Eighth Sunday After Pentecost

Today's text is Mark 9:43-48, read by Susan Gettys. This morning's sermon was delivered by Rev. Dr. Phil Snider.

Lead Pastor: Rev. Dr. Phil Snider (he/him)

Associate Pastor: Rev. Emily Bowen-Marler (she/her)

Youth Director: Paije Luth (she/her)

Children’s Church Coordinator: Valerie Bush (she/her)

Executive Assistant: Wacey Rivale (she/her)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Our scripture today is from Mark chapter 9, verses 43 to 48. If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to hell to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched. May we hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

So today we continue our summer sermon series that looks at what the Bible actually says about several hotly contested topics, and none more hot than today's topic of hell. Okay, we're gonna try something a little bit different this morning. Uh we've done this a few times just whenever we've live streamed, and we encourage those of you who are live streaming to join us in doing this. Um, when you think of the word hell, what comes to mind? I was reading uh a post on Instagram, uh, and and this person described uh hell as basically being all they ever heard about growing up in church. It was the foundation, and everything was like designed around the idea of like avoiding hell, you know? Uh and so there was a lot of fear in the sermons, uh, and and going back to like like you know, with being very young and feeling very afraid. Uh, and and this person looks back, you know, and feels like it was like manipulative behavior. They describe it this way: they say, hell was the floor under my whole faith. It's why I got saved at four years old. Good idea. It's if you if that is the understanding of hell. It's why I warned strangers, why I lay awake as a kid, it's why the altar calls worked. So when I finally opened the Bible to find it, I wasn't trying to disprove anything. I needed it to be there because otherwise my faith would have not been about something real. Okay, that was filler time for me to check the text now. See what's come in. Hmm. One says fire. Yeah, that's the first one I see. Yep. Someone writes this last year has been hell. You can feel that. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about that. Fire and brimstone, fear, threat, punishment for the unsaved, absence from God. Hot with the flame emoji. I wish I could like screen share. Um hell is Missouri in July. Complete and utter lack of hope, total despair. This person's giving away the end of the sermon. Dante's inferno. Eternal burning. Yep. That's when I grew up, I always associate it with eternal burning, conscious torment. Um, this person associates hell with eternity, and it's scary. This person says there's also someone whose phone number is close to this number, and they're gonna be getting a lot of messages regarding fire. No love, loneliness, coming from the idea of being totally separate from God, what that represents. Oh, here's here's someone who's following up. They shared what they thought, but then they're clarifying. But I totally don't believe in hell. This is the way the fundamentalists have taught it. More fire, torture, fire and brimstone, forever. Tyler, you got a good one, but it's gonna ruin the sermon if I share it now. Uh separation from God. If we take a look at the Bible, and thank you for doing that, by the way. I expected like five or six, and we have way more than I had time to get to. So, so thank you for that. I will properly put my phone away. Oh, well, okay, good, good, good, good. So if we take a look at the Bible, there are four different words that all get translated as hell: Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus. The first one, Sheol, is a Hebrew word that appears 65 times in the Bible. Now, it has a wide range of meanings, but it basically references like the shadowy abode of the dead. Sometimes it gets called the pit, sometimes it's known as like the grave, kind of like the underworld. Now, importantly, Sheol holds all of the dead. It holds all of the dead without judgment or torment. The idea of punishing hellfire, stuff like that, it came much later than the Old Testament, and we will get to that. The idea of hell being like punishing eternal torment, that does not appear in the entire Old Testament, which, by the way, are the scriptures that Jesus read, just as a reference point. The psalmist goes so far as to say that even God is present in Sheol. In Psalm 139, the psalmist writes, If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I make my pit, or excuse me, if I make my bed in Sheol, there you are. Even there you will find me. So this is very different than the idea of everlasting torment. Very different from the idea of hellfire and brimstone. It's the abode of the dead, not super exciting all the time, but it's not this place of eternal conscious torment at all. You get none of that in the Hebrew Bible, what Christians refer to as the Old Testament. And this is somewhat similar to the idea of Hades, which is another one of the words that gets translated as hell in the English Bible. Okay. But we first hear about Hades in Greek mythology before we ever hear about it in the Bible. So if you've read Homer's Odyssey, if you're going to see Christopher Nolan's film called The Odyssey, about the book, The Odyssey, you'll already know that Hades is the realm of the dead. It's the underworld. It also happens to be the name of the God of death or the God of the dead. So Hades is the God of the dead. And Hades is also like the underworld where the dead abide. In the Bible, Hades is usually just the Greek translation of the Hebrew word Sheol, which we talked about momentarily ago, referencing that abode of the dead. But still, not very much hellstone. Or sorry, I ran fire and brimstone together with hell. Not much hellstone. Not much fire and brimstone. We