The Good Place

Raise your hand if you’d like to go to heaven. And now those of you eager to go the other way?… But perhaps you’re not particularly sold on either option, or at least not as they are sometimes portrayed. And certainly, heaven and hell have inspired centuries of debate and imagination. The Bible gives us various depictions of both, but also leaves enough unsaid to allow for plenty of creative speculation.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t often watch a comedy expecting to find thoughtful religious reflection. Yet the TV show The Good Place contains a surprising amount of good theology! The premise is that Eleanor Shellstrop, who is not a particularly nice person, dies and wakes up in what appears to be heaven.

Everything is beautiful. Everyone has a soulmate. There is endless frozen yogurt. Eleanor quickly discovers, however, that she appears to be there by mistake. Then, at the end of the first season, something even worse dawns on her. Looking around at her fellow inhabitants, trapped in a web of resentment, anxiety, jealousy, and frustration, she suddenly realises: “This is the Bad Place!”

It turns out that it is a fake heaven disguising what is actually hell, where she really does belong. Not a hell with flames or pitchforks. Instead, the four main characters, paired off as ‘soulmates’, have been carefully chosen to torment one another. Their selfishness, indecision, insecurity, and recklessness will gradually make everyone else utterly miserable, creating hell for one another without even meaning to do it.

But, as time goes on, this sneaky hellish plan begins to fail. Instead of tormenting one another, the four begin helping one another. They tell the truth. They form friendships. They are still far from perfect, but they grow kinder, braver, and more capable of love. And the Bad Place stops working as it’s supposed to when they begin supporting growth and goodness in themselves and one another.

Now, of course, not every hell is of our own making. Nor do we create or earn heaven for ourselves, as it is God’s gift. Yet our choices can make room for that gift, or, accustom us to resisting it.

We see this reflected in our reading from Ezekiel this morning. The people of Israel ask how they can carry on living when they are weighed down by sin. God responds by holding out hope and forgiveness, desiring that they turn and live. Their situation is not hopeless. They can turn towards the life God is already offering, making the choice to either begin to participate in the life of God or to continue with rejection. So whether they reside in heaven or hell here on earth is up to them, up to what attitude they have and what they orient their hearts and minds towards.

I think we all know in our heads that evil, whatever form it takes, diminishes life. It stifles, isolates, and destroys. If we allow our hearts to be surrounded by it or full of it, we are trapped in an airless dark. Perhaps sometimes we even allow ourselves to think that we deserve it. Perhaps the people of Israel were all too aware that they’d failed time and again, and didn’t think there was a way out, therefore they were wasting away, and didn’t think they could live. But God offers life. God always holds open the possibility of turning towards love and forgiveness.

And of course, we can only ever make the choice for ourselves. Ezekiel is told to give the message of repentance to the people, but their response is up to them. We don’t stand silently while someone else walks towards destruction, because we are called to love each other, but another person’s response is not ours to control. And on the flip side of that, we are in turn responsible for our own selves.

The beginnings of heaven or hell can start very small or feel very ordinary. For example, we know that a home, workplace, school, social media platform, church, or society can all too easily begin to create its own hell. Suspicion breeds suspicion; people begin keeping score; we find resentment or judgement being the automatic response, and before we know it we are in the Bad Place.

But the antidote is clear. Paul lays it out very simply, saying “love does no wrong to a neighbour”; and we know from the parable of the Good Samaritan that nobody is exempt from neighbour status, no matter how much we want them to not count. So, while hell can so easily be of our own making, heaven is also right at our fingertips. We know how easily we can fall into a negative way of thinking, but we know too the great difference one honest apology or an unexpected kindness can make.

Towards the back of our Book of Common Prayer you’ll find the Catechism, or, an Outline of the Faith. There, the Episcopal Church sets out its teaching about key aspects of the Christian faith, and it also addresses heaven and hell, asking “What do we mean by heaven and hell?” with the answer, “by heaven, we mean eternal life in our enjoyment of God; by hell, we mean eternal death in our rejection of God.”

Enjoyment and rejection are relational words. Our relationships with God, one another, and ourselves form the foundations of our spiritual lives. And in this way, heaven or hell can also be of our own making here and now. Are we creating the Good Place, or the Bad Place? As Paul summarises: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

Now that’s not to say that love pretends wrongdoing didn’t happen, nor is it endless uncritical niceness. In our gospel reading Jesus knows us too well to imagine a church without conflict, so he lays out a practical way of dealing with it. The mark of a Christian community is not the absence of hurt. It is how we face the hurt when it comes. The goal being not to win, but to make relationship possible again.

Perhaps at times we need to ask ourselves some reflective questions: are we binding people to the worst thing they have done, or ourselves to old injuries? Are we loosing truth where it needs to be spoken, or loosing a person from a stifling label? Thankfully it is God who creates true heaven, but each of us has the power to make a little more room for heaven to breathe and manifest around us.

We do this, as Paul describes, by ‘putting on the Lord Jesus Christ’. Put on the mind and attitude of Jesus as deliberately as we put on clothes in the morning. Practice the mind and speech and love of Christ. Ask yourself, ‘is this choice or attitude or interaction creating the Good Place or the Bad Place?’

Because even though there are times when we drive each other crazy, the Bad Place can’t function when people are determined in helping one another toward life, when we look out beyond ourselves and see our neighbour who needs a glimpse of heaven.

Every Sunday we are sent out to love and serve the Lord. In other words, ‘go and make room for the Good Place’. So take that responsibility and run with it. Go and be a bringer of hope, a speaker of truth, an advocate of love for every neighbour. For where two or three are gathered in Christ’s name, Christ will be among us and with us. Own that promise, and make room for the Good Place wherever you are, choosing again and again the love that leads to life.

For in so doing you will make space for more heaven here on earth, here and now.

Amen.

Ezekiel 33:7-11; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20