“What is the Soul?”

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
On March 9, 2003

 And Mary said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord.

Luke 1:46

“Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.”      

         Matthew 12:18

“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.”

         John 12:27

Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, just as it is well with your soul.

         3 John 1:2

The preacher who wants to speak about the word soul in this generation labors under the difficulty of competition for the use of the word with popular culture. Consider how many of you know immediately where I am headed when I begin,

        “Listen, I was brought up on a side street. I learned how to love before I could eat.
         I was educated from good stock. When I start lovin’, I just can’t stop. I’m a soul man!”

I’m a soul man! You’re laughing at the thought that I might be a soul man? Or at the liberation of knowing this song. I’m a soul man. I’m a soul man.

Wouldn’t you agree with me that for many folks the place where they have most frequently heard the word soul in the last year is not in their memory of the scripture, but rather in  Patty LaBelle singing

“Lady Marmalade.” “Hey sister, go sister, bold sister, soul sister.”

So preachers have to work extra hard now, lifting up what scriptures mean by the word soul because there are so many competitors for the use of the word.

The psalm for the first Sunday in Lent, for Christian churches around the world, is this psalm, the one that Kathy read. The first verse is, “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.”

What are you lifting up? To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. What are you lifting up? What are you asking God to keep through the night? “I pray the Lord my soul to keep. What is the soul?

Here’s the sermon in a sentence. If I could reduce it to a sentence, I think it might be this: I think it’s a more accurate portrayal of a word that’s used a lot, even by the Bible, to say the scriptures teach us not that you have a soul, but that you are a soul.

That’s what I’m hoping that you’ll take with you. I think, and you have to be biblical interpreters too, but I think it’s a more accurate portrayal of a word that even the Bible uses a lot to say not that you have a soul (like it’s one of your possessions amongst many), but rather that you are a soul. I’m hoping that you think of yourself as a soul man, or a soul sister. You are a soul.

It’s true that even in the Bible, soul has a wide range of meaning. So in Genesis chapter two, verse two, says “God breathed the breath of life into Adam, and Adam became a living soul.” Adam is now living clay as opposed to inanimate, unloving clay.

Soul is that life principle that comes from God that can ebb and flow. Soul becomes reduced in a lot of places as life principle.

Or in First Samuel, chapter eighteen, verse one, when the Bible tells us, “When David had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.”

I think that’s something a little different than God breathing into Adam, but there is something of the deep essence of a person still there. Their souls were bound together. Or is the use of the word soul, as the Bible talks about it, defined as the place of deepest emotion? As in Job, chapter seven, verse eleven: “Therefore I will not restrain my mouth. I will speak of the anguish of my spirit. I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.”

Soul may refer to an individual person, as in Genesis forty-six tells us, “Leah gave birth to sixteen souls with Jacob.”

In the New Testament, soul also refers to a person’s life, their life principle. Herod says in Matthew two, verse twenty, “Herod sought Jesus’ soul,” even while he was still an infant.

Death occurs when God requires your soul, as with the man who built many barns, in the chapter of Luke when Jesus in the parable says, “Fool, this night your soul is required of you. Your very life.”

Soul may refer to the whole person, the self, as in the second chapter of Acts: “And three thousand souls were converted,” says the Bible.

The widest range of biblical scholars seem to agree that when the Bible speaks of soul, it is indicating in a wide spectrum of usage, it’s indicating the unity of a human being. Flesh and spirit. It’s not that you have a soul, but that you are a soul.

The Greeks, in opposition to the culture around the Bible, or at least indifference to it, the Greeks had an idea of an immortal soul that was different in kind from the mortal body. As if they were simply divisible, like separate parts: orange juice, orange peel. Soul, body. But while the Bible might use the word soul to refer to the whole person, even after the death of the earthly body, it did not mean to divide the essential unity of the body. And that’s why, when I talked to the children and tried to describe for them what the soul was, I said, It’s your pretty eyes, it’s your laughter, it’s your thoughts, it’s all the person together. The things that make you uniquely you, including even the gifts of who you’ve been in your body.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless his holy name. All that is within me, my soul. The Bible is trying to speak of everything that makes you really you. So you can lose a hand and still be you. You can lose both hands and still be you. It’s about the whole person.

