Jesus said: "By your endurance you will gain your souls."

Lately we here at St George's have been learning together a kind of Bible study--sometimes called "Dwelling in the Word" and sometimes called "Gospel-Based Discipleship"--in which you approach a biblical text, any biblical text, with three questions: 1) What catches my attention, what sparks my imagination in this text?; 2) What do I hear God saying to me in this text?; and 3) What do I hear God calling me to do, what is my response, to this text?

As I've been reading over the scriptures this week and gathering thoughts for a sermon, that first question--What catches my attention?--has centered on that one line from the end of the reading, "By your endurance you will gain your souls." And my attention has been kind of held there, my imagination has been sparked by that one line, and whatever else I've thought about, I keep coming back to that. Perhaps the Holy Spirit has a word to share with us about "gaining souls" in our lives.

I think part of the reason this line caught my attention and wouldn't let it go is that, on the surface of it, it seems like an odd phrase: "you will gain your souls." We usually think of the soul as something you have, something God puts in the body at the beginning of life and that leaves the body at the end of life--we don't typically think of the soul as something you have to "gain" in the process of living. Why would Jesus say "By your endurance you will gain your souls"? In the circumstances, given that Jesus is teaching about the apocalypse, we might expect Jesus would say "By your endurance you will keep your souls" or "By your endurance you will preserve your souls." But "gain your souls"? What's up with that? How do we gain soul?

Well it might help to know that in the original Greek of this passage, the way Luke wrote it, the word he uses for soul is psyche, from which we get our English word psyche, as in psychology or psychiatry. And psyche is something we do think about as growing and changing, something we might expect to gain as we go through life. Psyche is a word for our inner selves, our truest identities. Psyche includes our conscious minds, our wills, our emotions; but it also includes what Jung called the unconscious, our dreams, our inspirations, our imaginations. Psyche is the whole self, more than just the public face we show to the outside world. And of course our psyches grow and gain throughout our lives. Every new experience, every new thought, every new feeling, every new memory adds something to the psyche. We change and modify our psyches when we learn new things, or stretch ourselves to embrace different experiences, or acquire habits--when we work to break bad habits, and even more when we work to build up good and constructive and creative habits. Being intentional about how we form good habits of behavior, or creative patterns of thinking, or balanced ways of feeling, being intentional about that is part of the way we grow our psyches, how we gain in psyche. So maybe we can better understand what Jesus calls us to if we hear him say "By your endurance you will gain your psyches."

Things get even more interesting if we look at the Aramaic word for soul. Aramaic was the language Jesus originally spoke--he may have known Greek as well, because Greek was the business language of the time, and there was a Hellenistic city in Galilee not too far from Nazareth, and Jesus' work as a carpenter and a builder may well have led to lots of business contacts in the city before he began his public ministry--but Aramaic was almost certainly the language Jesus used with his family and his close disciples. In Aramaic, the word for soul is naphsha, and it comes from a Hebrew root that literally means the throat or the gullet. Naphsha or soul is closely used with another Hebrew word, ruach, which means spirit or breath. You can see the connection: the throat is the part the breath moves through, so the soul is the part the spirit moves through.

In Jewish thought, the spirit came from God, God breathed the spirit into living beings--as it says in Genesis, God formed a little manikin out of clay, breathed ruach into its nostrils, and it became the first human being. The spirit belongs to God. But the soul is distinctive and unique for each individual person. Think of how we breathe: the air doesn't belong to any of us, and none of us can take in the air and hold it for very long as if it were our own, or else we'll pass out. But the throat the air moves through--that's ours, and what we do with our throats modifies and modulates the breath that passes through. Right now I'm talking, which means that the vocal chords in my throat are vibrating, and that creates vibrations in the air as I breathe out, and those vibrations are sound waves which travel through the air to reach your ears so you can hear me. The air, the breath, doesn't belong to me, it "belongs" to the whole room; but the way I've modulated the air as it passes through my throat creates something we all can share.

And it goes even farther: we can learn how to use our throats to modulate the breath in all kinds of ways. Think of a stage actor or an orator or a singer who learns through lessons and coaching and practice how to use their throat to create all kinds of vocal qualities, whole ranges of pitch and tone and timbre, to communicate feeling and emotion and wisdom and inspiration and beauty. We can gain all kinds of vocal qualities by learning how to use our throats. What if the relationship between soul and spirit, naphsha and ruach, is like the relationship between throat and breath? What if the soul is that part of us God's Spirit moves through; and what if, as the Spirit moves in us, we can learn to sing with the Spirit, we can develop our ability to resonate in the Spirit, so that with the Spirit we create feeling and emotion and wisdom and justice and peace and love and joy? Maybe soul is not so much a thing we have, but a way we participate with the movement of the Spirit of God. So we gain in soul the more we synergize with God's Spirit. Maybe in the gospel today we can hear Jesus saying "By your endurance you will gain your naphshas."

And I think that gaining our souls, growing our psyches, developing the flexibility and fluency of our naphshas, is what the Christian life is all about. Becoming more able and more ready and more willing to recognize and respond to the movement of the Spirit in every moment is a core value of being a follower of Jesus. Jesus recognized and responded to the movement of God in every moment of his life--and that's the relationship with God Jesus invites us to come and share as well.

We develop that relationship, we gain in soul, when we come to church, when we join each other in praying and singing and offering intercessions and making Eucharist. Church is--or at least is meant to be--like a gym or a singing studio, where we gather to do the exercises, to train in the practices that will grow our psyches and develop our naphshas and help us gain our souls. Church is not just a place to come be with our friends and be supported and comforted--of course it is that, but it is more than that--church is the place, it is the community where we are taught how to grow our souls.

But it doesn't just stop at church. The soul-exercises we learn "in here" are meant to strengthen us and empower us to go "out there" and build up soul in the world. When Jesus says "By your endurance you will gain your souls," the endurance he's talking about is working in the world. And Jesus says that working in the world won't be easy. The world has wars and insurrections and earthquakes and famines and plagues and signs and portents. These are things we usually associate with the end of the world, but Jesus says quite pointedly in the gospel that these are not end, these come before the end, these are business-as-usual in the world quite apart from the end. And it's in the middle of that business-as-usual, Jesus says, it's right in the thick of wars and famines and earthquakes, Jesus says, that we have the opportunity to testify, it's there we have the occasion to bear witness to Jesus in words and deeds, it's there we have the calling to show forth the Good News about Jesus by working to build up justice and peace and community and right relationships and well-being and compassion and love. It is by standing firm, it is by remaining committed to bearing witness to Jesus in our public and our private lives, it is by persevering in building up relationships of communion in everything we do, with everyone we touch--it is by this that we grow our psyches and develop our naphshas as the Spirit of God moves in and through us for the renewing of the world. That's what Jesus means when he says "By your endurance you will gain your souls."

Let's gain some soul together today, shall we?