Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place."

"You are a king, then!" said Pilate.

Jesus answered, "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me."

"What is truth?" Pilate asked. With this he went out again to the Jews and said, "I find no basis for a charge against him."

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, "Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then did these weeds come from?" He answered, "An enemy has done this." The slaves said to him, "Then do you want us to go and gather them?" But he replied, "No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reaper, ‘Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’"

What is the aim of the spiritual life? Is it to learn the truth? Or, is it to learn how to live?

Learning the truth and learning how to live might not be opposites. They might not be antithetical. It might be that one leads to the other, as in, "Find the truth, and you have discovered how to live," or, "Learn how to live, and you will have discovered truth." That may be accurate. But it would be equally accurate to observe that spiritual lives characterized primarily by one or the other yield different ways of viewing the world and the aim and purpose of human life. A life in search of possessing the truth will inevitably involve identifying the right truth, and denying, maybe even vilifying what is deemed not truth, or heresy, and the people who hold those competing, heretical, untrue beliefs. A life in search of the proper way to live might involve someone in such compromises that they unwittingly ignore the evil of which human beings are capable. But, if forced to choose one as more primary than the other, to characterize the spiritual life, which one would you choose? Is the aim of the spiritual life to learn the truth or to learn how to live?

By the aim of the spiritual life I don’t mean the professional spiritual life, like ministry. I mean the spiritual dimension of all human beings. And, by spiritual dimension of human beings I am not talking about whether or not you regularly attend church, synagogue, or temple, or whether you faithfully obey religious restrictions on eating, dancing, dress, or Sabbath activities. By the spiritual dimension I am referring to the deep, "yearning and longing" part of human nature. The way human beings long for, yearn, and are compelled to find something more to existence than the material fact of it. We are created as creatures who crave meaning. Meaning and water are the two things we cannot live without. While the "school of hard knocks" teaches us early on that the facticity of existence is denied at our peril and at the threat of physical harm to ourselves or others, the spiritual dimension of human nature thrusts us out into our world for an entirely different search. Does the spiritual dimension of human nature, this search for meaning, compel us primarily and first and foremost, to seek to learn the truth, or to seek to learn how best to live?

I think this is the dominant religious question of our age.

In our age, those who favor learning the truth as the aim of the spiritual life are in conflict with others over what that truth is. Those who favor it is learning how best to live are in conflict with others over how to live that life.

Perhaps it is only our nostalgic temptations to view history as the degeneration from some glorious and peaceful imaginary time that leads us to think that the conflict today is some kind of betrayal of the peace of times past. Since the dawn of humanity there has always been conflict, especially conflict arising from religion. It’s just that we read the world in terms of the "ultimate" meaning of conflict, which was not always the case. While the ancient Greeks saw conflict in the affairs of human beings and the affairs of the gods, so much so that they symbolized that and institutionalized that in the form of the Olympic Games, the world was not an arena where men and women wrestled with the ultimate, cosmic quality of life and its outcome. They only wrestled with one another against the certainty of destiny and fate. The gods on Mount Olympus wrestled in a cosmic conflict with ultimate meaning. The ancient Hebrews, though, and later the Christians and the Moslems alongside of them, fashioned a different view of our world, one that continues to this day. We human beings are part of a cosmic conflict with ultimate meaning for the triumph of good and right, over evil and wrong. And this conflict goes on everyday, even in mundane events, and its outcome is unknown to us. We are intimately involved in determining the quality of life for weal or woe. Your life and your choices, my life and my choices, matter, unlike the ancient Greeks’ view of themselves and their "ultimate" fate. To us, human beings are planted into a world where wheat and weeds alike dwell, and are themselves made up of both wheat and weeds, and sorting this all out while enduring and enjoying life’s events is our lot and our adventure.

Sacred literature tells this ongoing story. Great literature depicts this adventure, too. It is the story of humanity’s search for meaning and God, although in great literature it can be disguised in a thousand and one different ways. While in sacred literature it can be missed by being misread altogether.

