Grace Church in New York

Posted: Nov 17, 2013

By Fleming Rutledge

At Grace Church in 1993 we had a series of Wednesday evening sermons
on the Four Last Things of Advent:
Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell—in their traditional order.
The sermon is unchanged from Advent 1993
and the names of parishioners have not been disguised.

Some of you have been curious about the hymns I would choose on this night when the subject, “Hell,” has been so widely advertised. The fact is that I have never had an easier time picking hymns. All I had to do was look through the Advent section of the hymnal. Here are some words that one finds in the Advent hymns: shadow, exile, fear, darkness, gloom, captive, misery, decay, bondage, torment, grave, doom, judgment, ancient curse, dread foe, Satan, sin, evil, death, hell. You get the idea.

You might think, Oh, well, this is Advent. But if you look sharp, you will notice that these themes persist into the Christmas season. It is truly remarkable that the season of our Lord’s birth has evoked, over the centuries, a large number of carols and hymns based on these motifs. You might particularly notice this at Christmas Eve services when choirs often sing early music, or early words set to modern music. Only in more recent centuries has all the focus been on shepherds, sheep, camels, and other child-friendly motifs. I have recently purchased the latest hot ticket in early music, a CD from Anonymous Four called On Yoolis Night. It is a collection of medieval Christmas carols and motets. Glancing through the texts, I note these additional words: guilt, hostility, offences, danger, malice, crimes, punishment, treachery, falsehood, vileness, horror, dregs of foulness, heretical fraud, malignant bond, the devil’s power, the Judgment Day. Can you imagine? Modern Americans are not used to thinking of Christmas this way. We don’t want our nice pretty holiday spoiled by these morbid subjects. In fact, we have a notable capacity for overlooking such things altogether; we are so enchanted with the music that we forget to listen to the words. The King’s Singers’ version of the Coventry Carol is a good one because it is so harsh and dissonant that one simply cannot avoid the fact that it tells a story about the massacre of babies.

The wisdom of earlier centuries was sometimes greater than ours, though that is hard for us to believe. The medieval church had an Advent tradition of focusing on what were called the Four Last Things during the four weeks of Advent, in this order: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. This meant that Hell was the subject in closest proximity to the birth of Jesus. This was no accident. Here at Grace Church we are following this custom on Wednesday nights this year, believing that there is an important reason for the old tradition.

John Root gave me a book three weeks ago; newly published, it is called The History of Hell by Alice K. Turner. It has lots of text and spectacular illustrations, but it is interesting to note that Ms. Turner issues a lighthearted disclaimer at the beginning; she writes, “I do not believe in Hell; I could hardly attempt this book if I did…[my book is] a real history of an imaginary place.”

I find that an amazing statement. The reason that Advent preaching is so important in the Christian church is that it is the time in our calendar when we take sin and evil seriously (that’s why we don’t bring out our Christmas decorations until Christmas Eve). It astonishes me that a thoughtful person could write a whole book about Hell and then toss the subject off so lightly. I myself think Hell is one of the realest things I know.

Now let’s be clear. I will not be talking tonight about Hell as a place of eternal fire and everlasting physical torment. Even Billy Graham has given up that idea, as he says in a recent Timemagazine interview. I agree with Ms. Turner here, who says that the descriptions of Hell in Matthew, Mark and Luke are “colorfully hyperbolic repetitive rhetoric” used to make a point. I am not very interested in the concept of Hell as a place of unceasing fiery torture, which I believe to be extrabiblical. Most of the mythology that clings to the subject of Hell came along in postBiblical times. For instance, there is a widespread belief that the Bible depicts the saints taking delight in the torments of the damned. This is not true; those admittedly gruesome passages come later in church history, with Tertullian and others.

What is Hell, then?

