The Call to Wholeness

Psalm 125

James 2:1-10, 14-17

When I get a sandwich at Marsha’s, I order a turkey and swiss on wheat with mayo, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, and black olives.  When I order the Son of a Sailor salad at Sharky’s, I ask them to hold the mandarin oranges (no use ruining a good salad).  When we order food, we get to say what we want and what we don’t.  Oliver gets his cheeseburgers ketchup only, no onions, lettuce, or pickles.  Now wouldn’t it be wonderful if life worked that way too?

 

Hi, I’ll have my life, but hold the anxiety, stress, anger, failure, depression, and grief.  I don’t want any bumpiness, any zigzags, or frustrating bits.  I’ll take my life but I’d like it without any struggle, or hardship, friction or conflict.  Oh, and as a side order, I’d like those close to me to have trouble free lives as well.  And yes, definitely supersize that.  (No, it doesn’t work that way.)

To be alive is an amazing thing.  To wake up each day is a genuine gift from the God who gives us birth and walks with us through life.  There is, of course, pleasure and happiness and joy and discovery.  But we have to welcome those good parts along with all kinds of things that make life hard – we might lose a job or worry about having enough money; we might not get the marriage we had hoped for, or the kids and family we had in mind; we may fall ill, or deal with migraines, or get cancer, or miss our friends, or lose our hearing.  We might feel lonely or depressed or confused or bored or overwhelmed.

When Jesus meets people in the gospels, he offers them healing and wholeness – a life where everything can belong.  He re-connects them to themselves, to their wider communities, and to God.  It’s probably not helpful to imagine Jesus’ practices of healing in terms of curing or fixing people.  Or at least in my experience very few of us are ever really completely fixed or cured.  When we experience God’s healing touch through the living Christ and the Holy Spirit, we find strength and comfort and even joy in the midst of our problems.  God doesn’t erase the trouble, but God does come to meet us in the mess and helps us face our limitations.

Over the next several weeks I will address some specific challenges that we face.  I’ll talk about stress and anxiety, about depression, anger and grief.  If these mental health challenges haven’t affected you personally, they certainly have affected those you love.

Issues related to mental and emotional health are common and widespread. 

·      When you look at all adult stays in US hospitals, one in four involve depressive, bipolar, schizophrenia, or other mental health disorders or substance abuse disorders.

·      Twenty five percent of US adults are living with mental illness.  Fifty percent of US adults will develop at least one mental illness during their lifetime.  (Here “mental illness” refers to serious psychological distress and feelings of depression and anxiety.) 

·      About 18% of US adults suffer from some sort of anxiety disorder each year.

·      About 7% of US adults suffer from a major depressive disorder each year (where “major” signals a significant interruption in work, family life, eating and sleep patterns).

Clearly, mental and emotional health issues affect all of us, either directly or indirectly.  One of my goals for this worship series on “wholeness” is simply that we will become more empathetic, more caring, and more inclusive of those with mental health challenges.  But we have our work cut out for us: when people with mental illness were interviewed, only 25% believed that others are caring and sympathetic to persons with mental health challenges.  That means that three-fourths of people experiencing mental or emotional distress feel abandoned, alienated, and unloved.  I think that with God’s help, we can do something about that.

God is love, the Bible tells us.  Merciful, caring, life-giving, love.  And life with Jesus will always involve the excitement and the difficulty of swimming out deeper and deeper into that love.  Letting that love work its way all through us, all through our past and the way we remember it, all through our habits and dreams and checkbooks, all through our singing and laughing and crying and eating and everything else we do.  It’s about letting God’s love gradually heal us, and then allowing that healing energy to move through us and into the lives of those who need it just like we do.

So what should we do when life brings us stress and anxiety; when we find ourselves depressed; when we are angry; when we or those we love are caught off guard by loss, failure, or grief?  How do we respond?  There might be some of us here who have to wrestle with serious mental illnesses like depression that’s so acute it makes you feel suicidal; like anorexia or bulimia; like cutting or harming ourselves in other ways; like schizophrenia or other struggles with hallucinations; like manic-depression or borderline personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder; like addictions to drugs or alcohol or sex or food.  Some of our young people may live with Attention Deficit Disorder or the challenges of the Autism spectrum.  Again, even if you haven’t had first-hand experience of mental health issues, those around you have.

Whether your challenges are of the serious kind that require therapy and medicine or the more common variety that do not reach that level, we all wonder why life brings us face to face with such heart-wrenching difficulties.  In our more superstitious or childish moments, we create a fantasy prayer world in which God will simply come and work some magic and the problems will be gone.  For the most part, when we’re talking about stress, anxiety, depression, anger, and grief, we’re talking about things that meet us in the normal course of life.  They’re not punishments for anything.  They’re just the cost of being alive.  These kinds of things happen to vulnerable, fragile, soft-skinned, genetically delicate creatures like we are.  And the same is true of serious mental health issues – they aren’t punishments.  They are forms of illness that require medicine to help balance our brain chemistry and expert guidance from physicians and therapists trained to help us.  When we are ill, we need a congregation of people who can love and support us through it.

