A Summer in the Psalms

How are the Psalms “the Word of Christ”?

We are spending a summer in the Psalms at church as a response to Colossians 3:16’s command to “let the Word of Christ richly dwell in you.”   This directive comes at the end of the string of descriptions of what a transformed life in Jesus Christ looks like – compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, love, peace and thankfulness.  Colossians 3:12-17 is the text that we have been living with since Easter.  We have been talking and thinking together about how our encounter with the Risen Christ changes us fundamentally and irrevocably. 

On Easter we looked at Romans 6:4 – “as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”  Since Easter we have been trying to understand what this “newness of life” looks like.   That’s what got us to Colossians 3.  Just like Romans 6, Colossians 3 is a baptismal text.  In Colossians 2:11 baptism gets explicitly named as the gesture that signals the fact just as Christ was raised from the dead so we too are “raised up with Him through faith in the working of God.”  This language about being “raised up with Christ” is where the argument of Colossians 3 begins (v. 1), and becomes the basis of its imperative to “put on the new self” (v 10).  The virtues that get named in Colossians 3:12-17 are the wardrobe of grace that we are to put on as God’s chosen and beloved (3:12).  And it is at the end of this list of virtues that Paul tells the Colossians that they are to “let the Word of Christ richly dwell in them”   by singing “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.”

In the parallel to this verse in Ephesians it is the fullness of the Spirit that issues in the singing of “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” (5:18-19).  This equivalency between the “Word of Christ” (Colossians) and the “fullness of the Spirit” (Ephesians) is a stunning reminder of how the Word and the Spirit are married in the work that God is doing in us.  When a Christian opens her Bible that has been inspired by the Holy Spirit, an arc is created in her heart that is the seat of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling and empowering presence in her life.  This is the experience of the “living word” that Hebrews 4:12 describes and that I started to write about in my April 2 Blog – “Let the Word of Christ Dwell in you Richly.”   This is what makes the text of Scripture “a place of transforming encounter with God” that changes us, and then through us, changes the world around us (See M. Robert Mulholland’s “Working Assumptions as to the Nature of Scripture” in The Way of Scripture – pp.16-27).  This is why it is indispensible for our spiritual vitality and effectiveness as a church to be a people who are committed to a serious and sustained engagement with Scripture.  This thing we call Christianity just doesn’t work if we are not deeply rooted and grounded in God’s love, and since “the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God” that we have (James Denney) this requires the Word of Christ to dwell in us richly (Ephesians 3:17/Colossians 3:16). 

Our “Summer in the Psalms” is a response to this critical need, one that takes its lead directly from Paul’s instruction that it is by “singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” that the “Word of Christ” can “richly dwell” in us.  So, just exactly how are the Psalms the “Word of Christ”?  Since they were all written long before Jesus Christ became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), how can the Psalms be the “Word of Christ”?  The answer to this question takes us in two different directions: (1) The Psalms are the “Word of Christ” because they were words that Jesus Christ used in His very own prayer life, and for that matter, still does; and (2) The Psalms are the “Word of Christ” because they are words about Jesus Christ; there is a sense in which He is the subject of every Psalm.

The Psalms are the Words of Jesus’ Own Prayers

I have a red-letter edition of the Bible, a Bible with all of the words of Jesus printed in red, and if it were more accurate, then the whole book of Psalms would be red.  The Psalms were the prayers that Jesus prayed everyday, both at home and in the synagogue, both when He was alone and when He was gathered with the community of faith.  As James Sire put it, “At key moments in His life on earth Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, turned to the Psalms for words to express his deepest thoughts and emotions.”  The Psalms were such a part of Jesus’ own spiritual formation that they literally saturated his own thoughts and words.  You hear echoes of them throughout the Gospels.  Jesus used the words, phrases and thoughts of the Psalms to express Himself at the pivotal moments of His life.  On the cross, in four of His seven “last words,” Jesus “chose Psalms as his voice” (Sire) –

1.    “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachatni,” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46, quoting Psalm   22:1).
2.   “I am thirsty” (John 19:28, quoting Psalm 69:21, cf. 22:15).
3.   “It is finished” (John 19:30, quoting Psalm 22:31).
4.   “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46, alluding to Psalm 31:5).

The book of Psalms was the prayer book of Jesus Christ.  These were the words that Jesus Christ prayed when He was on earth, and for that matter, still does. This was the insight of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, what he called the “secret of the Psalter.” The New Testament is quite clear that the Risen Christ now sits at the right hand of God the Father in glory, and one of the things that He is doing there is interceding for us – pleading our case – praying for us, and with us (Romans 8:34; Hebrews 7:25; 9:24; I John 2:1).  And according to Bonhoeffer, it is the Psalms that Jesus prayed while He was on earth that continues to be His prayer in heaven -

The Psalter is the prayer book of Jesus Christ in the truest sense of the word. He prayed the Psalter and now it has become his prayer for all time. Now do we understand how the Psalter can be prayer to God and yet God’s own Word, precisely because here we encounter the praying Christ? Jesus Christ prays through the Psalter in his congregation. His congregation prays too, the individual prays. But here he prays, in so far as Christ prays within him, not in his own name, but in the Name of Jesus Christ. He prays, not from the natural desires of his own heart; he prays out of the manhood put on by Christ; he prays on the basis of the prayer of the Man Jesus Christ. But when he so acts, his prayer falls within the promise that it will be heard. Because Christ prays the prayer of the psalms with the individual and the congregation before the heavenly throne of God, or rather because of those who pray the psalms are joining in the prayer of Jesus Christ, their prayer reaches the ears of God. Christ has become their intercessor. ( Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together)

In Romans 8:26-27 we are told one of the more obvious truths about us as human beings – “we so not know how to pray as we should” (8:26); and then we are given one of the most important prayer promises in the whole Bible -  “But the Spirit helps in our weakness… the Spirit intercedes for us… He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (8:26-27).   Whatever else this means; I believe it means that when we pray the Psalms – part of the inspired Word of God – we are making an important connection between what is going on in our hearts and what has been revealed to be the will of God for us.  This is why Jesus prayed the Psalms, and still does.

The Psalms are Words about Jesus Christ

The Psalms are the “Word of Christ” because they were and are words that Jesus Christ used and uses.  They are words that He has made His own through His own faithful use of them.  But they are also the “Word of Christ” because the Psalms are words about Jesus Christ.  At the end of the Gospel of Luke, in the days before His Ascension when the Risen Christ “presented Himself alive… to the apostles whom He had chosen… by many convincing proofs… speaking of the kingdom of God” (Acts 1:2-3), we are told that Jesus “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures,” showing them how all the things that had been written about Him “in the Law of Moses, and the Prophets, and the Psalms” had been fulfilled (Luke 24:44-45).  The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther once called the Old Testament the straw in which we find the baby Jesus, and this is what Jesus Christ Himself was telling His disciples at the end of the Gospel of Luke.  He said it again in John 5:39: “You search the Scriptures,” Jesus told His critics, “because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that bear witness to me.”   Take a look at Hebrews chapter 1.  After an amazing introductory affirmation of who Jesus Christ is and what Jesus Christ does (1:1-3), the author of Hebrews proceeded to make the case for what he had just affirmed by rooting and grounding his claims in things the Scriptures taught, and the Scriptures to which the author of Hebrews specifically turned to make his case for Jesus Christ was the book of Psalms.   Five different Psalms were quoted by the author of Hebrews in this chapter as having been fulfilled by Jesus Christ – Psalm 2 in verse 5; Psalm 104 in verse 7; Psalm 45 in verses 8-9; Psalm 102 in verse 10; and Psalm 103 in verse 13.  And this is not the only place that you’ll find this in the New Testament.  “Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the first Christians made the Psalms its own, applying to the Lord and to itself what was said in the Psalms about the People of God, Jerusalem, the king, the temple, the promised land, the kingdom and the covenant.”  The Psalms are among the most quoted Old Testament sources in the New Testament explanations of the person and work of Jesus Christ.   As Patrick Henry Reardon puts it in his book Christ in the Psalms: “Christ is the referential center of the Book of Psalms…the words of the psalms are the mighty name of Jesus broken down into its component parts” (xvii).  And so, to know Jesus Christ, you’ve got to know the Psalms.  They are as much about Him as anything you’ll read in the four Gospels.   DBS+