My soul is my spirit and my personality and my experiences and my loves and my hurts and my hopes and my fulfillments and my questions and my kindnesses and my self, altogether.

Lamentations three, verse twenty-five: The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.:

I think, after a whole lot of reading and some reflection this week, in modern times when we use the word soul, it’s close to the way we use the word person, or self. That’s close to the way the Bible uses the word soul, I think. It speaks of something more than just the life principle, of something more than spirit versus flesh. So in the scriptural sense, not the John Belushi sense but in the scriptural sense, soul speaks of a living being created in relationship to God. Both those things together.

Soul means a living being in relationship with God. So I don’t think the Bible uses the word soul to speak of a living being not in relationship with God, but rather of living beings created in relationship to God.

Four things that the Christian faith means when it uses the word soul. Why is this important? Because since you are a soul, these are four things that are true about you. Four things to remember as you set out on this journey from Lent to Holy Week and Easter.

One: When we speak of a soul, we are acknowledging that a human being is defined by the purposes of God the Creator. We are speaking of a life principle in relationship to a Creator, God. By soul, we are saying that this person has been called into existence by God, given an identity by God, an individuality by God. We are saying that God cares about this specific being, and in that care is in relationship with that being, and that being in relationship with God. We are saying that God gives that being a name. Not an English name, though we call the name in baptism as a way of heightening that, but rather a specific identity. We are saying, You. We are talking about a you in relationship with God. And that’s not the way that everybody in the world talks about people. It’s just not necessarily a given that every place in the world, even in this world, in Florida, in Tampa, it’s just not the given that when people speak of you they are speaking of a being in relationship with the God who created that being. But that’s what we mean when we speak of a soul, and that has profound implications for you.

Two: When we speak of a soul, we are acknowledging that human life is not self-explanatory. So when we say, “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” in some way we are saying that no matter how much historical analysis we do, no matter how much scientific inquiry we do, no matter how much biochemical analysis we do or psychological evaluation or sociological study, or even theological reflection, there is nothing we can do in our language that ever is going to fully explain the person whom God has created. We are acknowledging that human life is not self-explanatory. To speak of a soul is a way of saying that the living being was created by God and thus the purpose of that being is ultimately going to be found not in any of those individual analyses, but rather in the purposes of God. We are saying that your purpose, your intention, is found ultimately in God’s purpose, in God’s intention. We are saying something about you. When we speak of a soul, we are acknowledging that human life is good and valuable, and that’s not something that everybody in the world acknowledges about human life. When we say that you are a soul, that’s what we’re saying, that your life is inherently good because God created it and it is valuable. Human life comes as a gift from a good God and therefore it should be received with gratitude. And the inherent privileges and worth that you claim for yourself have to be claimed for your neighbor also, because your neighbor also is a soul created by a good God, and their life is good and valuable. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights….” That’s part of what it means to be a soul, I think. That you are created and thus you have these gifts which God has given you. That’s where your goodness comes from.

Three: Soul talk, in the Christian sense, is language that is always acknowledging that human life is good, and that has all sorts of applications. I don’t think you can harvest organs from unwilling people if life is good, if they are souls. And you can’t just dispose of people who are a nuisance to you, if they are souls. And you can’t say, “Well, let’s just nuke them,” because each one of them is a soul, known by God, created in the purposes of God, and valuable to God. And however we relate to them, it’s in that context, that truth. You can’t have them as slaves, not with the Biblical witness. That’s why the Christian community, though it started out that way, living in the reality of the Biblical witness to people being souls, over time, felt the weight of that scriptural witness and reality bearing in until finally we had to give the practice up. We just couldn’t stand it, under the witness of scripture any more.  You have to love your self, your own soul, as well as your neighbor’s soul. Soul talk, in the sense of human life, coming from a good Creator and thus also being good or valuable, has all kinds of practical implications. So when you say a soul, a part of what you are saying is that your life is good. Not that it’s meritorious, but that it’s valuable.

Four: Finally, when we speak of a soul, when you think of yourself as a soul or the soul next door to you, or the soul you may be living in a house with, you are saying that that’s a dependent life. Each person is dependent on powers and forces outside themselves. You know that’s true. All of the processes and energies of a created order. So we can’t put you in a rocket and shoot you up into space and throw you out of the spacecraft. You are dependent. There are some things that you have to have. We can’t drop you into Lake Michigan in the middle of January without some preparation – you’ll freeze to death. We can’t drop you into a volcano. You’re dependent. It’s really a fairly narrow window of dependency. We don’t have to raise the temperature much, or lower it much, before your dependency is excruciatingly clear to you. You are very dependent. We forget sometimes how dependent we are, or at least I do.

To speak of a person’s soul is a way of acknowledging their essential status as dependent beings, so soul people then, are people who know that they have to rest. Soul people are people who know that they have to eat. That they are not immortal. People who don’t think they have to rest, who don’t think they have to eat, delude themselves (though they may not realize it) into thinking they are immortal. They think they are God.

When I was an associate at this church, I was on some committee that was meeting out at Cedarkirk, the Presbyterian camp and conference center out on the Alafia River, and I had had a busy day. Just like you have lots of busy days. It wasn’t any busier than your busy days. Full of the kind of stuff we put into a day without margins, and I was running from one thing to another. Every task important. I was headed to this meeting late, and it’s like a thirty-minute drive, maybe forty minutes if you’re not speeding. I got there and they were serving dinner beforehand at Cedarkirk. I got there too late for dinner. They had already started. I parked my car and I raced up the stairs through the dining room heading to where they were meeting, and I was getting ready to run by the camp director, the fellow who used to be the camp director. A great big bear of a guy whose name was A.T. Brown. He is about twenty-five years older than me. Maybe thirty years older. A.T., short for Angus Theophylus Brown. If your name was Angus Theophylus, you’d go by A.T. also. Sometimes I’ve wondered if his mother had two other sons named B.T. and C.T.?

A.T. Brown. As I kind of ran through that dining room, he saw me and he said, “John, where are you headed?” I said, “I’m going to the meeting.” He said, “You didn’t eat supper.” I said, “But they’ve already started.”

As I went by him, he kind of stood up and he put his hand on my shoulder in a way that brought me to a halt. He turned me around and he said, “Sit down.” Then while he held his hand on my shoulder, he called into the kitchen and he said, “Bring a plate out here.” They brought it out and they put it in front of me, and he looked at me and he said, in a rebuke, in love, but in the rebuke of love, he said, “Who do you think you are?”

Soul people are people who know they are dependent. It’s a part of the way God has made us. So soul people know that they are people who have to rest. They know that they have to eat. Who know they are limited.

Apart from your relationship with God, (I think the Bible is trying to teach us) you have no soul, and when you wander away from your relationship with God, you do so at the peril not just of your physical body, but at the peril of your soul.

As you journey through Lent, I am hoping, like verse one of the Psalm says, that at least once a day you’ll lift up your soul before God. You will lift up your very soul before God, like a pastor holding up the communion chalice. That’s the image I’m hoping you have of yourself, lifting up your soul before God. And when you do, maybe it’s a way of trying to remember that you a human being, defined by the purposes of God. A human being whose life has purpose in God’s purposes. That you are a human being who is, while open to explanation, profoundly a mystery, which God can discern but you can never discern fully. That you are a human being that is good. By that I mean valuable, that you come from a good Creator. That you are a human being that is dependent. Dependent on something besides your own powers and your own abilities.

Soul is a self, an individual being, in relationship to God.

“Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, just as it is with your soul.”

“So now, O Israel, what does the Lord require of you? Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. “

“May the God of peace sanctify you entirely, and may your spirit and your soul be kept sound and blameless at the coming of the Lord, Jesus Christ. “

©John T. DeBevoise 2003