I believe what I am going to say is compatible with the New Testament and with the facts of life in this world. Hell is not a place. It is a domain. It is the domain of evil, the sphere where wickedness rules. It is, I believe, necessary to posit the existence of Hell as a way of acknowledging the reality and power of radical evil. By “radical evil,” I mean evil that has an existence independent of the sum total of human folly. Radical evil is aggressive, clever, willful, diabolical—that is to say, it has a personality, an intelligence, a purposefulness all its own, which explains why we personify it as the figure of Satan. Flannery O’Connor, who has written about the Devil as memorably as anyone, says that he, or it, “is not simply generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy.”

I believe, as I said before, that Hell is one of the realest things I know. It has been described in philosophical terms as “the absence of good.” That is true so far as it goes, but it does not go anywhere near far enough. It is too abstract. Auschwitz was not just the absence of good. Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia was not just the absence of good. The massacre of the population of El Mozote in El Salvador, many of whom were evangelical Christians, was described in The New Yorker last month; this massacre was not just the absence of good, but an example of demonstrable evil in which the United States government and the Wall Street Journal and other organizations participated by covering it up, by lying about it, by refusing to believe the testimony of scores of witnesses and photographs. But the Wall Street Journal is a fine Christian paper, is it not, with all sorts of good articles that I cut out and put in my files? But that is just what I mean. Radical evil is loose in the world and it finds many well-meaning people and institutions to serve its purposes. That is what the New Testament means by the “principalities and powers.” Satan has gotten hold of the principalities and powers so that tobacco company executives, for instance, will testify with a straight face (I have this here in my files), “To my knowledge, it’s not been proven that cigarette smoking causes cancer.” That is a good example of the nature of evil as idiotic, vulgar, and stupid. No one has outdone C. S. Lewis in portraying the obscene, coarse stupidity of evil. His descriptions of the devil in Perelandra are the most memorable that I have read in this regard. Here is no glamorous Satan like Milton’s in Paradise Lost. I have not been able to seeSchindler’s List yet, but I gather that one of its virtues is in depicting the Nazis, not as the dashing, impeccable villains we are accustomed to from a thousand movies, but as coarse, mindless, and gross.

We have not said anything about Hell as a place to which one goes after death. I want to establish the idea that Hell is not a place at all, but a realm. It is the domain of wickedness, of stupidity, of despair, of hopelessness. You will remember the famous words over the gate to Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” To have no hope is truly to be in Hell. How can anyone not believe in Hell who has known a person who has committed suicide? I believe that most people who kill themselves do so because they are experiencing Hell; they have lost hope; darkness reigns over them. That is why suicide prevention is an important Christian activity; it is a way of doing battle against the reign of darkness. It is a way of signifying that death is not the last word.

I think of the Advent collect: “Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come to judge the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal.” Here is the Advent theme of the link between this life and the life to come, the link which will finally and decisively be made in the Day of Judgment. On that day there will be only one Ruler, only one Lord; Scripture is quite clear and unambiguous about that. The Judge of all the cosmos will not be Satan. Radical evil will have no status in the last day. “Death will have no more dominion” (Romans 6:9).

Until that day comes, we must believe in the “hideous strength” (C.S. Lewis) of the realm of wickedness. We must believe in it because of that little two-year-old boy in England who was dragged off and beaten to death and left on the railroad tracks by two children not much older than he is. We must believe in Hell because there is no other way to take seriously the nature and scale of evil in the world. We must believe in Hell because there is no other way to do justice to the victims of darkness. We must believe in Hell because without it, Christian faith is sentimental and evasive, unable to stand up to reality in this world. Without an unflinching understanding of the radical nature of evil, Christian faith would be nothing but a suburban bedtime story.