The Welcome

The urgency of the question is matched only by the reticence of Scripture.  We want to know, we need to know, what happens to our loved ones when they die.  When someone who has been our constant companion in life and love, always at our side, is suddenly no longer there, their absence screams for an explanation.  What has become of them?  Where did they go?  Will we ever see them again?  “At this point saying that it’s all just speculation, or that we really don’t know, or the always popular but vague – ‘She’s in God’s hands now,’ just won’t do” (Scot McKnight).  We want a straight answer.  And so, as Christians, we turn to the Scriptures.  

 The Bible is our basic authority.  It’s where we go with our questions believing that it’s where the answers can be found.  But the Bible is surprisingly reserved in what it has to say about what happens to us when we die.  Oh, the big promise is unmistakably there: “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus told us, “even though you die, yet shall you live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26).   “I go to prepare place for you,” He promised, “and I will come again for you, and receive you to myself; that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:3).  It is a pillar of Biblical faith that the Lord will be our companion “in the valley of the shadow of death,” and that when we come out of it on the other side, that we will find ourselves “in the house of the Lord” where we will abide “forever” (Psalm 23), where there will no longer be “any mourning, or crying, or pain” because “there will no longer be any death” (Revelation 21:4).

 The broad promise is clearly there.  It’s the details that are missing.  And so the Apostle Paul told the Corinthians, “eye has not seen, ear had not heard, and the heart has not imagined what God has prepared for those who love Him” (I Corinthians 2:9).  And the Apostle John put an end to all the guesswork with his declaration that “it has not yet appeared what we shall be,” but we know that “when Christ appears, we shall be like Him” (I John 3:32).  “Mystery and modesty” – those are the two words that the United Church of Christ theologian Gabriel Fackre urged us to embrace when we are asked: “Where is my father/mother/brother/sister/friend now?”  This is not to say that we don’t know some things, but it is to freely admit that we don’t know all things.  “The secret things belong to the LORD our God,” Deuteronomy 29:29 tells us, “but what has been revealed belongs to us and to our children forever.”  And so, in the wisdom of our denominational tradition, “We speak where the Scriptures speak, and we are silent where the Scriptures are silent.”  I am hesitant to speak beyond what the Scriptures say, and so what do I say when a family, with tears in their eyes and a gaping wound in their hearts turn to me as a pastor and ask the poignant question?

 Acts, chapter 7, is the first description of a Christian’s death in the New Testament, and the most detailed.  Stephen was one of the church’s first Deacons, a man filled with the Holy Spirit and wisdom who had been chosen by the Jerusalem church to serve as a leader in its ministry of service (Acts 6:1-6).  Arrested for the work that he was doing in the name of Christ, Stephen was put on trial in front of the very same council that plotted against Jesus.  In his defense, Stephen preached a wide ranging sermon about God’s plan of salvation as it played out in the history of Israel, climaxing in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

Acts 7:54-60 is the description of the response that Stephen’s preaching generated.  They “became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen” (7:54), before grabbing him and dragging him out of the city to be stoned (7:57).  And as Stephen died, Luke tells us that he had a vision of the glory of God in heaven, “and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of the Father” (7:56).  Every other description in the New Testament of Jesus Christ in glory has Him seated at the right hand of the Father.  But here in Acts chapter 7, He stands.  The question is why?  I believe the answer can be found in verse 59: “While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’”  I believe that the Risen and glorified Christ stood up to welcome Stephen to heaven.  I think He got up to greet Stephen at the door of his new heavenly home. 

 Luke 15:11-32 is the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  Helmut Thielicke, the great German pastor and theologian of the last generation, always thought that this parable of Jesus should properly be called “The Parable of the Waiting Father” rather than “The Parable of the Prodigal Son.”  It’s more a story about how God behaves as the loving father than it is about how we behave as the prodigal son.  On verses 20-24 we are told that the father was waiting and watching for the return of his boy from the far country, and when he caught a glimpse of him on the horizon, the father got up and ran out to greet him, to welcome him home, enfolding him in his embrace and smothering him with his kisses.  When the son began his prepared remarks, hoping for nothing more than a position on the household staff, the father stopped him in midsentence, and began to lavish on him a series of gifts: a robe to cover him, a ring for his finger, some sandals for his feet and fatted calf on the BBQ pit.  Each one of these gifts was a wonderful symbol of the welcome home that the boy was being given.

• The robe was a garment from the father’s own wardrobe, something to cover the tattered and filthy rags that the boy had been reduced to during his sojourn in the far country.  One of the ways that the Bible talks about forgiveness is as a covering.  That robe was a witness to the welcome of the father’s mercy.

• The ring that was placed on the boy’s finger was the family’s signet, the seal they used to conduct business.  By placing it on his son’s finger, the father was giving him access to all of the family’s resources.  That ring was a witness to the welcome of the father’s restoration of that lost boy to the family circle.

• The sandals that were put on his feet were a sign of the boy’s status as a son rather than just a servant.  In the ancient world slaves went barefoot to discourage them from running away it’s said.  Only members of the family wore shoes.  Do you remember the old Negro Spiritual: “I got shoes, you got shoes, all of God’s children’s got shoes”?  Well, those shoes were the signs of dignity and freedom.  And in the story that Jesus told they were a witness to the welcome of the Father’s regard for the status of his returned boy.

• And the fatted calf that was put on the spit in the yard was a special animal that was kept for just such an occasion.  When a guest unexpectedly showed up at the front door, ancient hospitality dictated that a feast be spread, and so an animal was always being prepared for just such a moment.  That fatted calf on the BBQ was a witness to the father’s welcome and to the community that His love creates.

 Besides the fact that Acts 7:54-60 and Luke 15:20-24 both came from the pen of Luke, you might conclude that these two texts have nothing to do with each other, but I see a connection.  In Luke 15, in the story that Jesus told about the father who waited and watched for his boy to come home, and who then got up and ran to him, lavishing him with wonderful gifts when he finally did, the father’s welcome was the whole point.  And the same thing is true in Acts chapter 7, in the very first story that we have of a Christian dying.  Jesus stood up to welcome Stephen home.   It’s all about the welcome. 

