Pasadena Presbyterian Church Sermon Text
September 28, 2003 

"Thrown Into Hell"
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Mark Smutny

Scripture:  Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Mark 9:38-50

The Bible regularly astounds us with uproariously embarrassing and confounding passages to those among us who are immersed in modernism, the scientific world view, and the measured calm of empirical inquiry. 

We well educated types prefer cautious method and careful statement.  For 200 years, we've been carefully trained to dislodge hyperbole and fantasy from our religious quest and, instead, make our faith plausible and reasonable, so as not to be embarrassed when in cultured company with people who don't share our beliefs. 

In polite company, during intermission at, say, the opera, we rarely talk about mud-spit miracles, whales swallowing prophets and regurgitating them on shore, or lost and hateful souls being cast into the outer darkness where there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth.  We don't think that way or talk that way. 

Then along comes Mark's Gospel where Jesus speaks in stark, melodramatic images posing bleak alternatives.  "Choose this day what you will be and who you will follow.  It is better to mutilate yourself, to cut off your arm, to sever your foot, to gouge out your eye, than to end up in hell."

We are embarrassed by the wild exaggeration and are comforted by Biblical scholars who remind us that it was ancient Hebrew custom to speak in hyperbole.  All rabbis spoke this way to grab our attention, to shake us up.  It is only a dramatic device. Reassured, we return to our calm, respectable religion safe in polite society.

"It's better to go into the kingdom of God deformed, without an eye, foot or arm, than to find one's whole body cast into the furnace of hell," Jesus says.  "I set before you life and death, blessing and curse.  Choose right now whether to sacrifice your body to the kingdom of God or the fires of hell."  Hell, we're talking about hell.

We don't dedicate much time here at this church talking about hell.  In two decades plus of pastoral ministry I can never recall a single sermon about hell, save two years ago when Barrie Shepherd, retired pastor of First Presbyterian of New York City, preached here at PPC and talked about Ground Zero as hell.  But then he wasn't talking about you know where, he was talking about lower Manhattan on 9/11.

Hell is not one of your more inspiring biblical themes.  But Jesus, without a doubt, brings the subject up.  So will I.

Jesus really doesn't call it hell.  He uses the Aramaic name of a place called Gehenna.  It's a real, geographical place just south of Jerusalem.  So when we think of Dante's seven levels of hell in the Inferno, that's not what Jesus had in mind.  He was talking about Gehenna. 

Gehenna is in Hinnon Valley.  Centuries before Jesus, Gehenna had been a place where unfaithful Jews had practiced idolatry including sacrificing children to the pagan gods Molech and Baal.  Later it was used as place where enemy soldiers bodies were dumped after battle.  We call it a mass grave. 

By Jesus' time, it was the town dump where rubbish,  animal carcasses and bones were tossed.  Thus Jesus says quite literally it would be better to pluck out your eye and cut off your limb than be cast into this rubbish heap filled with garbage and atrocity. 

I don't imagine that ancient Near Eastern society produced that much garbage.  There were no plastics or paper or old computer monitors or disposable diapers.  If Gehenna was foul smelling, detestable and repulsive to Jesus' era, then our own dumps must be truly reprehensible.  Of course, we don't call them dumps anymore, they're sanitary landfills.  We don't really see them.  Our garbage is compacted, hermetically sealed in bags and delivered by mechanical arms to some place.  I'm not sure where.  Over the mountains?

But they must smell awful.  As a child, before the Environmental Protection Agency forced us nationwide to clean up our dumps, I would go with my father to the Twin Falls County Dump and Landfill.  It was about three miles away, just west of the airport.  With the prevailing westerlies, it was helpful to approach from the west in order to keep from gagging.  We would empty our trash barrels and gawk at the poor people picking through the refuse looking for items that they could sell: old bicycles, washing machines, a well worn dresser.  They would stack their old pickup trucks with the discards of the more affluent.   

Occasionally we would take the time to look around and see and smell all kinds of sordid things.  I don't ever remember hauling anything back.  I think Dad saw to that.  It was easy for me to imagine that five hundred years from now, some archeologist would be digging up our culture and drawing conclusions about what we treasure and what we do not.

I assume not many of you have ever visited a landfill.  The very thought of them may nauseate you.  To me, they are fascinating places.  In dumps, you can find out what we value and what we do not.  It's the end of the line.  Everything ends up there after having outlived its usefulness.  Everything that is forgotten, discarded, without dignity or honor or decorum ends up in the dump.

