Texts:
Isaiah 43:18-25
Psalm 41
Mark 2: 1-12
2 Corinthians 1:18-22

Ash Wednesday is but a week away. Then we can officially begin the somber season of self-reflection and preparation known as Lent. Then, somehow, late snows or cold spring rains correspond to my religious sensibilities. But today we are in the season following Epiphany — we seek to see Christ as the light for the world. We seek to affirm with the Apostle Paul, in an at best ambivalent, sometimes openly disbelieving, world that in “Jesus Christ every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.’”

To make affirmation even more challenging — take our specific context here at the Seminary this week; we are seeking to raise awareness of mental illness and the need for suicide prevention. We face the stresses and strains of a normal spring semester and plus the assignment process and the internship matching, CPE application and other more personal and institutional stresses. However, I submit this is the time and the place to seek greater understanding of the role of faith and community in understanding, offering companionship and compassion, and some measure of healing — even when there is no cure for those living with mental illness; while our efforts may seem cold comfort to some, and the challenge of being open to the reality of mental illness and suicide is daunting. What we allow ourselves to see and hear — the art and poetry displayed in Valentine Hall — may be just enough hope and light to sustain life for others.

Our text from the Markan Gospel for this morning is one of Mark’s more detailed accounts – Mark is famous for getting to the point and moving on. A crowd has gathered in Capernaum to hear Jesus speak — such a large crowd that “there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door.” Because of this impediment friends of a man with paralysis could not bring him to Jesus, so they climbed on the roof and tore it open and let the man down on a mat. Jesus’ response to the faith of the friends — is to say to the man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” (This pronouncement is actually in the passive — it’s already been done, I submit — for all, and Jesus is proclaiming this reality for the suffering man and his friends as a key to who Jesus is, and to understanding who God is and living in this faith.)

Now, the second act: Jesus knows that the religious authorities, the scribes, are questioning his every action and word. So he confronts their unspoken critique and declares his authority. As almost an afterthought, Jesus says to the man, “Stand up, take your mat and go home.” And this is just what the man does. What may not be entirely self-evident here is that if this can be seen as a healing, it is part one that is the healing story, and part two, the primary focus for Mark is a conflict story. If we use these lenses to view this biblical situation we may note some parallels with the situation we face when we seek to raise awareness of mental illness and prevent suicide. 

It may be that God’s grace in Jesus Christ offers healing but sometimes not a cure for illness and disease. It may be that the healing offered to all in the forgiveness of sins IS the ground on which to build hope, compassion, and community with and through the struggles of those whose lives have been touched, formed, distorted and even destroyed by mental illness. What can I possibly mean by focusing on “healed but not cured?” How is this Gospel Good News to those who suffer?

I begin by sharing what I know — as a pastoral counselor, as a former hospital chaplain, as a person with a multi-generational history of severe depression, bi-polar disease and even suicide:

1. Mental illness is pervasive and devastating. It is estimated that between one-third and one-quarter of all Americans will be treated for a mental illness during their lifetime; this doesn’t begin to get at all those who suffer and never seek treatment, or the effects on the family, friends and communities of those who suffer. We are all touched by the suffering and struggles of mental illness.
2. In many, if not most, of our families these stories of suffering go untold. In my family my paternal grandmother suffered from recurring major depression her whole adult life and died a suicide at age 59, an active, functioning professional who had tried every treatment for her disease available and when her three children were grown and married apparently decided enough was enough. I know this story because of her courage and the courage of her children, my aunts and my father, to find a way to share both the joys, gifts, great contributions of her life and her suffering. It took years and years for them to reach the point of telling this part of our family story — and not surprisingly, the reality that children and grandchildren carry this genetic predisposition to depression, and we need this information to understand ourselves and the struggles we face in each of our lives. So, my personal advice is tell your family story — all of it — the laughter and the tears, the proud accomplishments and the heartbreak, the mundane family rituals of love and connection and the painful disconnects and heartbreaks. Just as you need to know if diabetes or cancer runs in your family — you need to know how mental illness has touched your life — because it has!

It may be helpful to note a couple more facts about mental illness:

1. Mental illnesses are biologically based brain disorders (listen to this very carefully) – they are biologically based brain disorders. So, as Jeanne Befano said so succinctly regarding her experience as the mother of a young adult with severe depression on Monday night, “do not say anything to someone struggling with mental illness, or their family and friends that you won’t say to those living and coping with cancer!” However positive your motivation, it is inappropriate to say, “Just cheer up.” Or, “get over it.” Or, “just pull yourself together.”
2. Today, 80-90 percent of those with a diagnosis of mental illness respond positively to treatment — usually including both medication and counseling (there have been many advances in treatment in the last 40 years!)
3. One of the factors that often exacerbates illness, particularly mental illness, is both a sense of isolation and, too often the reality — people avoid, ignore, and fail to risk being close, and sharing the pain, particularly with those whose illness is manifest in emotional and behavioral symptoms.

On a lighter note, and because I love movies and often think of one as I’m writing a sermon, and, finally, because the movies I see these days are family films with a 2 ½ year old child, I want to share a couple illustrations from “Finding Nemo.”It’s telling that I just noticed this last week as I had today’s sermon on my mind and we watched, for the umpteenth time, that there are two uses of mental illness stereotypes for humor, but which are also instructive, I believe. How many of you have seen “Finding Nemo?”Good, that’s almost everyone. The gist of the plot is a father fish is raising his only son, Nemo, alone. On the first day of fish school, Nemo ventures too far on a dare from other little fish and is caught by a diver and taken to an aquarium. The rest of the story is about the father’s journey to find his son. 