still are not there yet, even with Hades. So, like, so like when does that appear? It appeared in that little scripture reading we had earlier from the book of Mark. The Greek word that was translated as hell in today's scripture reading is the third word we're going to be looking at, Gehenna. Okay, so Gehenna is the Greek name for like an actual place. An actual place. It was called the Valley of Hinnem. Okay, so this is not like some sort of place afterlife in another world. The Valley of Hinnem, Gehenna, was an actual place. Here's a picture of it today. I mean, not literally today, but like recently. I mean, it doesn't look bad. It looks kind of nice. So why is it associated with so much fire? Why would Gehenna? There are some scholars who speculate it there there used to be a place where trash would be dumped and burned. That's that's one of the uh theories that scholars have talked about. Yeah, yeah. Uh and so that's part of the idea you'll you'll hear people refer to as why the fire never dies out, because it's a place where garbage was burned. Um but e even even worse, um for ancient Jewish people, Gehenna, um it like conjured up the worst place imaginable. It doesn't, it doesn't look like it in this picture at all. But in ancient times, it was known as a site, this is where, this is the place, a literal place, located just outside of Jerusalem. It was the place where children had to walk through fire as a sacrifice to the gods. When Jesus invokes the idea of Gehenna, he's invoking like the worst place imaginable. Not associated with an afterlife. It was associated with the horrific things that human beings have done to one another in this life. Heartbreaking stuff. It would be like today remembering the ovens of Ashvat, conjuring up the worst place we can imagine, all the loss, all the suffering, all the heartbreak caused by human beings. Or the genocide in Gaza. There are a lot of other images that could have been could have been shared. Images of unspeakable loss. Immense suffering. The word Gehenna was reserved for the worst places imaginable. The unconscionable places of immense human suffering caused by human beings, often involving fire. It's Tartarus. It too comes from Greek mythology. Also, um it only appears in the New Testament one time, but in like Greek mythology, it's the region below Hades. Below Hades. It's it's where those who were damned to punishment were kept. Uh 2 Peter, that references it. It refers to it as like the chains of deepest darkness. The chains of deepest darkness. Um when I heard that scripture reading this morning, there's a there's a heaviness, there's a there attached to that, there's a weight attached to that. Um Jesus doesn't invoke these kinds of things just in a casual fashion. He's trying to call attention to things, he's trying to call attention to the horrific suffering that human beings are capable of inflicting on others when he refers to the word gehenna. But before we go much further, we just kind of like need to pause, um, take a moment to talk about just the ways that people interpret and understand stories in the Bible and stories in general. Okay, if we take a look at how Christians in the United States understand the Bible, according to the Pew Research Center, about 39% of Christians in the United States interpret the Bible literally, about 36% interpret it metaphorically or figuratively, and around 20% of Christians in the United States don't view the Bible as a divine book, but as a human product. Now, all of this definitely impacts the way that Scripture is understood by ourselves as well as in our society. Here at Brentwood, a lot of times we'll say we take the Bible seriously, but not always literally. We take the Bible very seriously, but not always literally. That's not to diminish the Bible, it's to value the Bible and try to understand the Bible on its own terms, to try to understand it for what it is and not what it is not. So that is not to try to do away with the Bible, it's to try to understand the Bible for what it is, not for what it is not. As one of our Sunday school teachers like to say, metaphors be with you. May the force be with you. This also isn't like some sort of like newfangled, modern, liberal way of understanding the Bible. I always kind of like get a chuckle. Actually, I don't get a chuckle about that. It makes me sad when people assume that taking the Bible figuratively or metaphorically is being dismissive of the Bible. I don't get a chuckle out of it. Um it's something that that I wish people didn't associate with being dismissive of the Bible or as being some modern way of understanding the Bible. Um, as my friend and colleague Aaron Van Voorhees writes, quote, it surprises a lot of modern Christians to hear that an allegorical reading was the most common reading for church scholars in the early Middle Ages, the most common reading. They read the text as layered with symbolic and spiritual meaning rather than as literal history. Myth and metaphor were not seen as antithetical to spiritual truth, but the very medium by which spiritual truth was conveyed. Now, evangelicals today would have us believe that an allegorical reading was never orthodoxy, and the church has always read the Bible the way they have, but that's simply not true. That way of reading the Bible is a modern product. And if we could be able to understand the Bible metaphorically, figuratively, a lot of the problems with biblical inerrancy and fundamentalism will go away. And we'll talk more about uh approaching the Bible from a figurative perspective and to look at what the Bible actually says about being inerrant and infallible in a later sermon in this uh summer series. But this also tracks with how scholars um read other stories too. So, like um the scholar Katie Sherrard, she describes mix she describes Greek mythology as a way people told stories to make points they wanted to make