I would like to make an introductory note about this passage from Nehemiah which, as you come to its closing, is very strange. This text comes from the period after the end of the Babylonian Exile, approximately 487 BC. The Torah, the Book of the Law, had been lost. Then, it was discovered and Ezra read it to reconstitute this religious community. Also, I would like to make another introductory note on this passage from Luke. Here, the writers have taken the first four verses of the Gospel and then skipped three chapters and moved to Jesus' first public appearance. But the one thing that should be noted, however, is that although Luke is certainly the most sophisticated of the evangelists in his style and language, when he talks about setting down an orderly, accurate account, well, this is not modern historiography. This is still 2000 years old, this is still Greco-Roman historiography which has as its point not the facts, but the edifying meaning of a man's life. So these writers do all kinds of things that we would think are not factual in order to express this.

If you did not hear Eileen's discussion Wednesday you missed a really important opportunity for all kinds of reasons. First of all, the discussion was very insightful, and secondly, the exchange of information was wonderful in that there was a diverse group of reactions to the talk. But I would like to pick up, because I think that this is what our readings are about, this business of spirituality. This is one of those words that has become a wax-our-nose so that people can make of it almost what they will. Eileen was very clear with regard to her understanding of spirituality and I just want to, in a sense, amplify this by sourcing the biblical material where, presumably, this business of spirituality is rooted, even if it does take on non-Christian forms.

The "Spirit" was the Jews' favourite word for talking about God as animating us. So, whenever you hear the word "Spirit", in either the Hebrew Scriptures or the New Testament, the writers are not talking about the third person of the Trinity as this did not get sorted out for several hundred years after the closing of the New Testament period. They were talking about God and how God impinges upon the world by animating the world, by making the world alive. An obvious instance of this is the Creation story in which God "breathes" into this little clay doll and it becomes a living spirit. Spirit just means "breath" and the Jews observed the simple physiological fact that when there was no Spirit, or when there was no breath in the human body, you were dead. Thus, they understood that when you were alive you were breathing, you had the Spirit - - the animating power, what makes us alive, or to use Sister Wendy's term, what turns us from zombies into real human beings.

There are just two things that I want to talk about today because this text from the Corinthians is going to be continued over the next few weeks. The things that Paul says about the Spirit are really important. Paul, a good Pharisaic Jew, talked about the Spirit quite often and when he talked about the Spirit - - "We are all baptized of the one Spirit. We all drink of the one Spirit" - - he was saying that we are all made alive. Thus, the question becomes: What does it mean to be alive? This is where what Eileen was talking about comes into play. Being alive means being honest, loyal, self-aware, responsive to other people, and to have integrity. All of these things, from the biblical point of view, are the result of the action of the Spirit. So, you have in both John and Paul these strange images of people being biologically alive, up and about, yet being dead, i.e. totally unspiritual. They have become zombies, they have become inhuman.

The first thing I want to emphasize is this: to believe in the "Jesus buisness" is to work under the conviction of these texts in which Jesus says, "Without me you can do nothing" are true. Yet , I personally do not take them seriously, and I don't because this text asserts something that flies in the face of every iota of our contemporary consciousness here in the West: the idea that we  can operate fully, all by oneself, as fully human beings! We have a can-do mentality. We talk about empowering and use phrases like, "I am pulling my own strings","I am being my own best friend". This is what we push and try to convince people that the ideal is the self-made, self sufficient-human being. But again, this raises the question, "What does it mean to be a fully human being?" We are all up and about, we are all walking around, but at what depth and from what depth? From what center do we operate? According to the biblical view, the normal center is simply the instinct for self-preservation. This is the ultimate depth. But, the Bible implicitly states that to operate from that center is to in fact be dead, to be unspiritual.

How do we get to the point where, as mature human beings, we come to that kind of self-consciousness? A self-consciousness derived from that statement: "Without you I can do nothing". That itself is grace. And again, everyone should be familiar with what I am talking about thanks to people like Freud and Nietsche who say that basically this is the ultimate claim of the absolute escapist - - "I cannot do it. Big daddy is going to do it for me". Well, maybe this is so radically difficult to get hold of because there are so few models of people who seem to have brought this off in their lives - - the sense that apart from the spirit of God I cannot manage a human life. And, a human life means all of those wonderful things that Eileen was talking about.

The second issue is the one that Paul insists on in an almost childishly literal fashion. He was very anxious, as we will see next week, to enable people to see and appropriate and make their own descent that everyone has the same Spirit; that we are not just animated for our own lives and by ourselves. Otherwise what makes forgiveness possible if I cannot come to the point of believing that everybody else wants the truth, what is good and beautiful, as fully and as ardently as I do, no matter how great the distortion of those desires? The first consequence of this is that we do not know what the Spirit of God is, unless we can recognize, by faith, the action of the Spirit of God in other people.Until then we cannot really talk about the Spirit of God, because contrary to much of Christian history, with its profound privatization and individualism, the reality of the Spirit is radically contrary to this.

Finally, maybe the whole notion of peace is a reasonable way to finish this discussion for today. What peace? Shalome, that great biblical word, "Peace I give to you, my peace I leave you". It is all over the place. What is peace? Is it some kind of inner contentment? No, this is not what peace means in the biblical sense. Peace is always a political reality. Peace is always the consequence of relationships and this, and this alone, is the biblical notion of peace and anything else is counterfeit, misleading, perverse, certainly not faithful to the Bible. Peace does not just exist in us, peace exists in the fact that we know that we are animated by a God who loves us, and therein lies the potential to be able to stand, like the words in Genesis state, "naked and unashamed before everybody". That is peace, and to finally take our last lead from what Eileen said, "that is the only possible source of real joy". So, you might want to ask yourself, as Eileen very pointedly and, I believe, accurately did, "Why the absence of joy?". We live a joyless existence and we, to a very large extent, live in a joyless world. But why? I put it to you that the reality of of the Spirit, at least this is what we say we believe, is the only possible grounds for joy.