Reflections on Heaven and Hell: A Sermon I Heard Nearly 50 Years Ago
A Lutheran pastor's description of Heaven and Hell nearly 50 years ago, and the lesson about community I've never forgotten.
John McGinnis
9/23/20262 min read
I remember sitting in church one Sunday morning long ago (sometime around 1979). My parents, who were just entering their middle-aged years, had put my brother and me in white polyester disco shirts with sparkling floral prints. We were giving off Saturday Night Fever vibes. I just didn't know it at the time. I thought my digs were kind of far out, so I didn't mind.
Sermons never excited me much as a boy, and nearly every word the pastor spoke usually went in one ear and out the other. The grown-ups could concern themselves with things like sermons, Carter, Camp David and whatever else was happening in the world. I was a kid in a far-out polyester shirt, and sermons were simply something to sit through on Sunday morning. On this particular morning, however, the pastor, whose name and appearance I no longer remember, painted a picture vivid enough that I've carried it with me for nearly fifty years.
He described Hell as a splendid banquet where the tables were covered with marvelous food and drink and there was more than enough for everyone. The problem was that everyone at the banquet had braces on their arms that prevented them from bending their elbows. They could see and smell the feast in front of them, but they couldn't bring any of it to their mouths, so they simply sat there frowning. Man, what a drag.
Heaven, the pastor explained, looked remarkably similar. In fact, it was exactly the same banquet, with the same abundance of food and drink and the same braces preventing everyone from bending their arms. The difference was that the people in Heaven had figured out that although they couldn't feed themselves, they could feed the person sitting across from them. So that is what they did. Can you dig that?
I don't remember what the pastor said after that. Before long, I was probably on board the Battlestar Galactica, flying the Millennium Falcon, or off somewhere with Pappy's squadron of Black Sheep. Yet somehow the image of those two banquets survived when everything else from that sermon disappeared.
Although I heard the story in church as a description of Heaven and Hell, it doesn't necessarily need to have religious connotations. Looking back at it now, what strikes me is that it was really a lesson about community.
The circumstances in Heaven and Hell weren't merely similar; they were identical. Everyone faced the same limitation and had access to the same abundance. Nobody at either banquet could solve his own problem, yet everyone had the ability to solve somebody else's.
There is something about that idea that seems more significant to me now than it probably did when I was a boy. We place a great deal of value on self-sufficiency, and with good reason, but maybe we sometimes become so accustomed to asking how we can solve our own problems that we overlook problems that aren't meant to be solved individually. There is strength in numbers, and the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes the solution to our own problem may be found in solving someone else's.
Perhaps that's why this particular story survived in my memory while so many others didn't. Nearly fifty years later, I can't tell you the pastor's name or what else he preached about that Sunday morning, but I can still picture those people sitting around the banquet table. Some were staring unhappily at everything they couldn't reach, while the others were feeding each other.
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