6th Sunday After Pentecost 2025

Our lessons from Baruch, the Holy One, the God of Israel, who brought out your people from the land of Egypt by a mighty hand, and with signs and with wonders, and with a great power, and with an outstretched arm, and you made for yourself a name that until this day endures.

We have sinned, that we have been ungodly, and we have done wrong, and the holy one, our God, against all of your commandments, and let your anger turn away from us, for we are left few in number, and among the nations where you have scattered us, and hearken, Holy One, to our prayer and petition, and deliver us.

And as to those who carry us on, for your sake grant us favor before their face, so that all the earth may know that you are the Holy One of our God, that your name has been called upon Israel, and Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, and Zilda, and Elba, and upon their offspring.

For it is not because of any righteous acts of our mothers and fathers, or our queen mothers and our sons, that we throw ourselves down for mercy, but we before you, Holy One, our God.

For you have brought your anger and wrath against us, just as you spoke by the hand of your women's servants and men's servants of the prophets saying, Thus did the Holy One say, Bend your shoulder and serve the king of Babylon, and dwell in the land which I gave to your mothers and fathers.

And if you and if you all do not obey the voice of the Holy One to work for the king of Babylon, I will make to fail from the towns of Judah, and from outside of Jerusalem a voice of merriment, and a voice of delight, and a voice of brider, and a voice of a bride, and all the land will be gone untrodden, and my inhabitants, and by the word of the Lord.

Our psalm today is Psalm 18, reading responsibly on the heavy birth.

The rock who gave us birth is my rock, and my fortress and my deliverer.

My God and my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my strong one.

May she be praised, and from my enemies I shall be saying, The snares of death encompassed me, the rivers of wickedness assailed me, the snares of shield encircled me, the snares of death confronted me, in my distress I called upon she who hears, to my God I cried for help.

From her temple she heard my voice, and my cry came before her to her ears.

Then the earth shuddered and quaked.

The foundations also of the mountains trembled and were shaken because of her anger.

Smoke went up from her nostrils and consuming fire from her mouth.

Burning coals blazed forth from her.

She spread out the heavens and descended.

Thick dark seasons was on her.

She mounted upon the cherub and flew.

She soared upon the waves of the wind.

She made darkness her veil around her, her canon in dark waters and thick clouds.

She reached down from on high, she took me.

She drew me out of the multitude of water.

She delivered me from my strong enemy and from those who hate me.

Be not quickly shaken in mind or alarm, neither by spirit nor by word, nor by letter, seeming to have come from us, claiming the day of the Savior, is here now.

Let no one deceive you all in any way, for it will not come unless the rebellion first and the revealing of the lawless one, the one born for destruction.

Standing in opposition to and self-exalted above every designated God or sacred thing, sitting down in the temple of God, self-proclaimed to be God.

Do you all not remember that I told you of these things when I was still with you?

Now you all know what it is, what is what it is restraining that one until the time of their revelation.

For the conspiracy of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed.

And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Messiah Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth, reducing that one to nothing by the manifestation of his coming.

The word of the Lord.

Glory to you, Lord Christ.

Jesus said, I say to you all, my friends, fear not those who kill the body, and after that have no remaining power to do anything.

But I will show you all who you should fear.

Fear the one who, after having killed, has power to cast into Gehenna.

Yes, I am telling you all fear that one.

Are not five sparrows sold for two copper coins?

Not a single one of them is forgotten before God.

Yet even the hairs of your head are all counted.

Fear not, you all are worth more than many sparrows.

The gospel of the Lord.

Please be seated.

It's possible that many of you are familiar with the African-American spiritual, His Eye Is Upon the Sparrow.

Hopefully you heard where that song comes from.

If God's eye is upon the sparrow, then God's eye must be upon me, a slave.

It was a song sung while working, really more chanted in the field, very slowly, to the tune of a swing and a backswing and a swing.

Jesus says, fear not.

Which means people are afraid, not only were they afraid, they are afraid that they are not worth as much as a sparrow.

Why is that?

Because human life is cheap.

