Sermon: "I'm a Soul Man"

2nd in the "Relational Theology" series.
Delivered February 15, 2009 by Rev. George Antonakas.
Sermon Text: Genesis 2:4-7; Psalm 103:1-2

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Isn't it great how we all relate to Charlie Brown? I mean all of us can relate to him as a person who is kind of not sure about himself. We also hear voices like Lucy's telling us certain things, and we hear voices like Linus' telling us certain things, and it's hard to separate all those voices many times. I feel a little bit like Charlie Brown when it comes to the announcement that I made last week about the sermon next week.

I think I got some e-mails, well I know I got some e-mails, because I didn't make myself clear. I didn't mean to say you should just keep your kids home if they're 2nd through 5th grade, and as you already can see from the back of the bulletin, we are planning alternative instruction for them if they normally sit here in this service or in the 8:30 service.

And I got another e-mail saying, "Wait a minute, you're going just talk about sex for 20 minutes and then that's it, I mean we don't have any follow-up, there's nothing?" And I said, okay, you know, you're absolutely right. We were planning it, it wasn't fully crafted and so beginning two weeks from today, on March 1st, Josh Glaser from Regeneration Ministries will be at the 10:00 hour and have a four-week class.

And part of that four week class will be fielding questions and the curriculum... snippets of the curriculum will be in next week's News and Views, and so hopefully things will be able to be processed in that way. And so I felt like I made a mistake, and so just to make myself feel better... did anybody else make a mistake this past week? Anybody make a mistake maybe? That's good, I'm glad. I'm worried about those who did not raise their hands.

Besides that, I made another mistake this past week, and I think it needs correcting. I'm not going to bore you with the details, even though I know you want me to, but it's still so fresh. I've been having these struggles of conscience and some rationalization battling back and forth. And my conscience is winning but it's still not fully... I'll tell you some other time about it when I do what I need to do about correcting things.

But we all have so many excuses for our failings, don't we? I mean we all just come up with stuff that, when you really step back from it, it's kind of goofy. We say I did this thing because I wanted this or I needed this, when in fact we didn't need it at all, we just desired to have it. We just wanted to feel good and so we do something dumb.

People say all the time, I did such and so, or I chose this relationship because I was unhappy, only to find that they become more unhappy. Or I was confused, or I was feeling very lonely or I was feeling frightened, and we rationalize, we use all kinds of reasonings for making poor choices to cover guilt and shame.

One excuse in particular is very common, and we've all probably said it. I'm guessing that every one of us has used this three or four-word phrase depending on the contraction, and in our culture it's like a special pass that we use, like a get-out-of-jail-free card, whenever we're feeling like we don't want to face up to our responsibilities or we don't want to admit our failures. And from a theological point of view, it's the absolute worst phrase we can use if we really understand what we're saying.

Anyone have a guess at what this three or four-word excuse might be? I'll start it out for you; I think you can finish it. I'm only... human. I'm only human. And when we try to comfort somebody else, we say well you're just being human. We don't even know what we're saying when we say that, because if we knew what we were really saying, what human really is intended to be, we wouldn't say that.

Now on the positive side of that statement is this... Romans 3:23 is very clear from the Scriptures, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." There's not a soul alive who has not sinned. But that is intended to get us moving toward the remedy that God provides in Jesus Christ.

So in one sense to say "I'm only human" is to say, "Yes, we recognize that all humans have failed." But on the not so good side of that statement is that it becomes an escape clause from a guilty conscience or a means of permitting ourselves to continue whatever it is that we feel guilty about or a means of ignoring the need for restitution and the pain of making things right.

It's a demand to be excused versus a demand for accountability. To say it denigrates the Scripture, what the Scripture says about being human. It's almost like taking our own names in vain in a way. When we say that, we are not really understanding what God means by "human." And the understanding that we're looking for today can be found in today's text from Genesis, chapter 2, and it has profound theological implications for how we view ourselves and how we relate to others. So we're going to look at Genesis 2, verses 4-7, but let's just pray for just a second.

Lord, we ask that your Word would be made clear to us, not just as, again, holy, ancient script, but your very Word to us today. And that as we read it and as we ponder it and other Scriptures, transform us so that we might be made more clearly into your likeness and into your image. We ask it in Christ's name, Amen.

