So, who's in?

So, who gets to go to Heaven? Who's in and who's out?

Or, here's a more interesting question: who's going to Hell? Who's in and who's out?

When I was in seminary I had a class with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Nobel Peace Prize winner one class asked us point-blank whether or not Adolf Hitler was in hell. He asked the question, and the class was dead silent. What was the Archbishop up to? No one dared answer.

And so he pressed us - 'Is Hitler in jail, come on, someone answer!'

Some brave soul from the back of the class - no me! - spoke up and said, "Yes!" Then a whole flurry of "Yeah" "Sure" "You bet he's in Hell!"

The Archbishop smiled. We had taken the bait. "How do you know?," he answered. "How do you know what was in his heart when he died? How do you know whether God chose to have mercy on him or not?"

His lesson was clear: It wasn't up to us whether or not Hitler was in Hell or not. He said that if it were up to him, or us, sure, he'd be in Hell. But, it wasn't up to us, and it wasn't up to him. Hitler's fate is up to God, and we won't know whether he's at the party until we get there to see for ourselves.

There is a common human trait to want to separate people into groups: who's in and who's out. We separate people by designations of rich and poor, black and white, educated and uneducated, liberal and conservative, right and wrong, smart and not-so-smart. One of the most dangerous of the distinctions that we make though is: who's in God's favor and who isn't.

In our three lessons today there are several kinds of distinctions - separations - that present themselves. In our Old Testament lesson from the book of Isaiah, we find Isaiah talking about foreigners and eunuchs. In ancient Judaism, foreigners weren't just annoying out-of-towners, they were also most certainly pagans: people who did not regard or honor God as we know him. They rather worshipped at the altars of pagan gods and idols.

Eunuchs, well, if you don't know what they are, ask your parents, or ask me after the service! They didn't just have a major handicap/ deformity, biblical law determined that they were unclean - unable to participate in certain religious ceremonies, and forbidden t