HEAVEN OR HELL, YOU CHOOSE
Driving down Route 26 after we left Interstate 81 at Johnson City on Sunday evening I saw this sign. It was almost a welcome home sign to Western North Carolina after six months of wandering, the last month in France and Germany.
The sign represents more than it says, I think. Its message seems quite clear. If you are born again and commit yourself to Christ Jesus you will go to heaven, if you don‘t, even if you have live somewhere where your haven‘t hear of Christ Jesus (and there are wide areas of the world where this can be true) you will go to hell. Of course in this case you would probably have no concept of the Christian heaven or hell and so the message would be meaningless.
But narrowing this down a little, here in the southern United States, even in the Bible Belt, there are people who have heard of Jesus who have only a faint idea of what being born again, saved from sin, means, and no idea of how you go about being born again or saved from sin.
But there are many Christian churches here in the south and other places where being saved by the blood of the lamb, saved by the death of Jesus on the cross, does have meaning. In Buffalo, Illinois, in the church where my mother‘s family worshipped, each Sunday a hymn was sung in which people were invited to come forward and give their life to Jesus. It was a small congregation and it was not often someone came up, but the suspense was there each Sunday to see if someone would.
In the Warren Wilson Presbyterian Church, my church, people are invited in the bulletin to join the church, but it is more like joining a social club. The life of Jesus and his death on the cross and resurrection is central to church worship, but there is no talk of being saved from sin. And while there is talk of heaven and life eternal and being one with God, there is no mention of the torments of hell from which you need to be saved and no mention of people of other religions going with certainty to hell.
So while people who believe very strongly in this message, Heaven or Hell, You Choose, they are a minority even in the Deep South in the Bible Belt.
So if you come from Sri Lanka where I recently saw the quiet worship of the Buddha and the Buddhist path of renunciation, or India where Hindus have deep faith in the sacred power of Shiva or Vishnu, in the form of Rama, or god in female forms or Germany where the churches are sparsely occupied you will be aware that Heaven or Hell, You Choose is the intense belief of a minority of a minority in one corner of the United States. You will realize this is more a statement of some person‘s intense fundamentalist belief put up on a billboard by the highway, at considerable cost, and seen without comprehension by most people. It is not a statement of fact, as it appears to be, it is a statement of identity. This is who I am and I am right and everyone else is wrong. That is is the definition of fundamentalism without any objective factual proof at all. The stronger the belief the better the believer feels. This person must feel very good about himself and very sure of his identity, and to use a southern phrase, God bless him, but don‘t take him seriously.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 