6th Sunday after Epiphany
Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
There is a list of church bulletin bloopers going around the internet. One of them goes something like this: “Tonight’s sermon topic: ‘What is Hell?’ Come early and hear our choir practice.”
What is hell? We rarely talk about hell in the Lutheran church. Yet Jesus mentions it three times in today’s gospel reading. I am going to take a closer look at what Jesus means when he says “hell”.
Many years ago, my husband’s cousin Tracy walked with her step-daughter through town. The girl was elementary age. When she was with her mother, they attended a fundamentalist church.
As they walked along, the girl pointed at the concrete sidewalk and asked Tracy, “Do you know what’s underneath that?”
Tracy replied that she assumed dirt and sand and stones and the like.
“No,” said the girl, “underneath there is the fire of hell!”
What a terrible thing to teach a child! What fear must she have been feeling, imagining hellfire under her feet that might just open up and swallow her. Yet some churches teach this imagery. They believe that hellfire is awaiting us; it will either destroy us immediately when we commit really atrocious sins, or it is awaiting us after we die, making us pay for our sins.
This idea would have been foreign to Jesus and the people of his time. We find the word “hell” 13 times in the English Bible, all in the New Testament. Only once, in the Second Letter of Peter, is the Greek word behind it the word for “underworld”. This is one of the latest books in the New Testament; by the time it was written, the Greco-Roman idea of hades had infiltrated Jewish faith.
Jesus, however, uses a different word: Gehenna. It is the Greek name for a valley that in Hebrew is called “Valley of Ben Hinnom”. It is a real place right outside of Jerusalem. Jesus and his audience would have known this valley for two things.
On the one hand, this valley was used to burn the city’s garbage. Back then, there was no such thing as a landfill. Garbage was burnt. Jerusalem’s garbage was brought to the Valley of Ben Hinnom and set on fire. Household refuse, discarded clothes, dead animals – it all was reduced to ashes by constantly burning fires. It is awful to imagine the sight, let alone the smell.
On the other hand, this valley is mentioned several times in the Old Testament as a place where people sacrificed their children. Jeremiah rails against people who believe that the god Molech demands the sacrifice of their children. The awful custom is also mentioned in the Book of Kings and in Chronicles. This is what Jeremiah writes:
And they go on building the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the Ben Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire — which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind. 32Therefore, the days are surely coming, says the LORD, when it will no more be called Topheth, or the valley of Ben Hinnom, but the valley of Slaughter: for they will bury in Topheth until there is no more room.
Ben Hinnom, Gehenna, is known as the place of sacrificial violence contrary to the will of God, as the Valley of Slaughter.
This is the place Jesus mentions. It is not a mystical location in the afterlife, but a very real location, a place known for fire and stink and violence and things abhorrent to God.
“Hell is other people,” writes Jean-Paul Sartre in his theater play “No Exit”. This would be more aligned with Jesus’ understanding of hell then the eternal hell fires of damnation some churches preach. For what Jesus is talking about in today’s gospel text is how we treat other people, and how our treatment of others determines that kind of life we live.
Four times in our reading, Jesus quotes laws from the Old Testament and then edits them. “You have heard that it was said …. But I say to you…” In each of these cases, Jesus takes the issue at hand out of the realm of laws and into the realm of relationships. He isn’t concerned with what people do, but what motivates them to do it. Jesus calls his followers not to control their actions according to the outward law, but by controlling their inner emotions and desires.
For example, Jesus speaks about adultery. The law cares about whether or not actual adultery has taken place. Jesus cares about how men and women treat each other. Curb your lust, he says, because lust leads to the kind of behavior that hurts relationships and diminishes the other person.
“But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Literally, Jesus says, “But I say to you that anyone looking at a woman to lust for her has already adulterated her in his heart.” He has adulterated her, he has objectified her, he has diminished her as the object of his lust. Lust is hurting other people. Lust victimizes other people. Lust turns the lives of the other, and also your own life, into Gehenna, a burning pile of garbage.