Okay, we are in week two of three weeks of the "Relational Theology" series and last week we focused on God is the starting point as we talked about the Trinity. And today we want to think together how God's act of creation affirms our worth and our value. So we're going to look at Genesis 2. Genesis 1, many of us are familiar with the first creation narrative. This is the second creation narrative.

Genesis 1 seems to be more of an interactive description with God speaking things into being and creating living creatures, including humans. And in Genesis 2 we see a shift in how God is referred to. In Genesis 1, it says, "And God said, and God said, and God said... "

In Genesis 2, it changes in verse 4.

"This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens- and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground."

And here's the key verse:

"The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being."

Another translation, probably more accurate, "a living soul."

In Genesis 2, God is given a double name, it's no longer Elohim; it's Yahweh Elohim. And this shows us in a fairly interesting way that this creation narrative was penned after the people of God became the people of God in Israel, maybe around the 9th or 10th century, that they were now reflecting back and using creation myths from all around them but shaping it for their own purposes because they were the people of Yahweh.

And so in Genesis 2, we see it says, "And Yahweh Elohim" did this. In Genesis 2, matter and things are not quite as formless and void as in chapter 1. There is still a "not yet" environment to things, things aren't quite crafted the way they would be in their final form. And then comes a crowning act of creation: from perishable material, dust it says, God shapes a man.

But the human form, in its shape, is still inert. There's no life in it, it's like a mannequin until something inexplicable happens. God breathes life into being, into the nostrils of the man, and the man of the ground, Adam... Adam, Adama, ground... becomes a living being, a living soul. Nephesh - a soul.

So now I'm going to do my James Brown impersonation, I'm a Soul Man. Ready? No, I'm just... Thank you for not doing that, somebody just said. But think about that song. Think about that song for just a minute, I'm a Soul Man. Obviously it's speaking about a certain kind of music that is being sung, but think about the word "soulish."

Now hang with me here, I'm going to just wax a little theological, using some help from Gene Peterson when he thinks about the word "soulish." He says this: "That word, our soul... or soul, something soulish gives a sense of something inherent and relational." It is something that is about our depths, entering the depths, plumbing the underlying sources of motive and meaning, as in soul food or soul mate, or we say when we look at somebody who is forsaken, that poor lost soul.

In Hebrew language, soul is a metaphor for the neck. Now yeah, you can go ahead, put your hand on your neck or you can put two hands around the neck of somebody you don't like next to you and squeeze... no. The neck... think of the neck, think of the neck, it's a connector. Why would soul and neck be metaphorical? Because a neck connects everything from the brain and the nervous system with everything else.

The neck literally keeps us together. The neck is the narrow passage through which air passes from mouth to lungs and then back up again in speech and breath. Breath, spirit, speech. God breathed life all about and focused on the neck. It's a conduit for signals from the brain. The mighty jugular vein is dangerously close to the skin's surface. The neck keeps everything together.

Soul is the force that keeps all of us together, unified in our bodies, in who we are. Genesis 2 says that this breath that flows through the soul is God's breathed-in life and that if the breath goes, the human being returns to the dust. Apart from God, there's not a whole lot to us. Who we are is created for God.

Soul is a word that reverberates with relationship. Think about it, when Psalm 103... in Psalm 103 verse 1, the psalmist says "Praise the LORD, O my soul." Look at what he says next, "all my inmost being."

My inner being, my soul, praise him. That part of me... that part of me, it's who I am in connection, in relationship to God. It says that Jonathan and David, their souls were knit together. They were soul mates in a way. It also points out what it means to be created in God's image in Genesis, chapter 1, in verses 26 and 27 it says... God makes this grand pronouncement and says, "Let us create and make humans in our image, and he created them male and female." (paraphrase)

The soul, the image of God, is not just capacities of personality, intellect and will. It's not just that we're a reflection of God; our soul defines us as able to partner with God who gave us that soul. Our soul makes us capable of relating to God and to each other, soulishly. Our soul explains that we're designed by God, for God, and we will never truly be fulfilled in our relationships until we live and breathe unto God by his grace.