about love and war and heroism and weakness and how otherwise competent men make foolish decisions that result in the downfall of civilizations. These stories are understood as stories, as poetry, as parable, not a retelling of what happened with the gods, whether it be Zeus or Aphrodite or Athena or Poseidon or Hades. It's not a retelling of what these gods did. It's a way of people trying to make sense of the world using story, parable, poetry to do so. And as Katie Shroud also writes, perhaps in the case of the Iliad and the Odyssey, it's also a way for men to still find a way to blame women, such as Helen of Troy. Okay, so how does this like impact our understanding of Hell in general or Mark's scripture reading, uh, or today's scripture reading from Mark more in particular? Okay, so let's take a look at it. I'm just gonna read parts of it again. If your hand causes you to sin, I I mean, I don't know if you take this literally or figuratively, y'all. I mean, if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. I mean, that's like Gilead, maybe, in the Handmaid's Tale. For it is better for you to enter life maim than to have two hands and go to hell to the unquenchable fire. If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched. Okay, I showed you the statistic earlier that says about 40% of Christians in the United States take the Bible literally. I claim that 0% do. I don't know a single Christian who's gonna read this passage and say, yeah, that part, that's literally true. But somehow, somehow, somehow, the parts about cutting your hand off or taking your eye out if it caused you to sin, you know, people will say that part, well, not that part, that's metaphorical, that part's figurative, but somehow, somehow in the exact same verse, the part about hell is supposed to be literal. Um those things don't really hold together. Um, but Jesus was a very memorable storyteller, and he used parable and metaphor all of the time to try to get people's attention and to try to make strong points. So when Jesus invokes Gehenna, he is calling up those images of the valley of Henam, those places of unspeakable suffering. He's not talking about an afterlife. He is not talking about an afterlife here. He's calling up these places of unspeakable suffering, and he's saying, do everything it takes to avoid that. Do everything it takes to avoid that. Don't cause suffering, don't create hells on earth. And this connects to some of the strongest teachings about Hades, too. In Luke 19, we hear Jesus' story about the rich man and Lazarus. Okay, to paraphrase this story, I'm not going to read it all, but but there is a rich man and a person named Lazarus. Okay, so this rich man feasts sumptuously, has these lavish dinners, and Lazarus uh who goes hungry, um, he just kind of waits at kind of like the stairs, the entrance to Lazarus' place, and just wants crumbs. I mean, like even the dogs, lick Lazarus' sores, and he can't even get the crumbs. Um, the rich man is cold toward Lazarus, does not care for Lazarus. Okay, if we take the story literally, um it ends up not making God look very good because Jesus talks about in Hades the rich man is burning uh and would do anything for like someone to quench his thirst. But there's a chasm. There's a chasm. And and then the uh uh man who had been begging Lazarus, he was being cared for. If we read it literally, like that eternal conscious suffering, I I mean I hate to put it this way. But if God eternally tortures people who don't do the right things or don't believe the right things, I hate to put it this way, but that makes God out to be like worse than Hitler. It makes God not praiseworthy, it makes God much more devilish. Um if we believe in God as revealed in love, that is completely against the idea of God causing eternal conscious torment. But Jesus taught in parables. This is a parable. If we have ears to hear it. If we understand it parabolically, it's a way of saying that if we don't care for the most vulnerable among us, then it not only impacts their lives, it also destroys our own souls too. To quote another one of my friends, he's a Presbyterian minister, his name is Eric Clark. He talks about the abolitionist John Rankin. Abolitionist John Rankin wrote in letters to his brother that black enslavement was destroying the moral integrity of white persons for the ways it permitted, if not promoted, the depravity of enslavers in their cruel and treatment, sorry, in their cruel treatment of enslaved persons. One of the many criticisms Rankin highlighted was the sinful reality that every slaveholder has power to strip his female slaves, and thousands of them are base enough to put such power into exercise, and indeed they did. Reverend Clark says that in the process of doing that, it didn't just harm those who were enslaved. Those who were enslavers, they were losing their own souls too. He says that the exact same argument applies to ICE officers today. By giving them the power to assault and murder with impunity, we contribute to the destruction of their moral integrity. Thousands of them are base enough to intentionally provoke opportunities to use lethal force against unarmed civilians, to falsify evidence, and to at times even laugh about it with their colleagues. That does not just harm our immigrant neighbors, it also destroys the souls of ICE officers. They do not have their moral integrity that is fractured. So one reason he says to abolish ICE is to save the souls of ICE officers. Because when you harm others, you also fracture and lose your own soul. Jesus told stories with provocative imagery to make those kinds of points. And so while he taught in parables, and while it may be metaphorical or figurative and not literal, that does not diminish or take away from the urgency of his call for justice and compassion. And nor should it take away our own urgency to heed calls toward justice and compassion.

