March 16, 2014 40 Shades of Grace: Disappointment, Sadness, Depression 1 Kings 19:1-16 My laptop computer will run on its battery pack for about four hours. It has a Wi-Fi receiver built into it that picks up the signal of our church’s wireless transmitter so that I can take my laptop with me anywhere in the building and still access the files I need on our church’s server. I can leave my office and go upstairs to a meeting in the Jubilee Room and still have access to all of my Word files, still surf the internet, still download my email. Even the voice mail recordings of phone messages that come in while I am out of my office will be forwarded to my laptop over the wireless network. But after three or four hours of heavy computer use, a warning message will appear telling me that my battery is running low. It isn’t a crisis. The computer isn’t about to crash. I’m not in immediate danger of losing all of the work I’ve been doing, but I know that I can’t wait much longer before I recharge the battery by plugging my computer into its power source. If I ignore the warning and keep on working, the computer begins turning off different functions to help it conserve whatever power it has left. The first thing it shuts down the Wi-Fi receiver. My laptop avoids crashing by isolating itself. It stops communicating with all other computers by turning off the link that connects it with the rest of the world. Today we are continuing our Lenten series on Forty Shades of Grace by exploring the movement from disappointment, sadness and depression into grace. Will you join me in prayer? “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.” Depression is an incredibly isolating experience. It drains away our ability to stay connected, to be in relationship with others, to share our lives with people. Depression leaves us feeling so depleted that we feel empty inside, we lose interest in all of the things that we once enjoyed doing, and sleep loses its restorative power: either we can’t sleep or we can’t stay awake. We can’t concentrate and even the simplest decisions suddenly feel overwhelming to us. Sometimes when we are in the depths of depression, thoughts of suicide offer the only hope of relief. When the battery on my laptop gets low, it turns off the wireless receiver and stops communicating with all other devices. Something like that happens to us when we get depressed. Even when people are doing their best to help us and care for us and reach out to us with compassion and understanding, we simply don’t have the energy that it takes to be connected to anyone else. In order to save ourselves from crashing, we withdraw from others. Depression is an incredibly isolating experience. There are lots of factors that contribute to depression: some hereditary, some psychological, some environmental, some circumstantial. Depression has a medical dimension, a cognitive dimension and a spiritual dimension. And recovery from depression often requires a combination of the right anti-depressant medications, talk therapy, and spiritual practices. Last week we said there was a common thread of fear that connects all of us on the anxiety side of the emotional continuum. Today I want to suggest that there is a common thread of disappointment that connects all of us on the depression side of the emotional continuum. We all know what disappointment feels like. Disappointment is what we experience when something doesn’t work out the way we hoped it would. When we wake up in the morning and the scratchiness in our throat hasn’t gone away, or when our favorite college basketball team doesn’t make it into the final sweet 16, or when a partner or colleague or a friend says or does something that doesn’t measure up to our expectations, we feel disappointed. We know why we feel the way we do. It may or may not be a reasonable response to what that has happened, but it is a response to some definite, identifiable thing that didn’t measure up to our expectations. I’m disappointed that I’m still sick, that my team lost, that my friend made the choice that she did. Sometimes disappointment lingers for a long time, but no matter how long it lingers we always know what we are disappointed about. But sometimes disappointment broadens into sadness. Sadness is a more generalized mood state that has a deeper level of disillusionment. When we are sad, it usually is not in response to any one thing. It is a whole constellation of events and circumstances that have ganged up on us and left us feeling less optimistic about the circumstances of our lives. There isn’t anything we can do to snap ourselves out of a sad mood. We still have enough energy to go about our daily business, but sadness leaves us feeling like we are on the outside looking in. We are aware of the laughter and joy that others are experiencing in life and we want to join them, but we can’t. No matter how hard we try, we can’ break the spell of sadness that has been cast over us. Depression moves the disillusionment of sadness all the way to despair. Life feels hopeless when we are caught in the depths of depression. When other people try to help us and care for us and lift us from our depression, instead of feeling grateful we feel guilty and ashamed. Nothing we do and nothing anyone else does can break through the isolation of depression. It is as if our spiritual Wi-Fi receiver has shut down and we no longer feel connected to God or to any of God’s people. Today we heard the story of the Old Testament prophet Elijah who was caught in the grip of depression and had lost his will to