October 02, 10:30am (Kevin Westling)
So, if you want to believe in Hell as real estate, as an eternal punishment by a vindictive and parsimonious God, go right ahead. But please, if you are going to believe such a thing… at least use images from our own experience; images from Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Cambodia, Rwanda and Sudan. Why stick with an ancient trash dump when we have so many more graphic images, from within our own generations, of how human beings create hell for one another. I for one reject the idea of Hell. I think it is absurd, personally. I can’t make sense of the notion of Hell.
Download
Full Text
SERMONS AT TRINITY
Sunday, September 27, 2009
“Bloom baby, bloom”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
Well, I can talk about Hell…or late summer roses.
You know,
the word and concept of Hell is as much poetry
as Mary Oliver “Late Summer Roses.”
The problem is
that we have had so much bad religion
use Hell so badly,
using narrative to talk about Hell as real estate,
that it is almost impossible to ‘get’
the poetry of Hell.
Okay,
I guess I am going to talk about Hell,
but then I want to say something about
late summer roses.
Gehenna
is where our word for “Hell” comes from,
and Gehenna was the name of an actual place.
Gehenna was the site of ancient Canaanite
ritual sacrifice of humans.
Children would be sacrificed there;
cut open, bled and burned
to access the Canaanite gods.
Such a brutal custom horrified the Israelites who had became the dominant culture in Canaan.
Actually,
as I tell my college students,
the story of Abraham being delivered from
sacrificing his own son, Isaac,
is an anti-child sacrifice story
that Israel told in order to explain why they did not
sacrifice children as the surrounding cultures did.
And jumping ahead 1000 years,
it is the same story
that brought us the idea of Jesus as God’s sacrificial lamb that saves us from Hell.
I know, it doesn’t make much sense to us in 2009.
But what is important is to see
how tangled it all is
with very ancient stories and ideas.
It was a very powerful story in the ancient world –
powerful enough to change world history.
But it isn’t such a powerful story today,
and ideas of ritual sacrifice to God or gods
simply do not add up for us in 2009.
But I need go back to Hell for a moment.
(I know, some people I have already going to Hell).
Anyway, the ancient Israelites,
in an act of scorn toward the notion of child sacrifice,
and as a rejection of human sacrifice altogether,
created a garbage dump at Gehenna.
They created a garbage dump
on a sacred Canaanite holy site
which is a pretty graphic denunciation.
A 1000 years later,
in Jesus’ time,
Gehenna was the site of the municipal dump
for the city of Jericho.
Now close your eyes and think about this:
Conjure up the image of an arid climate,
where the dirt –
if there is any on top of the bedrock –
is baked by the sun to a clay-fired hardness.
There are no modern earth-movers,
so what is a municipal dump going to look like?
What is an ancient municipal dump
going to smell like?
In the ancient world,
where do you put the dead bodies of indigents’
or peasants whose families are too poor to claim them,
or miscreant beggars
who have no family to begin with?
Are the authorities going to allow such rotting bodies to take up precious
and expensive space in a burial cave?
Absolutely not, such lifeless refuse is thrown
on the garbage heap and burned.
Gehenna
was an endlessly smoking pile of trash rotting in the sun, where charred and worm-eaten human remains
fuel a fire that is never quenched.
The mythical images of Hell
come from the municipal garage dump of Jericho –
and much later on, from Dante.
The idea of Hell was imported from Persia,
modern day Iran, from Zoroastrianism,
and brought back by the exiled Hebrews much earlier.
But the images
come from Gehenna, a dump.
So, if you want to believe in Hell as real estate,
as an eternal punishment
by a vindictive and parsimonious God,
go right ahead.
But please,
if you are going to believe such a thing…
at least use images from our own experience;
images from Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Cambodia,
Rwanda and Sudan.
Why stick with an ancient trash dump
when we have so many more graphic images,
from within our own generations,
of how human beings create hell for one another.
I for one reject the idea of Hell.
I think it is absurd, personally.
I can’t make sense of the notion of Hell.
I can’t get my head around a place where God
not only balances the scales of justice
as we would insist upon them being balanced,
but also acts as a vindictive sadist
who willingly tortures those with moral failures
as well as the mentally deranged –
who were victims of their own damaged biology
even as they were perpetrators of violence to others.
If that concept of God were not problematic enough,
it stands in contrast to the ancient prophetic notion
of a God who loves mercy MORE than justice.
And if that were still not enough
to cast doubt upon the idea and image of Hell
as anything other than poetry,
we live in the 21st century
in which the idea that human beings occupy the center of God’s universe is as odd and quaint as the idea that the Earth is flat.
Knowing what we know about the Cosmos,
or more to the point,
knowing how much we don’t know about the Cosmos,
the image of God as a moralistic Accountant,
someone keeping score on our lives with a golden abacus, seems…
well, I have to say it seems down right primitive.
