This is a caterpillar sermon. Becoming is how I pray. Let us pray. Holy One, may the meditation of my heart and the words of my mouth be acceptable to you, a light to reveal you to the nations. In Jesus name, amen.

I used to blame my dad for a lot of things.

I used to think that his absence is why I have so much anger. The added pressure to my mom in having to work, pay bills, run a household, help with my sister and my schoolwork, and get us to our various sports and activities left her exhausted.[1] I don’t know how she did it.

I was angry for a long time. I had a lot of work to do. I was in a bad place and needed to find a way out of it. Through the help of my pastor, the Rev. Bill Federici and the congregation at Emmaus UCC in Vienna, VA,[2] I started down the path of healing and wholeness. Kate encouraged it. As did my family, even when they didn’t quite understand it. Through therapy and family systems work and a lot of reading and reflection, I was able to reach out to my father at age 33. For 8 years, he would call. Especially after his heart started to fail him. He called a lot. Sometimes I would really enjoy the call. Sometimes I felt like it was an inconvenience.

Kate and I are about to celebrate 20 years of marriage. I am a proud father of two amazing kids. They are smart, active, and thriving. And so funny. My relationships with my mom and sister are solid. I love my in-laws, and I’m also a proud uncle. I’m the senior pastor of this church I love and we’re in the 6^th year of a great love story. We hired Meghan and Jenny and added to an already amazing staff! I didn’t ever think I would get here. Some part of me thinks I don’t deserve this. This life I am leading was not modeled for me in my family of origin. My father and grandfather both skipped out on their wives and families. This created a lot of drama and tension and unresolved feelings. Everything felt like a landmine. I felt like I had a different rule book than everyone else. I was living in the bad place.

Yet through education, reflection, and looking for good mentors… I found a community that loved me into being. A community where I could try to reconnect with my father and grandfather and find some peace. It all led to two events that will forever be with me.

In January 2020 my grandfather died. He spent his last few years thinking Eisenhower was president and my uncle was his brother. The war was over, and he had just returned home. He died, and we buried him. There was peace in that.

My grandpa didn’t have a peaceful life. He was the youngest of 12 children of a Slovakian immigrant family. He didn’t speak English until he went to school. He signed up at 17 to head to Europe for World War II. War is hell. Grandpa could understand the screams of both the Allied troops and the German troops. I can’t imagine what he went through. I don’t begrudge him the peace he found in his dementia at the end of his life. He’d lived enough of the bad place.

Maybe since the first time he came home from the war, he was at peace. I’m happy he spent the last few years in a time that he felt at home in. While I was driving to lunch after his burial, my dad called. Talk about timing.

He always said, “Hey, Luke. How you doing?”

“Well, Blue. I just buried my grandpa.”

“Aw. He was a good man. Didn’t like me too much, and now I see why. We made our peace. How are you doing with all that?”

It was a surreal moment. One of the men who I thought led me to the bad place, who put me and my family though hell, was speaking like a citizen of heaven. God is surprising like that. Jesus was always showing up to people who were in hell.

We here in the year of our Lord 2023 like to think we’re more civilized. We’re more evolved than to speak of hell. We wonder, “Does hell even exist?” That’s not a question the Bible raises. Hell is a brute fact. I agree. I’ve seen hell. I was living in the suburbs of hell for quite a while. The hells of poverty and food insecurity. The hell of isolation and estrangement. The hell of mental health and the stigma that surrounds it. The hell of war and PTSD. The private and social hells, we have so many. Hell isn’t always a hot, fiery place with a horned guy in a spandex onesie. It can be a cold, silent place.

We are seeing hell play out in Israel. The open-air prison of Gaza and the oppression of the Palestinian people. My heart breaks with the Palestinians who struggle for water and to get their stories heard. My heart breaks for Israel. For the Jewish people who fled the Holocaust and wanted sanctuary, a home country to feel safe in. I have no sympathy for the agents of the bad place, Hamas, who are causing all sorts of hell on earth with war, rockets, hostages, and disgusting displays of violence. Hell is real. Hell is in Israel right now, and I pray that it leaves soon.

We follow a brown-skinned Palestinian Jew. When Jesus was here on earth, he strolled right into hell and brought people out. Heaven followed him everywhere, and that’s what brought the crowds. This guy had good news! News so good, that 4 friends tore off the roof of a house and lowered their buddy down on a stretcher so Jesus could heal him.

Another time, Jesus came upon this guy in the tombs of Gerasene.[3] The Gerasene demoniac they called him. A guy in a full-blown mental health crisis, ostracized to the cemetery: a literal place of death. The townsfolk come out to see what Jesus is doing, and they find the man in his right mind. And strangely all the pigs are missing… but that’s a whole other story. The townsfolk want Jesus to leave. The former demoniac wants to go with Jesus, but Jesus tells the man to stay in his town and tell them what happened. Jesus doesn’t want him to follow, he wants him to stay and be a symbol of a heaven in his community that made his life a living hell.

Only God could arrange my dad to call at that time. I’m not a superstitious guy, just a little-stitious. The timing was divine.

For eight years, I got to know my father, Loren “Blue” Lindon. I can say that I loved him, but I didn’t like him. In terms of his record with his kids, he’s 1.5 for 6. Out of 6 kids, only one loved him and tried to care for him. I’d be the half. The other 4 wanted nothing to do with him. When I got the call he had entered hospice, I decided to go and say my goodbye.

