Sermons for the Month
Finding Our Soul
DATE: July 2, 2000
SERVICE: Pentecost III
TEXT: 2 Corinthians 8:7-15“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
There is an old legend that says when Adam was expelled from the Garden of Eden, he lay down under a tree and slept, his soul beside him. While he slept, the four spirits—Earth, Water, Air, and Fire—stole the man’s soul and carried it away. Then the four spirits looked about for a place to hide the man’s soul so that he could never find it again. The spirit of Earth said, “I will bury it in my depths.” The spirit of Water said, I will sink it into the deepest waters of the deepest sea.” The spirit of the Air said, “Let me hide it out beyond the farthest star.” But the spirit of Fire objected to all these suggesting instead, “Let me burn the man’s soul in my flames.” The four spirits finally agreed on a plan. After much debate and faltering action, they agreed: “We will hide the man’s soul where he will never find it. We will hide the man’s soul within the man himself.” And so they did. God knows where our souls--that part of us that defines us as human beings-- reside. The problem is that sometimes we don’t know. We let our souls get lost within us. We sometimes lose touch with what is at the center of our being, the very stuff of life itself, as we run dizzy circles around life’s outer edges. The moment of recognition that we have lost our souls often comes with forceful, numbing shock. It is the moment during which we recognize something is really wrong with the world in which we live and that there is something tragically wrong with our lives. It is the moment of revelation shaking us out of complacency and into action. As Christians, don't we know where our soul abides? As Christians why would we ever have such moments of revelation? Have we not already embraced a life of service and hope for the world having enlisted ourselves as disciples of Christ Jesus? Don’t’ we already have an agenda that includes reaching out to everyone with the good news of Jesus Christ, to help transform mere followers of Christ into disciples with a faith that works in real life, then going out to heal and give wholeness to all God’s people? The reality is that our embrace of these ideals of faith is not always wholeheartedly given. Often we have lost our souls in the pursuit of the world’s agenda just as unbelievers do. We too lose our souls to sin and need to find them in the generous undertaking of witnessing to our faith. We need to embrace the ideals of our faith when it comes to race relations, economic justice, crime, weapons, and profit taking. As one writer has said, “We desperately need holy places where accumulated experience carries the power to reorient us to what is essential to our humanity.” (Donald Saliers, “Sanctifying Time, Place and People,” Weavings, 1987) We need to find our souls in the generous undertakings of our faith. The only way I know of carrying on the gospel work is by living with a twofold rhythm of renewal and action, retreating and involvement. Liberation Theology calls this "praxis," the inseparable union of reflection and action. The good news of the Bible is that its promises are inclusive, not only for us but for all people everywhere. Everyone has the potential for renewal in their lives, to be revived in our hearts, minds, and souls. It will only happen when we open our minds to begin to address the many ways in which our world has gone mad. Reading the paper has one Vice-President candidate accused of unethical fundraising, the other affirming the irreversible act of death by legal sanction, even as whole segments of our country more and more resemble the conditions of many third world countries. My friends, it is only in the process of generously sharing in gospel undertakings we will recover our souls. We probably don’t think of a lighthouse as a place of renewal. Lighthouses generally point the way to safe harbors where refitting, refreshment, and renewal occur. One such lighthouse is the Williams Light in Scotland, which has quite a story behind it. An old man tended the light for a good many years. He went to town just twice a week, Wednesdays to buy groceries and Sundays to go to church. One day he didn’t come as usual. There had been a heavy storm the night before. His friends were worried about him, and they went out to see what had happened. They learned the old man had slipped on the wet rocks in the stormy night and broken a leg. He realized that the light must be lit, so he crawled with excruciating agony up those long steps of the lighthouse. He finally got the light lit, then he fainted into unconsciousness. His friends found him there the next day. They took him back to the village, but his exposure brought on pneumonia and in a short time he died. They held a simple funeral for the old man. After the service, a well-dressed man, a stranger to the village, wanted to address the villagers. He said, “I want to put up a monument to this man.” People asked why. He explained, “I was the captain of a ship off the coast the night of the storm. I couldn’t see the light. I didn’t know where the shore was. If we had hit the rocks, all of us on the ship would have been killed. Suddenly the light came on and enabled us to find our way to the harbor.” Then he said quietly, “This is the first time I can say that a man died that I might live.” You and I know we stand in the same place of faith. It is by “the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though we was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” (2 Cor. 8:9) We don’t have to build monuments to Jesus, though many of us confuse this activity with the real mission of proclaiming the gospel. Lutheran pastor Walter Bruggemann says the activity of monument building to our faith becomes a little less than “faith with a price” and makes religion a commodity. He writes: "The practices of religious communal life are priced out according to an alien standard: money value, not theological value. Once this standard is entrenched, the tendency to “weigh” everything religious casts a shadow over courageous expressions of faith within the community. For all practical purposes, extreme and innocent acts of obedience, compassion and generosity are eliminated. What is required is that we open our minds to God’s revelation and engage in the many generous undertakings of witnessing to the Gospel. Christ commissions each of us to go into all the world—especially our own back yard—and share the good news of Jesus. We are called to share the fullness of God’s unconditional love for and with all of our human brothers and sisters. AMEN