And the proof is, the truth is war, the truth is the building of pyramids, the truth is the building of the Great Wall of China in which skeletons are inside the wall.

Did I go on?

For some people, they are afraid they are not worth as much as a sparrow.

I wish I could say that's a myth, but we've done away with that.

It's not the case.

It's not the case.

Instead, we get this injunction that God deeply cares for us, despite the cognitive dissonance of the world we live in.

By the way, I'm convinced that that is one of the reasons we come back to church over and over and over again, because we need to remember that God is good and God is loving and we matter.

And boy, sometimes our experience out there makes that easy to forget.

So we come to be reformed and our minds to be transformed and renewed.

And Jesus tells us this week don't be afraid about just losing your life.

Be afraid about being cast into Gehenna.

Because there is no word hell in the Bible.

The word is gehenna, which is a Hebrew word, actually.

It's a place.

Like a real specific place.

So on the one hand, I want to tell you hell is real.

And then I want to show you where it is.

This is the city of Jerusalem around the time of Jesus.

It's a scale model and a scale replica.

Now, uh Jerusalem lives in the, it resides in this sort of hill country of Israel called the Shephelah.

And as with all hills, there is what we call at least a relative minimum.

Now, the absolute minimum on the earth is the Dead Sea.

But that's a long way away from Jerusalem.

So here it is right here, the relative minimum of the city of Jerusalem.

It is in the Hinnom Valley.

The Gar Hinnom, which in Greek is pronounced Gehenom.

If you went to Israel with the church group, I took this photo in 2017, you've been to Gehenna or Garhenom.

Nancy Jurgens has been to hell.

I have too.

Here it is.

So what the translator renders as hell is this low point in the city of Jerusalem.

Now, I wouldn't do what I'm getting ready to do except that I'm right.

So the theology of hell comes from Dante Algerian, John Milton, and does not come from the Bible.

There is no description in the Bible of an eternity of torture that is reserved for people that God loves but really doesn't like.

There is no place in the Bible full of ironic punishments.

That Sisyphus and the rock in Tartarus, in Greece, nowhere is it in the scriptures.

I'm not telling you that hell isn't real.

I'm telling you hell is real.

I'm telling you I have literally been there.

And I'm telling you, you have figuratively been there yourselves already.

That's where I'm going.

And I don't think it's real.

So why is hell, the Yehennah, the Garchanom, why is that a relative minimum?

Because maybe there's the southern expression, poop rolls downhill.

Have you heard that before?

It does.

Especially when you don't have stewers.

So where does all the waste of Jerusalem go?

Right there.

What else goes there?

All the blood from the temple sacrifices goes downhill.

But it's even more insidious than that.

Sky gods, and you know, God actually has the rainbow.

We hear that in Genesis.

The rainbow is not sweet, it's what you shoot lightning out of.

Sky gods are worshipped on relative maximums closer to the sky.

Earth gods are worshipped in relative minima, like down in the earth.

What we learn is that there are gods in Canaan who are given different monikers like Milcom and Kemosh and Molech, and they are worshipped right here.

There was, in fact, a shrine, and at least one king of Israel paid the ultimate price to worship Molech, Kimosh, Milcom.

He took his most valuable commodity and he gave it to God in such a way he could never get it back.

That he burned it.

Because once you burn something, it's gone, right?

And it was his firstborn son.

And the son was an infant.

So what if hell is a swamp that needs to be drained, that is full of our own excrement?

What if hell is a place where we sacrifice human beings, even family members, to appease an angry God?

What if hell is a place where all the stuff we thought was going to be worshipful runs down with the dirt?

Well, that's in fact exactly what Jesus is talking about.

Who can cast you there?

It's a great question, isn't it?

Well, Dante and Milton behind him decided that it was the Azazel or Lucifer or the devil, you know, old Smoo.

Friends, I've got to be honest with you.

I don't need help.

I know how to get there myself.

An unsuspicious you do too.

I didn't go to Israel this week, but I went to hell this week.

Spent a lot of time there.

Spent a lot of time, and I'll just tell you briefly, even though I preached about how gifts are different from investments a bunch of times.

I know.