Does anyone like a good horror story? Not the stuff that they put out nowadays, I'm talking about the classics, like Frankenstein. I mean those were classic stories; they had a message to them. Do you know when those stories rose? Frankenstein and Dracula and all those? They rose as a reaction to the Age of Reason where humanity was the center of things, where the Enlightenment Period said that we could kind of cast off God, that man was the measurer of all things.

So Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, I think was trying to make a statement, wasn't just about to scare people. She was trying to teach the world that all hell breaks loose when humans try to take the place of a creator or live out of reliance upon the Lord God. It's hard to think about Frankenstein without thinking about that scene where he goes, "I'm alive!", you know? But there's a false way in that context, of that life coming in.

Frankenstein's monster was like a fun-house image compared to what our soul is really intended to be like. When you look at a fun-house mirror effect, it's kind of funny, but it sends back a distorted image of who we are.

So I want to ask you, how do you think of yourself? What is your image of yourself? I'd like to use another picture as a way of God's intention for us to think. Now there is a masterpiece, Leonardo Da Vinci's masterpiece. I was so fortunate in 1968 to be able to go with other people from my high school on a tour of Europe, and we went to the Louvre in that year, and we were able to see the Mona Lisa. And we were in the Louvre that time, there was a rope right about where the rug is here and the Mona Lisa was right about where the first step is. You could almost... you could almost reach out and touch it.

Now when we went back last May and you go into this huge room that's hermetically sealed and you can't get anywhere near it. And people are flashing pictures from about here to maybe the fifth row. Now we're going to come back to the Mona Lisa in a moment, but I want to ask you, what do you think of yourself? How do you think of yourself, as a masterpiece or a piece of trash? We have a lot of crazy views about who we are. We get them from a lot of different places, from very powerful people as we're growing up, from other media information.

But I'd like to share with you just for a moment, that if we have a lesser view of ourselves than our God-bestowed image, we will spend our days seeking to gain a sense of value from everything other than God. We'll seek it from... it shows in our pursuits, our pursuits for acquisition, our pursuits about our appearance, our pursuits about an appearance of status. We try to gain in that way.

Relational problems really are deep down, when you think about it, a deep-seated need to connect and to know that we're loved. If we deeply believe that we have God's love, we'll be less inclined to make really poor choices about relationships. I mean, do you know anybody who's made a really poor choice about a relationship out of their own need to be loved, and yet it really didn't make a difference after a while? That person ended up being used?

When we know who we are before God, we won't place a burden too difficult to bear on another human being, as though that person were intended to meet our needs and do something that only God can do. We won't put a burden on our spouse or on close relationships. When we can stand with God in wholeness, we'll be able to give out of strength instead of take out of weakness. We'll be able to let go of false images of ourselves and the false messages of others.

This past week I was looking at an article in a magazine about a woman who... actually the author was writing about her mother, and it was the late 1960's in Boston and she reflected on when she was a kid. The author's name is Caroline and the mother's name is Helen. And when Caroline and her sister Ruth were kids, her mother Helen was always taking pictures of them, I mean always and always telling them they were beautiful.

And the kids naturally said, "Well mom, where are pictures of you when you were little?" And a strange look came over her face and she said we didn't really take that many pictures when we were back in those days. She said, I think there's one family photo, but nobody knows where it is. And so that became the quest of the kids, to find this family photo. Every time mother's siblings would come over, "Where's that photo? Who's got that photo? We've never seen a picture of our mom when she was a kid, we want to see it. Who has the photograph?" That was what they would always ask.

Finally as Helen was nearing her 90's, her sister Jean dies, and in the bottom of a box of her sister's is this family photograph, the first picture that Helen's kids have ever seen of her when she was a kid. And they said they could barely contain their excitement when they gathered around and they see this family photograph of about nine people, seven kids. And all these kids were looking so decked out and so regal, and dad, who was a rabbi, is sitting in the middle, looking very important and the mother standing next to him with hand on shoulder, looking like a queen. And then over here, way over in the corner is little Helen, almost like she didn't belong.

She looks at the picture, Helen, in her daughters' presence and she says "Do I look like my brother?" She was a twin and her daughters told her, "Oh mom, you look better. You look better. You look so beautiful." Then she started to tell a story. Now she's 90 years old and she's starting to tell things to her daughters that they never knew.