live. Elijah’s decent into depression started with the disappointment he felt over the treatment he received for exposing the priests of Canaanite fertility God Baal as frauds. Ahab, the king of Israel had married a Canaanite woman named Jezebel, and under the queen’s influenced had allowed temples to Baal to be erected throughout the land of Israel. Elijah was deeply offended by the corrupting influence of these pagan temples and decided to challenge the priests of Baal to a showdown on Mt. Carmel to see which God was worthy of their worship. He had the priests of Baal build an altar and sacrifice a bull and cut it into pieces and lay it upon the altar and call on their God to consume their offering with fire. So they built their altar and laid their sacrifice upon it, and danced around their altar, and sang their sacred songs, and offered their prayers and called on the name of their God to receive their offering and provide a sign by kindling fire to consume their sacrifice, but nothing happened. Elijah mocked them and goaded them on saying, “sing louder, maybe your God is meditating, or has wandered off, or is taking a nap.” When nothing happened, Elijah made an altar of twelve stones, one for each other twelve tribes of Israel, and he loaded it with wood, and set the sacrifice upon it, and dowsed water over it three times so that the water overflowed the trench that surrounded the altar. And when Elijah called on the name of the Lord, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the sacrifice he offered was consumed by fire that burned so fiercely that even the stones were reduced to dust. After the fraud of the priests of Baal was exposed, Elijah slew them all with his sword, but instead of becoming a national hero, Elijah became a fugitive. Queen Jezebel was furious when she heard what had happened and sent soldiers to slay Elijah so that the prophet was forced to flee for his life. That was not the way he had envisioned things working out. He was deeply disappointed, and his disappointment broadened into sadness when he realized that he could never go back to the life he had known before. He couldn’t return home, couldn’t be with his family, couldn’t resume his prophetic role in his community, and couldn’t restore his relationships with his friends and colleagues. Elijah had done everything he had been asked to do, everything he had been expected to do. He had been faithful to God and had taken tremendous personal risk in exposing the fraud of the priests of Baal, but instead of being rewarded he was being persecuted. The only prayer Elijah could pray at that moment in his life was a bitter lament: “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of Hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” Elijah’s sadness gradually fell into depression as he realized that there was no place left for him, nowhere to go, nothing to do, no work to make him feel worthwhile, no purpose to fulfill, no reason to go on living any longer. When Elijah finally stopped running, he was overcome with despair. He left his servant behind in Beer-sheba and went on alone deep into the wilderness until he finally collapsed exhausted, unable to go on any further. He sat down in the shade of a broom tree and gave up: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life.” And that is where Elijah began to experience the healing grace of God. When he collapsed exhausted, an angel of the Lord ministered to him, feeding him cakes baked on the rocks and bringing him water. All that Elijah could do for a long time was eat and drink and sleep. And that was enough. The angel of the Lord kept Elijah alive as he grieved the loss of the life he had known in the past. And then, when the prophet was rested, the angel sent him on a journey to Horeb, the mountain of God where the covenant between God and the people of Israel had first been recorded on tablets of stone passed on through Moses. And in a cave on top of Mt. Horeb, the prophet Elijah stood still and waited for a word from God. That is the spiritual work that depression requires of us. It demands that we stand still, that we quit our frantic activity; that we disconnect from all of the other voices speaking to us and listen for a word from God, not in the mighty wind or the fierce earthquake or the consuming fire, but in the sound of sheer silence. We love the story of Elijah standing before the mouth of the cave listening to the still, small voice of God, but we forget that he was only able to be still because he was depressed; because he had lost all hope of returning to the life he had known before, because he had so exhausted himself that he couldn’t go on any further. Only in the depths of his depression was Elijah able to discern the new thing that God was calling him to do. Our culture views depression as pathological condition, a mental illness that needs to be cured as quickly as possible with medication and therapy. It is a source of embarrassment and shame that we don’t ever talk about and try our best to keep hidden from others. But the story of the Old Testament prophet Elijah reminds us that the spiritual work of depression is to be attentive in the stillness, to stop our frantic activity and rest, to allow ourselves to experience the grief of all that is lost to us, to give up any hope of ever recovering the life we once had so that, in the sound of sheer silence, we can finally hear the voice of God calling us to new life. Amen.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 10:28:42 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015