Perfected in distress

Intro

The greatest preacher of the 19th century, hands down, was Charles Spurgeon. Every sunday, hundreds packed his church, his sermons were published in the newspaper, then collections were published. Then they were translated into other languages. He’s still influential today - when I was starting my theological studies, I was given one of his books.

And yet, for all his success, the respect he got from his peers, the gratitude of thousands, he often felt so low that he couldn’t get out of bed for days at a time.

At one point he described his depression like this:

“The mind can descend far lower than the body, for in it there are bottomless pits. The flesh can bear only a certain number of wounds and no more, but the soul can bleed in ten thousand ways, and die over and over again each hour”.

Now, today we’re continuing to reflect on that claim made in the bible, that God’s power is perfected in weakness. And as we’ve tracked through topics like disability and sickness I’m hoping we’ve seen that what God offers us is good, is life, is nourishing - even if it isn’t what we would choose. I’m hoping we’ve seen that God doesn’t do what we expect, he doesn’t operate according to the normal human way of doing things, but that this is good news.

And when we come to subject like mental distress - which Spurgeon seems to be suggesting is the worst thing anyone can face, I’m aware that it’s easy to be flippant. I’m aware that Christians, even Christian leaders have responded to things like anxiety and depression as if it’s a lack of faith, or worse, as if people should just get over it. I know of one Christian leader in a very powerful position whose advice to someone who was suicidal was ‘now, you won’t do anything stupid will you, just remember God loves you, ’.

Let me say clearly, serious mental distress cannot be waved away like that any more than mesothelioma can (asbestos disease). And let me say too, I realise this topic may be distressing and so if you need to tune out or even wander out, please do so I won’t be offended.

But I do sincerely pray that what I say today will offer real hope to all of us when, like Spurgeon we find ourselves in the bottomless pits.

Mental distress vs. mental illness

I’m not a pscyhologist so I’m following the lead of Rev. Dr Keith Condie who is the director of the Mental Health and Pastoral Care institute in Sydney.

Keith Condie says it’s really important to distinguish having a bad day, feeling negative emotions, being anxious about something or worried or disappointed, and clinical terms like anxiety and depression. Recently there’s been a big push to destigmatise mental health and that’s great, it’s really helpful to get it out in the open and talk about these kinds of things as common experiences. But Keith and others have said that what is unhelpful is the message that some people are putting out there that says, you ought to feel happy, even elated all the time and if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you.

Unfortunately, some people who don’t have training in psychology are putting this message out there.

And this creates really unrealisitic expectations about how we will feel, about what we need to do with negative emotions and so on.

So, instead of saying, I’m feeling worried about my exam tomorrow, we’ll say, I have anxiety. Or instead of saying, I’m feeling disappointed that I missed out on that job I applied for, we might say, I have depression.

Negative emotions are part of living in this world, in fact they’re good and useful. Feeling sad when we miss out on something we hoped for is right. We’re supposed to feel that. It would be a problem if we didn’t feel anything. Feeling a bit nervous about an exam is useful - it motivates us to to study, to practice, to prepare.

The problem is when we feel sad for weeks at a time, or nervous for weeks at a time and the sadness or nervousness has no clear object. If you are feeling sad, like you cannot enjoy anything and that feeling lasts for a week or more, or if it is stopping you doing basic tasks - go and make an appointment with your GP. If you’re not sure and you think this might be you, go and see your GP. They can assess you using a clinical tool and refer you to further help if you need it.

I’ll say it again, I’m a pastor, I will pray with you, I will open the bible with you and point you to the hope Jesus offers us, but I am not a pscyhologist or a doctor and God in his love and grace has given us modern medicine and medical experts and we ought to use them.

Whatever we are feeling, whether it’s mental distress, we’re feeling blah, worried, sad, or if we’ve tipped over into clinical depresison and anxiety, what hope does the gospel of Jesus offer us?

This is where I am trained and qualified so I want to draw out 4 things:

What does the gospel offer us when we are distressed?

Four things:

reality

dignity

community

hope

1. Reality

The bible is honest about life, God can handle us being honest about life

Christianity is gritty, realistic, earthy and honest when it comes to the range of what we experience. Christian faith it is not about believing life is all unicorns and rainbows against all the evidence. Christian faith is not romantic or naive about life. In fact, the bible is full of painfully honest descriptions of how difficult life can be.

