THE SPIRIT IS WILLING, BUT THE FLESH IS WEAK

Matthew 26:41 – “Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

One of the notable things to me about the Civil Rights Movement is that the people worshiped together in order to gain the sustenance and strength to go into the streets to face whatever came at them that day. They held prayer meetings, sang together, socialized together. All of these were necessary to build bonds of love and trust that could withstand the hatred and cruelty they faced. They kept each other’s spirits up, held each other when they grieved, they were stronger together than they were alone. They needed both prayer and a trusted community, because it’s so much harder alone.

Because the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Howard Thurman calls community a crucible, “a place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development.” It shapes us and forms us. If our communities (families, churches, neighborhoods) are supportive and loving, we become shaped and formed by love. If not, well, that’s the crucible, the challenge. Those in that situation must learn to adjust, adapt, accept, change, recover, heal as necessary. Churches, families, neighborhoods are all communities with both comfort and challenge. Let’s be honest, we often think of the church as sanctuary, the place where we are safe, where we go to assure ourselves that God loves us. It is that.

But it is also a place of challenge in the form of practices we don’t like, others who might irritate us, people who are mean or make others uncomfortable, people who can’t sing in tune, predators, and, well the list goes on. The church is nothing more than a microcosm of the world, not heaven. These challenges are necessary for our growth in the faith and in our spirits. Without them the flesh will not rise to the task the Spirit has set. What is that task?

Here’s Thurman again:

The profoundest disclosure in the religious experience is the awareness that the individual is not alone. What [we discover] as being true and valid for [ourselves] must at last be a universal experience, or else it ultimately loses all its personal significance. [Our] experience is personal, private, but in no sense exclusive. All the visions of God and holiness which [we experience], they must achieve in the context of the social situation by which [our] day-by-day life is defined. What is disclosed in [the] religious experience, [we] must define in community. That which God share[s] with [us, we] must inspire [our] fellows to seek for themselves. [We are] dedicated therefore to the removing of all barriers which block or frustrate this possibility in the world. [We are] under judgement to make a highway for the Lord in the hearts and in the marketplace of [our] fellows. Through [our] living [others] must find it a reasonable thing to trust [God] and to trust one another and therefore to be brought nearer to the great sacramental moment when they too are exposed to the love of God … beyond the evil and the good.

That’s a lot of words to say that our experiences of God must be interpreted through our context, the communities of which we are a part. in seminary, we were required to clarify our context in our papers, because we read the Bible from a perspective that no one else can share. Yes, many people share some contexts, but no one else can live our lives. That context includes our social location, our “race,” our financial situation, our family situation, our cultural background, our experiences of injustice or privilege. All of these impact how we read the Bible and interpret our experiences of God. We need a church community to help us discern what those experiences mean in our lives. We cannot do it alone, just as the Civil Rights Movement was not accomplished by one person, and just as Peter will not do his work in the church alone either.

Because the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

So we all need community existentially. Norman Wirzba makes this point by writing that we have always been a part of a community. From the community of our mother and ourselves, to our families, to schools and neighborhoods, to churches, to other communities that we belong to. We need people at every stage of our lives. We need community in order to eat, see, drive on roads. But more than that, we need community to live and thrive. That is one reason why the ongoing pandemic has been so destructive; it has exacerbated the loneliness and isolation that are becoming more integral to our society. How many of us have missed hugging other people? How many of us miss being in others’ company in peace and joy? Human beings have evolved as a social species. Without other human beings around, we die. Loneliness is more than a soul death; it can lead to physical death, because our flesh is weak.

Let us pray together that we may find community that supports us and that challenges us to be all that we can be and do all that God is asking of us, so that our spirits AND our flesh can face the trials and challenges that await us.

B