An Eternal Weight of Glory
10 June 2012 Second Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 5B
10 June 2012 Second Sunday after Pentecost – Proper 5B
Homily
Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland,
Oregon
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Genesis 3:8-15; Psalm 130; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-25
God,
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
These last two weeks, the last week of
May and the first week of June, have been very hard for me for many years. In 1989, I had just arrived in Beijing China
as a new Cultural Affairs Officer, and I was there in the last heady days of
the democracy demonstrations on Tian’anmen Square and through the bloody
military crackdown and political suppression that followed. I was particularly unlucky as a foreign
diplomat for being in the wrong place at the wrong time on a couple of
occasions, and I saw things that people should never have to see. I was haunted for years, particularly during
those two weeks, by vivid nightmares that made me afraid to go asleep. One of the common manifestations of
Post-tramautic Stress Disorder is depression, and I suffered from it for
years. Bad sleep, followed by an
inability to get up in the morning, disrupted eating patterns, a loss of the
joy in life, and a general alienation of feelings and shutting down of
emotional life and the disruption in human relations that come from this—all
these and more are symptoms of the horrible demon that is depression. Thanks to a very loving wife, some kind and
wise talk therapists, some great exercise trainers, support groups, and newer
anti-depressant medicines that came onto the market in the 1990s, I was able to
finally overcome the depression. When we
moved back to Beijing in 2009, and we went into the feared two week period in
2010, I slept soundly and without nightmares.
This last week, I had one slightly vivid dream including scenes from
that terrible time 23 years ago, but this was not drenched with the dread,
horror, and nausea of a full-bore nightmare.
My own pain associated with those events is minor compared with the
Chinese people who died, lost family members, were seriously injured, or simply
loss hope. I feel very blessed to be
over the depression, and remember those who suffered so in my prayers.
All of us have burdens and painful
experiences. As we age, lose our
vitality and health, and come closer to our own deaths, the weight of such
burdens can grow.
Many people feel guilty at suffering
from deep depression or hopelessness. Having
heard somewhere that “despair is a sin,” they tend to look on depression,
feelings of helplessness or hopelessness, and even acute mourning and sorrow like
homesickness or nostalgia as if they were character flaws, sins, or at the
least the result of a disturbing lack of faith or trust in God. We must
not do this. It is not only untrue,
but deeply damages our ability to do what is necessary to come out of
depression.
When St. Thomas Aquinas defined
“despair” as the gravest of sins (Summa
Theologica, Part I, I.20.3), he was talking about the willful choice of denying God’s effective grace and love, including
a suite of acts of moral dissolution rooted in such a denial. Few think his
discussion applies to the emotional state we call depression. Significantly, he cites St. Isidore, who says
that where committing an evil act may incur God’s wrath, despair is falling
into the pains of Hell itself.
Most modern psychologists and pastoral
counselors agree that emotions are things we experience, and that it is all
right to have the whole range of emotions.
What matters, and where our moral responsibility comes in, is not what
emotions we experience, but in what we do
with our emotions.
Those of us who pray the Book of Psalms
on a daily basis, understand very quickly that the whole range of human emotion
is found there, from the sublime heights of thankfulness and exultation at the
beauty of God to the depraved depths of rage, anger, and vengeance. Their presence in the Psalter teaches us it
is alright to have the whole range of human feelings. We are only human, after all, and accepting
who we are and what God made us means accepting our human condition and emotions. But again, the key is what we make of them,
and how we act or do not act on them.
St. Paul, in today’s epistle, writes
the following,
“So we do not lose heart. Even though our
outer selves are withering away, our inner selves are being renewed each and
every day. For our current bit of suffering—so insubstantial a burden as to be
almost nothing—is kindling in us a light glorious and substantial beyond any
possible comparison, because we are looking not at what is before our eyes, but
at what is hidden from our eyes; for what can be seen passes quickly away, but
what cannot be seen lasts forever” (2
Cor. 4:16-17).
Paul ’s teaching here at first glance
seems to disparage the world in which we live, the world before our eyes. Remember that when God made the world, God saw
it and said it was good indeed. Elsewhere,
Paul very clear that he sees plenty of evidences in the world of God’s good
intention and love in the world. What
Paul is talking about in today’s passage is how things seem when we are suffering
from some ill and unable to see any good before our eyes.