 Biblically the gift of hospitality is not just a matter of etiquette; it’s a matter of the deepest truth about God that’s been revealed to us in Jesus Christ.  As Paul told the Romans: “Welcome one another just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (15:7).   God wants to be in a relationship with us.  God wants us to feast at His table and to live in His love forever.  And so God the Father waits and watches for our return, always ready to bestow His gifts – the robe of forgiveness, the ring of belonging, the sandals of status and the fatted calf of celebration.  And as we approach the front door of eternity, Jesus Christ the Son of God, our Savior, stands up to welcome us home.    DBS+

 

 

Why Interfaith Dialogue?

Last week we had our third 2013 “Faiths in Conversation” gathering at Temple Shalom.  The topic was “Why Interfaith Dialogue?”  from the Jewish, Christian and Muslim point of view.  As usual, Northway was well represented, and our conversation partners – Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger and Sheikh Omar Suleiman – were engaging and informative.  We have made a significant commitment to this process.  To use the language of Kennon Callahan, it is one of the things that we are getting something of a reputation for on the church grape vine, and because we are, it’s important to know why?  This is my attempt to explain my participation in the process -

 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 At the end of my junior year in high school, one of my teachers wrote in my annual – “Stand firm in your faith, and keep searching for truth, I think that you will find that the two are not ultimately in conflict.”  Little did I know then that this advice would become something of the motto for the journey of my life.  It was said of Thomas Merton that his “openness to man’s spiritual horizons” came from his own “rootedness of faith.”  He regarded the Christ Event to be “the supreme historical fact” and “the perfect revelation.”  So do I.  And it was from the inner security of that commitment that he could “explore, experience and interpret the affinities and differences between religions.”  And so can I.

 I am a Christian, and while that tells you everything that matters about me, at the same time, it tells you virtually nothing.  And that’s because there’s more than one way of being a Christian.  Alister McGrath, the Oxford Theologian, in his 2002 book on The Future of Christianity (Wiley and Blackwell), identified five categories of Christians: Roman Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, Mainline Protestants, Evangelicals and Pentecostals.  Ask a question of Christianity, any question, and the answer that you’ll get depends entirely on the kind of Christian of whom it has been asked.  Tonight our question is: “Why Interfaith Dialogue?”  And the way that I will be answering it comes from my own identity as an Evangelical Christian who serves in a Mainline Protestant Denomination.

 That designation “Evangelical” comes from the root word “Evangel,” Greek for “Gospel” or “Good News.”   I am a “Gospel” Christian.  This tells you about what I believe, this tells you about what I believe matters most, and this tells you about my own personal experience of those beliefs.  As an “Evangelical” Christian, my Christianity puts the primary emphasis on what God is doing to save us; on what God has done and is doing to bring us into a “right relationship” with Himself.  And it is this salvation project, both as it has unfolded in the history that is narrated by the Bible, Old Testament and New, and as it has played out in my very own life, that is defining for how I think, feel and act.

 The “God behind the Gospel” (Fred Sanders) that I read about in the Bible and encounter in my heart is a God who created me, who redeemed me and who sustains me.  The God I know as a Christian is a God whose eternal purpose has always been to save us, all of us, and who then proceeded to accomplish the things that such a salvation requires before individually applying it to our hearts.  When thinking about this Divine work of salvation, we who are Christians see “something trinitarian” going on (Sanders).  You see, long before the Trinity – One God in Three Persons – was a Christian doctrine, it was the Christian’s experience.   My life is the story of how God made me for a relationship with Himself, and how God then broke down the walls of separation that my rejection of Him and His ways erected, and finally how God pursued me in love with His offer of reconciliation and restoration.  

 This is the God I know as an “Evangelical” – as a “Gospel” Christian.  He is the God who has purposed my salvation as the Father, and then accomplished my salvation through the Son, and finally applied that salvation individually to my heart by the Holy Spirit.   This is my spiritual reality as an Evangelical Christian, it is the grid through which I consider all things, and so it is where I turn to answer the question “Why Interfaith Dialogue?”  It is from the inner confidence of my belief in and experience of this God who has behaved in history and operated in my heart as a Father, Son and Holy Spirit that I enthusiastically participate in interfaith dialogue. 

• I am here because, as an Evangelical Christian, I believe that you are someone who bears the image of God from Creation.  The church’s historic creeds both begin with the affirmation that God is “the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”  And the crown of God’s creation is humanity, made just a little lower than Himself, filled with glory and majesty (Psalm 8). You and me, we alone bear the image of God in creation (Genesis 1:27).  And that fact affixes a dignity to you that I cannot ignore and that I dare not violate.  

 The Apostle Paul in his letter to the church at Ephesus in Asia Minor said the he bowed his knees before the Father “from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name” (3:14-15).   We are God’s “offspring” (Acts 17:28), all of us, and not just Christians.   And this means that I need to know who you are, and what you believe, and both what hurts you and what fills you with hope because we are kin. The desire of the God I know is for you, and His designs have always included you.  In Creation God made you for Himself, and it’s because I know this to be true of both you and God that I must take you seriously as a matter of my faith, and that’s why I’m here in this interfaith dialogue.

• I am also here because, as an Evangelical Christian, I believe that you are someone for whom Christ died.  In the first letter of John, Christ’s “beloved disciple” explained what I as an “Evangelical” Christian believe the cross of Christ was all about – doing what was necessary to make the forgiveness of sins possible (1:9).  John told his readers that when they sinned, they had “an advocate” or “a mediator” the Father – a Holy God (1:5-6); Jesus Christ, “the Righteous One” (2:1).  That’s the “Good News” that makes me an “Evangelical” Christian, and at its core is the message that “Christ died for our sins” (I Corinthians 15:3).  And then, just so that there would be no confusion about it, after telling Christians that Christ’s atoning sacrifice was for them, John added that Christ’s atoning sacrifice was not just for them, but for “the whole world” (2:2).     

The very first Bible verse we memorize as Christians, John 3:16, doesn’t say “For God so loved Christians that He gave His only begotten Son,” but rather, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.”  And I can’t say that I believe this while distancing myself from you, acting as if I’m chosen and special to God, and you’re not.  “God proves His great love for us,” Paul told the Romans, by “Christ’s death for us” (5:8), and Biblically, I understand that “us” includes you, and that’s why I’m here in this interfaith dialogue.

• And finally, I am here because, as an Evangelical Christian, I believe that you are someone over whom the Holy Spirit ceaselessly “broods.”  “Brooding” is what a mother bird does over her nest, stirring her chicks to life, and in Genesis 1:2 we are told that this is what the Spirit of God did in creation – “brooding over the face of the deep.”   As an “Evangelical” Christian I believe that the Holy Spirit is “the Giver of Life” in both creation and the new creation.  Jesus said that just like the wind that blows where it wishes, so it is with the Holy Spirit.  We don’t know where the Spirit comes from or where the Spirit is going to next, but we can know when the Spirit is present by the impressions that are being made (John 3:8). 

 So, what are the signs of the Holy Spirit’s presence?   What are the impressions that are made when the Holy Spirit is around? Well, Paul named nine of them: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23).  And it’s because I see these things in you that I must conclude that Holy Spirit is doing something in you and with you.  Thirty years ago a Hospice Social Worker told me that the very first thing she did with every visit she made was to try to figure where God was and what God was doing at that moment in that situation so that she could cooperate with Him rather than get in His way!  And I participate in interfaith dialogue for the very same reason.  I want to cooperate with rather than hinder what God is doing in the world today.