Looking at some of the key characters, first, the one fish that will help Marlin find his lost son, Nemo, is Dori. Dori suffers from short-term memory loss, and actually says when Marlin confronts her about her strange behavior, that “it runs in her family.” A little latter on, Marlin decides she’s not that much help and tries to convince her that he needs to go on alone, but as the story would have it, Dori continues to reveal new and key talents even though she suffers from short-term memory loss. Secondly, you may remember Marlin and Dori’s encounter with the three sharks. Key to both the humor and the meaning of that scene, perhaps aimed more at the adult viewer than the child, is the sharks’ 12-step program. Three sharks are having regular meetings to support each other in becoming non-fish eaters. Their motto is, ‘fish are friends, not food.’ 

While both these examples play with stereotypes and provide humor to some degree at the expense of the characters that suffer from some illnesses, they are also instructive because they remain connected — they are part of the community that is engaged with finding Nemo and remain part of the underwater family, gathered at the end of the story of success. The poignant counterpoint to this is when Marlin and Dori see Nemo belly-up in the plastic bag in the dentist’s office and assume the obvious, that he’s dead. Marlin is swimming away, alone in grief and despair, and Dori pleads, “don’t go … I remember better when I’m with you … no one’s ever stuck with me this long.” But Marlin just goes, continues swimming away, turned inward in grief and despair. As most of us know, this painful tension is resolved quickly, as Nemo has escaped from the dentist’s office through the drains and pops out of the sanitation pipes into the sea, right next to Dori. With one more key conflict, the adventure is resolved and we see them all back home on the reef and both Dori and the three sharks are part of the family.

Would that our lives and the suffering of so many ranging from depression to anxiety to schizophrenia; with symptoms such as alcohol and substance abuse, suicidal thoughts and self destructive actions, over-whelming fear and anxiety could be resolved into such happy Disney home-comings!

So what are we called to do, as the people of God, forgiven and graced in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ?!

First, proactively seek to hear/listen/see the lives and view of reality offered by those who struggle with mental illness and disease. We have a beautiful, poignant display of art and writing on our campus this week. There are many published works — novels, poetry, articles that provide profound insights — A Beautiful Mind (both the book and movie), “The Fisher King” — an unforgettable movie for me; the poetry of Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allen Poe, to name just a very few who have touched me.

Second, think about what you’ve heard, seen, or imagined as good models for faith communities to reach out and support and include those with mental illness, their families and friends. How can we debunk the prejudices and myths around mental illness? Do you or have you sensed in your congregation, an association, perhaps unspoken, between mental illness and demons, evil, the devil or Satan?  What will you do to root out these prejudices and proclaim the mystery of a theology of the cross — that suffering, all human suffering, is not a result of God’s condemnation, but rather a part of the human condition? Moreover, this is the central human experience — suffering — in which God became fully human in Jesus Christ — suffering even unto death and descended to Hell — that all humanity might be reconciled to God.

What is the central offer of grace our Markan text  — the community of friends who risk bringing a loved one to Jesus, who empower a direct encounter with Jesus, and the simple instruction at the end to “go home.” Restoration to community and to fuller life is the reasonable, yet sometimes, miraculous hope we can glean here. Perhaps, this restoration did not require the man to walk? Perhaps what was really needed was Jesus’ first pronouncement — updated a bit — “beloved child of God, remember you are forgiven, you can be loved and part of community because God’s love is enough!”

Finally, in closing, I hope this image will stick with you — picture in your mind’s eye the crowd gathered in the Markan drama — who are you? Where are you in the scene? Are we those crowded around Jesus denying access for others, immobilized in the doorway to grace, blocking those who can’t push their way through to God’s grace and hope? Are we the faithful members of the congregation who are questioning who is this Jesus and what right does he have to forgive sins? Or, are we the four friends who are motivated, perhaps even desperate enough, for some relief for their loved one that we will do whatever it takes to get to hope? Or, some days, if we’re honest, are we the one on the stretcher — too ill to even move, too tired, too sad and too depressed to move ourselves. And if we’re blessed with loving friends, family and community   … if, when, we’re blessed in this way — we are carried into the presence of the living God who reminds us we are already forgiven, we are loved, then, perhaps, we can hear, I can hear, the Good News that I am sent home more able, in my brokenness, to live in the knowledge of God’s grace and share the message of Jesus Christ in whom “every one of God’s promises is ‘Yes.’”

Let us pray:

Loving God, in whom we live and move and have our being, we give you thanks that you suffer with us in all our “dark nights of the soul.” We pray that we might catch the glimpses of hope that radiate from your love. We pray that we might be more faith-filled persons, communities, congregations and societies that can embody your grace in the world for others in their suffering.

Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. We pray in Christ name, remembering that in Christ God has suffered our sufferings and knows our despair and, thereby, births HOPE anew, moment by moment. AMEN

The Rev Christine E. Reimers is a pastoral counselor with the Virginia Institute of Pastoral Care in Richmond, Virginia. She holds an M.Div, M.A. and Ph.D. from the Claremont School of Theology.  Her ministerial calls have included being a hospital chaplain, pastoral counselor and a theological educator. She is married and the mother of a three-year-old daughter. Her greatest joy in ministry is being witness to the amazing healing power of faith and the presence of God's comforting and renewing spirit in lives broken by circumstances, pain and human sin.