He says that what keeps us going in
such straits is the vision we have inside our hearts of the important
things. Recognizing that all human life
ends in sickness and death, he uses a commonplace from Stoic philosophy: the
world is changing and reliably unreliable.
What really matters by contrast—the true, the beautiful, and the good—is
unchanging. It is the vision of this in
our hearts and minds, he says, that saves us from “losing heart.”
The word Paul uses for “losing heart”
literally means “being beaten down by bad things.” He contrasts our sufferings, changeable and
limited in time, with the unchanging timelessness of the Shining Brilliance around
the person of God. This brilliance is
the glory of God, in Hebrew, kavod, or substantial heaviness. Paul says that our
“momentary” sufferings are very light and insubstantial by comparison with this
“weight of glory” around God, a timeless beauty that our sufferings actually
are creating in us, unseen. He says that
the substantiality of God’s light is literally a “hyperbole beyond all
hyperboles,” immeasurable, timeless.
It is important here to note that Paul
is not trying to say that our sufferings are not real or truly bad. And he is not saying the world is simply bad
and needs to be ignored. He is
contrasting how things now appear
with how things actually are and will be.
For Paul, the hidden “eternal weight of
glory” or “timeless mass of Light” currently being created in us is actually the real thing, while our suffering, all
too clear before our eyes, is but a dim
shadow, an unsubstantial trifle, that is passing away. The image in our hearts of what God has
promised, and what God is already actually accomplishing in us, drives away the
demons of hopelessness and helplessness that threaten to beat us down.
Paul is advising a path of
contemplation, of reflection, as a way of driving away despair, of being
“renewed every day” so that “we do not lose heart.”
My father used to sing a popular song
from his youth, “You’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative,
latch on to the affirmative, watch out for Mr. in-between.” This is just
part of what Paul is trying to say.
Paul tells us to contemplate the
“invisible things” which do not change instead of the “things before our eyes”
that do.
His argument parallels Saint-Exupery’s
belief that “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is
essential is invisible to the eye.”
In order to break out of hopelessness,
you have to change the dialog going on inside your head. The dialog inside a depressed person’s head
is an argument that he or she can only lose.
Talking of constitutional melancholy, Samuel Johnson observed, “A man so
afflicted, Sir, must divert distressing thoughts, and not combat with
them” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson).
It might be as simple as finding memories,
stories, or images that embolden and inspire us. In Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief Bromden finds his release
and freedom simply through continued memory of McMurphy’s bravery, as badly as that turned out.
For Paul, the ultimate reassuring image
is that of God’s love and ultimate triumph over what is wrong with the
world. That is why he dwells so much
on “Christ, Christ on the Cross” and the
Risen Lord. It is why he talks so much
about God’s loving promises.
In the words of two African-American
freedom songs, one a Spiritual and the other a Work Song, Paul wants us to
“keep our eyes on the prize,” and our “hands on the plough.” He wants us to “hold on, hold on.”
Friends, occasional feelings of hopelessness
and helplessness are part of being human.
Depression is something that most of us can expect to experience at one
time or another. You don’t have to be alone.
Just as sharing joys with another seem to double our happiness, sharing
sorrows with another seems to lighten them. If you are truly depressed, you may
need to see a physician or counselor.
The medications now available can help put a bottom in your sinking boat
so that you can begin the hard work of bailing the water out. If you ever start thinking about doing harm
to yourself or others, you need immediately to talk to a professional for help.
For most of us, simply worn down by
life and its sorrows, it may not be as dramatic as that. But we must not resign ourselves to being
beaten down, and we must not, in Paul’s words, “lose heart.” The actor Tom Bosley (the guy who played
Richie’s father on Happy Days) said,
“Many people think that depression is something you just have to live with when
you get older, but it’s not.”
We too need to talk and share. And we need to contemplate the glorious good
things of God, not present before our everyday eyes, beaten down as we
are.
In the coming week, I want each of us
to be sure to take time each day to simply sit in quiet for a few minutes and
thankfully reflect on God’s beauty—in the natural world around us, in the lives
and examples of good people whose stories we have heard or whom we have known, in
the sacred stories we tell each other, and in the glorious promises given those
who trust in God. Simply reflect,
contemplate. Don’t let the committee
inside your head start discussing matters, good or ill. Just sit and look on. See with your heart, not your eyes. And as you do, feel the weight of that glory
growing, feel the warmth of that great light burning brighter, and the burden
of your pain getting lighter.
In the name of God, Amen.