 Historically, “Evangelicals” like myself have been the least likely Christians to participate in interfaith dialogue.  Fearing that the Gospel would somehow be put at risk by relating lovingly and respectfully to believers of other religions, Evangelical Christians like myself have tended to “circle the wagons” instead where we could talk about you without having to actually talk to you.  A generation ago, E. Stanley Jones, the pioneer of Evangelical interfaith dialogue and my own personal  role model in this process, said that our preference has been “the method of long-distance dueling… shelling your positions, or (at least) what we thought were your positions,” trying to secure a victory.  But, E. Stanley Jones pointed out, “The crusaders conquered Jerusalem and found in the end that Christ was not there…  They had lost Him through the very spirit and methods by which they sought to serve Him.”    

 It is the Gospel – the “Evangel” – that makes me an “Evangelical” Christian.   And it is the God who is behind that Gospel – a God who made us for Himself; a God who sacrificed Himself in love in order that we might be reconciled with Him; and a God who strives with us to bring us back to Himself – who compels me to participate in interfaith dialogue.  I can’t know Him, and not be here doing this.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Our next “Faiths in Conversation” event will be back at Northway on Wednesday, May 29, at 7 pm.  Our topic that evening will be “The World and the Next World.”

This will be a conversation about eternal destiny – what we believe happens to us, and to others, when we die.  What becomes of Jews and Muslims who don’t believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior? That sensitive question is my next assignment.   It should be an interesting evening.  DBS+

 

A Friend Died Today…

A church member died today; more accurately, a dear friend died today.  Just because a minister has a professional relationship with his or her parishioners, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t personal attachments as well, especially when you’ve been privileged to be somebody’s minister for a stretch of time as long as I have been with her.  I buried her husband, and I have buried lots and lots of her friends, my friends — our friends.  She attended most of the funerals that I have conducted over the past 16 years, and she always would always give me a great big hug when they were done and tell me it was “perfect,” my best one yet, and that she was so glad that one day I would be conducting her service.  Well, that day has now come.

As these past few days unfolded, and it became increasingly clear that my friend was losing her battle with cancer, in addition to being prayerfully present and pastorally attentive, I have been thinking about the journey that she has been on.  Sedated and put on life support in order to give her body a chance to rally, I watched all of those wonderful doctors and nurses at the hospital interact with my friend and her family.  They were so competent, so confident, so scientific.  They explained with an impressive precision just exactly what was happening in my friend’s body, and what they were doing in response.  They spoke with authority, and it was comforting.  You felt like they knew what they were doing, that they had things under control, at least as far as things could be controlled, and that everything that could possibly be done was being done.  They inspired such confidence, and listening to them and watching them, I remembered something that the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in the journal that he kept during his days as minister at a church in Detroit.

I visited Miss Z. at the hospital.  I like to go now since she told me that it helps her to have me pray with her… Sometimes when I compare myself with these efficient doctors and nurses hustling about I feel like an ancient medicine man dumped into the twentieth century.  I think they have the same feeling toward me that I have about myself. (Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic – 42)

I know all about this inferiority complex.   Sitting in a conference room with my friend’s family earlier this week, I listened to her Doctor clinically assess the situation.  He gave them the hard data of tests and the readings from monitors, numbers they could see and count, important information that they could then use to make their looming decision.   When he finished, I spoke up, and told the family of my friend that from my field of expertise that there were some things that needed to be factored in to their decision as well.  I reminded them of what God has promised to us in His word and what the church teaches and believes.    Simplistically it might be said that the doctor dealt with “facts” while I was only dealing with “faith.”   That he “knew” while I only “believed.”   That his truth was the fruit of reason: careful observation, controlled experimentation and disciplined reflection; while mine was only the fruit of revelation: Divine self-disclosure, inner impressions and a leap of faith.  But I would disagree.  I would argue that what I offered the family of my friend was no less rooted in truth than what the Doctor offered.  We have different epistemologies – different ways of knowing; and we have different sources of information, different fields of exploration; but there is one God with just one truth however we arrive at it.   And so I can speak with confidence too.

At the bed of my friend this afternoon, soon after she had taken her leave of us, I gathered her family around and talked with them about what had just happened.  I shared the beautiful image of the author Henry Van Dyke, a Presbyterian minister - 

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean.  She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch until at last she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says, “There she goes!” “Gone where?” Gone from my sight … that is all.  She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination.  Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “There she goes!” there are other eyes watching her coming and their voices ready to take up the glad shouts “Here she comes!” This is how I see and understand death.  (Henry van Dyke ~1852 – 1933)

I anchored this comforting image in Scripture for my friend’s family this afternoon.  I talked with them about how death is described as being “gathered to your people” in the Hebrew Scriptures (Genesis 25:8, 49:33); and how the Christian Scriptures assure us of a continuing conscious existence after we die because of our faith in Christ (“…even though we die, yet shall we live…” – John 11:25; “I go to prepare a place for you… and I will come again and take you to myself so that where I am there you may be also…” – John 14:2-3).  And so I assured them that their mother, my friend, passed from this world surrounded by loving family into the next world where loving family gathered to welcome her home.  “Today you will be with me in Paradise” Jesus promised the good thief as they both hung dying on crosses (Luke 23:43), and so just as I had been assuring them that He had companioned her through the valley of the shadow of death, so now I told them that I believed that she was home in the house of the Lord forever (Psalm 23:4; 6).  And my confidence in making such assertions is my certainty that God has spoken and acted to make Himself known to us, and that we have a reliable record of that Divine speaking and acting in Scripture, and the indwelling presence of God to lead us into all truth (John 16:13-15; I Corinthians 2:10-16). And so, I am not left to hunches and guesses when I am turned to for a word of wisdom and comfort from God.  It is not wishful thinking that I deal in as a minister.  That Doctor this week has his bases for the things that he said to guide the family of my friend in their decisions, and I have mine.  He wasn’t just making things up, and neither do I. 

Ben Haden, the longtime pastor of Chattanooga’s historic First Presbyterian Church, said: “The world has a gurgle in its throat when talking about death, but the Christian can speak with total confidence.”  And the basis for that confidence with which we can speak as Christians is God’s own self-disclosure. Hebrews 1:1-3 is foundational to how I operate as a minister: “Long ago God spoke to the fathers by the prophets at different times and in different ways.   But in these last days, God has spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed the heir of all things, and through whom He made the universe.  He is the radiance of His glory, the exact expression of His nature….”  In Jesus Christ I have a sure reference point about who God is and what God does, and it is from that sure reference point, that “hard data,” that I operate confidently as a minister.   Just as Paul comforted the Thessalonians in their grief by anchoring their experience of personal loss in the things that had been clearly revealed in Jesus Christ (I Thessalonians 4:13-18), so it is my job to lead people to the things that the Bible teaches, especially in times of suffering and sorrow, so that they will not be left to grieve as those who have no hope.  “Hopeful grieving,” that’s what anchoring our lives and losses in God’s promises that are found in Scripture can do for us.  In the pain and confusion of our circumstances, we find the still point in the storm where we can find shelter and strength.

At the very beginning of his letter to the Romans (the book the Bible Study my friend attended is in the middle of right now), Paul declared that he was not ashamed of the Gospel because it is the power of God for salvation (Romans 1:16).  As Christians we have a truth about which we can be confident.  My friend was, and that’s how I account for her extraordinary endurance, character and hope (Romans 5:3-4).  And now that her faith has become sight, she knows what we must still trust, that “This hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who is given to us” (Romans 5:5).  DBS+

 

“Why Doesn’t God Do Something?”