She tells a story from her childhood that when she and her twin brother slept in the same room and one night after they'd gone to bed, her mother guided guests up to see them, her mother not knowing that Helen was awake. And her mother said, "Helen's nothing to look at, but doesn't the boy look like a little angel? Isn't he the most beautiful child you've ever seen?"

The daughters who are listening to this say, "That's terrible! That's terrible!" And so mom goes on to explain how her father and her older sister Jean were the only ones who showed her unconditional love. Everybody else in the family bullied her and ignored her or pushed her into their shadow. And she goes on to say, she says, "I was never the pretty one. My mother only liked people who were good looking."

And the daughters say, "You were good looking, just look at that photograph." She says, "I never felt it." And she makes a point of telling how the mom would always say, "Well, put your foot out in front of the other one so you don't look so scrawny." Or when she was making dresses for her and they would be faded and torn after being worn by older siblings, she would say things like, "Well, they're only going to go to Helen, it's okay."

"Your mother was so wrong," her daughters pointed out, "and so were your brothers and sisters." And then mom, Helen, says, "You know, Jean was always there for me. I remember hearing her say, "Just be your beautiful self." And the daughters say, "That's the voice you should listen to, that's the voice you should listen to. You should listen to our voices." And then she finally picks up the photo, and she says, "Yeah, I guess I can see that there's something special about me."

Mom finally dies and here's how the author ends her article because the photograph now hangs over her desk at work, "When I look into my mother's eyes, I wish I could travel back in time, I'd go right to that house in Massachusetts and find that shy little girl. I'd tell her not to listen to terrible things that anyone said about her because they weren't true. I'd grab a mirror and show her the person she really was - radiant and alive and make her feel as beautiful as she always made me feel."

I want to ask you a question. Who has your photograph? Who has, who holds your soul photo? Who's interpreting it? Can I suggest that you let another voice in if it's got a poor interpretation? That the Lord Jesus could shine light onto this photograph, and you could find yourself in a family photo with Jesus, God's own Son, who Christians call "Our Brother," right there with you. He wants to tell you not to listen to any voice but his own when it comes to who you are. He doesn't want you to listen to the terrible things that others, or you, say about you.

I can hear someone saying, "Well, wait a minute, you don't know who I am. You don't know what I have done." You're right. But let's look at the Mona Lisa one more time. Tell me, what would happen if back 40 years ago, a madman reached across that rope and took a knife and slashed it down the middle? Would the curators come along and say, "Well, that's that, let's get rid of it." No way. They would find the greatest restorers in the world. They would find the greatest hands in the world to come and try to put that masterpiece back in as close to the original as possible.

The greatest hands in the world did just that when they were nailed to a cross. The greatest act of restoration took place on a cross 2,000 years ago, and the resurrection, when Jesus' body was laid in the tomb, sealed the truth of God's victory over death and restored us to God in a way that was lost.

You remember at the end of the Gospel of John where Jesus, in announcing the mission and announcing who he is resurrected, what does he do? He breathes. He breathes and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit." Receive the Spirit of God that is intended to help you to come as close to the original this side of heaven as you can be.

Jesus can free us and give us a new picture of our worth in him, which is why the psalmist later in Psalm 103 lists a whole litany of things, "Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being... " Praise him for his forgiveness, for his healing, for his redemption, for his love, for his compassion, for his satisfaction of our desires with good things. Jesus is the one who restores what was lost when our souls went astray.

I want to close with a text from 1 Corinthians 15 because here is Paul, waxing theological about Genesis, chapter 2, and concluding it in who we are recreated in, Jesus Christ. Let's look at it, 1 Corinthians 15:45.

"So it is written: 'The first man Adam became a living being'; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven."

And this is for those who said to Jesus... I trust in you, I put my faith in you: "And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven." Created in his image' A God who created is the God who saves. This God created and recreated you beautifully to the depths of your soul. Listen to his voice about who you are.

Lord, we pray that you would seal this Word to our hearts, help us to get beyond false images so that we might understand who we were intended to be in Jesus Christ. Thank you for not giving up on us even when we have sinned. We pray for your grace to cover it all. In Christ's name, Amen.

© 2009, Rev. George Antonakas
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org