The Five People You Don’t Want to Meet in Heaven

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on December 7, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Romans 15: 4-13

We’re experiencing a time when, whatever our personal circumstances and trajectory, we share a sense that society seems divided: we’re amid people with whom we profoundly disagree, in nation, church and world, and it seems it’s only getting worse. I want today to explore how we might embody the way of Christ amid polarisation and the frenzy of public dispute. In 1915 the physiologist Walter Cannon coined the term ‘fight or flight’ to describe how a zebra, tracked down by a lion, would either scram or try to defend itself. Later researchers added the term ‘freeze’ to describe the paralysis of indecision. It’s not hard to recognise these three responses in our experience of the current climate.

Freeze is the sense of feeling powerless, bewildered by rules that you’ve never known broken before and assumptions jeopardised that you’d never previously questioned. In some ways the current international scene is like covid, in that we’ve never known anything like it and don’t know how long it’s going to go on or how many years it’ll take to repair the damage, if indeed the damage is repairable. Freeze isn’t a medium or long-term option, and like the zebra, we might find we’ve been eaten up by then.

Flight involves attempting to screen out anything relating to antagonism, extremism, general political craziness or horror. It means avoiding the news, and sticking to comfort food media, or at least only engaging with curated content that affirms our own view of the world. It’s a counsel of despair that says, ‘The best thing I can do is sit this one out.’ Which isn’t much support to those who don’t have that option.

Fight can be ideological or practical. The ideological fighter piles into the public forum, whether a campus debate, a social media platform, or an institutional arena, and seek to win a verbal battle through force of rhetoric and unassailable argument. It can lead to a lot of heat but not often a great deal of light. The practical fighter joins active forms of resistance, legal or illegal, whether directed at specific outcomes or as ventilation for exasperated fury. These can be brave and admirable, but the reaction they can sometimes provoke can be brutal and long-lasting.

For all these reasons it may be that in the current crisis we find ourselves looking for reactions that go beyond the fight-flight-freeze triad. Before exploring some of these, I want to look at one of the most significant passages in the New Testament that relates to living with profound difference. When we think about why Jesus came, we assume it was to remove barriers between us and God, to model what it means to walk with God and humankind, and to open the way to heaven. But in Romans 15, Paul’s concerned with something else entirely. Today’s epistle is impenetrable unless you appreciate the following logic. God called Abraham, promising the Holy Land to his descendants, through whom God would offer a blessing to all nations. It seemed in the exile Israel had lost this blessing, but the return 50 years later showed God’s promises are irrevocable. Nonetheless God’s ultimate purpose was to bring gentiles into the embrace of those promises. So Jesus is a Jew, fulfilling God’s promise to Israel, but he draws the gentiles into the blessing. Thus the convergence of Jew and gentile are the fulfilment of Jesus’ ministry. This matters to Paul not just because he himself is a Jew, but fundamentally because, if we think God’s promise to Israel isn’t permanent, we have no reason to trust any of God’s other promises.

So Jesus isn’t just about reconciling us to God, he’s just as much about reconciling us to one another; and in the New Testament, the form that takes is the forming of one people out of Jew and gentile. Today our imaginations aren’t about a first-century world with a Holy Land populated by 2.5 million Jews in a Roman Empire of 50 million, but about a population of 15 million Jews in a global population of 8 billion. So while the crisis in Gaza still rings in our hearts and heads, the more general question is, what does Jesus mean for our reconciliation with all people. The point is not trying to work out who if any we don’t need to be reconciled with, but how Jesus bids us interact with all people, especially the ones from whom we find ourselves most profoundly alienated.

So as we seek to relate to those with whom we profoundly disagree, we recognise both that any progress we make rests on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but also that what we’re seeking to do is to embody the purpose of Jesus. So even if we fail, we’re embarked on a worthy cause. Here are five ways we can be moved by Paul’s words to the Romans to engage in our current crisis with the people we least want to see in heaven.

Number one, seek to understand. The celebrated community organiser Michael Gecan tried a novel thing. He went to the heartlands of America to meet, understand and build relationships with the people who voted for a party and a leader to who he himself had an allergic reaction. His surprise was they told him, ‘You’re the first person who’s come and listened to us. We know everyone thinks we’re deplorable. But no one actually wants to find out what we really think and why we vote the way we do.’ When Michael Ignatieff was asked here after his autumn lecture in October what he’d got wrong as leader of the Liberal Party in Canada in its catastrophic 2011 electoral defeat, I was moved by the humility of his answer. He said, ‘I didn’t understand half the voters we wanted to support us. I just didn’t come from their background and hadn’t experienced what they’d experienced.’ Remember Jesus: he spent 30 years in Nazareth seeking to understand the people of Israel before calling them to renewal. I wonder what it might mean for us to seek to understand.

