word guilt is not mentioned in this parable per se, but I believe the rich man experienced guilt gnawing at him. I believe it was partially out of a sense of guilt that he wants to have his brothers warned so they won’t come into that place of torment where he is. So he pleads with Abraham to send somebody back from the dead to warn his brothers.

Guilt is an amazing phenomenon. Guilt can cause us to seek to justify ourselves. We look for a scapegoat to blame for our sins. An alcoholic will blame his boss, he’ll blame his job, he’ll blame his wife, he’ll blame life in general, he’ll blame God for his drinking. "It’s their fault, not mine." A youth hooked on drugs will blame his family or somebody else for his choices; a thief will blame society-- "The world gave me nothing but bad breaks so I had nothing and therefore I had to take it. It’s society’s fault." We can always find a scapegoat to blame for our sin and wrongdoing.

So guilt can cause us to justify ourselves, but guilt can also cause us to be concerned about others. Many good deeds are done as a means of relieving our guilty feelings. I believe this rich man may have been trying to do this as he asks for someone to go back and warn those brothers. Yet the absolute tragedy of his guilt is that there is no relief for guilt in hell. Abraham says that men have sufficient knowledge of God’s salvation. They have sufficient knowledge in order to come to know him and to love him and to serve him. They have it through Moses and the prophets. If Jesus were here and telling this parable today, I think he’d say, "You have sufficient knowledge; you have it through the spread of the gospel by every means imaginable today. You have printed Bibles with my words in them he’d say. You have churches and preachers and Christian television. You have no excuse for not knowing about me and deciding to follow me. So Abraham says, "Not even the visitation from one who is dead, nor can any miracle change the minds of those who absolutely refuse the authority and revelation that God has already given." When we refuse that revelation of God through Jesus Christ, his loving kindness and his offer of salvation, we too will be without excuse. We’ll find no relief from that gnawing guilt.

The rich man in our parable has no relief for his guilt. There he is in hell, in his loneliness, in his lovelessness, in that regret and memory and in that gnawing guilt, going from one degree of misery to another, all throughout eternity. Jesus who is the Lord of life uses this story to tell us, It doesn’t have to be that way for you. For I am the way, the truth and the life. I offer you abundant life, I come that you might have life and have it more abundantly, I come that you might have heaven and not experience hell.

Jesus is able to pour his love into your heart, he’s able to remove from you that sense of regret you may have now, those bad memories you harbor. This is one kind of healing we offer at our Wednesday Healing Service. We pray for healing of the memory. Jesus is able to take away that sense of loneliness you have and bring you to joy and great peace within. He’s able to take away that gnawing guilt you feel in your soul, and when he does, it will be a glorious feeling indeed.

I recently went to the funeral of a priest named Dewey Silas. He was a priest in the Diocese of Fond du Lac and he had been a blessing to his parish for many years. The turnout for his Memorial Service was incredible.  It was a glorious requiem mass. The whole church was filled with people who had come to share in this moment of triumph for him. Part of the service talked about the promises of peace, the other part about the assurance of victory. Those who were with him in the last days and the last hours of his life said that he had praised God even on his death bed.

I have no doubt today where that man is. He’s rejoicing in the corridors of that mansion in heaven with those who’ve gone before, rejoicing in the presence of the Savior. This week when I was with my mother I was very much at peace. In fact, so much so that her doctor really expressed some concern about me. He thought I must be in some kind of denial to be so at ease.  When I told him I was a priest and that I dealt with death a lot he was a little comforted. When I told him that I knew for certain that my mother was saved he was reassured, but he talked as if he didn’t really understand what that kind of assurance was like. So I shared some more with him. I told him that on the drive down I had thought about what I would say to my Mom if they said she needs surgery. Here’s what I was going to say. Mom you’re in a win-win situation. When you wake up from this surgery you’ll either be looking at Dad and me or you’ll be looking at Jesus and your mother and father. I got the sense that the doctor knew I was sure of what I was saying.

I wonder if you should die today, do you know where you would be? Can you say with assurance, I’m going to be there with Jesus?

Some folks are going to hell, but no one has to. You see, Jesus has done everything possible to keep you out of hell. He poured out his life’s blood. He himself experienced hell on the Cross as he cried out, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"  For a moment in time he felt that loneliness, that lovelessness, that is the fate of the lost. He felt the burden of our sins. He died for our sins. Jesus has done everything he can to keep you out of hell. And he promises, "him who comes to me, I will in no wise cast out." You can choose the salvation God offers you today. You can seal the contract today and go from this place with joy in your heart and the absolute confidence that whatever takes place, you’ve got a home and a Savior waiting for you. No fear. Nothing to regret. Nothing to look forward to but joy and hope. I know altar calls are not our tradition and I know it might be hard for you to come forward in front of everyone so I want to make it easy for you. If the Holy Spirit has opened your heart to my words and you want to make Jesus the Lord of your life you can tell me privately after the service and we’ll pray together. If the message works on you this week and you decide this is something you want to do you can call me and I’ll meet you any time any where. And of course you can confess your sins and ask Jesus to be the Lord of your life on your own or with a Christian friend. Hell is an eternity of regret for not having done the one thing, the only thing that could save your life. Heaven is an eternity of joy, peace, and love. The choice is yours. Choose wisely.