A worship experience on a Sunday morning doesn’t just happen on the spot.  Our worship services at Northway are driven by the church year and the Biblical texts that have been pre-selected to fit the seasonal theme.   I am a series preacher, which means that I preach a group of sermons in sequence that fit the emphasis of the church year.  Right now we’re in Eastertide – Easter is a season and not just a day.  On Easter Sunday I preached Romans 6:1-7 on the theme of “Living the Resurrection.”  My focus was on how the Easter reality of Christ’s resurrection is not just something that we believe happened in history, but it something that happens in our hearts as well.  Working with Paul’s baptismal reference, I talked about how when we believe in Christ we are raised to walk in newness of life. This message set the preaching theme for the rest of Eastertide, a sermon series based on Colossians 3:12-17 called “Putting on the New Self.”  Each week we are taking one of the qualities that Paul said we “put on” as Christians like the pieces of a new wardrobe that fit our identity in Christ.  Yesterday (Sunday April 21) the section of the text that we were scheduled to look at is the part about forgiveness – “…whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you (forgive).”

The order of worship for Sunday (April 21) was prepared on Monday with this text and theme in mind. It was reviewed by staff on Tuesday during staff meeting and musical resources were mixed in.  Worship leadership assignments were made.  By Tuesday afternoon support staff was beginning their preparations for publications and publicity, and on Wednesday evening the choir went into rehearsal for the musical offerings tied to the worship theme that had been selected and reviewed.  Meanwhile I had gone to work on the sermon, taking the Biblical text and the sermon note outline that had been prepared on Monday and fleshing it out through research and reflection.  By the close of day on Wednesday I have a fully annotated sermon “map” for the Sunday message that I will then use to write my manuscript on Friday.  All of this was done last week in this sequence. 

 And then West blew up.

Watching the news reports of this disaster on our front doorsteps, and coupling it with the terrorist bombings that had taken place earlier in the week in Boston during the Marathon, by midmorning on Thursday it was clear that we were going to have make a shift and plan a different kind of worship experience for Sunday morning.   It was the theologian Paul Tillich who wrote about what he called the “Theology of Correlation” – how the world poses the questions that the church has got to answer.  Well, the events of this past week posed the question that we felt like we had to try to answer as a community of faith when we gathered on Sunday morning.  And so music, liturgy and preaching were all refashioned on Thursday for a different kind of worship service on Sunday morning. Ministerial and support staff went the extra mile to make this change possible, and as always, I am so proud of them and grateful to them for their flexibility, creativity and effort. 

“Why Doesn’t God Do Something?”  was the replacement message that I brought last  Sunday.  I based it on Romans 8:31-39.  You can find the text of it on the church web page – www.northwaychristian.org – follow “Worship” to “Sermons” to access it.  This message was an attempt to answer the question in the title: “Why Doesn’t God Do Something?”  You can be the judge of whether or not I was successful in this effort.  One church visitor told me after the second service that she didn’t hear an answer to the question that I’d posed and that was heavy on her heart.  I’ve been mulling her observation over in my head and heart ever since.  I recall an editorial I read years ago in Christianity Today about an ordination interview in which the candidate had been theologically careful and nuanced in his responses to the committee’s questions.  Finally a member of the panel, a layman, frustrated by what he perceived to be the evasiveness of the candidate, blurted out: “Do you or do you not believe in the Virgin Birth?  And no trick answers!”   Despite my best intentions to be clear in my message on Sunday to answer the question “Why Doesn’t God Do Something?”  At least in the mind of one listener, I wasn’t.  And so, with “no trick answers,” let me take another run at it.

1. Tragedy, and what theologian Marilyn McCord Adams calls the “horrors,” are part of the fabric of life in this world.  We are not given an exemption from suffering just because we are Christians.  There are religious teachings that suggest that we can escape tribulation.  I find them to be neither Biblical nor Christian.  They offer magical thinking and not Divine wisdom.  Bad things happen.  Bad things happen all the time.  Bad things happen to good people and to bad people.  Bad things are going to happen to us and to the people we love.  There is no one who is going to get through this life without some trouble – without some painful losses, some confusing circumstances and some soul-shaking experiences and events.

2. When the trouble comes, and it always comes, the “God Questions” get posed with a particular urgency:  “Where is God?” “What is God doing about it?” “Why didn’t God stop it from happening to start with?”  If you’ve been told that believing in God is going to provide you with an exemption from all the sadness and suffering in your life, then when that sadness and suffering shows up in your life, it can only be regarded as some kind of failure.  Either a failure in the faith of the people who had bargained for immunity, or a failure in the God they had been told that they could count on to keep them safe and make them happy. It is out of the wreckage of this inadequate system of belief that a more adequate belief system can and must be built.

3. A more adequate belief system has got to be rooted and grounded in God’s reality – in who God really is and in what God has actually promised to do.  This raises the most basic of all theological questions, the question of knowledge.  How do we know anything about God?  Is it all hunches and guesses, hopeful longings and wishful thinking?  Biblical Christianity says that the God who is there is not silent.   God has spoken and acted in lots of different ways, but decisively in Jesus Christ, and we have an entirely reliable record of what God has shown us and told us about Himself in the pages of Scripture.  This is the watershed decision that each one of us has to make.  If God has spoken and acted, and if we have a credible record of that speaking and acting, then it is to that record that we must turn to answer our “God Questions.”  Put me squarely in the camp of those who believe in God’s self-disclosure.  Who I know God to be, and what I expect God to do is based on what God has said and done to make himself known, climaxing in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the One to whom the New Testament documents bear witness.

4. Jesus Christ is what I believe that God is doing about the tragic brokenness of this world.  It is not a “quick fix” that He offers, but rather a redemptive process that unfolds methodically throughout history and into eternity.  God is not absent from this world in all of its tragic dimensions or disinterested in the anguish of people who were made in His image. In Jesus Christ we have “Emmanuel,” the “God Who is with Us,” the God who has stepped into this world as one of us.  He is “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3).  He can “sympathize with our weaknesses” (Hebrews 4:15), because he has become one of us “in all things” (Hebrews 2:17), sharing our “flesh and blood” and facing power of death (Hebrews 2:14-15). On the cross Christ challenged the powers of darkness that are arrayed against us and that seek to undo us, and His resurrection on the third day set in motion their final defeat (I Corinthians 15:20-28). 

5. Here and now we live in-between God’s initiation of this solution to the problem of pain in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and God’s consummation of the plan when Christ returns at the close of the age to fully and finally finish the work of salvation.   While certain, this solution is still in the process of unfolding, and it would be a painful mistake for us to think or act as if were already finished.  The unwarranted anticipation of the completion of the response that God is making in Jesus Christ to sin, suffering and sadness is a spiritual overreach that has shattering consequences.  We are still in the battle. We cannot let down our guard.  We must not act as if evil is not still active. We must not think that it will not touch us and those we love, or promise this to others.  What we can and must say is that death, disease, darkness and despair will not have the last word.  In Jesus Christ, God is in the middle of doing something about them all. God is not finished yet; the solution is still in the process of unfolding, but it’s on its way.

