SOPHISTICATED

Steve Van Winkle  |  Fellowship Baptist Church  |  Bozeman, MT.

I wonder about sophistication. It's a pleasant word. It has a melodic quality that many people want associated with themselves. It is a word that lends itself to condescension, both ways. You can cut to the fiber of self-esteem by directly calling someone "unsophisticated"; in the same way, you can imply numbers of people are dullards by singling out one person as sophisticated in the company of others. The unsophisticated hear it and know you are slighting all of them by praising the one.

It's a nifty word. It plays well. It plays on the baser desires of the moderate to be excessive. Sophisticated people are those who not only can enjoy excess, but they create and consume it and appreciate its nuances. It plays on the faculties of the simple who desire to be complex. The sophisticated are self-admitted into an exclusive club. They know things intuitively. They enjoy subtleties more than substance. They are able to interpret glances from others in the club. They know others know they are sophisticated and that knowledge is the currency they possess to acquire more. Sophistication perpetuates its own aura.

It's a satisfying word. It separates degrees and classes. Sophistication is its own reward, needing neither privilege nor acknowledgment to affect. Impoverished sophisticates use their poverty to enhance their sophistication. Sophisticates in fringe groups find shelter from the derision given to the masses of their clan by knowing that, while they agree with what their particular cultural refugee camp believes, they are different. They are able to mix well with the outside world. They travel well in the circles their bumpkin cousins would be laughed out of. Sophistication is a ticket out of the association of the arcane and archaic.

That word traveled out of my mouth this Sunday in addressing our Spring break decimated congregation of 125. It was an odd moment, really. In all my 12 ridiculous pages of notes, the word "sophisticated" never appeared.

Does anyone know where words come from in the heat of preaching? I suppose we like to think they come from God; maybe they do. What always pops into my head when I consider God delivering thoughts like Dominos delivers pizza is the thousands of preachers across the time zones doing exactly what I am doing at the very moment I am doing it and God having to direct every single word out of every single mouth during every single sermon in every single church across the globe. I get a mental picture of God working a large phone bank taking reports and saying things like, "He said what?". I see God rolling His eyes and hurriedly dispensing verbiage to every terrified preacher-boy stammering through a point before his faithful few and to every lyrical pulpiteer drizzling audio honey on the ears of his assembled crowd...And rarely getting credit for either.

Sometimes I bet He wishes we'd get it right before Sunday morning. But that's another story.

I think sometimes words are symptoms of thoughts. Vocal evidence of something inside that is desperately trying to work its way out. "Sophisticated" was one of those symptoms.

For days I had labored over this message. Labored like a woman in travail; not the physical travail (I am reminded fairly routinely that I could never live through the physical travail of heroic women in actual child labor) but mental travail. I've seen mothers-to-be in Lamaze videos crying to their partners at the peak of pain that they "can't do this"...they ask to "go home". They get a mental picture of an eight pound mass of wiggling flesh coming out a...well...coming out. And they say, "No, thank you...I want to go home now." But they can't, they have to deliver.

And that's the way I had felt about this message for a week. I wanted to say, "No thank you...Let's talk about something else." But I couldn't. I had to deliver. I had to deliver this message not because of physical necessity, but spiritual. I had to deliver a message about a Lake of Fire.

I know it's in the Book. I know its part of the fundamentals. I know its real. I know its perilous, yada, yada, yada. But it seems to have been relegated to "silent partner" status in many ministries. Without begrudging him his style, I remember Rick Warren counseling preachers to find "positive ways of saying negative things" in order to attract crowds. He may have a point about how to attract crowds, but funny, I couldn't think of a positive way to describe the Lake of Fire.

I remember an episode of the Rockford Files where Tom Selleck was a guest star who played an incredibly naive budding PI who was ridiculously optimistic about human nature. After being lied to by a beautiful woman and her involvement in the crime, James Garner comes along side of Selleck and says something to the effect of, "Lance, people lie...Now, I know it's a 'downer', but people lie." Sometimes I wonder if we haven't conformed ourselves to the "positive spin" ethos of American Political plasticity to the point that God doesn't have to come and wrap an arm around our shoulders from time to time and say, "There is a lake of Fire...Now, I know it's a downer, but people really should be informed of it."

I read of a scientist who was trying to put a face to this place. He was likening the Lake of Fire to a Dwarf star in the universe. The gist of it was that these stars behaved as eternal lakes of fire because they were so hot that all matter in them was gas and that the gas at such enormous temperatures behaved like liquid. How enormous? 30 to 50,000,000 degrees (exceeded only by West Texas in August). For the zero challenged, that's 30 to 50 million degrees Fahrenheit. Astronomers know of no way for these stars to cool and since all extinguishable matter would have its atoms stripped and become fuel for the inferno, they were, in effect, eternal lakes of fire.

