Hell on Biscuit Barrel

Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent

You are enjoying your favourite biscuit and then one of your friends comes along and tells you not only how many calories are in it, but also what else it contains including which parts of the sheep have been used in cooking it.

Suddenly, the biscuit changes. No longer is it a joy to eat, but rather it becomes an object of disgust.

However, nothing about the biscuit has actually changed. It is still the same biscuit that you used to enjoy, but now it's a horrible thing which you are very tempted to bin. Can the biscuit be saved?

What would it take to bring the biscuit back?

[PAUSE ]

It is a peculiarity of many Christians to deny the existence of Hell and the Devil on the grounds that they are unjust or superstitious nonsense. That is something the Devil truly loves because without knowing what is Evil, we cannot fully know what is Good. If the writing in a book was the same colour as the page, what use would the book be? In order to know where Germany starts, we need to know where France ends. 

We can only truly know the truth of our salvation once we know what it is we're being saved from. If there is nothing to be saved from, what is the worth of salvation. Why bother to suffer on the Cross if it doesn't really do anything?

[PAUSE]

The fact that Jesus suffers and dies for us on the Cross shows us first that there is something that we need to be saved from - something truly terrible, something that God hates. Secondly, it shows us that God believes that we are worth being saved from this terrible fate. He is not indifferent to what happens to us when we die. This means something important that we often forget: each human being is created inherently good. If we are worth saving, then our fall from grace through Sin does not destroy that inherent goodness. 

We can still see that today in this world. There are so many people, often unknown to the media, who are living lives trying to demonstrate the goodness that God gives us in our creation through acts of charity and mercy for no other reason than they just enjoy doing good for other people.

Satan will come along and show us our sins in the hope that we will hate ourselves, hate other and hate God and abandon hope. He seeks to suck the joy out of our existence as being truly human by convincing us that we are merely a shadow and that we should just please ourselves in order to enjoy a dark and dull life. Should we fall for this (and we all do this somewhere along the line), then we actively reject God and turn away. If we do not think that there is anything to be saved from, then we stand in danger of never knowing God, and thereby can never live with God.

[PAUSE]

Here is the importance of Christ's Cross, and indeed, through His Cross, our own personal crosses and suffering. In recognising sin in ourselves, we can choose to be transformed. We can beg for God to make us better, to heal us, to stop us from being just a pale shadow of what He wants for us. We can beg God to give us a sense of what is good in us so that sin does not reign any more in us. And God will give us what we want, because He is a good Father to us.

Alternatively, we can accept ourselves as we are. We can choose to try and change the world around us to fit what we want it to be so that what is wrong in us disappears because we say that it is right. The consequence is that we lose our vision that we are not our own but God's. We lose sight of the True Good in favour of our own personal "good" which is nothing but our own will. And then, the sin that is hidden from us through our own blindness becomes part of us. Because we demand to be accepted as we want ourselves to be, we find ourselves separated from the vision that God sees in us and wants for us. How can we be saved then, if sin actually becomes part of who we are?

[PAUSE]

What, then, is Hell?

Forget the medieval paintings of devils poking people up the bottom with pointed sticks. Hell is worse than that. Like the biscuit, Hell is life as we know it, but with no joy, no purpose, no light, no love, no meaning and, crucially, no death. The person in Hell still retains the same goodness that comes with being human, but it is a goodness separated from God, that hungers for God and yet cannot know Him because it will not know Him. It is this hunger for God that burns within the Hell-bound. It is this hunger that produces the agony because it can never be filled. 

And that is the true terror of Hell. 

This means something crucial. If Christ dies a horrible death to save us from Hell, then it must be truly horrible indeed. Yet, if we are truly to love our neighbour as ourselves, then it means that we have a duty to live our lives so that we, too, can help people escape Hell. This is why the Church has such an important mission to bring the Faith, Hope and Love of Christ into a world that is both dark and light at the same time. Our duty is to help people see the light.

[PAUSE]

We are told "Keep thy mind in Hell and despair not." As Christians, we must recognise the existence of this terrible place and remember that it is ultimately our own choice and our own fault to  end up there, because we create it ourselves. All we need to do is to turn to God our Father, and, through His transformation of our very selves, we will find the joy that He promises.