All That You Have is
Your Soul
Malachi 3:13-4:2a,
5-6
Psalm 98:5-10
II Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19
Tim
Christoffersen
St. Anselm’s
November 18,
2001
Good morning.
All
of the readings this morning, in their own way, confront us with the issue
of a dreadful Day of the Lord, a Day of Judgment and the end of the world
as we know it. The Kingdom of God is inaugurated as ‘the Son of Man comes
on the clouds of heaven’ [Matthew 24:30] to judge the living and the
dead. There is a dramatic tension between a future event and the present reality
and between physical life and spiritual life.
Some Christians go heavily into trying to decipher and interpret the signs
of the End of the Age. We are told the Temple in Jerusalem must be rebuilt
before the Antichrist appears and that believers will be raptured, or taken
up bodily into the air, before the battle of Armageddon and the final destruction
of the Antichrist and the forces of evil. The Bible clearly does describe
End Times in passages like today’s reading from Luke, and the parallel
passages in Matthew and Mark, and in Old Testament books like Ezekiel and
Daniel.
Other Christians go to the other extreme and ignore the Biblical prophecies
as products of a pre modern time and worldview and focus instead only on the
spiritual implications for life in our world today. Both tendencies miss the
tension that is created by the way the Biblical writers understood and experienced
their world. There is no doubt that Jesus is predicting the destruction of
the Temple in Jerusalem in the passage from Luke. We also know that most Biblical
scholars date the writing of Mark at about 70 C.E. and Matthew and Luke less
than a decade later, after the Temple has been destroyed. They were describing
a future event as well as a historical event.
The Biblical writers did not keep things in neat chronological and logical
pockets as we do today. The modern mind with its rational and scientific categories
does not have room for events that are both future events and present reality,
both physical events and spiritual reality.
In verse 16 in the passage from Luke Jesus says, "You will be betrayed
even by parents, brothers, relatives and friends, and they will put some of
you to death." Jesus clearly means physical death, as we still know
it today. Yet in verse 18 and 19 Jesus says, "But not a hair of your
head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls." Jesus
is talking about gaining your soul through endurance whether or not you die
physically.
A parallel to this is the Biblical understanding of the Kingdom of God. Most
of us remember the vision of a New Jerusalem with its streets of gold and
silver that is inaugurated by the Second Coming of Jesus. We have an image
of the kingdom of God as a future event.
We are less apt to remember the many passages where the Kingdom of God is
described as a present reality, or ‘near’ us or ‘within’
us. In Matthew 3:2 John the Baptist proclaimed, "Repent, for the kingdom
of heaven has come near." In Matthew 23:13 Jesus says, "Woe
to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom
of heaven in men’s faces." In Luke 11:20 Jesus says, "…if
it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God
has come to you." And most strikingly, in Luke 17:21 Jesus says,
in response to the Pharisees, "The kingdom of God is not coming with
things that can be observed…For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among
you." The New International Version translates "the kingdom
of God is within you."
Paul in Romans 14:17 says, "For the kingdom of God is not food and
drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." So
both in a very real and spiritual sense, choosing to live a life as a child
of God in the power of the Holy Spirit gives us a glimpse of the kingdom of
heaven. But Jesus tells us in the reading from Luke that it is not an easy
path. We are likely to pay a price for it. Some will pay with their lives
One contemporary example of one who did die carrying out the conviction of
his faith in his daily life was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian,
who was executed after he participated in a failed attempt to assassinate
Hitler. The day after the failed attempt Bonhoeffer wrote the following words
to a close friend:
"it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to
have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself,
whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called
priestly type!)…By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s
duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In
so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously,
not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world—watching with Christ
in Gethsemene. That, I think is faith…; and that is how one becomes a
human being and a Christian."
Now, most of us are not likely to lose our physical life for believing that
Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, who died for us that we might have spiritual
life as children of God. But we will have our challenges in the ordinariness
of our daily lives. I think the words from a song by Tracy Chapman that I
love capture our challenge and our temptation:
Don’t be tempted by the shiny apple
Don’t you eat of a bitter fruit
Hunger only for a taste of justice
Hunger only for a world of truth
‘Cause all that you have is your soul
I believe our soul is where we wrestle with God and struggle with our faith.
Our soul is where we recognize God’s presence in our lives. Jesus described
our soul as "gained" and not as a fixed or abstract thing. ‘Gaining
our souls’ is a matter of discipleship with endurance that comes one
day at a time. It is spiritual growth.
We remember the words of the Lord’s Prayer, "Give us this day
our daily bread and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against
us." Paul’s words from the reading in 2 Thessalonians also point
to the day to day or ordinariness of our lives as Christians. If a man
will not work, he shall not eat." And Paul admonishes his hearers
to "never tire of doing what is right."
We live our lives now in uncertain times. There have always been forces of
evil alive and well in the world, but now they are close to home for us. We
live out our lives in daily obedience, confident in Christ’s promise
that not a hair on our head will perish.
And Tracy Chapman is right: All that you have is your soul.
Amen.
