Let’s talk about hellfire.
Nobody really wants to, I’m almost sure of it. At best, “hellfire” is a dated, cartoonish notion from yesteryear. Or it’s the kind of thing people think of in a ho-hum, thoughtless way. “Go to hell,” you might say to someone, but you’re not really being serious, or literal.
But at worst, “hellfire” is abusive and traumatic. I have a friend who grew up in a part of the country that provided his childhood imagination with plenty of religious material to feel scared about, even terrified about. Even now, in midlife, he can feel haunted by the horrible, inhumane warning that if he does the wrong thing, or if he thinks the wrong thing, he will be sent to hell when he dies. And hell is a furnace of eternal hellfire.
I want no part of that. If that is what hell is, then I say to you: there is no such thing as hell. We can just collect all those images and ideas, wrap them up, and toss them in the trash. They are worthless at best, and grotesquely harmful at worst. Forget them.
But “hellfire” or “hell” could still be images or ideas that fascinate us, and spur us to do some healthy reflection. One of our Anglican forebears in faith and theology, C.S. Lewis, removes all the fire imagery and imagines hell as a vast, grey town, where everyone lives miles apart (because in hell, having a neighbor is intolerable), and no one is happy, but they nonetheless are there by choice. For Lewis, hell is the place where I get to do whatever I want, and serve only my own needs, and not have any relationships with anyone else, because relationships are costly. The other person inevitably will need something from me, or cost me something. Or they could break my heart. And so I may freely choose to be alone, free from all obligations and all danger of heartbreak.
C.S. Lewis calls that hell. But he is insightful: he knows that hell has an upside: I’m miserable and lonely, sure, but I’m not heartbroken. I am living an empty life, but I’m not hurting the way I would if I were vulnerable to you. I’m miserable, but I’m not wrong. Nobody is forcing me to be a better or different person. And so Lewis intriguingly says this: “The doors to hell are locked from the inside.”
And that’s one kind of hell or hellfire that I want to talk about. Not the cartoon version, or the terrifying threat that psychopaths in religious garments preach to terrorize their congregants. No. But this version: the hellfire I choose. The hellfire that rises around me and scorches my soul when I choose to step away from you, and from our neighbor, until the flames of selfishness consume me with loneliness and despair.
But there’s a second kind of hellfire that’s also well worth talking about. I can condemn myself to a hellish existence, yes. But I can also send my neighbor, if not to hell, exactly, then into a hellish experience. I can plunge my neighbor into a form of hellfire. In a few moments we will confess the “evils we have done,” but we will also confess the “evils done on our behalf.” My care and feeding, my shelter and clothing, my water and electrical supplies, my ability to move by automobile, all the access I have to the means of production, to creature comforts, to bank accounts, to seats on airplanes: all the ways I live and move in my life are connected to the lives and the livelihoods of others, and potentially damage them. I have a carbon footprint. I live and work on land that was forcibly taken from someone who lived there first. I am a person with white privilege, and therefore I can choose whether or not to care about that privilege, or work on it, or act consciously to blunt its impact on other people. (And that’s just one of many privileges I have.) And so yes, I can choose a hellish existence in which I am my own god and nobody else really matters in my life; but I can choose a kind of hell for others, too, simply by going about my business without consciously working on my ethical place in the world.
Jesus cuts across all of this and uses sharp language and vivid energy to get through to us. Jesus does not want us to live in that horrible grey town. And he definitely doesn’t want us sending anyone else there. He uses hyperbole — wild exaggeration — to get our attention, all those startling lines about cutting out our eyes and cutting off our hands. He wants us to stop putting “stumbling blocks” in front of “little ones” who believe in him. He is urgent and earnest about this. We should listen!
Now, we need to understand more fully the term “little ones,” lest we think he’s only warning us against putting stumbling blocks in the path of adorable little children. It’s more accurate to understand that by “little ones,” Jesus means lots of different people. He means neophytes in his movement. He also means people who lack privilege or status, because they are female, or in a different religious or ethnic group, or physically different in some way, or carriers of disease, or lower on the socioeconomic ladder. So yes, “little ones” does include children, particularly in our own time of history when so many children are vulnerable to so much injustice, violence, and oppression. But it also means many, many more people. It means newcomers here at Grace, certainly, but also those who do not feel welcome here and who doubt that we have any interest in welcoming them. It means people who lack economic or education privilege; people who lack cisgender, male, or white privilege; people our culture decides are too old, or too unattractive, or too sick, or too unworthy for any reason to be treated with dignity and respect.
If we choose not to reach out to our neighbors, particularly those Jesus points to as ones the world ignores or abuses, then we are choosing a hellish existence for ourselves, and potentially a hellish experience for others, too. Everyone is damaged. On this point, Jesus seems to be giving us a sharp warning, not a warm invitation. Beware! Jesus seems to be saying. My easy pattern of unconscious participation in systems of abuse and oppression is damaging everyone, including me.
But Jesus is invitational, because he knows that we don’t have to listen. He does not threaten us with the judgment of hellfire, he only alerts us to the hellfire we bring upon ourselves and upon others when we choose not to seek justice in this world. He wants us to choose justice, to choose life.
In C.S. Lewis’s story about the grey town of hell, in his little book called “The Great Divorce,” he imagines several residents of hell getting on a bus and traveling to the edge of heaven. (These lonely and angry souls, so damaged by their misery, are not yet strong enough to handle the intensity of heaven proper, so they can only lurk around at the edge of that bright land.) Once they arrive there, one of them is met by a resident of heaven, a person who on earth happened to be his wife. Lewis calls her one of the “Blessed Ones.” Filled with God’s love and light, she greets her earthly husband after he gets off the bus, and she invites him to go back with her into the mountains, into the presence of God.
But there’s a problem. To move forward into heaven, and to truly leave hell, he has to let go of things he holds dear: he has to let go of resentment; he has to let go of his own sense of self-righteousness; he has to (using Jesus’s imagery) metaphorically cut off or gouge out the parts of himself that keep him small, and petty, and self-centered. In our reading of Lewis’s story, he has to consciously set aside privilege. But he mostly just has to let go, and trust someone else, and stop making everything about himself. This gives him great pause. Like many of us, this poor man has discovered that hellfire is awful enough, but it is comfortable, too. It is the devil he knows.
The Blessed One persists for a long time. She, like Jesus himself, is forceful and earnest. (It’s fair to say that in their marriage, she’s still doing most of the emotional labor.) She wants to get through to this soul, who seems to be insisting on dooming himself to hell. The words she says to him are what Christ himself says to us, even now, this morning, as we gather here and pray for wisdom and understanding, as we gather here and pray for God’s little ones, here and across the world. She says this, to her poor hellbound husband, and to us:
“Dear, no one sends you back. Here is all joy. Everything bids you stay.”
***
Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29
Psalm 19:7-14
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50
Preached on the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 21B), September 26, 2021, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Artwork: Judy Dodds, watercolor, 2014, based on a quotation from C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce. I commissioned this work when I was approaching my first sobriety anniversary, on May 13, 2014.