An Apology

There only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done."  All that are in Hell, choose it.  Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.  No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.  Those who seek find.  To those who knock it is opened.

-C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

This is not an "I'm sorry."
This is another sort of apology, an apology as in an explanation of a belief or a practice, as in apologist: "a person who defends or supports something," according to the dictionary.  I was aware, as I delivered my sermon yesterday, that I was opening myself up to some questions and perhaps some accusations.
It has become, over the years I have spent in ministry, a great sorrow, to see many people I care for very much, interpret their own Christian faith simply as an exercise in "hell-avoidance."  In fact, I have come to suspect that many who are supposedly bound for glory, spend altogether too much time thinking about damnation.  A couple of years ago, Rob Bell wrote a book called Love Wins, where he questioned the foundations of our belief in Hell as an eternal punishment, and he was greeted with much weeping and gnashing of teeth from certain quarters.  Though to be honest, he didn't really say anything that other revered and staunchly orthodox thinkers had not already said.  Saying entirely novel things isn't really Bell's strong suit, he is good at mining up extant material and presenting it with fresh coat of paint.
Karl Barth, in all his voluminous Germanic theology, was of a similar mind, he just could not say it with anything resembling brevity.  Lewis, in his Anglican allegories, had a beautiful and imaginative vision of Heaven as the only true reality and Hell as nearly nothing.
The point that has been made, over the centuries by a diverse group of people who might, very broadly be called universalists, is that God is infinite and thus God's love is infinite, and that to say there is a sin that God cannot forgive and life that God cannot redeem is perhaps the only true blasphemy.
I understand why, in a world where persecution and suffering for the Gospel is living possibility, you might have a deep desire for God to judge those who are crushing you day by day.  I understand why some people might want to believe in a blissful future of salvation and peace and why they might have a strong need for some inverse to that promise for those that ain't among the number.
But I have a hard time believing it, primarily because of the Bible.
Which, I know, sounds weird to those of you who are probably already thinking I've gone all apostate.  See, I take the Bible quite seriously, even if I don't take it literally.  I read in the sacred texts about a God who rescues slaves and makes covenant promises with childless nomads, and loves people who are pretty awful and broken at times, and who warns and warns and warns, and even when "judgment" comes, never actually gives up and always keeps a remnant.
And lest you think I've given up on Jesus, I want you to know that I fully believe that Jesus is the way, and the truth and the life, and that I base that belief on the utter and confounding consistency of what he taught with the constant forbearance and forgiveness of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  I believe, as Jesus taught his disciples, that there are two distinct options available to all human beings: The Kingdom of Heaven, and the The World, but these are not merely teleological (how things will be) choices to be made they are ontological (how things are in their being and their now-ness), they have to do with the way that we live right here and now every bit as much as they do with how we're going to spend eternity.
I think that the Gospel should be Good News and a message of hope, and it bugs me that many people present it as yet another form of damnation to avoid.  I think it is we who do this, not God.  I think Jesus told us enough stories about unmerciful servants, and grumbling workers, and prodigals returning (not to mention bitter brothers), that we ought to be able to see how serious God is about the love and forgiveness thing.
Consider this hymn from Paul's letter to Philippi:

Therefore God also highly

exalted him

and gave him the name

that is above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and

under the earth,

and every tongue should confess

that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

-Philippians 2: 9-12 (NRSV)

I used to think of that as sort of a promise that one day everyone was going to realize that I was right.  I used to think that one day, all of my churchgoing and sin-repenting and dying to self was going to be rewarded and, I suppose, I also believed that there were going to be some people who were in for a nasty surprise.

But I was supplying a lot of imagination to that vision.

What I see now when I read that is a scene where I, and everyone I ever loved, hated, served, or wronged, is going to be together and receiving God's grace and glory.

The church, or a life of faith, is not a way to earn or even find salvation, it's practice for an inevitable moment when God's reality replaces our illusions.

Not that it's going to matter a whole bunch, but I like to be prepared.