Take the Harry Potter book series. Those who perceive the primary aim of the spiritual life to be to learn the truth, could declare after reading (or not reading) a single book in the Harry Potter series, that it is blasphemy and an enemy of truth. Of course, it is also true that they could declare it an avenue towards the truth and encourage others to find true belief hidden in its pages. That’s the claim of Greek Orthodox author John Granger in his book, Looking for God in Harry Potter. It is published by Tyndale press, the same company that publishes the Left Behind series. Granger’s claims that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has produced "doctrinally Christian friendly" literature ala Tolkien and C.S. Lewis have largely fallen on deaf ears, although much of the symbolic meaning Granger identifies is real, significant, and plentiful. But when truth is the aim of the spiritual life that’s still a much harder perspective to champion since the literature itself is not deemed sacred and therefore is not the bearer of truth. Those who perceive the primary aim of the spiritual life to be to learn how to live, though, have an entirely different reading. They must decide for themselves. They must take the journey Harry Potter takes to discern if that walk yields scenery suitable to a meaningful life. They must not only read the books themselves, but read it in such a way as to discern the meaning and spirit of the author and the characters.

I think this is great literature and will generations from now be recognized as such, because each book is symbolic of humanity’s spiritual journey in a world of wheat and weeds. The current movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, a delightful adaptation of the book of the same name, evidences the structure of the transformative spiritual journey seen in all of the books. It is a structure familiar to those who understand their own lives, and the life of humanity, to be primarily a transformative spiritual journey for an individual, through the relationships that form that individual’s community, that takes one deeper into the meanings of existence and towards an experience of God.

Harry is a 13 year-old boy who several years before learned that he is a wizard. During the school year he attends the school for wizards, Hogswart, while on summer vacation he stays with his Muggle family; that is, a family of human beings who are not wizards. Harry’s mother and father were tragically murdered when he was little, and as all 13 year olds are want to do Harry is yearning to discover who he is. He does so in this book (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) by learning and confronting his past, encountering several adults who knew his parents and were part of the events of support and betrayal that led to their tragic murder, and by his own choices in the face of that knowledge.

The journey of each book begins in the mundane home of Harry’s Muggle family. Each story involves some event that wrests Harry out of this mundane existence, whisking him to his place of learning, his school, where he is confronted with a deep mystery to be solved. In this story it is the circumstances of his parents’ death and the role that his godfather, Sirius Black, played in that death. Did Sirius Black, Harry’s father’s best friend, betray and murder him, and is he a threat to Harry himself? Each book involves a crisis, an event that throws Harry into the deepest and darkest places of human life from which he must battle the most threatening foes of humanity and the self. And each book involves a triumph, although only a temporary one. And in each book Harry discovers that the world is full of twists and turns, and what others claim to be true is not always the case. In life’s most important and ultimate events it is within the authority of the individual to choose, to live, and thus, to create and sustain meaning. And in each book Harry’s discovery comes from him having chosen certain qualities and avoided others. In the Prisoner of Azkaban, having learned the truth behind his parents’ murder, Harry chooses not retribution to the one he discovers to be the betrayer, but the merciful act. In other words, what is primary and more important than truth is the choices one makes and how one comes to live one’s life in the face of what one comes to know and understand.

It is a world of imagination and splendor, a world where appearances aren’t what they seem, and the opinions of others are not always accurate, let alone kind. It is a world where there are life giving and life denying elements, a world where real darkness threatens to triumph through humanity’s greed for power, or is and can be foiled by the transformative power of love, forgiveness, and mercy.

In the fantasy world of Harry Potter, as in the world of wheat and weeds in which we dwell, there is a certain spirit that gives life and is larger than death. But this spirit is elusive. And in the fantasy world of Harry Potter there is a certain much more available spirit that denies life in favor of the hording and distortion of power. Like wheat and weeds occupying the same field. The one who triumphs in this world achieves a provisional triumph, of love over death. It is provisional not because love is ever defeated by death, but because love is dependent for its appearance and its continuing existence upon how we live our lives. The choices character’s make matter as in real life. Do we align ourselves with the prejudices of our age, many and strong as they are? Do we choose retribution or mercy for those who betray and threaten us? Do we horde power and lord it over others, or do we choose the frail and fragile path of love? Thinking that the aim of the spiritual life is to learn the truth will not help us much here, because we are no more capable than Harry Potter of deciding what is true about the facts of our existence. But, if the primary aim of the spiritual life is to learn how to live, then humanity can rise above the world of wheat and weeds to see the love that is the source of all. Such that when harvest time comes, others can gather and say of each one of us: Here was an individual who collected and bound weeds to be burned, and lived to gather life giving wheat into the barn.

AMEN.