An Eternal Weight of Glory (Proper 5B)

An Eternal Weight of Glory
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

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.