unknown 25:06

Dr.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

Megan Henning, she puts it this way, she puts it this way. In the most detailed picture of eternal punishment in the New Testament, the story about the rich man and Lazarus, Hades becomes a way to talk about the importance of caring for those who are poor, wounded, or marginalized. In fact, in the places in the New Testament where Jesus is talking about eternal punishment, words that we would read as hell are often used to talk about the serious consequences for not caring for the social outcast or the minority. You see this also in Matthew chapter 25, when Jesus says that nations will be judged because they all came forward down the center aisle of the church and prayed the prayer and accepted Jesus into their heart as their Lord and Savior. Jesus says that's how the nations will be judged. Hold on, let me check my notes. Sorry, that's not what Jesus said. Matthew 25, Jesus says that the nations will be judged by the way they treat the least of these. Those who are hungry, those who are in prison, those who are strangers, those who are sick. For how you treat the least of these is how you treat Jesus. And when you don't care for the least of these, Jesus says Jesus says that you are judged. Not because of what you say you believe, but based on how you treat others. Okay, I gotta wrap up. You know, I've noticed all of these sermons in this series could like be a series in and of themselves. Um so if Jesus is using metaphor and parable, um, how did understandings of hell become what they are today? Or one person asks it this way. Okay, uh they say, I've got uh a question. If if hell is barely in the Old Testament and it's four muddled words in the New Testament, where did the hell I was afraid of actually come from? The fire, the demons, the eternal conscious torment, the detailed geography of the damned, where did it come from? And the answer wasn't the earliest scripture, it was what came after it. In large part, it comes from who said it earlier, I can't remember. Dante's Inferno. So uh I'm gonna quote uh a scholar here. Um you can uh look up, look him up on Instagram as reasoned underscore reality. It was built over time, the detailed afterlife grew in centuries between the testaments uh and expanded through centuries of church teaching and later still through poetry. Much of the vivid hell in your imagination, the levels, the torments, the geography owes more to Dante's Inferno, written in the 1300s, more than a thousand years after the Bible was written, than to anything a Bible a biblical writer set down. It was assembled piece by piece long after the earliest scriptures closed. Okay, so I chose a very lame picture for Dante's Inferno. I looked up, you know, uh book cover images for Dante's Inferno, and most of them like kind of scared me. They like freaked me out. So so I chose this kind of lame one. Um maybe it's safer just to go with Dwight from the office when he quotes Dante while repainting the office he thought he was getting from Michael. You know, abandon all hope, ye who enter here. You know, a lot of us have been manipulated to try to follow God out of fear or guilt. Um, but we have an invitation from God to follow out of love and care and grace and compassion. Lots of Christians over the ages have emphasized literal readings of hell in order to manipulate people and to scare them into conforming to a very particular way of being. But deconstructing hell is just part of the journey. Next week, we get to take a look at heaven. Happy Toffee, yay. Um, what the Bible really says about it. We'll see that heaven is not just about finding life after death, it's about finding life before death, too. And then if you stick with us for the whole series, toward the very end, we will ask the question of whether or not God's love and God's grace will heal and save all. We hope you'll be here.