He Turned to the Body (Acts 9:36-43; Easter 4C; April 21, 2013)

He Turned to the Body

Acts 9:36-43
Easter 4C
April 21, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

“Now I lay me down to sleep.  I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

This was my earliest bedtime prayer.  A few petitions were added, a prayer that “God bless Mommy and Daddy and Patricia and Jody and Jenny.”  Sometimes I tried to throw in a few extras, but this was frowned upon because it looked like a stall tactic.

One parent or the other would “hear” these prayers, say good-night and turn out my light.  So began the perilous time of the day, when, at least according to the prayer, my life was most in danger.  Being alive, I learned, had something to do with my soul, though what precisely I was never quite sure.  

“I pray the Lord my soul to keep…I pray the Lord my soul to take…”  What was it that God intended to do with my soul, anyway?  I eventually guessed that “keeping my soul” meant keeping me alive overnight.  “Taking my soul” seemed to mean that if this divine protection somehow broke down my fall-back position would be a hope that God would somehow safely remove my soul to where? To heaven, I guessed.  

But I had my doubts.  Could the God who had failed to “keep” my soul be counted on to “take” it?  I didn’t know.  I wasn’t sure about my soul itself, either.  I had never seen it or felt it, so what was it?  I’m sure I asked.  I’m equally sure that the answer to my question was not satisfactory, because I know the standard answer to the question and my parents were rather conventional religious thinkers at that time.  What is the soul?  “The soul is that part of us that lives on after we die.”  This would be the part that God “takes,” but then that would lead to a hard choice.  

One choice is that the prayer says in effect that the part of us that lives on after we die will live on after we die.  This sounds good, but it is what philosophers call a tautology, a statement that appears to be more than a definition but is not.  The other choice is that the prayer assumes that my soul would live on after I died, but that it was possible that God would abandon it, find it unacceptable and so refuse to “take” it.

I’m sure that they had not done it on purpose, but this simple bedtime prayer, meant I am sure as a soothing bedtime ritual that would help me surrender to rest, confident that, no matter what happened, I would be okay, had led me instead into anxiety about heaven and hell.  If I did die, how would God decide whether to “take” my soul, or refuse to take it?  Would God take my soul just because I asked every night for it to be so?  Or were there other standards I had to meet, standards about which I had not yet been told?

As I got older I found that most people believed that souls either went to heaven or hell—God’s choice—when someone died.  I also found that most people believed that God’s choice had something to do with whether we were good or bad.  Good people went to heaven and bad people went to hell.  Or rather, to put in the words of the prayer, God “took” good souls and failed to “take” bad souls.  

I will say that, as a child, I wasn’t very hopeful.  It seemed that I was bad a lot.  For me bad meant that I made my parents angry.  They were angry a lot and they seemed to angry at me.

Later, in Sunday School, I learned about Jesus.  Jesus, it seemed, had been perfectly good, so all I had to do was to do what Jesus had done and I would be good, too.  I learned that Jesus was kind and polite and obeyed his parents and that’s what I should do, too.  |But we only have one story of him as a child and in it Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem for three days when his parents were going home to Nazareth and when they found him and began to chew him out, he talked back to them.  And didn’t even get spanked.  So there were clearly things I didn’t understand.

It seemed unlikely that God would take my soul because I had been like Jesus, when being like Jesus was what got me into the most trouble.  

Still later I learned that people thought that, if you tried your best to be like Jesus (still struggling with that) and believed in him hard enough, that God would have to “take” your soul.  When I was young there was a famous theologian who made a movie about believing.  The famous theologian was Walt Disney and the movie was Dumbo.  Dumbo, the hero, was an elephant with enormous ears who was convinced by a friend that he could fly if only he had a magic feather.  With the feather , Dumbo had faith and, sure enough, he could fly.  Of course, the plot wasn’t that simple.  Dumbo lost his feather and was unable to fly.  It was only in an emergency, when Dumbo was distracted from the fact that he couldn’t fly, he found that he believed he could fly and then, of course, he could.  

Not only was this a movie about belief, but it was also a movie that asserted the superiority of Protestant faith (that did not rely on things you could hold and touch) over Catholic faith (that leaned on statues, pictures, communion wafers, and complicated rituals).

But Dumbo’s faith didn’t happen by act of will.  He was deceived into it in the first place and then it just sort of happened when he discovered un-feathered flight.  How could I believe?  It either happened or it didn’t.  How was I going to make sure that it did so that God would overlook the gap between my goodness level and the minimum soul “taking” standard?

