“What price shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

(Matthew 16:26)

The mother of a teenage girl once told me of a bitter conflict that was raging in her home between this daughter and herself. The girl was rebelling against all the rules and restraints of home and family. In desperation, the mother had finally suggested that the daughter come talk to me, her pastor and friend, about her problem of trying to grow up in a household where her ideas and her rights were not respected as she thought they should be.

“Why don’t you go talk to Dr. Jones about your problems,” the mother had said, and the daughter had responded: “I don’t want to go talk to Dr. Jones. Dr. Jones would talk to me about my soul, and I don’t want anybody talking to me about my soul.”

Well, lots of us have the same sort of squeamish aversion as that teenager to anyone talking to us in an intimate, probing manner about our souls. We just don’t like it. We can tolerate “soul-talk” in a general, pious sort of way, but up go our guards if anyone begins to probe the health or sickness, or the lost or saved condition of our souls.

Yet no subject has fascinated the minds of people across the centuries more than the notion that every person encounters the temptation to sell his or her soul in exchange for the gratification of some desire or some ambition that will prove less than satisfying in the final judgment of life.

Across the ages, in all sorts of cultures and languages and countries, the theme of striking a bargain with the tempter of human souls appears and reappears.

I remember seeing one summer in New York, while I was attending a ministers’ conference there, two different Broadway plays based on this same old familiar plot of selling one’s soul to the devil. One was the immensely popular musical play, Damn Yankees, in which a die-hard baseball fan vows he would sell his soul to the devil if the Washington Senators, his favorite, yet unsuccessful, team could win the pennant just one year and defeat those damn New York Yankees. Straightway the devil appears before him with the offer to consummate just that deal.

In the other Broadway play I saw, a young writer sold his soul for illicit sex pleasures, Hollywood acclaim, and writing fame. In both these plays Satan, the Adversary of the soul, appeared as a character in the drama and confronted the chief character with a business proposition. In each instance a deal was made and the principals shook hands on the agreement.

Of course, both these plays portrayed the every day drama of every person’s life. Whether we are squeamish about someone’s talking to us about our souls or not, that soul conversation or deal making is going on all the time while we watch TV, or listen to our peer group, or forecast our long range and short range business goals.

Perhaps the most famous dramatic portrayal of the soul’s encounter with the devil is Goethe’s Faust, but Goethe did not invent it. The earlier English writer, Marlowe, and scores of others across many centuries have told and retold their story on this ancient theme.

Furthermore, the classical idea goes back to a scriptural setting. It is Jesus himself who suggested, in our gospel lesson today, the possibility of the sale of one’s soul to the devil, as He talked with His disciples on that eventful day when He alternately congratulated Simon Peter on his brave confession: “Thou art the Christ,” and then harshly rebuked him, saying: “Get thee behind me, Satan.” For it is as He talks with the Twelve about the cost of discipleship and the possibility of desertion under stress and temptation that Jesus asks: “What will it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul, or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?”

However squeamish we may be about anyone talking to us about our own souls, we had better wake up to the fact that the souls of men and women are being bought and sold in America today. Does this surprise you? It should not. Every fool knows it. Does it shock you? It should, for we need desperately to be waked up.

What is the nature of this commodity that is being sold and purchased? Why, the souls of people. But what, exactly, is the soul? Not something to be hidden away inside us, to be saved by Sunday worship and labeled for heaven while the rest of us remains earthy. The soul is the self. Not an unsubstantial vapor, but the very core of our being. It is the essential thinking, knowing, feeling, willing being that we are. That is your soul, and it is that essential self which men and women are selling to the Adversary and Destroyer of our souls today.

We can discern this sort of satanic deal taking place with a Noriega in Panama, or a wife’s murdering her husband to collect her insurance money, or an unethical Washington senator’s building up his campaign chest for re-election, but can we recognize the deal that Satan is pushing for our souls?

Well, the devil is still making his across-the-table deals. The devil is still paying. Those who become his associates get their rewards. The terms of his contract the devil fulfills. In Goethe’s drama, Mephistopheles promises to be Faust’s slave — to be with him everywhere and do whatever he wants done. When Faust asks what he must do in return, Mephistopheles hedges, saying there is plenty of time for that later. But at Faust’s insistence the devil makes clear his bargain: “I will bind myself to your service here, and never sleep nor slumber at your call; when we meet on the other side, you shall do as much for me.”

