One of the legacies of the 18th century Enlightenment, was to banish the spiritual dimension of life from public discourse, and to explain everything in mechanical or material terms. This was a great benefit to science, but it impoverished our understanding of human life and relationships. Outside of the church, the concept that we each have a soul or spirit is still suspect today among many people. We 21st century people feel much more comfortable talking about the mind and the body, or the brain and the body. Perhaps we think of people as being like cars: each car, these days, has a computer which controls its’ functions. Certainly we have brains and a complicated nervous system which controls our bodily functions, but there is more to human being, much more.

The language of soul or spirit is an imprecise matter~~it just gives us a way to talk about what more there is. The concept of soul is almost completely absent from the Hebrew Scriptures, although the word soul appears in English translations. Soul is a Greek idea, which refers broadly to a principle of life animating the body, and more specifically to the mind or intelligence. It was given a Christian content by St. Augustine in the 4th century. The Biblical concept is that each human being is made alive by the breath of God. We are incarnated spirits, each having the image of God within us. It was this image that Jesus saw in the paralyzed man, and the lepers and the tax collectors. Paul speaks of it in terms of the outer nature which is wasting away, and the inner nature, our spirits, which are being renewed. Even in the Psalms, there seems to be an assumption that our spirit is not subject to death. I am thinking of such lines as, “The Lord preserves all those who love him” Ps 145, and “you hold me fast and shall set me before your face forever” Ps 41, among many others.

What I want to focus on, is the complex interactions of body and spirit in our lives. Each of our readings today gives us an example of how mysterious those interactions are. In the reading from First Kings, we have the curious story of a drought in the land of Israel. The narrator’s purpose in telling the story is to demonstrate that Yahweh, the Lord, controls the rain and the sun; the storm god Ba’al has nothing to do with the rain. What I see and hear is a story of faith. Outside of Israel in the coastal region of Sidon, a widow has given up all hope of life, and is preparing to die. The Lord sent Elijah the prophet to live with her as a guest during the drought. The assumption of the narrator is that a miracle has happened: the jar of meal was never empty, and the jug of oil did not fail.

Let me give you a post-Enlightenment explanation. On the one hand, the widow had no male relative to protect her, and no source of income. Her only purpose in life was to raise her son, but she had run out of resources to do that. On the other hand, Elijah might starve if he stayed in Israel, but he trusted the message God gave him to go north to Zarephath. In full obedience to the Word of the Lord, Elijah brought faith and hope to the widow. She in turn was honored to provide hospitality in her home to a prophet, and soon everyone in Zarephath was aware of Elijah’s presence. So now and then the people of the town came to consult the prophet, and when they came, they brought a little offering of meal or of oil. It was not much, but it was enough to sustain 3 people until the rains came and the crops grew. So the provision of food for 3 began with obedience to God’s word, it was made possible by one person bringing faith and hope to another, and it was completed by the goodwill of neighbors who wanted to receive some of that faith and hope themselves.

Now consider the miracle in the Gospel reading, which St Luke probably intended as a demonstration of Jesus’ power to give life. And that may be exactly what happened: Jesus raised the young man from the dead. Or, it may be that the son was in a coma and only appeared to be dead. We know that comas can last a long time, and we have the means to keep comatose people alive for months and years. But in the first century, after a few days, a mother might well conclude her son was dead. The possible miracle I see, is that Jesus sensed that the spirit had not left this man, and he was vividly aware of the mother’s grief. Somehow he was able to touch, or reach, or connect his spirit, to the spirit of the comatose man, enough to wake him up.

Let us turn now to the reading from Galatians, where Paul describes how he was converted from being an enemy of Christ, to becoming an apostle of Christ. Think about what a huge change this made in Paul’s life. Paul was a well-educated man who had done the equivalent of graduate work with the Rabbi Gamaliel in Jerusalem. He was a Pharisee, who observed the oral laws as well as the Torah; and he was so eager to fulfill the law that he persecuted Christians as an expression of his righteousness. Think about how extraordinary it is that Christ chose to appear to Paul, of all people, and send him to convert the Gentiles. It was such an enormous reversal for his spirit, that his body responded to the change with temporary blindness. How appropriate for a man who had been so sure of himself, to suffer an inability to see, while he considered what had happened. I think his whole nervous system just shut down for a few days, because the spiritual change was so great.

