Third Sunday of Easter
Grace be to you and peace from God our father and the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Mental Health has always been an issue this congregation has been willing to name and address, and I am ever so grateful for that. Now after COVID, we need open conversations about mental health struggles more than ever. I feel blessed that here we have a safe space in which we can share our experiences with that struggle and ponder it in the light of our faith.
People with mental health issues are all around us. Statistics indicate that at least one in 5 adults has suffered or is currently suffering from such pain. Look around you and do the math. When we lift up people burdened by depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, eating disorders, or suicidal ideation, we are not talking about those people across the county line distant from our daily lives.
Rather, it’s our friend, our co-worker, our family member, our fellow church member, our neighbor. They are lovely, beautiful people who bless us with their love, their talents, their wisdom, their humor, their art. And then suddenly, they are not so lovely; they turn needy, or angry, or withdrawn, or unreliable, or demanding, or ungrateful, or self-centered, or unendingly sad.
I have struggled with depression myself. By the grace of God, mine was on the mild side and never impaired my functioning, thanks to a therapist, medication, and the loving support of my husband. Thus, I know a little bit what mental illness feels like. However, when I think of some of the people I have ministered to who were in the grip of severe illness, I am aware that I probably just scratched the surface of feeling the pain.
As I searched for material for this Sunday, I found a prayer litany that helped me gain better understanding of how powerless, how trapped, how immobilized, how frantic afflicted people can feel. I invite you to turn to your bulletin where the sermon is printed and follow along as I read this litany.
A Litany of Life Experiences
One: When we feel nervous, and the walls close in, and too many people are too close, and every day noises are too loud, and every light is too bright, and all we can do is plan our panicked escape from the situation we are in…
All: God help us
One: When sadness and depression pull us down like a lead weight, making it hard to move, hard to concentrate, hard to find motivation, hard to be alive, just hard…
All: God help us
One: When we can’t help but burst into tears, and we learn the difference between crying and weeping, and the weeping won’t stop, and we lose hope that we will ever feel hopeful again…
All: God help us
One: When information comes at us in blasts that we can’t make sense of, and it seems like someone keeps randomly “changing the channel” when we try to focus, and it feels impossible to learn or keep up with what’s going on around us…
All: God help us
One: When we get so revved that we want to take on the world, and leap tall buildings, and outrun freight trains and take on too many major projects at once, and stay up all night for days on end, and the only thing we know we can’t do is slow ourselves down, until we crash out of control…
All: God help us
One: When voices inside our minds constantly intrude upon our lives, and when they won’t stop and they confuse our thoughts and make it impossible to be with other people, let alone have any kind of real conversation…
All: God help us
One: When all we can see is a world that is out to get us, and we get stuck believing that some grand conspiracy is designed to hurt us, or ruin us, or kill us, and we believe that only our constant vigilance can save us, if anything can…
All: God help us
One: When we simply don’t know how out of touch other people think our thoughts are…
All: God help us
One: When we feel completely isolated and alone, longing for social connections we cannot make…
All: God help us
One: When we feel utter despair, and we see more reasons to end our lives than to keep living…
All: God help us
One: When we strive with best intentions to stop addictions that are ruining our lives, and we try our best again and again, but we can’t resist, and we end up over and over again at the same helpless place that we would give
anything to avoid…
All: God help us
One: When our thoughts jumble and things we thought we knew slip away, and we feel helpless, powerless, and scared, for the moment and for the future…
All: God help us. Amen.
These prayer petitions express such powerlessness. The person suffering from mental illness is controlled by forces beyond their own power.
We read comforting words from the Prophet Isaiah this morning. Through the prophet, God assures the people of Israel that God has not abandoned them. Given their current situation, one might assume that God has abandoned the people: Their country had been ransacked by the Babylonian army and thousands of them had been deported into exile. They, too, were far from where they wanted to be; not free to enjoy their lives, but captive and manipulated by powers beyond their control. The people experienced a lot of grief and hopelessness and depression. And for good reason.
Isaiah ministers to them.