6. And so, for now, we live Romans 8:31-39.  This lyrical, powerful text runs its course between two banks: the bank of the painful realities of this world -  “tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril sword” (8:35) – we get no exemptions; and the bank of what God has done and is doing for us in Jesus Christ – “Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, who was raised” (8:34).  In Jesus Christ God is solving the problem of pain.  In Jesus Christ God is fixing everything that’s gone wrong with us and the world.  But God has not finished this saving work in Jesus Christ yet.  And so while we continue to struggle and suffer, we have the consolation of knowing how things are going to finally play out, and we have the empowering and indwelling presence of God’s Spirit to comfort and encourage us in the face of the troubles that we will face, reassuring us that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed” (8:18), and reminding us that nothing that might come our way has the power “to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (8:39).

7. And finally, when we know these things, when we have been “comforted in our afflictions” by God in Jesus Christ, we are given a capacity to comfort others in their afflictions “with the comfort with which we ourselves have been comforted by God” (2 Corinthians 1:4).  As we live in-between the initiation and the consummation of the response that God is making in Jesus Christ to the problem of pain, we don’t just batten down the hatches and ride out the storms that break in upon us.  No, we rise up in compassion to comfort and console.  Knowing that the sadness and sufferings of this present world are contrary to God’s purposes, and believing that God in Jesus Christ is actively engaged in a process of reversing the damage that’s been done, we rise up in courage and care as people of faith to provide specific and concrete help at the point of people’s hurt and hopes in anticipation of the full and final healing that God is busy bringing about in Jesus Christ.   While we are not surprised by tragedy and the “horrors,” neither are we indifferent to them.  Believing that God is doing something about them in Jesus Christ, and will finally bring about their defeat, we now take our stand in the direction of that future that is coming by binding up the wounds of all people and by contending with the powers and principalities that inflict them.   And when we are asked why we are doing this, our answer must be “Jesus Christ.”  He is, after all, who God is and what God is doing.  DBS+

When a Christian Commits Suicide

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 Vitriol infests Rick Warren family’s Grief                                                                                     

Cathy Lynn Grossman USA Today | April 8, 2013

In the days since, uncounted strangers have joined the 20,000 congregants who worship at the mega church network “Pastor Rick” built in Southern California, Warren’s nearly 1 million Twitter followers and hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers in flooding social media with consolation and prayer. “Kay and I are overwhelmed by your love, prayers, and kind words,” Warren tweeted on Sunday. “You are all encouraging our broken hearts.”

But a shocking number are taking the moment of media attention to lash out at Warren on their digital tom-toms. The attacks are aimed both at him personally and at his Christian message. Some unbelievers want to assure Rick and Kay Warren, his wife and Matthew’s bereaved mother, that there’s no heaven where they’ll meet their son again. “Either there is no God, or God doesn’t listen to Rick Warren, despite all the money Rick has made off of selling false hope to desperate people,” one poster from Cincinnati wrote in to USA Today. In another comment, the same poster counsels Warren to “abandon primitive superstitions and accept the universe for what it is — a place that is utterly indifferent to us.” …Others have appointed themselves 140-character theologians in a debate over whether someone once saved can lose his or her salvation if suicide is against God’s law. These posters, rather than waiting for Judgment Day, have ruled for hell…

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 A dozen times in my 40 years of pastoral ministry I have been called upon to preside at the funeral of someone who has taken his or her own life.  And then I have been left to work with the grief of those who survive the death of the one who has committed suicide.   As you can well imagine, it is among the more heart-wrenching tasks of ministry.  As I have picked my way through the wreckage that is created when someone takes their own life, I have, as a “V.D.M.” (“Verbi Divini Minister” – ‘Servant of the Word of God” – see my April 2 blog), turned to Scripture for wisdom and guidance.  And frankly, when I did I was rather surprised by what I found, or more accurately, by what I didn’t find.

The Bible tells us about seven people who took their own lives, six in the Hebrew Scriptures: Both Saul and his armor bearer (I Samuel 31:1-7), Ahitophel (2 Samuel 17:23), Zimri (I Kings 16:11-20), Abimelech (Judges 9:50-57) and Samson (Judges 16:23-30); and Judas Iscariot in the Christian Scriptures (Matthew 27:3-10; Acts 1:16-20).  In all seven cases, the stories of these people taking their own lives were told without making any moral judgments or drawing any spiritual conclusions.  The silence of Scripture here is striking since it is so widely assumed that suicide is clearly and consistently condemned by the Bible.  It is not.  It is tragic, it is aberrational, and it is agonizing, but no enduring truths emerge out of the stories of the seven suicides that the Bible narrates.

The tradition of viewing suicide as a sin is largely the result of an interpretation of the sixth commandment: “Thou shalt not murder” (Exodus 20:13).  If it is a sin to commit murder, as this commandment so clearly says that it is, then if a person murders himself, then it just follows that it must be a sin too.  And because suicide is an act that cannot be repented of and confessed after it has been committed – the presupposition here is that there are no second chances given to us after we die – then suicide is not just a sin, it is an unforgivable sin – a final unconfessed sin that excludes us from the joys of heaven.  Beyond the fact that this is not how our Jewish mothers and fathers understand or have ever understood this commandment and its application to the question of suicide – and since it was theirs as Jews before it was ours as Christians, how they have historically understood it should have some bearing on how we understand it now – there is the larger problem of the spiritually precarious position that you will wind up in if you think that unconfessed sin in a believer’s life excludes us from salvation.  I could be killed instantly in an accident or drop dead suddenly from a medical condition and not have time to formally repent of and confess my sins.  Will this exclude me from God’s nearer presence?  This mechanical and technical understanding of the dynamics of forgiveness misses the whole point of what the New Testament is saying about justification by faith through grace.  And so I’m not convinced that the sixth commandment brings any more clarity to the question of suicide than the seven Biblical narratives of those who committed suicide do.

As I have sought wisdom and guidance from the Bible on the question of suicide, I have found that it is Matthew’s application of what the Prophet Isaiah said about the Suffering Servant (42:3) to Jesus Christ that has helped me the most - “A bruised reed He will not break off, a dimply burning wick He will not extinguish” (Matthew 12:20).  In the history of Christian interpretation, these images of a broken reed and a sputtering wick have been taken as references to people with crushed souls and despairing hearts.   The “bruised reed” describes a person bowed under the burdens of life, a person just about to collapse under their weight, a person whose strength is faltering and fading fast.  The ”smoldering wick” has been taken to mean a person of faint promise and vanishing hope, one whose life if flickering and fading  out.  “Bruised reeds” and “smoldering wicks” are of little value.  They are both hopeless cases.  Ordinarily they would be broken off and put out.  But Jesus Christ came not to discourage and condemn, but rather to comfort and redeem.  And so Matthew tells us that Jesus Christ does not cast such people away from His presence, but rather He gathers them up and He gathers them in.  He deals with them kindly and gently.  They become the special objects of His concern and care.

In 1990 the award winning author William Styron published his memoir Darkness Visible.  This was his gut-wrenching account of his struggle with depression that nearly drove him to take his own life.  He concluded that people kill themselves, not because they are cowards, or weaklings, or spiritually confused, or morally depraved, but rather “because they are afflicted with a depression that is so devastating that they can no longer endure the pain of it.”   He explained that the pain of depression kills because “its anguish can no longer be borne” by those it victimizes, and that no more reproof should be attached to those who take their own lives than is attached to someone who dies of cancer or heart disease.

