In the Kingdom of God, love wins

Ralph was the youngest of eleven children.  Born when his mother was forty-six and and her next youngest child was four, he was an "oops" baby. His family wasn't wealthy, but they were well-off. His father was a very successful building contractor in a bustling coal mining town.   Ralph's dad always had projects going. One of them, the Sesser Opera House, is on the national register of historic places.

Even with so many mouths to feed, Ralph's family had a comfortable life.  Everyone doted on the baby of the family.  Ralph was a very bright boy, destined to be
the first person in his family to go to college.  But everything changed the year he turned thirteen. 
 
Given the nature of his business, Ralph's dad owed money for all the building materials that had been ordered for the projects he was working on.  When the buildings were completed, he would pay for the bricks and lumber.  The year Ralph turned thirteen, the stock market crashed.  Overnight, building came to a complete halt.  Ralph's father had no hope of paying back any of his bills and loans.  He was bankrupt.  By the end of November, he had died of pneumonia, and probably of a broken heart as well.  By then, the older children were grown and launched into their adult lives, but Ralph and his mother were destitute.

Ralph sometimes talked about one of the people his dad was indebted to, a local businessman who probably had ties to the mafia.  This man came to Ralph's mother and told her that her husband was a good man, and she didn't owe him anything.  One person who did insist on being repaid, however, was Ralph's uncle.  Uncle John insisted on being paid back as soon as possible.


That would be bad enough, but there's more to the story, something that Ralph carried around all of his life.  He shared it with me when he was in his mid-eighties.  Shortly before I went to seminary, he told me he had something important to ask me.


"Do you think you'll recognize people in heaven?" he wanted to know.  I said I didn't know and he went on "Because if you can recognize people in heaven, and someone you love isn't there, how could heaven be a happy place?"  After some coaxing, I was able to get him to tell me why he was asking about it.


It turned out that when he was thirteen, at his father's funeral, his Uncle John told him that his father wasn't going to heaven.  Uncle John was a devout Baptist.  Ralph's dad was not.  Ralph's mother was an Anglican who attended the Methodist Church.  I don't know whether Ralph's dad went with her or not.  But he wasn't a Baptist.  And he was thought kindly of by a minor Mafioso.  And he died in debt.


Looking at Ralph at that moment, I saw a boy who was heartbroken because he'd just lost his dad.  I saw a boy who, a few years later, would have to borrow a jacket, shirt and tie from the high school janitor to have his senior picture taken. I saw a young man who was admitted to college but couldn't afford to go.  I saw a man who had been carrying around a world of hurt for over seventy years.  I told him that I believed heaven is a happy place, and that if there were anyone he wasn't going to see there, it was most likely his Uncle John.


For almost two thousand years, there have been Christians who have felt the need to "keep score."  One of the favorite tactics of the Church has been to use heaven as a carrot and hell as a 2x4.  Partly, I think this is due to human nature - the ugly side of it.  At our ugliest, we like being in the in-crowd.  For us to be insiders, some people have to be outsiders.  Or so we think.  Another problem with human nature is that we can't begin to comprehend the grace of God.  We can't begin to understand how much God loves us.  People like to quote the Letter to James and say that "God is love," but I fear that many of them have no idea, earthly or heavenly, what that means. 


In my sermon on March 27, I talked about this.  The Gospel passage was on the woman at the well.  She was an outsider whose life was completely transformed after her encounter with Jesus.  In my sermon, I also talked about a fierce controversy going on among evangelicals and fundamentalists in this country.  This controversy went into high gear a couple of weeks ago with the publication of Love Wins by Rob Bell. 

Rob Bell is forty years old.  He pastors the 10,000 member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  He's been attracting a lot of attention in recent years, because of the message of love, grace, and the Kingdom of God that he's been preaching.  Not all of it has been positive attention.  A lot of haters out there are accusing him of not being a real evangelical, much less a real Christian.  Apparently, he's overturning a pretty large number of apple carts.  I'm in the middle of reading his book.  When I'm done, I'll post some more.