forest hill 
March 23, 2025
Third Sunday of Lent
“Daring Questions:
3. Heaven and Hell”
Our worship themes in these weeks before Easter grow out of the daring questions you sent me last month. Here are this week’s questions:
- How should we view heaven and hell? Do they exist?
- Do we believe hell and purgatory exist? if so, who goes there?
- Aren't we all forgiven?
I grew up with a child-like view of heaven and hell. Heaven was the place that “good” people ended up when they died; Hell was a place of torment that none of us ever want to experience. St. Peter’s job was to stand at the Pearly Gates and tell the souls of people who had died which road to take, depending on the things that were recorded in an enormous book in front of him. In that cartoon version of a final judgement there was no appeal, no opportunity even to argue your case, and no mercy. Even as a child I couldn’t reconcile that summary justice with what I was being taught about a God who loves and forgives. But I thought that this was what all church people were supposed to believe, and that God would be mad if I expressed my doubts!
How astonishing, then, to learn as an adult that Christians have never agreed about the nature of Heaven and Hell – especially about Hell! Some Christians think that a final judgment happens the moment we die; others that we need to wait till the end of the world. Some think it will happen when the Messiah comes; some think it’ll happen 1000 years later; some think the Second Coming is itself a myth. Some think Hell is a lake of fire; some think it’s nothing more than a dreary place full of regret and lost hopes. Some think Hell is something to fear; some think it’s no more than a metaphor to scare people into good behaviour. Over the centuries, legends, myths and artwork about the nature of Hell have multiplied to the point that they’d be unrecognizable to Biblical authors. And lots and lots of Christians have rejected the idea of “Hell” altogether, preferring to trust in a God of forgiveness who will ultimately reconcile all sin and repair all hurt.
If good Christians have held such a wide variety of views on this, and not been thrown out of the church for doing so, maybe there’s room for me too!
In the New Testament, the word we translate as “Hell” is actually no more than the name of the Jerusalem garbage dump – which, like many of our modern dumps, was characterized by spurts of fire as rotting food turned into flammable methane. It was a stinky and fearful place – and the bodies of people who died by suicide were thrown there – but it wasn’t a supernatural place.
Jesus himself says almost nothing about an afterlife, and the stories he does tell sound more like warnings and teaching stories than they do like eye witness accounts. Think about the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, or the separation of the sheep and the goats, or the farmer who dies with barns full of hoarded grain. Each of those stories is a warning about how to choose wise priorities in this life. Each of those stories use “the afterlife” as a way to invite us to contemplate the value and purpose of our lives today. Each of those stories advises that we should live in light of the legacy we hope to leave. None of them really gives us a roadmap to the Hereafter.
In church history, stories about Hell have functioned that way too, except that they came with the added baggage that the church claimed an enormous amount of authority on how to avoid an evil end. Where Jesus tries to entice to us live differently, the church has threatened us with terrifying retribution. Where Jesus encouraged us to trust in God’s forgiveness, the church claimed that a horrifying end could be avoided for a price – usually a donation! For me, the power grab makes the church’s approach suspect!
How do we rationalize all these different views? How do we inhabit a church, and a tradition, that contains so much variation? What is faithfulness, when the “right” answers aren’t obvious?
I wonder if, at its root, all our thoughts about an afterlife are ways to wrestle with our conviction that God cares when people act evilly. We want to trust in a God who will set the world to rights, but sometimes evil people prosper. Trusting that God will eventually right the balance – even if we have to wait till our life on Earth is over – is one way to keep faith that God cares, and will fix things. But is this really how God is fixing things? Is this the only way we can see that God cares? Is it God’s job to be a hanging judge? Do hanging judges really repair what’s going wrong?
Join us on Sunday as we wrestle with how we connect our conviction that God stands for justice with our confusion about what that might look like in both this world and the next!