I thought of 30,000,000 degrees and its effect upon a being unable to die at Divine fiat. My fingers stopped typing as the faces of people I knew came into focus.

I had for sometime wrestled with the lack of zeal for evangelism in our church and maybe even the lack of fruit for the message and wondered why. Down inside, I knew why. At least I knew for me and probably for the church here.

We had grown too sophisticated. Not too sophisticated to acknowledge such an awful place as the Lake of Fire, but too sophisticated to consider it- To look long at it- to lay the concept on top of our minds and let the hideous images leech into our imaginations. Too sophisticated to disrobe from our sterile theologies and stand at the shore of the 30,000,000 degree burning abyss and find faces in the crowds of the condemned we had known in life- faces of people we had loved and still love on that infernal shore. Our sophistication had kept us from considering such an inconceivable horror, and by not considering the Lake of Fire, we were passively allowing untold numbers of people to go there.

That word, sophistication, was the symptom of a spiritual malady I had been sensing, and I was afraid our people had been programmed into such ecclesiastical softness that to take a Sunday morning and remember that there is a literal lake of fire waiting for literal loved ones might appear "uncouth"...Unsophisticated.

It seems, sometimes, that we have become only slick marketers and consumers of 12 Steps to Biblical Relationships...The Bible way to grow Your Business... What God Says About Barney...Sometimes, it seems, we have become purveyors of Bible Voodoo, mixing up sermonic concoctions of equal parts verse, success, pleasure and ambition...shaken, not stirred, and served up as How-To sermons designed be relevant for time but anesthetizing for eternity.

The Lake of Fire does not make for a good "felt need" sermon, and sophisticated people often hesitate to be associated with such archaic "tools" for "reaching" the lost.

I read in Fresh Wind/ Fresh Fire that Jim Cymbala, in talking to a "big time" radio teacher from California, discovered that this particular church leader knew that in spite of thousands who came to hear him teach on a Sunday morning, If the church called for a prayer meeting few, if any would show up. I was worried that if I did my best to describe the indescribable horrors of the Lake of Fire, I might come back next Sunday to an empty building.

But, my intent was to make people uncomfortable...make them feel the heat and see the faces and understand the terror and envision the flames; I intended to take them careening down the corridor of time to stand on the precipice of eternity...to stand on a beach that is pounded by a hungry tide of fire. I determined I wouldn't use terms like "separation from God" or "eternal death" or even "Lost". Not that they aren't fine terms, they're just not graphic enough. Honestly, I can live with my dad being "separated from God" I shudder to think of him damned to the Lake of Fire. I cry to think of watching it happen.

At first people were uncomfortable, but the amens were predictable and on-cue. They looked like people who visit a doctor who specializes in "probes": they are polite, but name any other place on earth, and they'd rather be there. . And then I said it...I indicted us all for being too "sophisticated" to consider hell. The amens died down as the language intensified. Even if you agree with them, words like "hell", "torment", "damnation", "abyss" and "condemnation" are hard to amen- you sound like you like the thought too much.

People started leaning forward...you could see their minds churning up the images I was suggesting. Countenances weren't angry; they began to be earnest. I could see the concern on some faces, the conviction on others. They could see their friends there...some could see themselves there

No one can spoon feed people lava and demonic screeching every Sunday, but, I think, neither should a generation grow obese on spiritual candy without the stomach to take a strong dose of hard truth every now and then without gagging. In our sophistication, I continued, we had given too many people the impression that the gospel was ultimately about "Heaven and Not-so-heaven". In the sophisticated comfort that technical jargon ("Gehenna") and euphemism ("Separation") imparts, we had lost our urgency to rescue people from an eternal hell. We can live with people dying and going to Not-so-heaven...But we might die to keep people from living for eternity in the Lake of Fire.

I think sometimes preachers look at invitations like Nielson ratings. We tend to believe that good messages get good results. Me, I'm not that big on them. But, there are times when you can sense people want to pray in church...When what was said struck something somewhere...like a physician's hammer struck at just the right place in the knee: Either your leg snaps out or you have died and just don't realize it yet.

The leg snapped Sunday. Before I even started my intro to the invitation, people were coming to pray. Pray for themselves, for others and for the world. Some were even, I'm sure, praying for both strength and forgiveness. Only one raised his hand about needing to be saved. I go to his place tonight.

In a weird way, a message on the Lake of Fire was like a glass of water to our people. They don't enjoy it or revel in it, but they know they need to be reminded of it from time to time to fuel the message of life and love with high-octane urgency.

After all, divorcing urgency from damnation is unsophisticated...If you know what I mean.