Why you should care about my dishwasher (by which I don't really mean my dishwasher)

Much ink has already been spilled over the Rob Bell controversy. If you're trying to figure out why people care, click here (for the post which prompted the tweet which started it all), here (to find out what the cool kids are saying), here (if you'd like to know what universalism is), and here (for the perspective of someone who's at least read an advance copy of the book). 

Are you all caught up now? 

This is a terribly important debate. A teacher with tens and thousands of followers is being called a heretic by another teacher with tens of thousands of followers. Christian thought leaders are gearing up to fight a theological battle over what will become the modern evangelical understanding of hell. And they're going to do it in real time, in public, online, often using Twitter bombs of 140 characters or less.

I'm suddenly feeling nostalgic for the councils of old . . .

Since I have nothing original to add which hasn't been said eloquently elsewhere, I would like to make an announcement: my dishwasher has been fixed!

(Stick with me here. The three months that it took to fix that blasted thing are tangentially related to hell.)

But first, I'd like to point you to the most accessible but comprehensive discussion of hell I've yet come across: Tim Keller's sermon, "Hell: Isn't the God of Christianity an Angry Judge?" (No matter what you think of Rob Bell or John Piper, we can all agree that Tim Keller is still great, right?)

The sermon is free, so you should download it and listen to it on your Metro ride home. I'm not even going to pretend to summarize it, because that's how strongly I believe that you need to listen to the whole thing on your own.

I do, however, want to take a minute to draw an analogy from the Lewis quote that Keller uses:

Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must either be true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse--so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct technical term for what it would be. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

I don't know a lot about Hell, but I am a frequent user of the gateway drug (sin). And I do believe that every person you meet has an immortal soul which is being forged and tested during the season that it is subjected to the dimension of time (life). Which is basically just a trippy way to say that what you do with your life matters, because it will continue in one way or another.

So fix it.

This brings me back to my dishwasher. It stopped working last December. There were a million reasons it took us three months to get it fixed: our landlord lives on a different continent but still insists on being involved in minute repair details, including which repairmen we're allowed to call; during the few weekends we weren't out of town, we had more exciting things to do; when we finally blocked off time to wait around for the first repairman to come, he never showed up. It was discouraging.

But mostly, it just wasn't that big of a deal. It didn't take very long to wash one or two dishes here and there. As long as we didn't let the sink pile up over the course of multiple days (because we would never do that, right, S?), it just didn't really matter.

We're renters. Though we're very good tenets and always pay our rent on time, the truth is that we're not going to live in this apartment forever. We have no ownership of this place. It is not always worth the time, money, and effort necessary to keep it in mint condition.

So we bought more dish soap, and December gradually became January, which slipped into February . . .

And then THIS happened:

Yes, I really did take a picture of the dishes that I washed.

Brunch.

This photo represents about 30% of the dishes I had to wash that day, with my own two hands. It took me about three hours before my kitchen was even passably clean.

The worst part, though, was not the time I spent on my feet with my hands in soapy water. It wasn't even drying those dishes, putting them away, or laundering the million and seven dish towels I used. 

It was that immediately after serving brunch, I couldn't wait for my guests to leave because I was irrationally paranoid about the amount of time it would take me to wash their dishes in relation to all of the other errands I had to do that day. Even though I had invited them over, I couldn't enjoy their company. I was totally stressed out.

In Lewis's definition (above), hell is metaphorically like getting stuck, eternally, in a home with all of the broken things I've failed to fix left in disrepair without any hope of maintenance. It's not necessarily a place filled with literal fire and brimstone full of unwitting sinners; it's worse.

(The following week, I was on the phone with the repairman, and now we can once again hostess without fear and trembling.)

If I had been acting like I owned that apartment, I probably would have fixed the dishwasher well in advance of my brunch. But I wasn't, so the real impetus for action came from 1) the ramifications of living in community (in this case, brunch guests), and 2) fully understanding the consequences of my behavior (tackling my party debris).

Everything about this life is a gift. But the truth is, you  now own it. Forever. 

So whatever truth or heresy Rob Bell's book actually does or doesn't contain, let's make sure we take the discussion of hell seriously. The ramifications are huge.