“The Whatabouts: Responding to Questions with Faithfulness,” Week Seven
I still remember how nicely the conversation began—with cooing over my two dogs who are, objectively speaking, the cutest, most adorable doggos in the whole wide world.
And I remember how quickly the conversation nosedived after that—when the two door-to-door evangelists who showed up at our Vancouver townhouse asked me if I knew that we don’t need good works in order to be saved (spoiler alert: we do).
I explained to them that not only was I already a Christian, but that I was a pastor of a congregation—which usually stops door-to-door evangelists in their tracks, because I go from fresh chum to completely off-limits in a New York minute. To their credit, such evangelists had, up to this point, at least been unfailingly polite to me as I turned them down.
Not so here. Before long, I was told that what I was teaching was a heresy, that I was sending other people to hell, and that I myself would end up in hell if I died the next day.
I was rebuked in the name of the Lord (or, much more accurately, in the name of this person’s interpretation of the Lord) and told that when I die God will say to me, “Get away from me, I never knew you,” before the pair of evangelists left, but not before the other complimented me once again on how cute my dogs are, leaving me standing on my own doorstep, simultaneously agape and bemused at what had just transpired.
It wasn’t the first turn-or-burn hard sell I had been subjected to despite being a basket-to-casket Christian, and it surely will not be the last. But it is probably the best illustration I can offer of the lack of fruit that comes from them, and how we can offer something much different, more loving, and more effective to people who are seeking right relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
This sermon series is my first as your new minister here at Valley, and I arrived at it after multiple conversations with the search committee about how and why evangelism came to be noted as so important a trait in the congregation’s search and call profile. And specifically what I heard was a need to be equipped to talk to people about faith in a way that could answer their questions—questions to which we may or may not have all the answers, or not feel comfortable answering.
The way I experienced doing evangelism on the West Coast would sometimes come in the form of fielding questions from folks skeptical of the nature of my faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and I came to think of those questions as “the whatabouts,” as in, “Well, what about…?” Being honest in those moments was vital for my own integrity and for my friendship with the person asking me. I crafted this sermon series to tackle many of these questions a way for me to share with you what evangelism has looked to me and in my ministry, by trying to answer those whatabout questions, and as a way to let you into my own theology and faith.
Today’s whatabout question is, “What about the turn-or-burn hard sell?” It is a question I perhaps cope with disproportionately because some folks seem to almost expect it once they learn I’m a pastor (and have finished apologizing for whatever swears they uttered in front of me before learning of my vocation). It is almost expected that I would lay the guilt on thick for them.
How did we arrive at a place where the turn-or-burn hard sell from us would be treated almost as a given? What does it say about us and how we are perceived by others? And perhaps most importantly, what does it say about what others outside of the church think about God because of us, and how do they (and we!) perceive God in someone’s salvation?
These are questions that, truthfully, I grew up with as a child, because as numerous as the Disciples are in Kansas City, we were and are far smaller than the churches that saw the path to heaven as far more narrowly defined, and I spent many years questioning my own salvation as a direct result of what my peers told me then would have to be my ultimate fate due to my noncreedal, fundamentally Disciples Christianity.
But where does that exclusion come from? We can start with a simple question without a simple answer: what do we imagine heaven and hell to be like? None of us, I think, have direct, firsthand experience of either, and so our understanding of each must come from, in part, what we imagine. Because of this, this is one question for which I truthfully have no good answer.
The hit NBC show The Good Place made a thoughtful, humorous attempt at envisioning a heaven and hell (or a Good Place and a Bad Place), but amid its secularity, one aspect to its premise is worth highlighting—that this plucky group of upstarts led by Kristen Bell is trying to get from the Bad Place into the Good Place. It’s worth mentioning here because you can see its implication in this passage from John 12—that complete, irreversible judgment upon us does not happen when we die, but at the end of time, and so movement between heaven and hell may yet be possible.
And what if it is? Should that shock us? There is some expectation of it in Jesus’s tale of the anonymous rich man and the beggar Lazarus in Luke’s Gospel—after both men die and the rich man goes to the Bad Place while Lazarus ascends to the Good Place, the rich man asks for Lazarus to be sent down to the Bad Place to ease the rich man’s suffering. It is an irredeemably self-centered ask of the rich man, but again it points to some expectation that movement between heaven and hell is possible; indeed, as Abraham (standing in for God in this parable) says, it is only the rich man’s selfishness that creates an impassable chasm between him and Lazarus.
Or, as C.S. Lewis put it much more simply, the gates of hell are locked from the inside.
What if hell, rather than being a divine punishment doled out arbitrarily by a deity with a serious narcissistic complex, were something we chose for ourselves? Maybe we did not, like the rich man of Jesus’s parable in Luke’s Gospel, know we were choosing it at the time, but it is the consequence of our choices rather than God’s whims all the same. With John’s Jesus, that fate remains potentially reversible until the end of time, when the Word that Jesus has spoken will judge us all.
The idea of a fleeting, momentary hell, a hell that can be escaped, may not be the one we first imagine, or the one we remember traditionally being told as children. But what is it we so often say about suffering experienced here on earth? That it is ultimately temporary and fleeting, and that someone who has died is no longer in such pain. If we are already able to escape one version of hell here for heaven elsewhere, that should throw some serious water on our turn-or-burn hard sells because, like any fire, suffering here on earth can have soothing and healing water thrown upon it.
Which is why this passage from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 is so important in the face of this tradition of the turn-or-burn hard sell. Jesus tells us to be salt for the earth and a light for the world, and neither of those qualities come from turning the world off to us. We are called to be prophetic when prophesy is needed, and that is a call I heed often, but prophets are called to punch up, not down, and to amplify God’s ire at the powers that be, not the powerless. And—this is critical—if we are presenting someone with Christianity as a way towards salvation, we are almost certainly the one in a position of power in that relationship. Which means they are far more likely to need us to be a source of salt and light for them, not a source of divine anger to instill fear in them. I do not subject people to the turn-or-burn hard sell because I may be the only pastor in their lives, and I will not throw that away on account of an approach to evangelism that creates heat, not light.
Jesus understood this, I think, because His pronouncement on salt and light is preceded by one of the most famous parts of the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes. And the Beatitudes, almost across the board, are concerned with ministering to and for the powerless—the meek, the poor in spirit, the persecuted, and so on. The earth specifically is the meek’s inheritance in the Beatitudes, and we are called to be salt for it. We are called to preserve and bless the meek’s inheritance and, by extension, the meek themselves. If we are the ones doing the sharing of our faith, we are being bold and it may well be to someone in a position of meekness. If we do so with humility instead of self-righteousness, and compassion instead of fear, others will see that, and will praise God as a result.
So, what about the turn-or-burn hard sell? The short answer is that I do not know for certain what happens after we die. I have ideas, of course. I think of it like going all-in with aces in poker—I am cashing in all my chips on this hand because everything I know tells me it is the right thing to do, but I still do not know what the future holds. I think my hand—my interpretation of God, as it were—holds up, but I have to be humble enough to admit I do not know this with 100% certainty.
If it worries you to hear your new minister say that he does not know with 100% certainty what comes next, and you are wondering how I can say that with my background and calling, I understand, but I am admitting my uncertainty not out of fear, but out of faith. I know the limits of my knowledge, and my belief what awaits us after we die is a leap of faith that what God has led me to imagine about the kingdom of heaven may in fact be so.
I hope you’ll take that leap of faith with me, and, as we continue building our relationship, invite me to join you on your own leaps of faith, knowing all the while that someday, in God’s good time, we all will know for certain about what comes next, because we will have arrived at that place together.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
October 25, 2020