Jesus says, "Choose this day what you will be and who you will follow.  It is better to mutilate yourself, to cut off your arm, to sever your foot, to gouge out your eye, than to end up in some Gehenna, some garbage dump for all eternity."  Life is precious.  Your life is precious.  All of life is sacred.  Don't cast it away on some refuse heap.  God doesn't make junk.

Years ago I was making a pastoral visit to the state mental hospital in Dayton, Ohio.  Stephen, who had been a member of the singles group I staffed, had tragically had an onset of schizophrenia in his mid-20s.  His parents were active members in the Dayton church where we served.  I remember standing at the imposing gray security door, waiting to be let in, waiting, wondering how I could possibly be helpful.

When the door opened I could see some patients pacing the hallways, while some mindless soap opera droned on, tobacco smoke and PineSol permeating the air.  I could hear pleas of help coming from a room and when I sat down to visit Steve there was only his bed.  He talked nonstop for an hour with no coherent pattern.  Yet, he knew who I was and his pain was palpable.  I felt utterly helpless.  There was little chance he would be able to get out.  It was the Dayton state mental hospital, but it's name was really Gehenna.

Most of us have been to nursing homes, not the good, clean ones with cheery paintings and comfortable chairs and enough staff.  I'm talking about the ones that are named something innocuous like Mercy Care Center.  They could be called Gehenna.  Inside are underpaid orderlies and nurses stretched to weariness with too many patients.  People are bound in wheelchairs and the odor is hard to take.  Cries of "help me" are too often heard.  Visitors are few and far between.   Gehenna. 

Gehenna is any hellish place where human beings are forgotten, where children of God are discarded, where moms and dads and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters are treated as little more than garbage.

Jesus says that in God's kingdom, no child is forgotten.  There is no place in creation, where God's love cannot be found.  We can travel to the farthest reaches of sea and God will be there.  We can even make our bed in Sheol and God will still find us.  God's love is everywhere and if God's love is everywhere, then God's love must even be in the thousands of Gehennas that stain the landscape of creation. 

Jesus looks at the hells we have created, the places of refuse and heartache, of loneliness and the forgotten, and he speaks starkly: "Choose this day what you will be and who you will follow.  It is better to mutilate yourself, to cut off your arm, to sever your foot, to gouge out your eye, than to end up in Gehenna."

"I believe in Jesus Christ . . . who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; he descended into hell," says the ancient creed.  Jesus was descending into hell all the time, not just when he was crucified, but throughout his ministry.  He entered into places that others had given up for lost, into the margins of hopelessness, out to the edges of town where people discarded their refuse, confronting demons of paralysis, overturning structures of religious arrogance and exclusion, healing all that is wounded, driving out everything that dehumanizes and degrades, welcoming in the broken, the lost, the reviled.  He descended into hell.

As followers of Jesus, we take up his courage.  We live his life.  We meet him in these places.  There can be no tolerance for resignation.  There are no places that can be tossed away.  There is no Gehenna that we can not carry his love.  We both treasure the lives we have been given and we cherish every other life.

The church is that collection of people who have the courage and compassion to enter into the thousands of Gehennas that are a part of this life.  From forgotten nursing homes to mental health wards, from trash-strewn back alleys to the rubble of wars, we keep entering these hells and we salvage lives.  We restore dignity.  We declare that life is precious and that God doesn't make junk. 

With God's help and the strong arms of Jesus, we lift people from loneliness.  We dust off what is tarnished and declare it beautiful.  We embody the wildly imaginative, uncontrollable good news that God's kingdom is all around us.  Look at it.  Live in to it.  There is no place that cannot be redeemed with the power of God's love.

"See, I set before you today life and death, blessing and curse.  Choose this day, who you will serve."  Decide now, today. 

If there is anything that needs to be cast away in you, anything that holds you back, some secret fear, some deep wound, some prized possession, pluck it out, cut it off, get rid of it.  Your life is at stake.  Salvage your life.  Make it whole again.

If you know of anyone who teeters on the edge of their Gehenna, seek them out.  Go to them.  Descend into their hell with all the compassion you can muster and lift them up and let them know that they are precious, beloved, of essential worth.  Let them know that God loves them and so do you.

Go there today.  Descend into hell and be raised.  Amen.

(c) Copyright 2003 by Mark K. Smutny.  All rights reserved.  Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution.