The Spirit as Transcendence[1]
By Charles Rush
May 30, 2004
Acts 2
oday
we lift
up Pentecost when the Church if filled with the Spirit of God in a supernatural
experience that manifested itself in people speaking in languages that they did
not know. I recognize that there are a number of intellectual difficulties
presented in this story, all of which I would like to skip this morning in
order to say something about transcendence and the spiritual. The point of this
story, made with the subtlety of a great white whale breaching the open sea, is
that the Spirit of God empowers us, cajoles us, and finally drives us to the
four corners of the earth to spread the good news of the gospel with every last
person.
The Spirit of
God is very real. We experience it as transcendence, we live it through love
and the hope of its power lies in eternal livingness. Perhaps this is a good
weekend to say a thoughtful word on love and death, seeing as how it is
Memorial Day weekend and we will remember the sacrifice that others made for us
at some point. It is a fact that most of us today try not to think about death.
I know that I am not much better at thinking about my own death than many of
you.
A couple
summers ago, I was in a parking lot outside a small grocery store in the Tuscan
hill town of Chiusi, waiting for my wife to purchase prosciutto and melone in the
noonday heat. She was inside, I was in the car, when I
began to grow faint. Sweat was pouring off my forehead profusely and I sensed
that I would pass out shortly. All of a sudden I said to myself,
'you are having a heart attack'. Never mind that I was missing the critical
symptom, pain or tightening in the chest. I was sure I was going to die. Now
you might think that a Minister would have serene, sublime thoughts at a moment
like that. Oh no… I was just thinking how stupid I was that I couldn't even
figure out how to say "take me to the hospital in Italian" to the old
men walking by. My vision started to darken and I knew I was losing
consciousness. My parting words to the world were, "I can't afford this
right now." While technically true, it lacked a sense of profundity in the
moment.
I was sharing
that story with a colleague that teaches philosophy and he said, 'We live, we
live, we live… and then we die.' It brings to mind the reflections of Epicurus
that depict pretty accurately the way most of us live, even if we never say it
so clearly. If I am alive, I am not dead. If I am dead, I am not alive. Why
should I think about death while I am still alive? It only spoils my pleasure
in living and gets in the way of my work. For me, this life holds everything.
For me, death is the end of everything. Or as the Oxford philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once
said, 'Death is not an event in life. No one experiences death."
Regardless of the quality of that insight, it strikes me that as a culture we
pretty much live as though that were true. We avoid reflection on the subject,
like certain teenagers that know they have important examinations that they
have to take but refuse to prepare for them nevertheless, as though somehow
lack of preparation might become a feeble out for their underperformance on the
test itself.
How different
the ancient world. Throughout Greece you can see depictions in art and
sculpture of a man holding a skull in his hand for the audience to ponder. Just
under the skull are the words, "Know thyself", which meant,
understand the nature of your mortal existence. The Roman philosophers used to
say memori mento, know
that you are mortal so that you could structure your earthly existence with
maturity and realism. They also used to regularly say vita brevis est, life is short. They recognized that there is
a limit and a structure that death sets for us and the recognition of that
boundary is critical to developing a meaningful life. The bible makes the same
point in the Psalms. Psalm 90:12 says "Help us to understand how short
life is/that we might develop wisdom in our heart". What kind of wisdom is that?
On one level,
it is a recognition of the uniqueness of each
individual person. The philosopher Fichte referred to
this as our transcendental subjective identity, a wonderful phrase. There is
something about our personality that suggests the sum aggregate is greater than
the mere biological components that compose it. Some have said it is our
ability for rational thought, others our ability to develop a moral code,
others our creative capabilities, others our awareness and deployment of time
and history. Sum total, we have an ability to shape the world in breadth and
quality that is quite unlike any other species. And within
that matrix of abilities, it apparent that a qualitative evolutionary leap has
been made. Teilhard de Charin used to say that our self-consciousness
is a spiritual interiorization, an involution, a
concentration of psychic ability. And with it, a new form of energy came into
being- a personality, a soul.
In our
earliest religions, we recognized that this soul is greater and longer lasting
that the mere material world around it. Many have said, it
must be immortal. As the Bhagavad Gita (II, 20) puts it "Never is it
[the soul] born nor dies; never did it come to be nor will it ever come to be
again: unborn, everlasting…"
Plato
developed this idea and it has come down to us. One of his most touching
arguments for the uniqueness and eternality of the soul is
in his observations about lovers. He noted the way that great lovers have that
feeling that they have found their true compliment, another person that not
only makes them feel safe and accepted like they could never imagine, but
someone who inspires them to grow and develop, someone who gives them a
profound joy such as they never imagined that they could ever experience. Plato
used to say that God has created for us one partner and our quest for romance
is to find just that person. I think he overspeaks at
this point, but he is absolutely right that when great lovers are parted in
death, they say of each other, there will never be another person like her… No
one could take his place… Great lovers feel like the bond they had together
established something unique and wonderful, something that cannot be destroyed
by death.
I trust it
goes without saying that this is not true just of lovers but great friends have
the same awareness that the unique personality of great friendship is also
transcendental- it has an eternal quality to it that is not diminished by death
and mortality.
The Bible has
a similar recognition when they say that we are all children of God. It is one
of the more profound teachings of scripture that each of us have
divine value. It has been that teaching that has been at root of our
development of human rights and democratic values in the West. We all matter to
God.