But who knows, I could be wrong
and that is absolutely and exactly how God manages the creation.
Okay, that is enough about Hell.
I wouldn’t have mentioned it if Mark didn’t make
such a gigundo big deal about it.
I have read dozens of commentaries over the years
about what Jesus might have meant
by pluck out your eye if it offends you,
but it all sounds like trying to domesticate Jesus.
The only thing I can say about it
is that Mark wrote
and put the words in Jesus’ mouth,
and I don’t know if Jesus actually said it.
But if he did, he must have been having a really bad day.
Like all of you,
I have issues that won’t go away in my life
and some days they are more painful to accept than others.
Some days I just want my issues to go away.
Some days I feel like taking Jesus’ advice
and plucking out any and all dysfunctions I could.
But those are only on the very worst days.
So, I don’t take these verses that seriously,
because I do not take the threat of Hell seriously,
nor do I ever take fear-mongering with the threat of God seriously.
So with Gehenna behind us, let’s move on to late summer roses.
Mary Oliver’s conclusion,
“Neither do they ask how long they
must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.”
reminds me of Jesus suggesting we
witness the lilies of the field, how they grow…
they neither toil nor spin
and yet they are magnificently beautiful.
I guess we are not really that far
from the conversation about Hell after all,
because we are all late summer roses.
We are all singing birds
that one day will no longer be able to sing.
We are all leaves that will turn red and golden,
and fall to the ground.
We are all
foxes teaching our children
and one day we will be replaced by our children.
I guess that is what Mary Oliver’s poem is about…
about the red and golden autumn
disappearing into the cold dark winter.
At the very moment it all seems so sweet –
in the autumn
when it is all so exquisite,
all so unspeakably beautiful,
like a perfectly ripe apple jumps for joy in your mouth,
at that very moment
it is also about to turn
and say good bye.
And what both poets, Mary Oliver and Jesus,
tell us is:
just bloom.
Just bloom away like the late summer rose.
Bloom as if there is nothing else to do but show your exquisite self for what it is and never even peek at the season’s turning.
Threats of Hell
and promises of Heaven
are utterly unfaithful.
They are utterly lacking in trust.
Bloom, for Christ’s sake!
“Neither do they ask how long they
must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.”
Neither should we ask, “Then what?”
We do not know the answer to “Then what?”
We will never know the answer to “Then what?”
Unless of course, we find out when we die,
and then it will be “Now what?”
I am not really being flip about this.
Of course we have anxiety about death
and what is after death,
but trying to resolve that anxiety
with made up theories and myths
that we pretend are actual, is lacking in trust.
Demanding to know how it is all going to work out
in the end so that our sense of justice is fulfilled,
and the good guys get rewarded
while the bad guys get punished,
not only lacks trust,
it asks for more than we get to know.
We do not get to know.
We do not get to know.
We do not get to know.
We will die without getting to know.
Either we trust God in this
or we do not,
and if we trust God
then what happens on the other side of the veil
is left to bloom on its own,
while we bloom as long
and as spectacularly as we possibly can.
Now having said all of that –
or said nothing actually,
other than we don’t get to know…
Let me offer one more thing
before we offer up our prayers.
As it says in the introduction to the Worship Guide,
Creation is our primary sacrament.
Creation,
all that we see and hear and touch and feel and taste…
is an outward and visible sign
of God’s presence in the our midst.
What that means is that,
if God is the Creator,
then the Creation can tell us more about God
than anything else – including our mythologies.
That is really what Mary Oliver does with her poems –
she looks for evidence of the holy
in the Creation.
One thing that we know about the Creation
is that, what we call resurrection, is woven into its fabric.
Matter, and therefore energy,
does not go out of existence
but changes form.
The summer rose dies and falls upon the earth
and is absorbed
and eaten by the earth, so to speak,
and becomes part of that which has eaten it.
The bloom is unrecognizable as a later seed or branch,
but it is present nonetheless.
The grain of sand at the bottom
of the deepest part of the ocean
came from a mountain top.
Groundwater dripping from the ceiling of the
deepest underground aquifer,
has already been through the rain-and-snow-and-evaporation cycle numerous times.
I don’t know what that means for you and me
except that if the entire cosmos operates that way,
then I figure we do too.
If indeed,
as it says in the Book of Genesis,
that the Creation is “good”
then by-God I am going to trust God,
that it is all good
even if at the very moment
it does not seem or feel good for me personally.
So the message for us is an ancient one:
Don’t be anxious about today –
what we have and what we do not have,
what we are and what we are not,
what we have achieved and failed to achieve.
Bloom, just bloom.
Whether we are in a tender time,
just barely beginning to bud,
or whether we are a late summer rose
and in our final bloom (which we can never predict),
bloom, just bloom.
You are exquisite.
You are.
You are as exquisite an act of Creation
as the most magnificent thing you can imagine –
you are.
So bloom baby..bloom.