Aren’t we always witnessing the ever-recurring drama of the devil paying off his own in the rewards they have lusted for? He supplies the physical attractiveness, the business acumen, the artistic creativity, the financial gains — just so long as the soul, the very self, is used for the devil’s purposes and against the purposes of God.

Never for a moment think that the evil spiritual forces of this world are impotent. Those who have made their deal with the powers of darkness receive their own appropriate pleasures, powers, and prestige — for a time.

But in this moral world there always comes judgment day — payoff time — and then the ultimate fulfillment of the contract for the souls of men and women is a pretty sad, dismal deal if we sign with anyone less than Eternal God. Faust, in Goethe’s work, comes to the point where he regrets his deal with the devil. When Faust finds Margaret, whom he has seduced, waiting in her cell to suffer for the crimes he had induced her to commit, he begs Mephistopheles to let him off his bargain and Satan says: “Why dost thou enter into fellowship with us, if thou canst not go through with it?”

This is, of course, the testimony of the scriptures for us. Judas, having made his bargain to betray his Lord for thirty pieces of silver, returns to ask out, but it is too late and he throws down the blood money and as it scatters across the pavement, runs out into the darkness ringing his hands.

Yet, at the same time, all about us, every day, life proclaims the glory and everlasting satisfaction of the soul who has made its deal with God and not the devil, who has accepted the soul salvation God offers in Christ, rather than selling one’s soul to the devil for the momentary thrills and fading gratifications the Tempter can provide.

I remember reading one day, Lydel Sims column in the Commercial Appeal after someone had irked Sims into a spate of righteous indignation with the remark that “People decide to be teachers who aren’t good enough to do anything else.” Whereupon Sims wrote: “Teachers decide to teach in spite of the condescension of the fast dollar folks, in spite of the low pay, in spite of the heckling and the back-biting and the multitude of petty outside duties tacked onto the job, because teachers know its worth it anyhow.

“Because they have somehow glimpsed the unique delight that comes from opening new worlds to young minds; because they have discovered the priceless satisfactions of selflessness; because they know that, in teaching as in no other work, the rewards of confidence and faith and affection, of shared enthusiasm and ideals and innocence, are greater than ever could be bought with higher salaries. Teachers should be better paid. But let no one condescend to them through failure to understand the magnitude of the rewards they receive. It might be nearer the truth to say that many teachers choose their profession, not because they aren’t good enough, but because they are too good to be anything else.”

Finally, let it be observed by all of us “soul-squeamish” folks that nowhere in the drama of the soul’s encounter with our satanic adversary is the truth made more apt, more personal, more intimate, than at the point of the inevitability of the choice we mortals have to make. We are free to choose. This is no illusion. Our freedom is real. “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.” What shall I do with my soul?

And the necessity of making some deal is also real. Every day we are in the midst of signing that contract, or fulfilling its demands. We can’t say: “I’m not trading today. I’ll just wait to see how the market goes.” To someone we are saying all the time: “It’s a deal. I’ll give you my hand on it.”

Both Carlyle and Goethe give us affirmations to the effect that every day this song is being sung to our souls: “Thou must go without. Thou must go without. Thou must go without.” Yes, today I must go without — either the higher life possible to all people, or, I take the lower. The soul must grasp one world or the other. We can’t have both. It’s either God or the devil, heaven or hell, Christ or chaos.

“What will a man give in exchange for his soul?”

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

O Lord our God, to us has been given yet another day, another week of life. For what purpose are we made the recipients of this good gift? Surely, that we should remember gratefully that we are Thine, created by Thy wisdom, redeemed by Thy love though unworthy, supported and sustained by Thy providence. In this hour of our worship, O Lord, we would sound aloud not only the formal songs of praise, but in the genuine testimony of intimate conversation our witness to what Thou hast done for us.

As the tensions mount in the high places of political power and the lives and destinies of so many of our human family are hanging in the balances, may be not despair nor grow distraught, our trust in Thy omnipotence. But forbid, Lord, that we should disparage our own infinitesimal role in the mighty drama of history. Help us each one to see our own crucial assignment in the mighty spiritual struggle that overshadows the marshalling of men and missiles, and the gathering of potentates and princes and presidents in conferences and congresses and summits. Turn our attention daily and hourly to the warfare within our own souls. Help us to see that the problems of our world are compounded of the fear and hate, the doubt and discord, the cruelty and oppression of our own hearts. So, grant unto to be strengthened with might by Thy spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith, that we, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend and express in all our relationships the love of Christ that surpasses human knowledge, to the glory of Thy great name. Amen.