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Job 5:7 NRSV

but human beings are born to trouble just as sparks fly upward.

Or what about the Psalms of lament like psalm 88

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Psalm 88:1 NRSV

O Lord, God of my salvation, when, at night, I cry out in your presence,

Psalm 88:3 NRSV

For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol.

And it goes on like that for 18 verses. This psalm is relentless, there’s no happy ending, there’s no silver lining, it’s just 18 verses of venting.

And here’s the thing: God caused it to be written so that we would take it up and say it back to him.

Apply

What does this tell us? That God wants to hear us, that he will listen to us. The Bible constantly encourages us to tell God our frustrations and pains and distress.

Why? So that we would find real comfort.

When you are distressed, knowing that someone will hear you, listen to you without jumping in to try and ‘fix you’ too quickly is deeply comforting. It’s rare from people, but it’s always available from God

What’s more, the bible says that this is something that Jesus himself did. Jesus is identified as the suffering servant of Isaiah. He’s a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He pours out this grief to his father - regularly!

We have a God who longs to hear us voice that pain, we have a God who will listen to us without jumping in too soon, and we have a God who has experienced the pain of this life firsthand, including, and here’s the increadible, mind-bending thing, he’s even experienced what it’s like to feel like God has abandoned us. See that at the cross, God the Son calls out to God the Father, why have you forsaken me? It’s Jesus’ raw expression of distress, even though yes, he is quoting a psalm that ends in confidence of God’s deliverance - the point is he feels it.

We have a God who knows what it’s like to feel Godforsaken. To feel alone and desperate and dark.

When we are distressed, God sits with us in our grief and pain. He encourages us to be real about it.

2. Dignity

The stigma around mental illness is decreasing, thankfully. It’s easier to talk about now. But the beuaty of the gospel of Jesus is that it tells us that God has given us a dignity that cannot be diminished by any illness we have - mental or otherwise.

The gospel declares that we are all made in God’s image. And that image does not depend on having it all together. No matter how broken we feel, how distressed and distressing we are, our dignity is not diminished.

Part of what we’ve been exploring in this series is what it means for this to be true. That the image of God is not diminished by our weakness, or disability, or sickness, or mental distress. Because the gospel reminds us that Jesus embraced every one of these kinds of weakness and triumphed in them.

3. Community

We talk a lot about inclusion these days. That’s an improvement on shutting people up in institutions, or out in the street. But the gospel tells us that we are called into a family - that’s what church is. Jesus radically redefines who we belong to, and whom we are to love. We all want to be loved, we all want friendship, but we naturally gravitate to those like us. The gospel tells us that we are memebers of one body - that’s what church is. It’s not an organisation you might choose to associate with, it’s not a club you may or may not sign up to. It’s a body, and as the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians, all body parts are essential!

As John Swinton puts it:

“the difference between inclusion and belonging is to belong, you need to be missed” - John Swinton

People used to say, you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family but increasingly, people are deciding to give up on their family members if they’re too difficult, or if they have different political views.

But Jesus was notorious for being friends with people who weren’t like him - tax collectors, the uneducated, sinners, prostitutes, the disturbed. The church - this body we are joined to is a community of people who are not alike, but whom Jesus binds together in love.

And the gospel reminds us that in our distress, God gives us a community - a place where we aren’t just included, but we are missed.

Church, our church, Christ church is supposed to be place where we can experience not just inclusion, but belonging. It’s supposed to be a place where, when you aren’t here, we miss you. You belong here! It’s supposed to be that way, and if its not, then we’re not following Jesus’ faithfully.

It’s not the church’s job to cure mental ill-health. But it is our job to what health professionals can’t. They can’t provide a place to belong. They can’t provide a community. They can’t share the love of Jesus in those small but powerful ways like inviting someone to have coffee, cooking a meal, checking in with a text or something like that.

Part of the way God meets us in our distress, sits with us, hears us, is through the church. You and I are called to bring God’s presence to each other.

4. Hope

Poor mental health shrivels up hope. Christian faith offers profound hope because it places us in the big story of God.

This story tells us that we are desired.

At the start of the story we discover that we are made to be loved. God simply wanted to make us out of the overflow of his love. We are desired by him.