This is the interesting thing about the hell I've been to.

I've been able to get out.

And I know where the door is.

And I've even put a sign on the sword that says the door that says, do not enter.

And I love going right back in there.

It is delightful.

This week I went to hell because I gave somebody a gift and they didn't respect it the way I thought they should have.

Which tells you I gave them a loan.

Which tells you I made an investment that I wanted interest on.

I didn't get the interest.

And boy, I was able to really talk myself into how bad they were because the thing I gave was universally precious.

It wasn't like giving somebody a Pokemon because only 5% of the population cares about that.

No, this was like a high gift.

Almost everybody would say that was a good thing.

And they didn't use it right.

Do I have the right to be angry?

You have the right to feel whatever you feel.

Would I rather be right?

Or would I rather have joy?

Boy, I'll tell you, there's this line if you've read.

Keep in mind, this is not in the Bible.

This comes out of Paradise Lost.

John Milton.

Satan says, I would rather be the master in hell than a servant in heaven.

How ridiculous.

He would want that.

I would.

I would.

I would rather be the master in a city that I know what it looks like.

I would rather be important.

I would rather be right, which means everybody else is wrong, than be the servant of all.

Would you hear that?

Because Christ did not come to be right, did he?

He came to be the servant of all.

Okay, so it's not just about gifts.

And look, I've got to tell you, if you've had children, you know what it's like to live in hell.

Because there's things you want for your kids that they don't want.

Am I wrong?

And what do we do with that disappointment?

Hopefully we figure it out and we don't just stay in our own excrement.

But boy, I have lived in that swamp and I've been, even in the swamp, I've been saying, drain the swamp, drain the swamp.

Do you know that one?

And I'm filling it up.

I got a family member.

My second cousin once removed, was born a girl, has decided that they're a boy.

Now the family won't accept that because it's not acceptable.

They know her better than he knows himself.

And that's something, let's think about that for a minute.

So they'll never call him the he, nor will they call him the name he wants.

They will only call him her and refer by the name they gave him.

So what is he to do?

He can either decide he's completely wrong about who he is, he's 30, and have his family back.

At the loss of himself.

Or he can live without his family.

I mean, what's the win?

What's the win?

I'm not saying he's living in hell either way.

I'm not saying that.

What I am saying is, why do we allow as families swamps so big as to create conditions like that?

After all, you probably know that my name is Michael, but you better not call me that.

Because you don't have the right, you didn't earn it.

You can.

Just know I'll resent you if you do, because my name's Mike and I've told you that.

Now, if you can do that for me, why can't you call Leah Luke?

Do you hear what I'm saying?

Because I decide how I would like to be called.

And if I say I'm Ms.

and you call me Mrs., you broke the fundamental rule of Southern hospitality.

I decide how I would like you to call me.

So how is it that we know better than somebody else?

And look, here's the truth.

If God's going to judge them, let God do that.

Let God do the judging.

The truth is, we like judging for God.

I like it.

I'm really good at it.

In fact, I went to college so that I could be a master analyst.

College taught me how to judge.

It didn't teach me how to condemn.

I already knew how to do that.

The truth is, when I live and revel in condemnation, I'm living in a pit of excrement called hell.

It is a real place, and it's a metaphorical place where I thrive.

Because look, I know I'm not better than everybody, but I know I'm not the worst.

And that is strangely comforting for me.

If you're the one who can cast you into hell, will you give up family members over pronouns?

Will you wallow and revel in being not the best, but better than many?

Fear the one who bases your security and your dignity on the performance you did 20 years ago because that meant something.

Even if I can't do it anymore.

Fear that one.

That is you.

That is me.

I am terribly afraid of myself.

Now, I said this at 8 o'clock, and Sean said, Mike, I think people get it.

Like, I think people get that hell is real.

And I think people get that they've been there.

Sometimes for large periods, but maybe you should tell people how to get out.

I mean, that'd be a great book, wouldn't that?

How to get out of hell.

Well, you could pray the sinner's prayer, and that would do it.

Except I did that when I was 10, and I lived in hell more since I was 10 than before.