First of all, he speaks to them. Even though they are sad and depressed and probably not much fun to be around, Isaiah stays with them and talks with them. He listens to their pain and bears their grief. He is there in the midst of their struggles.
Second, he shares his faith with them. He speaks God’s word of assurance to them. Through his message and his presence, Isaiah is bringing God’s presence into the situation, into the lives of suffering people. Suffering doesn’t mean being abandoned by God.
Third, Isaiah holds out hope. God will do a new thing. The situation will get better. By the grace of God, the captivity will end. Nobody knows when, but just knowing that it will happen grants a glimmer of hope.
In our gospel reading, Jesus gives a very similar promise. Jesus is the good shepherd. We need a good shepherd because there are wolves out there. Jesus never denies the fact that the wolves exist and that they make life dangerous; they cause anxiety and fear to the sheep.
But in the face of the wolves, Jesus provides a safe space. Jesus is present among the sheep. As long as the sheep stay with the good shepherd and his flock, they can breathe.
They don’t have to change in order to join the shepherd’s flock. “I know my own and my own know me”, Jesus says. He knows us, knows us intimately and deep down, knows our pain and our struggles and our heartache and our powerlessness. Knows us and invites and calls us anyway. Knows us and desires our presence, just the way we are.
Our society is very quick to dismiss or abandon people with mental illness. Why would Jesus desire them and call them? Because they have so much to contribute, so many gifts to share. They are so much more than their illness. In fact, their illness might have strengthened gifts in them that neurotypical people don’t have in such measure, gifts of compassion or intuition or sensitivity or new perspective.
God values what they can contribute. Pastor Eva McIntyre mused on a mental health ministry website about John the Baptist, writing “Would Jesus’ family maybe on occasion have said, ‘Cousin John is a bit odd, bless him!’ when he took to his eccentric style of life? It has long been suggested that King Saul was displaying mood swings that suggest he had bipolar disorder. Some people think Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus was the result of a breakdown or psychotic episode.” In the centuries since the Bible was written, there were many saints who probably suffered from one mental illness or another.
And yet, all these people made invaluable contributions to the community of believers, to their neighbors, to the church, to us.
That’s why Jesus calls all people, including people with mental illness. He knows them and knows their gifts and knows how they can bless others.
In the flock of sheep Jesus gathers, we bless one another and give one another safe space and support and love. People with mental illness bless the community. And the community blesses those struggling with mental health when needed.
In preparation for this sermon, I read many stories of congregations offering amazing ministry to the mentally ill. The one that moved me to tears was offered by Cotter J in an essay called “Soundings from a Deep Depression”. It is a thank-you letter to a person of faith who stuck by him during a period of deep depression. This is what he writes:
Thank you for being honest about how difficult, no, how frightening it was to visit me. There is nothing that the visitor to the patient can do. Even the pastoral actions of prayer, of giving communion, even of touch, may have no visible effect. They do not appear to be doing any good, and they give no encouragement to the pastor. You found yourself wanting to get away quickly, away from a place which seemed so empty, from a person who seemed but a shell. A friendship that had been two-way had no substance any more because there was no response. You mentioned to me that you had been seeing a young man who said, “My soul has gone: I am only a shell.” Simply to be with such a person, to be fully there, aware and alive, entering that empty nothing even for a few minutes, is terrifying, however rational we may be in talking about it. I am reminded of someone else’s comment, “You had left us; and I did not know if you were coming back.” Nevertheless, you came back, returning again and again despite your fear. […] you did not give up. You did return, trusting that in time I would also return. And eventually we discovered that it was so, your remarking that my openness about my treatment, my helplessness, my feeling of guilt, had helped, as had my courage in fighting (too strong a word, crawling perhaps) my way back, despite the setbacks and falls . . .
When this man was in exile, surrounded by wolves, God knew him and called him. In the person of the minister, God called his name. The minister embodied God’s faithfulness and love, spoke of, and acted upon, hope in the face of despair.
That is the power of resurrection that we are celebrating this season. That is the good news of life after death that we are empowered to bring one another. That is the miracle of God’s love leading us into new life that we get to witness and participate in, thanks to our good shepherd Jesus Christ, who values each one of us and calls us by name. Amen.