We all want to be loved. We all want to be desired. To be wanted. We spend our lives trying to find a love that is big enough and strong enough to meet the profound ache in our souls. And poor mental health can leave us with the terrifying feeling that no one really loves us enough. We spend our lives that way because we were made to be loved! As Augustine put it, our souls are restless until they find rest in you!’

The gospel tells us that we are loved, by the infinite love of God! God’s face is constantly turned towards you in love and mercy and grace and welcome. No matter how badly we have messed up, no matter how confused or perplexed we are or how messy our emotions. No matter how many days we’ve had where it’s all we can do just to get out of bed and get our of our pjs.

That doesn’t take away our struggles, but it can fuel our hope.

This story tells us that we are destined to be together:

Poor mental health so often robs us of the future. Poor mental health tells us that there is nothing to hope for, there’s nothing new under the sun, nothing ever changes, why would we expect anything but more of the same.

But the beauty of the gospel of is that it offers us a new future. In the gospel, God calls us to a new destination, he invites us to participate in the new creation he is making.

God invites you and me to become partners in his renewal project. We’re told that our destiny is a place where there will be no more crying, no more mourning, no more death, no more grief, where God himself will wipe away every tear from our eyes.

And the great difference this makes to us, especially when we are distressed, is that God’s promise brings the future into the present. God’s committment, his word gives his future an anchor in our lives.

Spurgeon put it this way:

“An ointment for every wound, a cordial for every faintness, a remedy for every disease. Blessed is he who is well skilled in heavenly pharmacy and knows how to lay hold on the healing virtues of the promises of God”

God who has shown himself faithful to his promises, comes and speaks to us in our distress by his promises! Especially in those moments when we have lost hope and everything around us feels dark:

Illustration - MLK kitchen table

It’s easy to think of Martin Luther King as this unflappable force of justice, someone absolutely confident in God’s presence with him. But he wasn’t. In fact, he struggled a lot with the feeling that God was absent. One night, when the Montgomery bus boycott had gotten started, he received a phone call. It was about 3am and it was a threat from someone who said that he was going to be killed, his family was going to be killed, his house was going to be bombed. And he just broke down – it was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back. He knew he couldn’t get back to sleep, so he just sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and said a prayer, which basically was, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do good, but I’m losing my courage”. He had never felt like God was close, and here he was broken, overcome with fear and anxiety.

And that was the moment when he said he heard a voice speaking to him, saying, “Martin Luther King, stand up for what’s right, stand up for justice, and I will never abandon you, I will never leave you. I’ll never leave you alone. I’ll never leave you alone.”

Apply

The gospel tells us that God comes to us in our darkest moments to offer us hope. When God says I will never leave you, never forsake you, that nothing can separate us from God’s love, that a day is coming when Christ our King will make everything right, where the suffering we experience now will give way to peace - he only has to say it because we feel like he is absent. Hope - the hope that comes from being invited into the story of God has the power to lift us up.

Conclusion

Last week Laura spoke of her Dad’s experience with cancer. Some of you will know that Laura and Lucas and I drove to Sydney to be with her Dad as he received his diagnosis. We drove from Orange because we had been at my Dad’s funeral that morning. Some of you will also know that the last few years have added sorrows on top of these that were so heavy that for months I couldn’t pray. I couldn’t even really talk. I couldn’t conjure up the words.

In Romans 8:28, Paul says that God works everything for the good of those who love him. It’s a favourite verse for many. A verse that says God is working everything for good. But when you’re in the bottomless pit, it’s really hard to read. At least not without feeling put upon, like I was being told to buck up - every cloud has a silver lining, and all that. And yet Romans 8 shows us exactly what we’ve been reflecting on today - realism, that creation is groaning like a woman in labour. But also that God listens, offers us the dignity of his presence, the community of his presence, and the hope of his redemption. It even tells us that God himself prays when we can’t.

Which is what I discovered. When I coulnd’t pray my own words, I could pray the psalms. Psalms like 77, which we read out, like 88 which doesn’t hold back.

And I found that in this experience of having God pray with me, Romans 8:28 with its talk of all things working together for the good of those who love God, went from something that seemed outrageously naive, or just a way to avoid facing reality, or worse, a way to have my distress dismissed, it went from all of that to a gritty determined hope in the face of death.

I pray we will all find that hope when we are distressed.