“Hey, Luke how you doing…”  Here was a withered man laying in the bed he would die in 4 days later. He told me he was proud of me. He always knew I’d make something out of myself, that I would be special. “When you was born, you weren’t coming out right. They kicked me out of the room so they could attend to your mom. So I gots down on my knees and I prayed to God that I would give up the drugs if He’d save you and your mom. He did and I never touched the stuff again.”

I thanked him and I asked if he was ready to go. “Ah yeah. I’m tired. I wore my body out; it can’t take anymore. I broke near every bone in my body. The worst time was when I broke my leg right after your mom left me. I was twisted up on all the beer and hash and I crashed my motor bike…”

I looked around the room to see if anyone else heard it. No one seemed to. “I promised God I would never do drugs…” and in the next breath, “I was twisted up on hash…” so does hash not count as a drug? That sums up Blue.

Integrity is key for me. Do what you say, and say what you do. Let there be a one-to-one comparison. I try my very best to live a life of integrity. As James 1:22 states, “Do not merely listen to the word, do what it says.” Jesus is saying the same thing about the sheep and the goats.

The sheep and goats aren’t the point.[4] The point is the action. How one lived. The kingdom behavior is going into hells of food insecurity, poverty, sickness, and imprisonment and bringing heaven there. Not doing these things only allows hell to persist. We must live with integrity, we who have faith in Jesus. Our job is not to go to heaven, but to bring heaven here.

Here’s the thing about my last visit to my dad. One person in his hospice room bragged that they got my dad baptized. They thought that as a pastor, I’d be proud of him and glowing that he accepted Jesus into his heart, and he’d be going to heaven. I have no doubt he’s going to heaven… I hope he’s there now. Absolutely, 110% I mean it. But the whole “we got him baptized” is some goat theology. I affectionately call this “trash theology.”

Trash theology is this: just accept Jesus into your heart. That’s it. Just believe. Get your ticket to heaven punched, and then you’re done. I think that’s trash. Here’s why: in this model, hell is not defeated. Nothing is changed. Nothing is challenged. The thirsty and hungry are still that way. The sick and prisoner still languish. The outcast still unwelcomed. You can live life just like you did before, but now you “have” Jesus. Dumpster fire theology. This allows the bad place to continue, and worse: you can now create hell for others but in the name of Jesus because you’re right and others need to believe like you.

For me, if you follow Jesus then you’d act like Jesus. You would forgive and reconcile. You would go to those you harmed and do an act of contrition. Here’s my old catholic roots showing. When we would go to confession, we would tell all that we did wrong to the priest who would then say, “Pray the act of contrition, say 5 Hail Mary’s and 10 Our Father’s.” But before then… you would have to do an act of contrition.

Say you stole someone’s goat. You would confess this to the priest who would then say, “give the goat back and a wheel of cheese.” This act would say you were sorry and looking to restore the relationship and reconcile.

If my father had accepted Jesus, he would have reached out to the 4 other children who were still in hell and say the words he said to me. If he had accepted Jesus, he would have not put my half-sister who loved him through hell. You can’t act like a goat and say you follow Christ. That lack of integrity just leads to more of the bad place. More hell on earth.

We’re not called to bring more hell on earth. We’re called to bring heaven here. As on earth as it is in heaven. We forgive. We reconcile. We do little acts of contrition. We speak out against the hells of poverty, isolation, war, debt and more when they show up. We do these things not to earn heaven, but because we believe in Jesus, and this is what Jesus would do. He would flip over the tables of injustice and call people to live lives of integrity. He hung out with sinners, prostitutes, and all the unclean, untouchables in the world. We still have those in our society as well. Next year, we’ll be in a hot political season. Just listen to who gets called out: single moms on welfare. Illegal immigrants. Immigrants. “Woke” people, whoever they are. Black lives matter folk and LGBTQ+ people. Gang members. Boogiemen used to scare us. Don’t fall for it, for Jesus hung out with them. Those whom I see Jesus most clearly in are still hanging out with these groups, because they believe in Jesus and seek his ways.

I believe my grandfather, George P. Benish is in heaven. I sincerely believe Blue is in heaven. My parting words to him were, “Well Blue, thank you for your phone calls. It was good getting to know you. I pray that your transition from this life to the next is a peaceful and painless one. And should you get the chance to do this all again, next time: be present to your kids.”

“Alright, Luke. I will.”

I believe him. The last 8 years were his act of contrition, at least for me. It helped.

Hell exists. I lived in the suburbs of it for a long time. My anger. My isolation, sometimes self-imposed, sometimes culturally assisted, kept me there. Our Palestinian and Israeli kindred live there now. Yet Christ came and brought me out. You, church… the body and promise of God brought me out and continue to. The church must speak and speak for peace. Find ways of reconciliation and acts of contrition so that the good place comes, and the bad place is banished away.

Keep doing what you’re doing church. Feed and cloth people. Keep visiting. Keep bringing the Good Place to the world however you’re gifted. More integrity and more justice. Do it to the least for when you do it to the least of these, you do it to Christ himself. Amen.

Works Cited

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/season-13-episode-5/

[2] https://emmausucc.org/

[3] Mark 5:1-20

[4] For more on the Sheep and Goats, see: https://www.uccmedina.org/sermons/sheep-and-goats/