Journey into the Soul (Who Wants an Ego When You Can Have a Soul?)
by Griff Martin
A Sermon for the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
On Mark 8:31-38
For the Second Sunday of Lent
February 28, 2021
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
Now Incarnate and Present God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing reality we can all together experience. Make us attended to your presence here in this space and in these words God, for if we are aware of your being here then nothing else will matter, but if we are not aware of your being here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.
A few years ago I was tasked with picking up a leadership speaker from the airport and driving him to an event, this speaker was not American but was here doing some events. It was fall, but you all know fall in Texas is really just summer part 2. When I picked him up from his flight, it became quickly obviously that he was not ready for this heat, his sweat was an issue. I put the AC on as low and high as possible in the car, but it was midday and the Texas sun was beating down. He kept sweating, it was all very unpleasant for him and his endless complaining was all very unpleasant for me.
He paused to ask if I had another sun shade and said the sun was beating down on his lap. I showed him how to work the visor and we continued driving and his discomfort increased until he finally blurted out, “What do you men here in Texas do, my ____ is on fire.” Only he did not use a blank and even worse he did not use a nickname or code name, he just told me exactly what medically appropriate term on him did not like the Texas sun.
I just drove in stunned silence, I am not a puritan but the whole thing just was better unsaid.
A few minutes into the silence he started laughing and said, “Oh forgive me, I forget that you Americans don’t talk about so many things that are real and just part of life.”
He is right, we do that. Being polite in America is often more about what you don’t say and don’t talk about instead of how you say it and how you talk about it, which might be part of our problem and division today, there is so much that we have been taught to not talk about that when it came time to talk about it we didn’t know how to do so…. Sex, money, power, race, mental illness -- just to name a few.
Oh and this one from the text today, death.
We don’t like that topic. When we speak of death we prefer to talk about someone passing, moving on. We say “she went quickly” or “she passed away” or “he’s not with us anymore” or even “he lost his fight with cancer.” This is one of the reasons I think we can’t begin to see the loss Covid has had on our world, we can’t understand the daily death toll (which most of us are ignoring)…. Death is an off limits conversation.
So we don’t like this passage of Scripture at all. Now despite what our minds have done to Jesus, he was not western and he was certainly not American, thus he refuses to play by our rules. If you look at the list of things you should not talk about in public, Jesus talks about them all. He is always talking about the things that make us uncomfortable, which should teach us something about our comfort.
The story for today begins with Jesus just boldly teaching people that he is going to suffer and die. And he is not using metaphor here, there is no parable, Scripture puts it simply “he spoke plainly about this.”
Now Peter is once again our stand in with this text, he does not like this kind of talk either. So he pulls Jesus aside and rebukes him. Which makes Jesus angry -- not because Peter rebuked him, that seems like fair game which might help enhance our prayer lives. What angers Jesus is Peter’s rebuke is wrong. “Get behind me Satan. You don’t have in mind the things of God, you are stuck thinking like a human.”
Listen to those words again, you don’t have in mind the things of God, you are stuck thinking like a human. Jesus is doing some theology and psychology here in pointing out that the way the human mind works does not lead us to the greater truths of God. That we have to move beyond human thinking and take on the mind of God. Hold onto that as we read the next words from Jesus because there is a connection between human mind and mind of God and this next teaching.
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?”
Did you catch it, if not hear it like this…. Jesus has just told us that we need to move beyond our human thinking to take on the mind of God and then he uses two important words… lose your self and discover your soul. Human thinking is self and God thinking is soul.
In your freshman psychology 101 course you might have heard this referred to as the id and ego. My therapist once had me sit in silence and observe my thoughts, then she pointed out that my thoughts were like a train passing by and that my soul was the one observing the thoughts, she suggested I might work to spend more time in the soul role and not getting carried away by the train, or as Jesus called it deny self and find your soul.
Richard Rohr does the best job teaching this, he calls it the False Self and the True Self. He defines the false self as the container we build and True Self as that which fills the container. The False Self is all about what the world sees and success, which are so much the same today because we are so success driven. It’s elitist. It’s building, protecting and promoting self identity and image. It’s opportunistic. The false self loves power, control and knowing. The false self is the costume you catch yourself wearing to protect yourself, to hide who you are, to try and earn love and win the world.
Whereas the True Self is egalitarian, it sees what is and celebrates what is, feels connected to all, risks big to add to the greater good, sees beauty wherever it looks, knows that it is loved just as it is, is full of passion and grace. The true self knows that you already belong, as does everyone else. The true self feels a connection to all of creation. It’s the best part of us, the diamond hidden in us, it’s the heart the costume is hiding and the world needs so bad. Father Rohr says it’s the essential part of you, you can never lose it but you can fail to recognize it.
The true self is the moment we join Saint Catherine of Genoa who spent her life letting go of the costume the world wanted to give her of a wife, mother and a known person in society and instead became essentially a hospice nurse, caring for those who know one would, and then one day it all clicked in her soul and that aha led her to run shouting through the streets, “My deepest me is God.”
The true self is Thomas Merton at the corner of 4th and Walnut, after a lifetime of trying to make a name for himself had this realization: “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
The true self is the moment you realize you belong, everyone belongs and that love is the glue that holds us all together and once you know that, you have the freedom to live like Jesus. It’s the moment you look someone in the eyes and you see the divine spark in both of you. It’s the breath you take before you do something brave and kind knowing that this is what it’s all really about. It’s the times of life where you are defined by forgiveness, grace, justice, love and you know that it’s all bigger than you.
It’s almost as if Jesus is giving us a classic midlife crisis, just instead of suggesting buying a sports car and a younger spouse to impress our friends, Jesus is saying let all that go - just be you - find love and find the things that matter, that is your Truth, that is your Soul and you have lived long enough from the other and you don’t really have all that much time left so, let’s live here now. Let’s let that other part die and let the true you be born.
Which brings us back to death, I think one of the things we miss when we don’t talk about death is that there are deaths all around us all the time. Things fall apart. Things don’t go the way we plan them. We lose control. We lose a relationship. We fail. We hit rock bottom. All of these are deaths that if we don’t avoid might allow us to resurrect into our true selves, our souls, which is what our world needs so bad today.
“What does it mean to gain the world but to lose your soul?” Jesus asked a rhetorical question and we have given him a literal answer. Just look around us -- it means a world where competition thrives over community, where we bleed the earth dry for our own selfish purposes, where systemic racism and white supremacy keep entire populations enslaved, where resources are scarce and where the end of the world looks within our own doing if we continue on the same path.
What saves us is souls and the gospel is that we all have one, we all have access to it and when folks learn to live from the soul, well resurrection happens and if there is anything we need today it’s resurrection.
Can we surrender to our own soul? Can we die to self so we can be born to soul? Can we let go of the False Self so that we can hold onto the True Self? Can we take the costume off and let our beautiful diamond hearts shine?
As Father Rohr says, “And in the case of surrendering to God, you will find that you are not actually losing yourself in the other, but gaining who you really are.”
As the brilliant Rumi wrote, "When we practice dying we are learning to identify less with our ego and more with our soul."
I mean, the sermon title is the question we need to ask, who wants an ego when you can have a soul?
As Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?”
May we be soulful Christians, which might be ironic because the truth is there may be no other kind of Jesus follower. Amen and Amen.
*artwork: Dancing Soul by Naked Fakhar
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