The Rev. Clare Fischer-Davies
St. Martin ’s Church
March 5. 2005
For sale on E-Bay – one human soul.
That story in Saturday’s Providence Journal caught my eye as I scanned the paper over coffee yesterday morning. Michael Esordi, a former student at RISD, has put a human soul up for sale on E-Bay, that massive internet auction site that functions as a sort of giant flea market for buyers and sellers around the world. E-Bay requires that anything posted for sale must be “tangible”, so if you are the winning bid, and purchase the soul Mr. Esordi has for sale, you will receive a nice certificate identifying you as the winner of the transaction.
But Mr. Esordi doesn’t go quite so far as to say the buyer has actually purchased a soul – either his or anyone else’s. Instead he acknowledges that his auction item is really a kind of performance art, meant to provoke reflection and discussion. The certificate reads, in part, “By virtue of this act, this certificate is presented in recognition of a significant contribution to Souled perceptual art."
Ok, Mr. Esordi – I’ll bite. I won’t bid on the item, but I will take up your invitation to reflect and discuss. In fact, I’m grateful that such a perfect sermon topic for the first Sunday of Lent fell into my lap. Do we have souls? If we do – what are they? What does a soul consist of? And who does the soul belong to? Can we indeed make that Faustian bargain and sell our souls? – or do our souls from the beginning really belong to someone else?
“Soul” is a good theological term – but that one small word represents a staggering array of different ideas and opinions, not just in our own era, but stretching back through human history. Not just theologians, but philosophers long before the Christian era, debated the existence and nature of the soul – it isn’t just an argument for our own fragmented, post-modern time.
We started Psalm 25 at verse 3 this morning. If we’d included the opening verse, we would sing “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul…” The Hebrew word translated as “soul” can also mean life, person, heart, blood, desire, breath. It’s a word that represents the very essence of being human – whatever it is that makes us who and what we are.
The ancient Hebrews had no notion of the soul encased inside the body; ancient Hebrews didn’t have bodies, they were bodies. It was the Greeks, especially Plato, who developed the idea that the immortal, perfect, pristine human soul was trapped inside the prison of a mortal, destined-for-decay, body. Christian theology has danced uneasily between the Hebrew and the Greek notions of the soul for two thousand years.
But perhaps we don’t need to agree on exactly what the soul is in order to ask – who does it belong to? Do we belong just to ourselves, or do we belong to someone, or something else? Maybe that’s the perfect question for Lent – do we belong to ourselves alone, or do we belong to something beyond ourselves?
The Gospel for the first Sunday in Lent is always either Mark, Matthew or Luke’s version of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. It’s a little confusing – in the weeks after Epiphany we penetrated as far as the third chapter of Mark, as Jesus opens his ministry with exorcisms and healing. But now, we’re back to the beginning – to Jesus baptism, his journey into the wilderness, where he must go through a trial before his work can begin.
Once again, Mark doesn’t waste any words: “ And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.” Notice what’s NOT here – it’s only in Matthew and Luke that we hear about Satan’s three attempts to entice Jesus away from his purpose by showing him what wonders he might perform – Mark just tells us – he was tempted by Satan.
Whatever kind of temptation Satan offers Jesus there in the wilderness, Mark is clear that it doesn’t succeed. Jesus explodes out of the desert – preaching the Good News, proclaiming that the Kingdom of God has come near – that now is the time for faith and repentance. Whatever enticements Satan dangled in front of him, Jesus resists them. He understands that he doesn’t belong to himself. His baptism identifies him as God’s Son – he is not an independent agent; Mark wants us to know that everything Jesus says and does is on behalf of Someone greater and is the sign of a larger reality.
And that leads us to baptism, and to the lessons from Genesis and 1 Peter. At baptism, we are incorporated into a larger reality, given an identity and a purpose that is greater than our individual selves. The first letter of Peter is perhaps an ancient baptismal sermon, preached at a time when choosing to become a Christian was dangerous. It encourages Christians to hold on to their new identity and purpose; to remember that whatever suffering may come to them, Jesus has already endured, in order to bring them to God. The water of baptism not only cleanses, but drowns our old selves, in order to recreate us in the new reality of the Kingdom. And to make his point, the author of 1 Peter points to the story of Noah, making it another illustration of how God has used water for salvation.
The Sunday lectionary gives us very few chances to hear even a snippet about Noah and the ark, although it is probably the best known Old Testament story, because of its appeal to children, familiar even to those who never darken the church door. I will confess that we had a variety of Noah’s Ark related toys when my children were small – sang Noah’s Ark songs – and otherwise treated this really terrible and gruesome story as if it were a sweet little tale about animals and boats.
The story of Noah comes very early in Genesis, very close to the story of creation itself. It shocks our modern sensibilities because God seems to act so vengefully, flooding the earth in punishment for human sin, destroying everything except Noah’s family and the animals he preserves in the ark. If you haven’t read the story since your own Sunday School days, go back to Genesis 7, where the story begins and read it yourself. You’ll be appalled.
But to ancient Israel, this was not a story about the wrath of God, but about the love of God, and about God’s power to save. What is extraordinary about this last portion of Noah’s story that we heard this morning, is that God makes a binding promise to humans – promises to limit that awful power that scoured the earth clean – and makes that covenant with every living creature on earth.
“You are just like Noah,” the author of 1 Peter is saying. You have been brought, through the water of baptism, to this new life; you have stepped out of the ark into this new world – a world healed and restored through the suffering and the resurrection of Christ.
There are some Christian writers through the ages who have said that it is only our souls that are saved, following that Greek way of thinking about the soul as something separate from our bodies. And some of those same writers go on to suggest that at death; the soul flees its carnal prison and ascends to the bliss and perfection of heaven.
But I think that if you read 1 Peter and the letters of Paul, who are our first baptismal theologians, it’s clear that for them, it is our bodies, our whole selves that are saved – and that salvation isn’t something that comes only after death, but is the experience of living in the new reality of the resurrection from the very moment of baptism on. We belong, our souls and bodies, no longer to ourselves alone, but to Christ.
So – no, I don’t think we can sell our souls. We are not the owners of our selves. We belong to someone else; we have a larger identity and a larger purpose, and more than any other season of the church year, Lent is the time we recall ourselves to that identity and purpose.
In the Apostles’ Creed, the creed associated with baptism, we affirm our faith in the resurrection of the body. That doesn’t mean a conjuring of bones on the last day, it means our selves – our being – our souls in the ancient Hebrew sense – the very essence of who we are as individuals, created, and named and loved by God. Our risen life does not begin at death, but a baptism, and that risen life continues after we die.
There is an old, old Star Trek episode that opens with Captain Kirk and his landing party beaming down to a strange planet, where the leader of that new civilization demonstrates his power to Kirk by turning two hapless crew members into little white blocks. He picks up one block and crumbles it slowly and deliberately into dust, destroying the young woman ensign who just seconds earlier had been all cute and perky in her little red uniform.
That episode disturbed me terribly when I first saw it in childhood. Was that little white block really all there was of that young woman? When the villain destroyed the block, and tossed the dust to the ground, did anything of herself remain?
Christian faith says, yes. The soul is not imprisoned in the body, but neither is the body the full expression of who we are. And whether we are in the body, or out of the body – thanks be to God - we belong to Christ.
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