My struggle was a traditional Christian struggle, one, incidentally, that I shared with people like Martin Luther and John Wesley.  This is a story that lies completely within traditional Christian teaching and practice.  According to traditional Christian teaching and practice, the Christian religion is about how to have souls that God will take.  Bodies are at best cumbersome obstacles to be overcome and at worst deadly enemies to the health of souls.  Life is not so much to be embraced as survived.  Life is at best a mere preparation for life as a bodiless soul in heaven.

The truly strange thing is, while that is what traditional Christian teaching and practice have been about, this is not what the New Testament—and still less the Old Testament—is about.  Take our lesson from Acts this morning.  In Joppa, where our story takes place, there was a Jesus-follower who went both by her Greek name, Dorcas, and her Hebrew name, Tabitha.  Tabitha was a good woman who could always be counted on to take a casserole to a family that had fallen on hard times and to make prayer shawls for the sick.  She herself got sick and she died.

Now we would say things like, “She’s in a better place.”  Or, “She was suffering so; now she’s at peace.”  Or, “Now she is with Jesus.”  All of these things would be true, and yet these weren’t what her friends and family said at her visitation.  They said, “Isn’t Simon Peter just over in Calmer—I mean, Lydda?  Let’s send for him!”  

Why did they send for Peter?  Well, let’s see what happens.  Two men went to Lydda and brought Peter back with them.  Peter came into the house where Tabitha was laid out and heard how she had lived.  He ushered the visitors out of the room, knelt down and prayed.  And what did he pray?  Did he pray that the Lord take Tabitha’s soul?  It doesn’t seem likely, because what he did next was to turn to Tabitha’s body and tell Tabitha to get up.  She opened her eyes, saw that it was Peter, and sat up.  Then Peter called the others in and gave Tabitha back to them alive.

According to traditional Christianity this doesn’t make any sense.  Tabitha, a truly good soul—after all the evidence of that is all around and there are even Tabitha circles in some the United Methodist Women units so that proves it—had died.  God would surely take her soul.  But that isn’t what her friends ask for and it isn’t what Peter prays for.  What he prays for is Tabitha’s renewed bodily life.  And that’s what Peter gets.

Peter is just following in his master’s footsteps.  Jesus says very little about souls and a whole lot about bodies.  To Jesus, bodies are important.  To Jesus, matter matters.  

Bodies get sick and need healing.  Jesus heals.  Bodies get hungry and need food.  Jesus feeds the crowd.  Bodies get tired and Jesus calls them to rest.  

One of the very few times that Jesus talks about the last judgment in any detail, what turns out to be central to the judgment are these very things: food for hungry bodies, water for thirsty bodies, clothing for badly-clothed bodies, companionship and solidarity for bodies in prison, a hospitality that goes beyond a warm fuzzy feeling for people in general and extends a welcome to the tired, hungry and no doubt smelly body of a particular stranger at one’s door at six o’clock on a particular evening.  It’s fair to say that salvation for Jesus extends beyond death, but first it is about bodies.

In Jesus’ practice and teaching, bodies figured prominently.  In the Bible the soul appears hardly ever and it is clear that for many biblical authors there is no such thing.  Christianity on the other hand, has given itself to saving souls.

And it’s not hard to see why.  When I was in basic training in the Army my drill sergeant used to threaten us with dire things in the event that something didn’t meet his standards.  Perhaps a bed wasn’t tightly made, or a boot lacked the high shine he thought was fitting.  He would say that if it wasn’t done right, “You can give your soul to Jesus, but your backside belongs to me!”  At least that’s the gist of what he said.

Drawing a line between body and soul was convenient for my drill sergeant.  It’s been convenient for all sorts of regimes throughout history.  The regimes of money and power let us have the souls.  And it keeps the bodies.  Bodies can be exploited.  They can be sent to war.  They can be used to shield the rich and the powerful from threats.  They can be imprisoned and compelled to work.  They can be overworked and overstressed until they get sick and then their very illnesses themselves can become sources of profit.  The longings and aversions of the body—hunger, disgust, thirst, fear, and sexual desire among them—can be manipulated and exploited for profit and power.  Bodies are disciplined, conditioned, and colonized for the sake of the rich and the powerful, for sake of the empire.  Which has graciously left to religion the soul?

This is why, of course, whenever I start to talk about war or hunger or prisons or healthcare or guns or anything else that matters to bodies, I am sure to be accused of “getting political.”  The accusation is accurate, as long we accept a division between the body and the soul.  But Peter and Jesus and the Bible in general refuse this division.  

If we are to be followers of Jesus we shall have to refuse this division, too.  If religion is founded on this division, then if we are to be followers of Jesus we shall have to leave off being religious.  If Christianity has come to mean saving souls and ignoring bodies, then if we are to be followers of Jesus we shall have to cease being Christians.

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