EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST July 25, 2004

Happy Saint James day. That was a wonderful celebration yesterday. Everybody up for it again in another 125 years?

The theme of fiesta connects a bit with what I want to talk about because fiestas represent a kind of uncomplicated unity between the spiritual and everyday life, that creates a kind of spark – a kind of special connection with God.

We find that in the Old Testament lesson today. There is a deep familiarity between Abraham and God in this negotiation, this bargaining, this almost street market haggling over the fate of Sodom. "Suppose there are fifty righteous in the city, will you then destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous? Far be it from you to do such a thing to slayy the righteous with the wicked. Will not the judge of all the earth do right? What about forty? What about ten?"

It reminds me of making a purchase in Varanasi, India when I was 21 years old. "Kuch kam kijie bhay. Mai Vidhyarti hum. Tourist nahi hum." Bring down the price a little brother. I’m a poor student, not a tourist."

One of the things you see over the course of the Old Testament is a progressive distancing of God from human beings. Abraham can bargain. Moses has to take off his shoes, because he is standing on holy ground. And by the time you get to Jesus the Holy of Holies was stuck off behind a curtain in the Temple where the high priest would prostrate himself once a year. It was an increasing spiritualization of God that was one of the targets of Jesus’ protests when he says, "Abba (Daddy), just give us our daily bread."

Yet, as the Christian Church evolved, Jesus himself became more and more distant from human relationship. Mary and the Saints somewhat filled the gap, but the intimacy of Abraham’s bargaining or Jesus’ simple prayer has been hard to maintain. Where the intimacy is lost, I think, has been in the focus on one of the other of two extremes of spirituality or materialism.

The Jewish and Christian rejection of intimacy with God came with an over-valuing of the realm of the spirit and a near rejection of the material world. Spirit was good. Matter was bad. Spirit was the ultimately real. Matter always contained a kind of hidden lie. Satan was the Lord of this material world. But with God in his heaven all would be made right. Death was seen as a release from bondage. Heaven and pure spirit were seen as our ultimate reward. Augustine’s spiritual City of God was contrasted with the fallen city of men. And on, and on, and on.

That sort of dualism, I believe, is really contrary to the central monotheistic assertions of the Bible. It came into the Old Testament from Persian Zoroastrianism and into the early church, in spite of the warning in the letter to the Colossians, from its long tradition in Greek philosophy. And we still struggle with such dualism today. We see it in the puritanical reaction that anything that is really fun must be at least somewhat sinful.

And yet when all is said and done, the modern world is pretty much in the camp of the opposite extreme of materialism. We don’t really fully believe in the reality of experiences that aren’t tied to our physical senses. That’s why we are so impressed with miracles, with healings, with answers to our prayers, and visions of the Virgin Mary. What you see is what you get…we think. We really only value the physical world, the material world and its rewards. We find it nearly impossible to conceptualize, for example, the motivation of the enemies of our "way of life" when it isn’t based on a materialistic way of thinking. At least with Communism (dialectical materialism) we were fighting against people who had an equivalent philosophical materialist foundation. With radical Islam that’s simply not the case.

I don’t have a problem with most of modern American religion because it is too spiritual, I have a problem with it because it is too materialistic. Fundamentalism takes what used to be the arena of spirituality, accessed through religious institutions, religious thought and ritual and expresses it in a materialist form. Taking the Bible only literally is a materialist misinterpretation. Focusing issues of religious life only on morality is a materialist lifestyle. And, in both of these ways, extreme spiritualization and extreme materialization, intimacy with God is lost, relationship with God is lost, true faith is lost. That’s where we are. It is why some people say that God is dead in the modern world.

But an answer to this dilemma, I think, can be found in the concept of soul. But I need to explain what I mean by that word. The word "soul" has been used by spiritualists to mean the real person as opposed to the physical person. And it’s been used by materialists, at least fundamentalist materialists, to mean some quasi-physical expression of a person’s spirit which goes to heaven or hell when we die…the "immortal soul". (A very un-Biblical concept, because in the Bible nothing and no one is immortal but God!)

The way I use soul is to mean an entirely new aspect of reality that comes into being with the coming together of spirit and matter. God made Adam from the dust of the earth and breathed the spirit into Adam and Adam became a living being. Without the spirit there is no life. Without the dust there is no being. With the two together, a synthesis takes place, a third is created, something new is created. With the two together there is a soul. There is life. Soul is life…not just thoughts about life, not just the physical in life, but the whole of life…the life of life. And that’s something that is very, very special; very, very holy.

With the two extremes of spiritualism and materialism certain methods, certain techniques were developed to increase access to those realms and filter out interference.

Spirituality, for example, encouraged ascetic practices – self-denial, celibacy, fasting, that sort of thing, in order to disconnect from the material world. It developed various forms of meditation to increase contact with spiritual reality. The most spiritual state is seen as a contemplative state where the mind is cleared of all clutter and distraction.

Materialism uses the scientific method. Science deepens our ability to examine the physical, filters out emotion and bias and other non-material reality, which it really doesn’t understand as being reality at all.

But soul has its method as well. It involves the imagination, what some psychologists call the imaginal (distinguishing it from the concept of the "imaginary" that materialism equates with "unreal.") The imaginal works with symbols and metaphors. And it aims primarily at finding meaning in things, meaning in experiences, meaning in life.

In pure spirituality there is not need for any kind of "meaning". In pure materialism there is no possibility of it. But the realm of the soul is filled with meaning…in dreams, in sacraments, in the scriptures when read in depth, in relationships, in love. Soul is where we find purpose in life. Soul, in fact, is our purpose in life. And, I believe, its is what the Church today can bring to the world…to individual lives, and to the world at large. And this third, this life, this meaning, can be accessed and realized today in few other contexts. I know that in my heart. I know that in my soul. It’s what, I am convinced at this point in my life, that my calling is all about. The creation of meaning, the creation of soul was at the heart also of the wandering of Abraham. It was at the heart in all its depth and passion in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. The creation of meaning, the creation of soul is what the community at St. James has been about for 125 years. And we’re not stopping now. It’s what incarnation is all about. It’s what creation is for.

Soul, this coming together of the spiritual and the physical to create something else, something new, a synthetic third is not just there for us (even though we as human beings are the focal point of soul because of our awareness of both the spiritual and the physical.) Soul is also the growing edge, the evolving edge of God; the purpose and meaning of God as creator…a mirror, an extension, a child, a new chance.

The late Edward Edinger, a depth psychologist from Los Angeles, claimed, for example, that this encounter between Abraham and God talked about in the Old Testament lesson today, the debate over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah shows God learning something from Abraham, shows God moving away from the amoral destructiveness seen in much of the Old Testament, and into a deeper justice.

And then in Jesus there is a full identification, an emptying of all distancing spirituality in favor of a passionate empathy with humankind that brings love rather than anger to address the evil in the world. "In him the whole fullness of deity dwelt bodily." In us as well. The universe is being made in us, meaning in life is created through us, the Word is being spoken. We are the body of Christ. Just use your imagination.

Thanks be to God.