Psalm 125

Our Psalm begins, “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be shaken but endures forever” (v. 1).  The lively prayers of the Psalms are full of images that can help us approach our lives in new ways.  Can you see yourself as a mountain, immovable and enduring?   It might be hard for us to imagine ourselves as a mountain.  But we can be as impressive as mountains – present, solid, real.  Like mountains, our lives have depths far below the surface.  In fact, when you look at a mountain, you are only seeing part of it, a pretty small part of it.  The rocks folds that formed it plunge down deep into the earth.  It’s rather like an iceberg in that sense, with the tip visible above the surface, but the mass extending down beneath.

We would probably be wise to approach our own lives in this way.  Not everything is visible or on the surface.  Much that’s important in our lives is down deep, and can be somewhat difficult to get to.  And yet it is there, as solid and real as the part that’s visible.  For example, we have very few memories from early childhood – most are there but under the surface.  We remember very few of our dreams – but they are there, under the surface.  Sometimes we are too busy, or too numb, or too afraid to even take note of what we’re feeling, and in that case our feelings and affections and emotional responses to life stay beneath the surface.  And when there are parts of our lives that embarrass us, parts we don’t like, parts we’ve excluded – those too stay down in the depths. 

God’s love invites us to a kind of wholeness where we can begin to integrate what’s down deep with what’s on the surface.  When we hear the good news that God loves us, what it means is that God loves all the different parts of who we are.  It’s the kind of love that help us gather up even our childhood experiences, our dream life, our emotional responses, and even the unlived and neglected parts of our lives into a beautiful new kind of wholeness.

When Jesus calls us to a new life, we choose the decent parts of our lives, the shiny parts, the parts we’re not embarrassed about, the parts we let others see, and then we put all this in a nice little knapsack and off we go, following Jesus.  But then Jesus turns around and looks at us quizzically.  It’s clear we’re doing something wrong.  “Bring all of it,” Jesus says to us.  “Bring all of what?” we ask.  “All of you.  All of who you are.  All your experiences.  All the parts of you that you’ve categorized as good and bad, clean and dirty, worthy and unworthy.  Gather it all up and bring it with you.  Don’t leave anything behind.”

James 2:1-10, 14-17

Our reading from James is a wonderful call to wholeness.  James points to the divisions and cracks in our lives.  These divisions can be social and economic – between rich and poor, where the rich have all the leverage and the poor don’t count.  These divisions can also be very personal – the cracks run right through our own lives.  We are to love our neighbors and ourselves as whole persons – bodies and souls.  We are not to neglect the need for food and clothes, as if our bodies are second class or unimportant.  We are to express our love for ourselves and others by simple acts of feeding and clothing our bodies. You cannot love all of your neighbors until you have learned to love all the different parts of who you are.

I believe that God is at work in all of us to lead us toward healing and wholeness.  It is a long and wonderful and mysterious process.  It does not happen by force, instead God woos and persuades us.  I think the life of faith picks up steam when we let go of the childish dream that our lives should be easy.  I do hold out hope that the different patches of our lives can be stitched together into a quilt.  It may not look perfect.  But there can be a lively conversation between all our different loyalties, allegiances, and belongings.  The name I’m giving to that hope for the next several weeks is “wholeness.”

Wholeness here means primarily that we are invited to welcome life’s lows into the house of our lives.  They may be a surprise or even unwanted guest, but they belong as much as anyone else.  This will be a real breakthrough for some of us.  Life’s low points are part of the messy life that God offers to us.  You can’t pick and choose – you either have a life full of experience and aliveness or you have nothing. The lows won’t go away.  They won’t be shut in a drawer or shelved in the garage.  They demand to be heard.  They demand a place at the table. 

If you want a chance to experience a renewal that invites you into a fresh perspective, you will have that chance over the next month or so.  We’ll be exploring the same old story we keep telling – God’s love for us in Jesus Christ – but from an angle that we don’t often consider.  What does this good news mean for my emotional life, for my mental health, for my affections? What you’ll find out is that there are two ways to hear this good news: you can hear it as a kind of cosmetics – nothing in you really changes, you just cover it up with a little bit of religion.  Or you can hear and welcome the good news as life-shattering, life-rearranging good news. This is the level where you’re no longer talking to God through a crack in your front door.  You invite God in, make some tea, and even give God permission to rearrange the furniture of your life.