I.

Our Presbyterian forebears used to talk about Hell all the time. But we have not spoken about Hell very much in the past few decades; I suspect that since Hell doesn’t fit very well into any kind of modern world-view, we stopped bringing it up. Hell appears in the Bible, of course, but in the view of many it is really not a major biblical theme. It also seems to depict an angry, vindictive, unforgiving, and brutal deity which we have trouble reconciling easily with the God of love.

At most we might talk these days about Hell as a "spiritual place," or a "state of separation from God," or even a present reality in the form of mental illness or political oppression. At the same time, in the 20^th century human beings have gone further in bringing Hell to Earth than at any other time, with a catalogue of unspeakable and inhuman horrors culminating in the Nazi Holocaust.

In spite of this, we tend to view Hell as a sort of mythological residue from a age when the common people were thought to require some cosmic paternalistic threat in order to keep them in line. It was like the monsters who would take away and devour our children if they wouldn’t behave, or so we told them. Hell becomes a fiction which is useful in exercising social control. But now that we are mature adults — and sophisticated moderns — we believe we no longer have need of such a childish and embarrassing doctrine.

In this passage, Paul isn’t talking specifically about Hell, but Hell is there in the background in some form. He is talking about God’s judgment and condemnation, and the consequences of evil actions. "Wrath and fury," "anguish and distress" are the words Paul uses to describe the consequences of these actions.

And even this has become hard for us to swallow. Like jaded and petulant teenagers, we modern people hear about God’s wrath and judgment and say, rolling our eyes, "Yeah, right." We know that whoever had the power always predicted dire consequences if they are disobeyed. Nonconformity was frequently said to have earned people certain damnation. We just don’t believe it anymore.

On the contrary, we modern folks know that the disobedient nonconformists among us are really more often at the cutting edge of social progress. Revolutionaries and rebels, individuals who went against the grain and challenged convention, those who reject the old and strike out for the new... in science and politics and sports and war and the arts, these are our heroes!

They were undeterred by threats of God’s wrath against the disobedient. They knew these threats were just a smokescreen for the institutional preservation of the entrenched powers-that-be. Where would we be if Luther, or Galileo, or Jefferson, or Edison, or Lincoln, or Susan B. Anthony, or Frederick Douglass, or Beethoven, or Van Gogh, or Bob Dylan, or Miles Davis, or any of the great leaders and innovators of our era were intimidated into towing the established line by threats of God’s wrath? And all of them received such threats, I assure you!

So it’s easy to understand why we might want to skip over passages like this one and move on to something more relevant, something more suited to mature adults who don’t need to be motivated by mythical threats.

II.

However we may be led to understand Hell, it is important to remember that the judgment and wrath of God are not illusions or abstractions. They are not invented fantasies to be used in controlling immature and unenlightened people. They are real in the sense that they are actual dimensions of human experience, and they need to be taken seriously.

Jesus said we ought not to judge others, for those who judge others will be judged by God. So the primary way to bring judgment from God down on ourselves is to pass judgment on others. To judge is itself to put ourselves in God’s place over someone. It is to reject our equality with that person and to assume a stance of superiority above them. Judging is therefore usurping God’s position in the life of another.

To judge is to put ourselves at the center of our universe. It is to claim the role of arbiter over someone else. It is to make our own immediate needs the ultimate criteria for all the decisions in our life.

On the surface, that does not seem unreasonable. But when taken to its logical conclusion it becomes an inherently hostile, sour, and closed way to live.

We have tended to function in this way generally as human beings, and I think it is one of the main manifestation of human sinfulness. This is what Paul is getting at with his audience of Christians in Rome, most of whom were Jews. This is what he means when he says they are doing the same sinful things as those whom they judge and condemn. He is criticizing the ethnocentrism of a community which had considered itself to have a lock on God’s favor, to the exclusion of everyone else. In this view, only some were saved by birth and those others, Gentile sinners, were automatically condemned.

Paul criticizes his brothers and sisters for their arrogance and self-righteousness in judging others as sinners. He says that their own attitude of judgment actually condemned themselves. They criticized Gentiles for being cut-off from God, but by the very act of judgment, Paul’s friends were cutting themselves off from God just as completely.

The apostle sees that it is a crime against God when we put ourselves, humanity, the individual, our family, race, nation, economic system, religion, political philosophy, or community, at the center of our world. When people believe, as Paul himself used to and many of his fellow Jews still did, that, as we say about immature people, "the whole world revolves around them," we have a problem. And it is at least as big a problem for the people espousing such views as it is for those whom they judge.

