The Rev. Dr. Clay Smith: The heat

After a surprisingly cool June, the heat showed up last week. If you live in the American South, you know this heat. You step out from an air-conditioned building and are bathed in what chefs call "moist heat." You not only feel the heat, but you can also cut it with a knife.

Growing up in Florida, the heat did not bother me. We did not have air-conditioning (but we loved to visit relatives that did). Fans and screens on open windows kept the air moving. But this was not significant since my mother was of the "It's a nice day, go play outside" school of thought. You learned to play in the shade or go down to the barn and play on the equipment inside.

When I became an adolescent, my body changed. As soon as my nerve endings felt the heat, sweat poured out from every pore. I spent most of my teenage and young adult years with soaked shirts. Staying hydrated was a major task. In the summers, we would set out in the morning with a frozen milk jug of water. By mid-morning, it would have thawed to cool water. By lunchtime, it was tepid. You filled it up, put it in the freezer and took out another frozen jug for the afternoon. It melted even faster.

Most of the classrooms of my elementary and high school years were not air-conditioned. In high school, you liberally applied cologne not to attract girls but to keep them from running away. You chose your prom date based on who sweated the least.

I spent four years of college and two years of seminary living in un-air-conditioned dorm rooms. These were Baptist institutions, so I can only assume their goal in having these rooms was to make us fear hell. We found one fan blowing in and another blowing out was the best strategy for surviving the heat of those little sweatboxes.

In college, I made two mission trips to the Mexican desert. People told me the heat there was different; it was a "dry heat," they said. What is the difference between dry heat and high-humidity heat? A dry heat sears you on the outside and can dry you out like a hamburger left on the grill for too long. A moist heat means you slowly fall apart like a roast in a crockpot. Either way, you are cooked.

I actually owned the last two cars in America without air-conditioning. I remember driving one of those cars to church and sweating through not only my shirt, but also my pants. That wouldn't have been so bad, except my pants were light brown. When I was a pastor in rural Kentucky, I owned a little Ford Ranger truck that had no air-conditioning. It wasn't too bad except in funeral processions. Then, it was agony.

I am told old-time preachers saved sermons on hell for the summer. In those days before air-conditioning, the heat made hell seem much closer. When the preacher talked about never-ending torment, our minds instantly translated it to a never-ending summer. The sermons about hell were always lengthy. It made you really think about spending eternity burning up. One older deacon told me preachers stopped preaching about hell when church buildings were air-conditioned. People were so comfortable, the threat of the fire of hell seemed like a remote possibility.

Jesus, of course, lived before air-conditioning. Being God, he could have chosen to be born after the invention of air-conditioning. But Scripture tells us he suffered along with the rest of us. He felt the oppressive heat of the Palestinian summer. He tasted the dust of the dry season. When he talked about the fires of hell, he knew what heat was like.

Jesus did talk about hell. He never talked about it as a symbolic place. For him, it was real, it was a threat, and it was not pleasant. Why is fire and heat a feature of hell? Scholars say it is symbolic of judgment. I am sure that is true, but I also think people could understand a heated hell was a place you did not want to be. It is summer without hope of fall, misery without an escape.

I think Dallas Willard is right: God has no desire to send people to hell. But for people who want to live their lives apart from God, hell is the best God can do. The reason it is such a place of misery is a person still exists, but their own choices have put them in a place of regret. Someone said, "The refrain of hell is coulda, shoulda, woulda."

People today say they do not believe in hell. If you think about it, that is an odd statement. It would be like me saying, "I don't believe Connecticut exists. I have never been there. Just because people say it exists, doesn't mean it exists." Part of being human is remembering I do not have the last word on what exists or not. God does.

I am not sure all of what hell is like, only that Jesus said it was hot and miserable, and it is not a place you want to be. I'm not sure all of what heaven is like either, but I am pretty sure it is air-conditioned. One more reason to follow Jesus.

The Rev. Dr. Clay Smith is the lead pastor of Alice Drive Baptist Church in Sumter. Email him at claysmith@adbc.org.