Similar things happen in the 21st century, but we tend to search for medical explanations, and ignore the spiritual dimension. This is certainly the case with grief. The common attitude is that after a month, you should be just fine, and if not, you are depressed. But in fact, grief is an affliction of the spirit, which also affects the body in some very specific ways. Grief uses a great deal of energy, so grieving people tend to get tired easily, they are not able to think as clearly as usual, or to anticipate the consequences of their actions as well. Both memory and attention span are diminished, and grieving people often feel lost. Over the years as I have walked with grieving people, I have urged them to accept the slow-down in their lives and let the grieving process take its natural course. Now I am experiencing all those physical effects of grief, and having to take my own advice! Tomorrow, I will do something I have recommended to many of you, and that is, go to the grief counseling service called KARA, in Palo Alto.

Because this complicated interaction of body and spirit is identified in the Bible, and because the heart of our faith is the incarnation of the Beloved Son in Jesus of Nazareth, Christians through the ages have been sensitive to the way spiritual healing can affect physical healing, and likewise the way that physical healing can affect the human spirit. Whenever a meal is provided for a hungry person, there is more going on than the nourishment of the body. Not always, but very often the spirit is revived as well as the body. Whenever a sick person is visited, there is more going on than spiritual comfort; very often there is some physical healing as well. There is something about giving help and care which nourishes the spirit; and as all of us know who have had a loving parent, receiving help and care also nourishes the spirit.

I hope you are all aware that we chose to begin Our Daily Bread 24 years ago in faithfulness to Jesus’ words, “when I was hungry, you gave me food”. All along, we have tried to nourish the spirits as well as the bodies of our diners, by creating an atmosphere of dignity and community and caring. We are now able to add another dimension to that ministry, by means of the grant we have received from the Satterberg Foundation. We have hired an Outreach Worker, Emma Valdez, to be present with our diners on Wednesdays and Fridays. Her job is to listen to their concerns, to provide support and hope, and to help them learn about the social services available to them. This is, of course, an experiment, which we hope will be successful. Emma began work last week, and I ask you to pray for her and for her ministry with our diners.

Do you remember that two summers ago we set out to find new objectives for St. Thomas? Out of the various dialogues held that summer, one goal we adopted was to seek a new way to reach out to children. Three possibilities were explored, and last November we decided to begin work first on a Transfer Center. The idea is for the church to provide a safe place, and safe people, so that divorced or separated parents can drop their children off with us on a Friday evening, and a little while later, the non-custodial parent can pick up the children for the weekend in a peaceful atmosphere. Such centers have been established in Episcopal Churches on the East Coast, but there are none in California: ours will be the first. The ministry here, is to the spirits of both children and parents, who often experience great stress and anxiety, when children are transferred from one parent to another. What we will do is open our Education Center, and train some volunteers, to provide a brief welcoming atmosphere for the children on Friday and Sunday evenings. We will be presenting a slide show after each service next Sunday, the 17th, to explain how this will work.

Perhaps I’ve gone overboard in giving you six examples of the interaction of body and spirit: three from our Scripture readings, and three from our lives in 2007. The one important point I hope you will remember, for yourself, and for those around you, is that we are called to “live in the spirit” as Paul says. That means, we are to recognize daily that we (and everyone else) are made in God’s image, that the spirit in each person needs to be nourished with love, and that whatever affects our bodies, will affect our spirits, and vice versa. We human beings are a combination of earth and heaven, of dust and spirit, with incredible potential to do good, and to create evil. To live in the spirit, is to be energized by our living connection with God, and to spend that energy in God’s service.