Spiritually
speaking, the bible teaches us that it is not just romance but love that makes
us alive. 'Brother and sisters, love one another as
God has loved you'. Love animates us. Love fills us with the Spirit. Love
brings out the joie de vivre, the joy for living in us. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann says, "An affirming, loving and
accepting life is a truly human life. By virtue of this love we become living
people- by virtue of this love we surrender ourselves to life- by virtue of
this love we make others living people too.
"But in
what we love we are also vulnerable, for in this affirmation of life we open
the door to happiness and pain, life and death. If it our love for life, our
own life and the life of those we love, that makes us suffer and experience the
deadliness of death. In love we surrender ourselves to life, and in surrendering
ourselves to life we surrender ourselves to death. That means that love makes
our life living, and at the same time consciously mortal. Love lets us
experience the livingness of life and also the deadliness of death."
[2]
We have all
had friends and relatives who have lost loved ones and are in great pain.
Sometimes the pain is so great that you wish you could relieve them of that
pain. But you can't. And the reason you can't is because they have known great
love. Great pain at death is the price we pay for the privilege we have of
living great love. They go hand in hand. The only authentic thing we can do for
our friends and relatives is to promise to walk with them through their season
of pain, to check up on them and do the things for them that they cannot bring
themselves to do. We can pray for them and support them.
But there are
things worse than the pain of grief that is felt openly and honestly. We can
shut down. We can be overwhelmed by the frequency or scale of death around us
as sometimes happens to survivors of great tragedies or our soldiers in a
combat zone. There are just too many people dying and we can't take it in. What
happens is that we begin to close down our emotional and spiritual selves. We
stop feeling. We must protect ourselves from the scope of death around us and
the price is that we become numb and insensate. That is to say that spiritually
we are not experiencing the livingness, the lovingness of life, we are not
feeling at all and it is a kind of spiritual dying. It is lonely and isolated,
even if people are all around us. Spiritually, we would wish that anything
would jolt us back to life and it seems to have to come from the outside, we
just can't generate it ourselves. The inability to mourn is worse than the
grief of mourning because it is also an inability to love and to live.
In the bible,
the afterlife is always depicted as a community. That is because the eternality
of our existence is only experienced through love. We must have each other. We
must be for one another and with one another for love.
And in the
bible, our hope is not exactly in the nature of our souls which will transcend
death. Our hope is really in God, God who is ultimate love, God
who can create new life out of death. It is in the gospel of John that this
connection is spelled out for us poetically. One of the memorable lines from
John begins, "For God so loved us… that God sent Jesus…" And in the
gospel of John, Jesus tells the disciples not only to love one another, but
that their love is life, it is the livingness. He says symbolically, "I
live, and you shall live also" (John 14:19).
It is because
of God's love that Christians say that God grieves with us as well.
Symbolically, this is what we understand by that terrible scene when Jesus is
on the cross, alone, and Jesus says, "My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me".[3] On the
one hand, that depiction of Jesus is a graphic, realistic reminder that we are
not spared the worst sense of abandonment in this life, regardless of our
spiritual maturity or moral virtue. On the other hand, we have always
understood the profundity of that scene that Jesus, so to speak, takes that
sense of forsakenness into the heart of God.
If God is in
an ultimate sense, love. Then God grieves too. God feels our isolation, our
numbness, our deadness, our sadness and lonliness
too. There is a wonderful Methodist hymn that says
And when human hearts are breaking
Under sorrow's
iron rod,
Then we find that self-same aching
Deep within the heart
of God.
God, who loves us, suffers with us
and grieves with us too because that is part and parcel what it means to love.
And God gives us spiritual comfort too. Jesus said, "Blessed are those who
mourn for they shall be comforted." There is death, there is grief, but
there is also comfort and there is also new life that comes out of death. That
is our hope and it is also our witness. This is what we have known and lived,
in and with each other. That is the transcendent life of the Spirit that fell
upon the Church in power and truth.
This morning,
if I sound like I am reminding myself of the substantial promises of faith at
the close of my families season of mourning, I guess
that would also be true. And perhaps part of that is a witness also to the
profundity of love, both in its face of grieving a loss and in its comfort of
consoling presence in person and through prayer. The older I get, the more
grateful I am for the healing love that we share with each other. We can't
always cure what ails us, but we can always heal. And that is really the
spiritual business that we Christians are called to,
the healing of what is broken around us. We are menders, making new what has
been broken in compassionate, humane love, giving witness, living out the hope
that God resurrects what is dead unto new life. This weekend, as you pause, to
remember in memoriam those that have died that you might live, fill that memory
with love, fill it with life. And may God's healing surround you too. Amen
[1] The
substance of this sermon is entirely in debt to Jürgen Moltmann.
Though I will cite some of the original sources for the
readers who are interested in following them. All of them were
originally found in the chapter on Eternal Life in Moltmann's The Coming of
God (Fortress, 1996) pp. 49 ff.. I have been
largely influenced by Professor Moltmann
on his view of the afterlife and his understanding of the futurity of God that
draws us forward eschatologically. Professor Moltmann taught for many years at
the University of Tubingen.
I met him at Princeton when I was in graduate school.
[2] Ibid. p. 55.
[3] What
follows comes from Moltmann, p. 126.
© 2004
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