I'm just being honest.

So that's not going to be in the book.

I've never been a drug addict, although I have worked with drug addicts.

I'm not an alcoholic.

I've worked with alcoholics.

Nope.

I don't have socially unacceptable addictions.

I've got the other kinds.

Having looked at the other kinds, the data says it's really hard to get out of hell.

It's really hard.

And if you're going to do it on your own, it's probably not happening.

You know what every alcoholic needs, don't you?

They need a sponsor, somebody who's gone to the door and come out, and now they put a sign.

They've tried to put like bars on the door so that they don't go back in.

You know what they need is they need a community because they need something bigger than themselves.

They may not even need God.

They just need something bigger than themselves.

I don't think I'm getting this wrong.

I think this is exactly right.

You know what every alcoholic and every addict needs?

They need to say, I'm not going to hell today.

Because thinking about avoiding hell for the rest of their lives is so overwhelming, it'll put them right back through the door.

So if you think about changing your speech pattern every day for the rest of your life, I guarantee you it will probably make you feel a little bit of despair because it's a lot of work to change what comes naturally to you.

So what do we do?

We just say, today.

Don't think about the next 20 years.

Because the door starts to open.

We say, today my commitment is, I am going to use these words, or when I see this person, I'm going to call them what they've asked.

Just today.

I'm not going to do the rest of my life, I'm just going to do today.

And then tomorrow I'll do that too.

What does it take?

The scriptures don't get this wrong.

The scriptures say it takes taking every thought captive.

You can't allow thoughts to just pass through your head willy-nilly and say, yup, human life is cheap, but not mine.

Their lives are cheap.

Mine matters.

God, that's a lot of work.

That's why you just got to do it one day at a time.

One day at a time.

And you've got to have a community that says, yep, today wasn't your day.

Tomorrow here we are.

If you don't have that community, that's a pretty good one here.

I'm just going to say that.

There's a pretty good community here of people who will be that community for you.

I know that they've done it with me for almost 10 years.

And they say it's okay.

It's alright.

We all have a bad day or a year.

We do.

We have bad days for years.

And it's work.

It's work when somebody does something so flagrantly wrong.

And we know that because we went to college, or because we learned to read, or because we had parents.

It's work to stay there and not do the good and condemnatory part.

It's work to stay at the wrong without stripping the dignity of the wrongdoer.

It's work.

It's a lot of work to see your hopes for somebody get dashed by their behavior.

But they're their own person and your hopes for yours.

So what if you just gave them?

What if you just gave them?

The scriptures are really, really clear that God is not visible to our eye.

Right?

And I'm reading a book about how faith becomes real from an anthropologist who says, look, in all world religions, God's invisible.

So what we have to do is imagine what God is like.

We have to imagine, right?

And one of the things our scriptures tells us is you have to, you have to.

We get to, we're invited to imagine God in the people we hate the most.

And that ought to form how we treat them.

Looks like ought to be well.

So it's a really interesting thing, having grown up evangelical, in which we believed eternal damnation and hellfire.

And where do we get that from?

We didn't get it from Milton or Dante.

We didn't read those.

We got them from our Sunday school teacher, who got them from Jonathan Edwards.

Not from books, not from Christian history.

Nope.

The first thousand years after Jesus, we didn't have this stuff.

We decided we wanted it.

We wanted to revel in our own excrement.

We wanted to rebel in the idea that God loves us so much, that God loves the world, that God really actually hates us.

We want that.

We want to be masters in hell instead of servants in heaven.

You don't see any of that business about our righteousness is filthy rags.

You don't see any of that until the 1200 and 1300s in hymns or in liturgy.

None of it.

But we've hooked line and singer, swallowed it because we want it to be true.

I know you're thinking, Michael, we want that to be true.

You would like that to be true.

Because if you didn't, you'd give it up.

I want it to be true.

Because I like it.

It's comfortable.

There's a book about this by C.S.

Lewis.

It's still summer.

You've got a month left.

It's called The Great Divorce.

It's only 96 pages.

And it's about, in C.

S.

Lewis's imagination, by the way, he's a John Milton scholar, not a theologian, John Milton scholar.