And it is connecting these three dots – the surprising silence of the Bible on suicide, what Matthew 12:20 says about who Jesus Christ is and what Jesus Christ does, and what William Styron said about the destructive power of depression’s pain – that has informed my pastoral response when the phone rings and I learn that a member of my flock, someone I have known and loved, has taken his or her own life.  The last time this happened, a little over a year ago, the message that I preached at the funeral of my friend is the distillation of the wisdom and guidance that I have gotten from Scripture and experience, and that I had to offer to those who were left behind wondering -  “Why did this happen?” – and, perhaps even more urgently for us as people of Christian faith  - “Where was God?”  I offer it here as a resource for any who might be struggling with these questions in the aftermath of the Warren family tragedy, or in the aftermath of your own tragedies — DBS+

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 The Lord Looks on the Heart ~ I Samuel 16:7

 “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” the Lord said through the prophet Isaiah, and “neither are my ways your ways” (55:8).  Consider the way that God looks at us. Samuel, the prophet, was sent by God to the little Judean town of Bethlehem, to the house of Jesse, with a horn full of oil and an eye for royalty.  Saul had forfeited his throne, and it was time for God’s choice of the next ruler for His people to be revealed.  And so, one by one Jesse’s sons were paraded before the prophet.  Young, strong, brave and handsome, any one of them would have appeared to have fit the bill.  “Surely the Lord’s anointed is before me,” Samuel thought to himself as he looked over the seven candidates.  But Samuel felt nothing stir in his heart as he looked them over.  The Lord designated none of them king to Samuel by inner witness.  And so Samuel asked Jesse, “Is this it… is this all there is?”  And Jesse replied, “Well, there is one more, the baby of the family, but he’s out watching sheep.”   “Send for him,” Samuel said, and when David was ushered into Samuel’s presence the Lord showed him that this was the one who was to be king.  “Do not  look on a man’s appearance or on the height of his stature,”  God told Samuel, “for the Lord does not see as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (I Samuel 16:7).  We form our judgments of people by how they look, by the way they dress, by the accent of their speech, by the work they do, by the things they own, and by the things they do.  We have to look on the externals.  But God told Samuel that he looks on the internals, on those places we never get to see. 

 In the Biblical languages the heart is the central organ of the body, and by way of analogy, the center of a person’s being.  In Hebrew the word for heart means “the midst,” what is in the middle.  And the Scriptures consistently teach that one’s true identity will be found in our depths and not by what’s on the surface.  From the Biblical perspective, life is always lived from the inside out.  And so, when God looks on our hearts, what does God see?

 Well, someone has written that before we have finished with this life, the world will have done one of three things to us: “it will make our hearts very hard; it will make our hearts very soft; or else it will break our hearts altogether.  No one escapes.” 

 Some hearts God sees are very hard. Throughout the Bible this is the assessment of the spiritually dead – their hearts are hardened.  Like stones, some people’s hearts grow callous and hard before the verities of life.  This is what happens to some people’s hearts; but I don’t think it’s what happened to Jeff’s. 

 Some hearts God sees are very soft.  In Scripture the hard heart is often contrasted with the heart of flesh.  The prophet Ezekiel said that the work of God in us is the spiritual equivalent of a heart transplant.  “I will give you a new heart,” the Lord says, “I will remove the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (36:27).  This heart of flesh is warm, soft and pliable. It can be shaped and moved.  This is what happens to the hearts God touches; and I have reason to believe that Jeff’s heart had been.  In fact, I was there when it happened. De Colores!

 And some hearts God sees are very broken.  In fact, I suspect that this is what God saw when He looked at Jeff’s heart in recent days.  God is drawn to these kinds of hearts.  In one of his wonderful songs Wayne Watson describes Christ as “the friend of the wounded heart,” and I think that’s right.  To describe the ministry of Jesus Christ, Matthew in his Gospel quoted this line from one of the Suffering Servant Songs from the book of the prophet Isaiah -  “He will not break the bruised reed, or quench the smoldering wick” (Isaiah 42:3; Matthew 12:20).  In the history of interpretation these images of the bruised reed and the dimly burning wick have been taken as references to broken people with crushed souls; to those who are in great despair and with little hope.  And here’s the Gospel’s promise: our God does not ignore these people; our God does not forget these people; and our God will not abandon these people because Christ is the friend of the wounded heart.

 Shortly before he was ordained to the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church, one of Brennan Manning’s professors at DuquesneUniversity in Pittsburgh told him this story.  One of 13 children, one day Brennan’s professor got thirsty while playing outside.  And so he quietly entered the pantry off the kitchen to get a cool glass of water.  While doing so, he overheard his father visiting with a neighbor at the kitchen table.  “Joe,” the neighbor said, “there’s always been something I’ve wanted to know; with 13 children surely you have a favorite.  Which one of your kids do you love the most?”  Well, Brennan’s professor put down his glass and pressed his ear more closely to the door, hoping against hope to hear his own name spoken.  And his father said, “Do I have a favorite? Is there one I love more than the others? Of course I do, that would be Mary – she’s just 12 years old, has braces on her teeth, and feels so ugly that she hardly ever leaves her room these days.  I sure love my Mary – but you asked me about my favorite didn’t you?  That would be Peter – he’s 23 years old and his fiancée just broke off their engagement. He’s desolate.  I love him so.  But you asked about my favorite didn’t you?  That would have to be little Michael, he’s small for his age and totally uncoordinated.  He never gets picked to play ball, and all the other boys make fun of him.  My heart belongs to little Michael.  But the child I love the most would have to be Ann – she’s 24 and off living by herself in the city now, and she’s developing something of a drinking problem I fear.  I weep for my Ann.  But you asked which of my children I love the most – that would have to be….”  And so it went.  That father sitting at his table telling his neighbor the names and needs of each of his 13 kids, one by one in answer to the question, “Which one do you love the most?”  And Brennan’s professor ended that story by saying, “What I learned that day standing in the pantry was that my father loved the most the one who needed him the most at the time.  And that’s how the father of Jesus Christ is too – He loves the most those who need Him the most.”

 There is so much that we will never understand about what happened to bring us to this moment here this morning.  There are so many questions that we cannot ask right now, and so many answers that we want so desperately to hear.  I can only imagine the anguish of that silence.  But here’s one thing about which we can be absolutely certain – in the painful circumstances of Jeff’s life in recent years, and a week ago Thursday, God loved Jeff the most because that’s when Jeff needed God the most.  And in these agonizing days that have followed, God has been loving you who are Jeff’s family and friends the most because this has been when you have needed Him the most.  And in closing I would suggest that because this is who God is in Jesus Christ, the friend of the wounded heart, that we can trust Jeff with Him, and ourselves.  That’s where the healing begins.

 ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Depression and the Christian ~ A Personal Testimony

 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The youngest son of Rick Warren, author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” has committed suicide, the evangelical pastor said in a letter to members of his church on Saturday. Matthew Warren, the youngest son of Warren and his wife Kay, died after a long struggle with mental illness, according to the statement from Saddleback Valley Community Church in Lake Forest, Calif. The church asked for “everyone to join us in praying for the entire Warren family” on Saturday. “At 27 years of age, Matthew was an incredibly kind, gentle and compassionate young man whose sweet spirit was encouragement and comfort to many,” Saddleback Church said in the statement. “Unfortunately, he also suffered from mental illness resulting in deep depression and suicidal thoughts.”