Number two, find points of convergence. Few people feel able to engage with the best possible interpretation of their opponents’ arguments or actions; and fewer still can disentangle the positive features of their adversary’s programme and celebrate them. On September 13, Erika Kirk spoke in Phoenix, Arizona at the memorial service for Charlie and said of her husband’s assassin, ‘I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did. … The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.’ Surely those remarkable words are ones everyone across political divides, especially Christians, can admire and cherish. Finding points of convergence means demonstrating that hostility is towards ideas and actions not towards individuals and certainly not towards people who show dignity, courage, and extraordinary forbearance. Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive.’ Turns out that’s a point of convergence.

Number three, find a way to stay in the conversation, even if only as an observer. Paul starts by twice referring to steadfastness and encouragement. I recall a moment when I was a child at home one evening. My father was out at a meeting, and I was home alone with my mother. A group of people came to the door, and I quickly saw my mother was agitated. I never knew the whole story, but it was clear they wanted a lot of money, and my mother didn’t trust them. It wasn’t clear if they were asking out of need or threatening out of power, or a bit of both. My mother made some calls to try to track my father down, and maybe some police as well. She asked me to sit in the lounge with them. I knew it was one of the hardest things, aged 8, I’d ever been asked to do. I must have sat in silence with them for half an hour. Looking back, I was being asked to be an observer. If they’d tried to steal anything I’d have seen them, and if they’d started to cause damage, they’d have had to do it in front of me. Eventually my memory is that my father returned with some other men, and said a few things, amounting to, ‘I think you need to leave.’ And later that evening my parents were so appreciative of me I even got to drink a bottle of coca cola, which is doubtless why I still remember it. But I think what was happening was my parents couldn’t stop something bad happening, but they could ensure we were watching so we could testify and remember later. Where there are bad things happening today, we can do the same. That’s what we’ll be doing later this morning by joining Amnesty International’s Write for Rights campaign.

Number four, find a way to retain a sense of everyone’s created humanity. Paul shows how God finds a place for the gentiles. In a celebrated radio address, Leonard Wilson, Bishop of Singapore, spoke of being flogged by Japanese guards during the second world war. He said, ‘Their faces were hard and cruel, and some… were evidently enjoying their cruelty.’ But then he had a vision of them as they had been. ‘Once they were little children with their brothers and sisters – happy in their parents’ love in those far-off days before they’d been conditioned by their false nationalist ideals. And it’s hard to hate little children.’ Leonard Wilson shows us a way to look upon even our most determined enemies with kindness and thus avoid being consumed by hatred.

Number five, never lose hope. Hope means the Holy Spirit will find a way to weave all the stray and discordant notes back into the melody. Beyond time, we’ll be together with the people we rallied against and the people we ridiculed or said discriminatory things about, those we ignored or quietly thought the worst of; and we’ll realise we all needed each other to enter God’s realm. We’ll behold the Father looking with intense fondness, love and longing towards each and every one of us – including them. So our way to live God’s future now is to ensure heaven isn’t a crushing disappointment. Living hopefully means finding a way to live with the people we find it hardest to imagine being with in heaven.

There’s a popular phrase, ‘This too will pass.’ Many trace it back to medieval Sufi poetry in Persia; although something like it pops up in a speech of Abraham Lincoln. But you can trace it back to Paul in Romans 15. Three times Paul refers to hope. ‘In Jesus the gentiles shall hope,’ he says, quoting Isaiah. ‘May the God of hope give you all joy and peace in believing,’ he prays. ‘May you abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit,’ he concludes. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. The conflicts we face today are serious and troubling. But they’re not bigger, wider or longer than Jesus, and they too will pass. We’re not zebras. Fight-flight-freeze are not our only options. We show our faith not by destroying those with whom we profoundly disagree, or by running away, but by following Jesus’ way of love. He sought to understand. He found points of convergence. He stayed in the conversation. He recognised our created humanity. And he told a bigger story, one of hope not hate, faith not fear, love not lies. Do not be afraid, say the angels of Advent. I am with you always, says Jesus. Perhaps most pertinently, says Mother Julian: ‘He said not “You shall not be tempested, you shall not be travailed, you shalt not be dis-eased”; but he said, “You shalt not be overcome.”’