Before we congratulate ourselves for our enlightenment and maturity in this regard, let’s think about how we still participate in this crippling ideology. Most of us, I suspect, still believe that human beings have a God-given right to dispense with the Earth and its life-forms, even other people, as we please. We don’t think twice about mowing down forests for tract houses, redirecting rivers for irrigation or recreation, drilling for oil in natural treasures, or displacing or even wiping out wildlife that has gotten in our way. We even casually and violently remove other people who get in the way of what we call progress. Indeed, we too often approach personal relationships with the same self-centered callousness, passing judgment on who we want in our presence, even on who will live and die. The inconvenient, the unproductive, the unattractive, the poor, the sick, the aged, children, illegal immigrants, convicts, foreigners, workers.... We have too often judged many people in these and other categories to be of less value and importance, and may be sacrificed to whatever happens to be our present self-centered whim.

Look at the way we make decisions regarding garbage and toxic and nuclear waste. The going philosophy is "NIMBY," which stands for "not in my backyard." We dump our trash in the mountains or the ocean or we send it to an incinerator in some hapless urban area to be burned, which is okay as long as the dump, barge, and incinerator are out of our sight and smell.

In economics and politics and in international relationships we are encouraged to think primarily in terms of how something directly and immediately benefits us: our nation, our company, our city, our family, or even just me personally. It is only the rarest of leaders who can convince us to make a sacrifice for the good of others from which we see no tangible and immediate gain.

III.

Paul writes to his friends in Rome, "By your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. For he will repay according to each one's deeds: to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but wickedness, there will be wrath and fury."

The point is, if, through self-centeredness and a judgmental attitude, you make the universe your enemy, something to be controlled, conquered, dominated, exploited, and drained, then you are also making an enemy out of the One who made it. If we are steering our course through history based on the hypothesis that we are at the center, we will certainly crash because we are proceeding according to false information. God is at the center of Reality, not us.

God is love. God loves us inexorably like gravity, like the movements of tides, like the flow of a great river, like the warm light of the sun. But if we, using false information derived from our assumption that we are ourselves at the center, step off a cliff, or try to row upstream, or gaze into the sun unprotected, we will fail. We will suffer the consequences. To those who resist and reject God’s love, that love seems to turn into wrath for them. We experience God’s love as judgment when we try to place ourselves at the center of our world.

It is part of being a self-reflective, thinking, conscious form of life, that we can if we want to choose to perceive God’s love as a horrible thing to be avoided. We can turn God’s love against ourselves and live as God’s enemies. We can choose death. We can construct Hell for ourselves.

And unfortunately, by our self-centeredness, we are choosing death. By choosing death for others, we are bringing God’s judgment down on ourselves. By visiting a reign of wanton wastefulness and terror on the Earth’s natural environment, by encouraging economies that allow for and create and spread poverty, unemployment, dislocation, and despair, by dismantling families and communities in the name of progress and personal liberty, by undermining individual responsibility and devaluing sacrifice... in all these ways and more we are choosing to live sour, pinched, cynical, negative, and shrunken lives bent on acquisition and hoarding and squeezing resources until they crumble. This is the careful and diligent building of Hell for others, and so in the end for ourselves.

IV.

Paul says that "God shows no partiality." We ultimately get repaid according to our deeds. "There will be anguish and distress," he says, "for everyone who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek."

For Paul there is now no "us" and "them." There is no sense in which one group of people, or even one aspect of creation, is any more at the center of things than any other. No group, race, nation, community, family, tribe, species, or individual is closer to God than any other. All are part of the great network of God’s holy creation and all will be evaluated according to the same standard: Are we doing good by bringing things together? Are we mediating God’s love and order, forgiveness and grace, into our world and the human community? Are we cherishing and celebrating and cultivating the life and existence of everything? Are we living in awe and wonder? Are we seeking for glory and honor and immortality by patiently doing good? In other words, are we following Christ?

Or are we living as if we, and not God, were the masters of creation, the lords of humanity, the saviors and redeemers of all?

Do our actions reflect and refer to the Kingdom of Heaven, which Christ proclaims as present among us and for which he taught us to pray? Do we live as if life were eternal? Or do we sneer and complain as we painstakingly rivet together the walls of Hell?

In Jesus Christ, God comes into the world to reveal that the world’s salvation is an accomplished reality. He comes to show us God’s Realm, a zone of perfection and completion which hovers around, beneath, within, with, and among us, but remains invisible to us, like gamma rays or the pervasive presence of empty space. God’s Realm hums in the space between the atoms and molecules of everything that has existence, including us. It shines in light inaccessible through everything. It shapes and forms and defines everything. God’s Spirit holds everything together and unites it in purpose and direction.

In God’s economy, nothing is ever lost. No one is ever finally abandoned to annihilation and extinction. Nothing can ever separate us from God’s love; all things are always working together for good.

This is the faith of Christ’s resurrection. May this faith and this hope guide our steps in the journey. May we continually remain oriented towards the true Center of all things, the living God. May we see ourselves joyfully spinning in our own orbits around that light, energized by its ever flowing life.

+++++++