…Warren wrote about his son’s death in an emotional letter to his church, calling his son “an incredibly kind, gentle, and compassionate man.” “No words can express the anguished grief we feel right now,” Warren wrote in the letter. “He had a brilliant intellect and a gift for sensing who was most in pain or most uncomfortable in a room. He’d then make a bee-line to that person to engage and encourage them.” “In spite of America’s best doctors, meds, counselors, and prayers for healing, the torture of mental illness never subsided,” Warren wrote to church members. “Today, after a fun evening together with Kay and me, in a momentary wave of despair at his home, he took his life.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                               http://usnews.nbcnews.com

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 We all get depressed.  A beloved companion dies.  A friend moves.  A job changes.  A relationship falters. There’s a sudden and unexpected crisis in our health or our finances.  Depression is a normal response to all such difficult circumstances in life.  We’re all familiar with the experience. Something bad happens, we’re staggered and sad for a spell, and then we pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off and carry on.  It’s a normal part of life.  We all get depressed from time to time, but for some of us who are depressed; it’s our “set” point.

The printer that’s connected to my computer has some default settings.  The print quality is “normal.”  The orientation is “portrait.” The paper size is “letter.” And the paper type is “plain.”  I don’t have to do anything to my computer or the printer for it to print normally on ordinary letter-sized paper; that’s just how it’s set.  But if I want to print something on legal-sized paper with the quality of a professional document, then I have to fiddle with the “properties” of my printer, making some deliberate adjustments to get those results. And for some of us, depression is our default setting; it’s our “normal.”

More than ten years ago I was diagnosed to be suffering from depression.  A patient, loving wife, a good doctor, a daily pill and a perspective of faith have all helped me navigate the darkness quite effectively, but the experience has been defining.  Like the key to a map, that little box down in the corner that tells you what all the different colored lines and markings on the page mean, so my diagnosis of depression has been something of a key to understanding who I am and why I am like that.  You see, my depression may have been diagnosed only ten years ago, but I now understand that I have suffered from depression for the full 59 years of my life.  It’s my “set” point. 

I remember the first time I got glasses.  I kept stumbling over the fine print in my teaching Bible at a study that I was leading in Amarillo.  One of the class members, an optometrist, told me to come and see him in his office.  And that’s how I went from wearing no glasses to wearing bifocals in just one doctor’s visit.  And I remember how amazed I was at how clear everything suddenly became the minute I put those glasses on.   And the same thing happened to me with my diagnosis of depression.  It just explains so much. 

I can now step back into moments in my life from childhood on and understand why I felt what I felt and reacted as I did.  I was depressed.  It turns out I have been my whole life long.  Now, I don’t offer this as an excuse for anything that I’ve ever said or done.  It’s not a ploy for sympathy, or an attempt to squeeze some strange kind of admiration out of you.  Believe me, there’s nothing romantic or heroic about being depressed.  It just is.  And it is for more of us than you know.

The studies all indicate that depression affects approximately 19 million Americans, or 9.5% of the population age 18 and older at any given time.  At some point in their lives, 10%-25% of women and 5%-12% of men will become clinically depressed.   In fact, it affects so many people that it is often referred to as the “common cold” of mental illness.  According to an Australian Government study, a country whose depression statistics are comparable to ours here in the United States, everyone, will at some time in their life be affected by depression – either their own or someone else’s.  One study I’ve read suggested that in any random gathering of people, as many as 15% of them will be struggling with depression.  If you are one of them, it’s important that you know that you are not alone.  If you are not one of them, it’s important that you know that we’re here.  And whether you are one of us or not, it’s important to know that being depressed is not a failure of faith.

My greatest struggle in being transparent about my own personal experience with depression has been my concern about what might happen to your confidence in me as your pastor when you learn that I am one of those people who deals daily with depression.  When I was a kid, I remember unexpectedly seeing my minister on the high dive at the Verdugo Plunge, the city pool in my hometown of Glendale, California.  It was horrible.  I mean, there was my priest, my spiritual father, the man who ministered to me the life-giving sacraments of the church, nearly naked and screaming like a little girl as he hurtled feet first into the deep end of the pool.  Any illusion that I might have had about his special sanctity was gone in the flash of that moment that has been forever burned into my memory. It was one of the best things that could have possibly happened to me and the development of my own soul and call.

You see, ministers are real people too.  Ordination does not bring with it some kind of special immunity from life’s struggles.  I was not made a minister because I had achieved a higher level of spiritual living than you, or showed the promise that someday I would.  The imagined pedestal of ministerial superiority crumbled away a long time ago.  Every pastor from my generation on has learned about “the wounded healer” from Henri Nouwen.  He told us that it was not only useless, but foolish for us as ministers to think that we would be able to conceal our woundedness from our flocks. “Open wounds stink” he wrote.  But paradoxically, he argued that those same wounds can become an important source of healing when they lead to mutual understanding and grace, the recognition that we are on this journey together as equals.

Listen to what he said –

A Christian community is a healing community not because wounds are cured and pains are alleviated, but because wounds and pains become openings or occasions for a new vision… Community arises where the sharing of pain takes place, not as a stifling form of self-complaint, but as a recognition of God’s saving (presence and) promises. (94)

Lewis Smedes suffered terribly from depression.  A professor of theology and ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, America’s premier evangelical school,  Lewis Smedes, a Godly man whose books I’ve read with deep appreciation for their spiritual wisdom and depth, nevertheless fell into a deep, dark place where just like Elijah in I Kings 19:1-12, he felt all alone.  And just like Elijah, at what he described as “the ground zero of my hopelessness” (My God and I: A Spiritual Memoir 132), God showed up.  In the pit of his depression, Lewis Smedes said that he discovered what “the old Hebrew verse-maker” told us – “Where can I go from your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, you are there” (Psalm 139).   In the wilderness his life had unexpectedly entered, God finally came to Lewis Smedes, breaking through his terror, and told him, “I will never let you fall; I will always hold you up,” so that Lewis could eventually say, “You can lie down in hell and find yourself in the hand of God,” and know that it was true in his own experience.

Believe me when I tell you that I wish that there were no wildernesses for us to have to pass through as Christians.  If all it took for depression to vanish was faith, then believe me, there are a bunch of us who would have been free from its terrible hold on us a long, long time ago.  Instead, in this wilderness of ours, we are learning, however slowly, however painfully, that “no matter how deep the pit is into which we descend, we keep finding God there.  He is not aloof from our suffering, but draws near to us when we are suffering.  He is vulnerable to pain, quick to shed tears and acquainted with grief,” We are never forsaken or forgotten; when we have to make our beds in hell, God is there.  And my prayer for Rick Warren and his family in the coming days is that this is what they will discover.  I believe that his son Matthew already knows just how true it is.  DBS+

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

If you are struggling with depression, or love someone who is, and are trying to sort out what it all means, especially as a Christian, let me highly recommend Steve and Robyn Bloem’s 2005 book Broken Minds (Kregel Publications).  More than just a personal narrative, although it is the story of Steve’s own struggles with depression as a minister that holds it all together; this book is the best single volume on the subject of depression that I have come across.  Broken Minds brings together important clinical and Biblical and practical information on depression in a way that is specifically and helpfully addressed to Christians. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________