He wrote the commentary on John Milton's Paradise Lost that is still the standard.

C.

S.

Lewis says, imagine you're living in Newark, New Jersey.

That's hell, by the way.

And uh every day God sends a Newark?

I mean, the airport's enough.

You don't even need to leave the airport.

It gets worse.

Imagine God sends a bus to Newark, and there you are, and the bus is going to take you straight to heaven.

And you know what the people do?

They say, Well, we leave.

We're comfortable.

I mean, Newark's awful.

What are you going to do?

And they stay in Newark.

And in T.S.

Lewis' imagination, the bus comes over and over again.

The bus driver says, get on, get on, get on.

The people don't even come to the bus.

A few people are brave enough to get on the bus to believe there can be something just different.

And boy, you know, they get to heaven.

And some of them want to get back on the bus and go back what they're used to.

Because it's better, but we're not used to it.

You know what that's like?

I know what that's like.

You know, C.S.

Lewis was writing about what happens when we die.

And I'm convinced that the scriptures, and honestly, my own concern is about what about now, too?

And having been with drug addicts and alcoholics, it is a daily bus.

It's a daily bus.

Having been with people who have physical dysmorphia, I've got that.

It's not even a daily bus.

It's like every five minutes.

It's like, what am I going to do?

Am I going to stay here and wallow in this?

Or am I going to leave?

Now, I hope you're aware too that there are people that have taken us and pushed us down slides into hell.

Like we didn't earn that or deserve that.

That's trauma, right?

Trauma.

Like real trauma.

I don't mean like the way Jen Alpha uses the word trauma.

Like I stub my toe, it's trauma.

No, I mean like that's things like abuse.

Or that's things like, I don't really like the word mental illness because it's just really tough, but for lack of a better phrase, it's things like mental illness, which I have, right?

I have major depressive disorder.

I didn't earn that.

I don't deserve it, and I have it, and boy, it takes me to hell in a handbasket and a handshake.

Like it's just quick.

And how do I get out?

Well, I mean, again, I can't get rid of it.

There's not a pill that gets rid of that.

Right?

There's pills that help manage the symptoms.

God doesn't want us to have those things.

Which I'm just going to say is really different from the Baruch passage.

The Baruch passage says, God punishes us and we go into slavery because we weren't faithful.

And if we were more faithful, we get rewards.

And I just think that that actually is the low point outside Jerusalem.

I don't think that's the high point.

Because that means if you get a speeding ticket, you deserve it.

We don't live with an accountant God who has debits and credits and says, you send, you send, you send, you sung one praise song.

Okay, that takes care of one of us.

Actually, maybe we do we live with that God.

It's just that that's the God of our own making, not the real one.

I grew up with that God.

Everything's a transaction.

Everything's a transaction.

If you want to live in hell, have a transactional God.

Because there's no way you'll ever get enough credits.

Or if you do, guess who will be in heaven?

Just you.

Oh my God.

It's hard to imagine, isn't it?

Being with yourself all the time.

Wow.

Okay, favorite therapist story.

I see this therapist, and she said, you know, I had this client one time.

I had no empathy for her.

God, she was the ugliest woman I've ever met, inside and out.

And sure enough, we were in the middle of one of these sessions, and like usual, she was standing up and she was screaming at me.

I had no empathy for her until she said to me, You can't stand to be with me for 45 minutes, and I have to be with myself all the time.

Be afraid of the one who can not only kill your body, but can cast you into the valley of Gehenna.

I think the reason we read this gospel is so that instead of being afraid of ourselves, we might develop all and wonder.

Instead of being afraid of a transactional God, we can start to imagine the God of grace not only in heaven, but in the person in the gutter or on the TV that makes us nervous, and especially the harvest one, the person we look at in the mirror.

I think C.S.

Lewis is right.

We only stay in hell, not if we want to, but if we choose to.

If we choose to.

And what does it take to help draw us out?

I don't have the magic words, but I do have at least one thing that works sitting in front of me, the community.

And above all, love.

If you find yourself in hell today, I probably will.