If you're ever in the South, you'll notice there aren't a lot of really old places. There are venerable, elegant banks and state buildings, and if you head out of the city you'll find some plantations to tour, but your neighbor isn't going to be living in a home from the early 19th century. Each town won't have the little clapboard houses of the first settlers like you find in New England or New York state. And the reason is simple and practical: there was a war there. Only 150 years ago, which is a little blip on the cosmic time-line, the American South was a disaster zone. During the Civil War, towns and downtowns and farms and fields were leveled and burned and changed forever in more ways than a landscape can tell, and in more ways than people can remember. Today, if you shoot through Atlanta on Interstate-75, you're going to see success: tall buildings, thousands of cars, bridges and apartments that are new and shiny with this unbelievably cheery sun lighting it all up. But if you were running from Atlanta in 1864, it would have looked just like that scene from Gone with the Wind, where Rhett Butler is racing a horse and wagon through walls of flame as Sherman's army burns everything to the ground. Atlanta, a real place you can see today, looked like a furnace of fire.
When Jesus talks about wheat and chaff and the furnace of fire today, he's talking about a real place, too. South of Jerusalem there's valley called Gehenna that captured the imagination of Jesus' friends the way a haunted house captures ours. The valley was once home to people who worshipped a god called Molech, and by Jesus' time ideas about the horrible things their cult had done were part of popular lore. People may have burned trash there and Roman soldiers may have practiced cremation there, so evoking Gehenna brought up for everyone images not only of fire, but of ritually unclean and morally abhorrent things. In the Bible, Gehenna stands for everything that’s opposite to the kingdom of God, and to say a person would end up there meant that the more God's kingdom comes, the more God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven, the more painful life will be for those who are opposed to God's will.
So in the parable today, the one we just read about the wheat and the chaff, we could say that Jesus is being descriptive. He’s describing how people who are committed to bad things would experience the coming of something good. Which is easier to hear than if he were being entirely prescriptive about it - we don't want him to be saying here, "Bad people are going to live in a bad place forever and ever" which is our own popular idea about hell. Because if you believe the latest research, a lot of us here today are uncomfortable with the notion of eternal punishment - either we don't think about it, or we just don't buy it. A few years ago a huge scholarly study found that while 74% of Americans believe in an afterlife and believe in heaven, only 58% believe in hell (Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, June 2008). And that statistically significant sample of people who believe in heaven without believing in hell looks awfully like us. Many are Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians, Reformed Jews, or members of the United Church of Christ. Many live in urban areas where they meet lots of different types of people, or they have lots of education or work experience, so they've been exposed to different types of ideas. The sociologists and theologians who published the study had some thoughts about why hell has dropped off the map for so many people, and it seems to boil down to a couple of things.
First, the difference between who goes to heaven and who goes to hell is often cast in terms of belief or non-belief. Do you believe in God? Do you believe Jesus is God? Good - heaven's up that ladder over there. No God? No Jesus? Sorry. But people today see that their neighbors and their family members are good and kind and live according to God's will even if they are Buddhist or Muslim or atheist, and they're not willing to consign them to a Judeo-Christian underworld. The second thing is that the difference between who goes to heaven and who goes to hell is often cast in terms of doing good or doing bad. But we understand that being human is complex. Institutions and systems and states can lock all kinds of people in bad behaviors; sick families, sick circumstances can create sick individuals; what one group of people thinks is good another thinks is bad; and besides, our religion teaches us to love and to forgive. Who wants to walk down Michigan Avenue, looking at all those people around you like they're a waving field of grain, and decide "this one's in and this one's out ... she's wheat and he's chaff ... he's going to get punished, and she's going to be with God."
Here's the thing. That's what happens when we decide what hell is. That's what happens when humans do the choosing: we look at all of the people around us and since we can't possibly know about a person's soul, we decide who's good and who's bad based on things that aren't eternal. Like the servants in today's parable, we want to get in there and do a weeding even if it means that healthy plants get ripped up in the process. That's how you get a Holocaust or a Bosnia or a Rwanda. That's how you get prejudice and apartheid. But if you know better, if you’re rightfully sensitive to the evil that happens when we start deciding who is saved and who is lost, you end up with the problem of what to do with evil at all. How do we talk about it? How do we discern what it is? How do we teach our children and grandchildren about life in this world? And if it does make itself known to you - if, God forbid, something terrible happens to you or someone you love, or to the place where you live, like it did for us almost a decade ago, how do you suddenly make sense in a Christian way of this thing we're afraid to touch with a thirty foot pole? We don't even like to hear Jesus talk about it.
This is the part where we need God. Not for clues about what eternal punishment looks like, because God doesn't actually give us a lot of concrete information about any place called hell in the Bible. God does, however, give us tons of clues about what the kingdom of heaven looks like. And salvation - making your home with God - depends on being for God's kingdom. When we look to Jesus, we see that "God's kingdom" means health, sight, abundance, rest, reconciliation, peace, and unselfish love. But it comes at a cost. Those things don't just happen - they have to be prayed for and worked for, and there’s plenty in this world that is against them. You know it when you see it - you know that in God's kingdom children are safe, and you know that people who hurt children are not for the kingdom. You know that in God's kingdom people are governed wisely, and you know that leaders who abuse their people are not for the kingdom. You know that in God's kingdom people are judged by their hearts, and you know that those who judge by any other standard are not for the kingdom.
As people of faith, we believe that God's kingdom is here now, but is also coming. We pray that one day it will be all-in-all - that every child will be safe, that all communities will know peace, and that all hearts will be united with God and with one another. And when that happens, the person who's committed to anything else, be it hurting other people, hurting the land, even hurting his or her-self will experience the pain and suffering that comes when there's a radical paradigm shift. If you were a slaveowner in Atlanta in 1864 and you lost your home, your farm, your laborers and your status as a powerful person when the army rolled in, you would weep and you would gnash your teeth. And not only you - as St. Paul says in the second reading today, the whole creation would groan along with you, because your paradigm shift, the change you’d be forced to make, would cost everyone. God wants slaves to be free, but God doesn't want a city to burn. God might want people to take action against injustice, but God hurts for the young soldier who has to draw his weapon.
So here's the other part where we need God. With God, that burning city, that furnace of fire isn't the final word. It isn't the end of things. That slaveowner's reckoning, that soldier's memories of war, the conflict inscribed in that very land is only one part of the story. Because repentance is possible, redemption is promised, and God will never leave us. Look at this story of Jacob today, who’s fleeing from his brother, who’s afraid and goes to sleep in this insignificant place only to discover that he has found heaven. That no matter where he is and what happens to him, God will be there, and God will bring him home. Our whole Bible is this story of forgiveness and reconciliation and hope that everything will be with God. And just as God promises to bless the world through Jacob, God promises to save the world through Jesus. It doesn't happen all at once, it may not even happen in the course of a lifetime, and it doesn't happen easily. But it's the work we're given to do - not saying what's out, but drawing everything in. And again, as Paul says, to wait with patience and hope for things that we can’t see now, for it will be our salvation and it will be our joy.