Will Hell, conceived as a domain, not a place, persist into eternity? About this we cannot be sure. The book of Revelation, which is a major source for these motifs, speaks somewhat mysteriously of the “second death” in a lake of fire. Again, not even Billy Graham understands this literally; he says the fire is “possibly an illustration of how terrible it’s going to be [to be separated from God].” I think we can say this much for sure, based again on the book of Revelation with its “Hallelujah Chorus”: The Messiah is going to reign for ever and ever. The Devil is not going to reign for ever and ever. It is not for nothing, therefore, that we read the passage from Romans 8 earlier in the service: “For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Why is Hell brought into such close proximity to Christmas in the liturgy of the church? Once again we will find answers in the Christmas hymns. Here is a translation from the Latin of one of the motets from On Yoolis Night: “When time had run its course, the Father…sent from the heavenly throne his only begotten son…that in this fleshly abode he might vanquish the devil.” Over and over again you will find it, if you are alert; the meaning of Christmas is that God has entered the lists against the Prince of Darkness. You will hear this on Christmas Eve at Grace Church. Satan has met his master.

Our gospel lesson tonight was one of the classic lessons for Advent, the story of the wise and foolish virgins. You remember that the story tells of a wedding with ten bridesmaids. Five were ready and five not. When the bridegroom arrives, the five bridesmaids who have their lamps burning are admitted to the feast. The other five have the door shut in their faces, and hear these terrible words: “Truly, I say to you, I do not know you” (Matthew 25).

Last week we had a sermon on Heaven. One way of understanding Hell, surely, is that it is the opposite of Heaven, which is typically depicted in Scripture as a wedding banquet. Last Friday night Susan Leckrone was married to David Copley. After their honeymoon and a few more weeks of furlough they are going back to Liberia to continue the work they have begun in resisting the Devil by ministering to the children who have been traumatized by the civil war there. This wedding was one of the great events of recent years at Grace Church. Many, many people were present, some of them from considerable distances, who had not been here for years–people I thought I might not see again. I did not realize how many there were until I began distributing communion. It was simply astonishing to look out and see the people who were coming forward. I was overwhelmed. It seemed like a little foretaste of the Kingdom of God. It was as if the saints past, present, and future were being gathered for the marriage feast of the Lamb. There were so many of them from so many different eras at Grace Church that I could hardly believe it. I began to imagine that I was seeing other dear people too, people who had died, faces from the Church Triumphant joining with us “who toil below.” Then suddenly I saw the radiant faces of Claire and Michael Aitchison. It would be a great surprise to them to learn that they were serving tonight in this sermon as illustrations of the Kingdom of Heaven. When they were members here, Claire and I had some run-ins. When they left, I was sad that there had not been more of a reconciliation. When I saw their glowing faces as they came to the altar rail, an amazing thing happened to me. It was as if the past had been simply erased. We were two sinners rejoicing in the same salvation, the same deliverance. For a few minutes, at least, I felt I knew what heaven was going be like. Everything unhappy will be purged away. It will be God’s doing, not ours. We will be new creatures, children of the day.. All of our unlovable traits will be gone forever. Reconciliation will be complete; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it. “ And they will come from north and south, and from east and west, to sit at the marriage feast of the; Lamb.”

There is no music in Hell; there is only hideous discordance. There is no dancing in Hell. There is no joy in Hell. There is no hope in Hell. Above all, there is no love in Hell. But the day will come when the divine laughter will ring through heaven like Papageno’s glockenspiel in The Magic Flute, and the devil, like the rapist Monostatos in the opera, will dance to the Lord’s tune before he is overthrown for ever. “And there [will be] war in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon, and the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent who is called Satan, the deceiver of the whole earth, he was thrown down. Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, ‘The kingdoms of this world have become the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever. Amen. Hallelujah!”

~~

Fleming Rutledge is a preacher and teacher known throughout the mainline Protestant denominations of the US, Canada and parts of the UK. She is the author of seven books and has received a grant from the Louisville Foundation to complete a book about the meaning of the Crucifixion.

One of the first women to be ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church, she served for fourteen years on the clergy staff at Grace Church on Lower Broadway at Tenth Street, New York City.

Fleming and her husband celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2009 and have two daughters and two grandchildren. She is a native of Franklin, Virginia.

http://www.generousorthodoxy.org/sermons/hell—a-sermon-for-advent.aspx