Last Sunday of Epiphany – Ted Hackett
This the second of a “mini-series” of Sermons on “Heaven, Hell, Death and Judgement”…
The so-called “Four Last Things” which all humans must face…
Last week we tackled two of them…Heaven and Hell…
I am sure all of you remember in exquisite detail all of that sermon…
I learned years and years ago not to ask students what I had said in the last lecture…
Because the blank looks caused me so much frustration…
It was not good for my self-esteem!
So, to review, I talked about Heaven and Hell…
I said that Hell was not Fire and Brimstone and Devils with pitchforks for eternity…
Hell was self-centered alienation which prevents people from being close with each other….from loving each other…
Prevents people from knowing and loving themselves…
Prevents us from knowing and loving God with all our hearts, souls and minds!
We were created to love…
So alienation is Hell!
But, I said, this Hellish alienation does not last forever …
God is infinitely patient…
God will last the selfish, unhappy sinner out.
Because…think about it…
One soul lost forever would mean God was not able to complete the divine creation…..
Like the Father of the Prodigal Son…
God would have lost a beloved child…Forever…
And God would not be…
Well… God!
Thus Hell was…to the extent the earliest Christians thought about it…transitory
The purpose of Hell was reform not punishment.
And though for a Hitler or a Putin it may take a long, long time…
No one can resist God’s love forever…
And as I said…
God is very, very patient!
And Heaven is the very opposite of isolation…
Heaven is loving others with your whole being…
Loving yourself as God loves you…
And…loving God with all your heart, soul and mind….
Gathered with angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven…
Including all redeemed sinners…
Banqueting and singing of love…for eternity!
So that brings us to today…
The last Sunday before Lent…
And we have to talk about the remaining two of the Last Things…
Death and Judgement.
In the Christian tradition, of course, God’s Judgement of us…is commonly thought to be executed by God….or an intermediary Saint like Peter…
Deciding…as soon as we die, what will be our eternal destiny…
Heaven or Hell…
Death was sure…
The Good and the Bad died…
But..then what?
Already in the 2nd century Christians were grappling with the issue of whether Martyrs who died for being Christians should not get better treatment in heaven than ordinary Christians who stayed under the radar and died peacefully.
The long…rather boring work called the Shepherd of Hermas said the Christian Heroes go to a higher, better place than ordinary folks…
Gradually, over the years, more and more people came to believe that imperfect loved ones wind up in Heaven rather than eternally in hell-fire…
Though they probably were not yet ready for being in the full presence of God.
And so they began believing in an intermediate state to which most, imperfect people go when they die.
In that intermediate state their souls do penance, and helped by the prayers of the Faithful on earth, grow more and more in the Love of God til they are finally ready to see God in all God’s splendor and beauty.
It stayed that way in the Eastern Orthodox Church
In the West, though, the emphasis was on “paying up” for earthly sins…
Thus “purgatory” became sort of a minor Hell…painful but temporary.
Hell, however, was still there for serious sinners.
Christians should pray for the souls in Purgatory…
They are still members of the Holy Communion of Saints…
The Hitlers and Putins are lost forever…
Consigned to eternal Hell-Fire!
This theological scheme kept both Hell for the really Evil and purification or Spiritual Growth for ordinary sinners…
It sort of satisfied our sense of justice…
I mean I want my Uncle Louie to join my saintly (though impish) Grandmother in Heaven…
I do not much want Hitler to be redeemed to Heaven!
And that, you see…that not redeeming Hitler…
Is a kind of justice…
But it is not forgiving.
One of the hard things about Christianity is the thing about loving your enemies…even the really evil ones…
It is hard…
But if one soul is lost forever…
If even one God-created soul does not finally come to love God and the neighbor…
God’s Kingdom lacks something…
And God is not…well…GOD!
Too much to ask, you say. “Can’t bring myself to forgive that much!”
Well….the vast majority of us will need time, the Prayers of the Church and the
Grace of God
to be able to forgive and love our enemies.
That is the essence of Purgatory…
That in the end…
Justice and Love will co-inhere
Justice and Love will be one in the same thing…
Even if you and I can’t really get our heads around that idea!
You see…judgment is really part of death…
It is not standing before St. Peter who is seated behind a judge’s raised desk peering down at us…
It is simply having who and what we are out in the open…especially to ourselves.
It is how much we can gradually overcome our fear.
Our fear of others…
How charitable we are able to be…
Our lives are filled with decisions…
We know the big ones…
Who and when to marry…
What career to pursue…
When and how many children to have
Those stand out in memory…
But most decisions are not those big ones…
They are the little, everyday ones…
The ones that we hardly notice…
The beggar by the side of the road at an intersection…
Your child who wants to play ball while you are doing the taxes…and you are not in a good mood!
The friend in the hospital who you are too busy to visit…
The guy who makes racist remarks at a cocktail party…
And it feels too uncomfortable to confront him!
Those are the little sins we commit and forget.
And then there are the nice…often really good things we do…
Working in a food kitchen…
Giving a woman…huddled and shivering on the street…ten or twenty dollars…
Working for a candidate who will help the poor and disabled…
Supporting an agency that finds homes and work for foreign, displaced people…
Greeting a shabby visitor at Church…
Comforting a grieving co-worker
The list goes on…
But you get the idea…
But here is the thing…
Every time we make a little decision…
Every time…
That decision changes us!
For better or for worse…
Those decisions make us more or less able to stand the atmosphere of Heaven…
Those decisions form…make us…who we are!
That accumulation of little decisions…
Forms us into people who can love others…
whether they seem like us or whether we feel easy with them…or not…
Will we decide… “yes…She is my neighbor!”
Every day of our lives…
We are making little decisions…
And those decisions are gradually forming us.
And when we die…
When we “pass on” as we say…
The question of what happens is not up to St. Peter…
It has been…
And will be…
Up to us.
Because what happens next follows naturally from who we are…
And over a lifetime…
We have made the decisions that make us who we are…
Are we ready to be fully in God’s presence?…
Are we ready to love as God loves?
Are we ready to embrace all those others who we used to despise?
Are we ready to love?
To love God with our whole being?
To love others as ourselves?
And…to actually love ourselves…
as God loves us?
Those are the four “Last Things”
the measures of how we stand with Heaven…
the yardsticks of how much love we can stand!
How much acceptance we can stand…
How much…God we can stand.
And how much growing in Christ’s love do we have to do to be able to stand Heaven…
Those are questions I will ask myself this Lent…
I know part of the answer…
And to the extent that I can look at these questions honestly…
It’s because I know God will not give up on me…
And at the end…
No matter how long it takes…
God will bring me to God’s Self…
And I will be to myself…and to all others…
Not as a stranger…
But as beloved…for all Eternity.
And so with all of us… That is…all of us!