Proper 14 Year C |
St James’, Peace River |
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Today's readings triggered a couple of lines of thinking for me, which ended up converging in an interesting way, and I want to share that with you. It starts, in the middle, with St Paul wrapping up his letter to the Galatians. As in a number of Paul's letters, he talks in the language of “flesh” and “spirit”, terminology which the culture we live in has profoundly misunderstood. Because of the patterns of the last 400 years and more of western philosophy, most of us are trained to hear those words flesh and spirit as though they describe components of who we are. We think of spirit as our soul, the piece of us that is concerned with religious themes like our relationship with God. And we think of flesh as our body, another piece of us which just is what it is, that moves about and interacts in the world. A lot of the ways we think about and practise our faith have been touched by this soul-body duality. For many people, religion has become marginalized exactly because it seems to be only about the “spirit” part of us, and not about our real physical existence. Even within Christianity, people have fallen into one side or other of the trap this duality presents: CS Lewis, for example, challenged what he saw as a diminishment of the spiritual reality of human existence when he wrote, “You don't have soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” But just in saying that, he swung the pendulum too far, helping to objectify the body and to minimize the sheer physical reality of what faith is about. St Paul likely wouldn't have understood the first thing about the way we divide flesh from spirit. For him, they were the same thing: they were both ways of describing what it means to be a human being. We are both spiritual and physical beings – not half and half, but whole and whole. Everything we do with our bodies, we do with our selves. And nothing about our spiritual existence has any real meaning unless it has an impact on the actions we take or don't take in the world. But when Paul says “flesh”, he isn't just talking about the fact that we exist as bodies. He's talking about the choice we have – we always have – to let our physical existence be an end in itself: to aim who we are at taking pleasure for ourselves; at satisfying merely our own needs, wants, and goals; at measuring our value or success by material, this-worldly standards. Life in the flesh is life lived focused on oneself. And that's why Paul speaks so negatively about it – not because he thinks the body is an inherently bad or recalcitrant part of who we are; but because allowing our bodies to serve themselves is a fundamentally selfish and faithless attitude to life, but it's also a temptation we always need to be conscious of. On the other hand, when Paul says “spirit”, he doesn't mean some vaguely transcendent perspective on life, like the language you hear people use today when they say “I'm a spiritual person.” In fact today's reading really shows what Paul is talking about, when he talks several times about the life of, or life in, THE Spirit. Life in the spirit isn't a way of pretending the world isn't there – it's a way of living life in this world, but in a constant and continuous relationship with God, based on the gift of God's Spirit that gives us a new attitude and orientation to everything that happens to us and around us. This is a crucial gap between the language of the Bible and the language of the secular 21st century, and it's a gap we have to train ourselves to overcome. Every time you read flesh and spirit in the Bible, remember to think, “life fully lived for MY sake, and life fully lived for GOD's sake.” And every time you see someone talking about body and soul in a modern context, remember to challenge the assumption that those two things can be separated. But now let's take that biblical picture of flesh and spirit into our reading of today's gospel. Those who were at the diocesan conference in April, or at some other meetings since then, will find it familiar reading. Thanks to our guest speaker Alan Roxburgh, it's become something of a touchstone in our new sense of who we are as a church, moving outside ourselves to discover the reality of life for people in the communities around us. But what I want you notice today is a couple of echoes of that sense that the physical and spiritual are not two different things. First there are the practical and physical dimensions of the mandate Jesus gives his disciples. They are to carry no purse, no bag, no sandals, and they are to remain as guests at one house, eating and drinking whatever is put in front of them. Even to say all that is to recognize how much they are going to be concerned for their own material needs – and Jesus' instructions are meant to help them recognize their own needs but not be controlled by them. I've only had that experience of being dependent on others\ kindness for a roof over my head once in my adult life, but it's an intensely physical and uncomfortable experience. Any time we truly expose ourselves to other people's hospitality, we learn something about what it means to forgo the demands of the flesh which push us to be in control of our own existence. So the disciples head out with these instructions that root them in their own physicality. And then they are told what to do, and it sounds tremendously spiritual: to offer God's peace, and to proclaim that the kingdom of God has come near. But wait – they are told to do one other thing: cure the sick who are there. Their spiritual message isn't about pie in the sky when you die. It's about life right now, and it will only get a hearing if it address the physical reality of the sicknesses and hurts the people they meet are actually living with. Sounds simple doesn't it: cure the sick. Easily done! The point of this isn't just to take an excursion into 1st century Palestinian life and philosophy. Jesus' sending of the disciples in Luke 10 wasn't just for them, then – it's also about us, now. We are still being sent to share the lives of people around us in our communities. And the same issues the first disciples had to face are still facing us. Number one: we are still human, and we are still preoccupied with our own physical and material needs. We can't call ourselves spiritual people, and those around us will not see us as people of the spirit, just because we go to church or do other “spiritual” things. But God's call to us to venture out into mission actually addresses that problem in us, as much as it speaks to any need others might have. By living life alongside our neighbours – spending time with them, sharing their activities, finding out how they do stuff rather than just going our own way – we will become less people of the flesh, less attached to controlling the physical conditions of our own lives. And as we do that, we may discover along with our neighbours something about how to live life focused beyond ourselves, and ultimately on God. That happens not by avoiding the material aspects of life, but by living through them in a way that responds to God's Spirit. There is still plenty of sickness out there to cure (and “in here”, too!) and ironically that is the point at which people are most exposed to the possibilities of life in the Spirit: because it is when our bodies don't work that we see how little we actually can control our life in the flesh. And while that's literally true about health issues, it also works as a metaphor for all the other kinds of sickness that affect human lives – the cultural, social, economic sicknesses that prevent us from living our lives to the full for the sake of something more than ourselves. When the 70 disciples came back to Jesus it looks as though they were quite full of themselves and the success of their mission. It's as though they were still struggling to break through from flesh to spirit, from being centre on themselves to being centred on God: “even the demons submit to US”, they say. But Jesus is, for once, gentle with them. He simply tells them about the deep spiritual significance of their encounters with their neighbours. Their simple victories over prejudice, suspicion and illness were actually a piece of the dethroning of Satan. And the benefit to them was not that they got to be big shots, but that their names were written in heaven. As we start to wrestle with the physical and material issues that compromise the life of the community we are a part of – we can believe that Jesus will be saying the same things to us.
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