In The Dumps

Matthew 22:34–40 NRSV

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

These are some of the most famous words of Jesus, in fact rarely will you attend a worship service that I preside over where I don’t at least mention these commands in a prayer. And I think that we all have a pretty good functional understanding of what Jesus is teaching: We are to love God and to Love our neighbors (who coincidentally are all other human beings.)

But what I want to do over the course of the next 4 weeks is to look at some of the details that we often overlook from both of these commandments in an effort to have honest discussions about of of the greatest crises that we face in the modern age: Mental Health. This series, not so conspicuously named “All Your Mind” is going to take us on a journey through some of the most common mental health afflictions that we see in our world today, and to seek after a solution that allows God to do a healing work in our souls.

So ya’ll ready to dive in? I bet. Here we go.

Jesus says that we are to love God with all of our heart, soul, and mind. Essentially what Jesus is driving at is that loving God is a full contact, full body sport. Every aspect of our being is involved (if you read Mark he adds in the traditional Jewish phrasing that adds loving God with our strength.)

And I think that we are often really good at loving God with our hearts and our souls and even our strength. That’s because these are deeply rooted in our tangible experience with God. Our heart and our soul are moved and affected by the emotional transformation that happens when we encounter God’s love. Our strength is simply the way that interact with our world as the outpouring of God’s love through us and into the world.

But our mind… that’s often the hardest thing for us to love God with. The mind is tricky even when it functions as it was designed to. It tells us not to trust our experience of God. It tells us to doubt. It asks all of those big scary “Why?” questions about God and human suffering. And sometimes that suffering is what we experience as a result of our Mental Health. Whether it comes to us in the form of a crisis or a slow and gradual onset, Mental Health is the part of our human experience that we are least likely to want to be honest about.

Regardless of if it’s because of the social stigma, or an unwillingness to admit that our mind is our own worst enemy, mental health is something more people suffer in silence with than any other physical ailment. But it’s not supposed to be this way.

Jesus commands us in the next line to “love our neighbors as ourselves” and this is the key. We are called to love ourselves. If we don’t love ourselves then we can’t possibly love others. And part of loving ourselves is being honest with ourselves about ourselves -- to be honest with the world around us about what’s going on inside of our head so that we can receive help and allow others to love us and give us healing.

So here’s the deal: This sermon series comes with a disclaimer. I am not a licensed mental health counselor. I am a pastor. I can tell you about God’s desire for your healing, and God’s ability to heal you. But if you came in here with an open wound, I’d tell you to go to the Emergency Room. If you came in here with cancer, I’d tell you to go to see an oncologist. And the same thing applies. Mental Health is a medical concern. If you are suffering I’m going to pray with you and also tell you to go see a doctor. Too much harm has been done by religious leaders trying to pray mental illness away without any professional follow-up. Counseling and therapy are good for you.

You’re like well thanks, i think? I promise I have more to say than just telling you to go to a doctor. Because the doctor is only a piece of the puzzle. The Doctor is an agent of God’s healing.

Today, briefly now since I’ve taken far too much time already, I want to talk about depression. You know, when you’re really down in the dumps. Depression takes different forms.

There is situational depression: the kind of depression that I can really actually help you with. You’re depressed because of the situations in your life. You’ve lost hope because you’ve come face to face with suffering through loss — loss of a loved one, loss of a job, loss of a career, loss of a marriage, etc.

Then there is clinical depression: The kind of depression that is caused by chemical imbalances in your brain. There is an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness that you deal with every single day. This is the kind of depression that requires medical intervention.

The healing for both of these types of depression begins with honesty. Telling on yourself to someone you trust opens the door to healing. But you’ve got to walk through the door. And walking through the door means that you take responsibility for doing what is necessary for you to continue to heal.

Before we go on, perhaps you’re thinking “this isn’t really something that applies to me.” That’s a blessing. But here is why is still should matter to you:

Depression in the United States Affects over 18 million adults in a given year: That’s 1 in 10 people.

It’s the leading cause of disability for ages 15-44

It is the primary reason why someone dies of suicide about every 12 minutes — over 41,000 people a year. That’s 3 times more than homicide.

Depression affects all of us in one way or another. There’s very little chance that you don’t know a single person who suffers.

In August of 2014 I was on vacation with a friend, sitting on a gulf beach when I heard the news that one of the most influential people in my childhood had passed away from suicide. Now I’d never met the man behind the Genie from Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, Hook, and Dead Poet’s society — among dozens of other stories. Robin Williams was a face on a screen, but so much more. He was the comic relief needed during the heavy moments of adolescence. He was a license to laugh. To forget about the world for a while. He was comedy.

But Robin long battled depression. He suffered silently. He never grew out of it. It never just went away. Comedian Russell Brand penned these words in the wake of William’s loss:

When someone gets to 63 I imagined, hoped, I suppose, that maturity would grant an immunity to adolescent notions of suicide but today I read that suicide isn’t exclusively a young man’s game. Robin Williams at 63 still hadn’t come to terms with being Robin Williams...

...Is it melancholy to think that a world that Robin Williams can’t live in must be broken? To tie this sad event to the overarching misery of our times? No academic would co-sign a theory in which the tumult of our fractured and unhappy planet is causing the inherently hilarious to end their lives, though I did read that suicide among the middle-aged increased inexplicably in 1999 and has been rising ever since. Is it a condition of our era?...

...Robin Williams could have tapped anyone in the western world on the shoulder and told them he felt down and they would have told him not to worry, that he was great, that they loved him. He must have known that. He must have known his wife and kids loved him, that his mates all thought he was great, that millions of strangers the world over held him in their hearts, a hilarious stranger that we could rely on to anarchically interrupt, the all-encompassing sadness of the world. Today Robin Williams is part of the sad narrative that we used to turn to him to disrupt.

-Russell Brand “The Guardian” Aug 12, 2014

What was it that Robin Williams lacked? It wasn’t money. It wasn’t fame. It wasn’t success. It wasn’t adoration. It wasn’t a legacy.

It was a fundamental inability to come to terms with the reality of his mental health and find some kind of hope to cling to when things got rough.

As we approach this subject on the same day that we celebrate and remember the lives of those that we have lost, we too face the same question… where is our hope? Where does it some from?

The Apostle Paul writes of this hope in 1 Thessalonians

1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 NRSV

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Our hope in human loss is in Christ and in the resurrection of the dead. And the same is true for our quest to overcome the pain of depression.

We need to place our hope in something greater than the pain of suffering, the reality of this broken world and the condition of our era, as Brand would say.

If we are going to love God with all our minds and love ourselves the way that God has commanded us to do so, then we need to cling deeply to the hope that is found in Christ. The hope that is the promise that things won’t always be this way. That your life, the lives of those that you love, the lives of all who suffer from depression can be transformed. That transformation begins with personal honesty and is completed by putting in the work necessary to heal. And we are able to do that work only if we cling to hope. Hope that some day he will wipe away every tear from our eye and that this world will be a place of peace and eternal life.