Curb your anger, Jesus says, because anger leads to violence. Behind most of the violence we see in the news is the anger of a person or a group. Whether it is domestic violence or child abuse or mass shootings or terrorist attacks, anger infuriates people to the point where they just have to lash out.
Such violence hurts so many people! I had to think of the video of Tyre Nichols being beaten. That poor man. The fury of five police officers was unleashed upon him. It caused so much suffering: his mother and his child, his siblings, his whole community, but also all the police officers who serve honorably and are now facing doubts and outright hostility from the population. Anger leads to violence that ignites the fires of Gehenna, the Valley of Slaughter.
Hell is something we humans create. Hell is Auschwitz. Hell is the Twin Towers on 9/11. Hell is Hiroshima. Hell is Chernobyl. Hell is civil war in Sudan and Ethiopia and Lebanon and Syria and countless other places. Hell is Islamophobia and homophobia and antisemitism and fascism and racism and chauvinism and all the other -isms that degrade other people. God doesn’t create hell; people do.
Jesus does not want us to live like that. Nobody’s life should be like a smoldering garbage dump, like a valley filled with violence. Jesus came to bring an end to all kinds of hell.
In today’s reading, Jesus calls us to continue his effort to eradicate hell. As his followers, he wants us to live with true integrity.
In today’s world, “integrity” is often understood as a person’s reputation. However, the Latin root of the word is “integer”, which means something that is whole and intact. Jesus is asking his disciples to act in a way that is wholesome and in sync with our faith in Jesus, with the grace we received in baptism, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, with the love of the God whose children we are.
Integrity means not to murder, but also not to shame someone publicly or make someone uncomfortable with our angry demeanor.
Integrity means not to commit adultery, but also not to diminish others by regarding them as objects for your lust.
Integrity means not just bringing a sacrifice to God, but also sacrificing our pride by seeking face-to-face reconciliation with people we are in conflict with.
Integrity means doing our best to strengthen marriages, our own and that of other people.
Integrity means that our “yes” just plain means “yes” and our “no” means “no”, that people can trust our word.
Right before today’s reading, Jesus calls us light of the world and commissions us to shine God’s light into the world. Today, he is telling us one way of doing so: by living with integrity; by valuing relationships; by building trust; by doing our best to extinguish fires in the Gehennas of this world, or at least by not starting any new ones.
In the beginning, I told you about Tracy’s stepdaughter and her fear of hellfire under the sidewalk. Unfortunately, her fear of hell did not help her lead a good life. In fact, her life is a mess. She had four children by four different fathers, has drug problems, and is in and out of jail. Once, she was arrested for stealing a bunk bed from Walmart. Fear of hell after death did not seem to have motivated her to a productive life.
Maybe hearing a bit more about being loved by a merciful God would have been better? We’ll never know.
We are nearing the end of the Epiphany season. During this season, we ponder the revelation of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, as the Light of the World, as the Redeemer of all people. We rejoice that in Jesus, born in a manger, wandering among the villages of rural Palestine, God has entered our world with all its messiness and struggle, all its fires and violence.
He has done so not to keep score and to tally our every deed so he can determine whether we will go to heaven or hell after we die. No, Jesus was born to save and to heal and to show us how to bring to life the kingdom of God; how to create a world without hell fires and anger, lust and adultery, violence and deceit.
Jesus wants all children of God to have life and to have it abundantly - not after they die, but here, in this world. To foster that for all people, Jesus calls us to live with integrity, to be trustworthy in all relationships. Let us learn from Jesus to treat others not as objects of lust but as worthy human beings, to deal with our anger in healthy ways so it won’t lead us to act out in violence, to let our “yes” mean “yes”, to seek reconciliation for broken relationships.
We are beloved children of God. We have been promised salvation. We do not need to fear hell after we die. We are saved by the grace of God. This assurance sets us free to do something about the hell fires burning all around us. We do that, among other things, by listening to Jesus’ call for integrity, and by fulfilling Calvary’s mission: As followers of Jesus, we are called to be an inclusive and compassionate community, where everyone is connected in relationship with God and each other to foster wholeness of mind and soul. Amen.