This Week's Sermons

Sermons for the Month
"From SAD to GLAD"
DATE: September 20, 1998
SERVICE: Pentecost XV
TEXT: 1 Timothy 2:1-7
"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN

In Finland, March and April are "birthday months." It is an amusing fact that far and away, more babies are born in those two months than during any other time of the year. Why a birthday spike in March and April?
For babies to be born in March or April they must, of course, have been conceived in June or July, the long, golden days of high summer. In the face of Finland's extreme northern latitudes, however, the summer days are almost endless with midsummer sunlight lasting for more than 20 hours of the 24-hour day.
While it may not be too surprising that the Finns' passion for life during these sun-drenched days is made manifest some nine months later, what is unexpected is the extremely low birthrate recorded in the months of July, August and September. The flip side of those long summer days are bleak weeks of near total darkness in November and December. With little or no daylight to speak of, most recreation during those dark winter days has to occur inside. Despite all those rib-jabbing jokes about enjoying nights that are three months long, the nation's birthrate nine months after these endless weeks of night is at its lowest point.
It seems that the Finns are particularly prone to a malady known as Season Affective Disorder (SAD). The disorder, appearing during those bleak winter months, is caused by lack of light and results in general feelings of malaise, anxiety and sluggishness. In the United States, the city with the highest concentration of SAD people is Seattle. Actually, it doesn't rain all that much in Seattle. It just constantly drizzles. So while Seattle gets less rain than Miami, the constant dripping and drizzling and fogging creates SAD people.
Seattle deals with its SAD-ness in a couple of different ways. One is by consuming large quantities of coffee. In the Pacific Northwest you can find espresso booths even in the high schools. Jangling nerves jazzed up on caffeine temporarily mask the malaise and lethargy associated with SAD-ness. The second way is by using special UV-lighting in cafes and restaurants to give people the light their bodies, minds and spirits need.
For those who suffer profound, debilitating depression as a result of their SAD-ness, physicians prescribe a U-Haul. For some individuals there is no cure except to move southward to warmer, sunnier climes, where daylight hours are long and leisurely.
There is yet another manifestation of the SAD syndrome in postmodern culture. This strain of the malady is more specifically focused and should be recognized as a Spiritual Affective Disorder. This version is currently running rampant through the churches of many of my colleagues. In the last decade, the ELCA started 322 new congregations. Unfortunately, we closed 660 congregations. They estimate 40-50% will close in the next 25 years. These SAD churches display all the classic symptoms associated with individuals struggling with the disorder. They are lethargic, slow to react to events either within their faith community or in the world around them. At the same time, there is an underlying sense of anxiety and disease running through everything these churches try to do.
Like individuals, SAD churches have a notoriously low reproduction rate. Every year the number gathered in their pews grows fewer, grayer, frailer. New members certainly aren't attracted to a SAD congregation, and any current members who aren't themselves completely spiritually debilitated often flee in order to keep their flickering flame of life from being snuffed out by the spiritual vacuum around them. In Paul's letter to Timothy, our text for the day, he urges Timothy to preach the only truth: "There is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all." Just as the cause of Season Affective Disorder is a lack of light in a specific spectrum, so, too, churches that suffer Spiritual Affective Disorder do so because they lack a certain type of light in their lives. That light, of course, is the "Light of the World," Jesus the Christ.
Today's pastoral epistle celebrates the universality of God's love and God's redeeming intentions. But as universal as that divine urge is, it is made possible only by a single particular: the "one mediator Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all" (vv. 5-6).
The church is called to stand out in a darkened world as a saving beacon of light, a blazing standard of hope. But the church itself is lit from within by a single source of power -- the redemptive love and spirit of Christ.
The high-modern era of systematic theology of the 40s and 50s was fixated on God, nervous about talking about Jesus and ran from talking about the Spirit. High-modern theologians only wanted to talk about God, and even then in abstract terms like "The Ground of Being." But the heart of the Gospel and the heart of the matter is not "Ground." It is Jesus. Jesus is our all in all. An African-American Gen-Xer in Chicago recently started coming to church because he got excited about somebody named Jesus. He told his pastor, "If it weren't for Jesus, I wouldn't be a Christian." He had encountered numerous church people, but all of them were afflicted with SAD. That some Christians can suffer from such an affliction might explain the T-shirt which proclaims, "Jesus save us ... from some of your followers." My sadness often come in many clergy meetings from the sadness of many of my colleague, good men and women all.
I know that this sound paradoxical but the church that suffers from SAD-ness is the church that fails to lift up Christ. Such a church has lost nothing less than the gospel. And a gospel-starved church almost always ends up developing a bad attitude to go along with its SAD-ness.
In Harry E. Chambers, The Bad Attitude Survival Guide (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Longman, 1998), the author argues that a "bad attitude" is really a catchall phrase for a syndrome with three symptoms. He argues that one won't find one symptom without all three present: a bad attitude, poor performance and resistance to making a change.
Chambers suggests there are six root causes of a "bad attitude" in individuals. What is clear, however, is how easily these individually based contributions to a bad attitude also can be found in SAD churches. 1) Low self-esteem; lack of confidence.
What to do? Chambers counsels that for individuals with a bad attitude, we must give recognition when it is deserved and always delegate to an individual's strength.
The church has its own history of low self-esteem and the divine cure that remedied the problem. It was not until the Holy Spirit was given at Pentecost that the disciples were transformed from a sniveling circle of cowards into a bold, articulate wedge of witnesses for Christ and the gospel. The Holy Spirit doesn't delegate to our strengths to increase our sense of self-esteem. The Holy Spirit transforms our weaknesses into our strengths.
2) Fear; obsessed with failing. Without Spirit-inspired assurance, our sinful nature knows it always falls short, always fails to make the grade. When Christ's Spirit prevails in the pews, however, there can be no real failures, for Jesus has already achieved the ultimate victory for us. How can we fail when we already have the assurance of salvation we read about in today's text?
3) Resentment; loss of power and respect. A SAD church can tell it's standing in the dark. It knows it is out of the power-loop. SAD-ness makes the church feel powerless in relation to the "real" sources of power in postmodern culture -- money, technology, information. But in truth it is the church that holds the real source of unlimited, infinitely renewable, consistently available power for the world.
4) Unresolved conflict. By definition, SAD churches are not happy places. The "quiet and peaceable life" Paul urged Christians to pray for eludes Christians that have a spiritual hole in their hearts. A GLAD church has a sense of unity, void of warring factions waging endless skirmishes in its midst. GLAD churches have a unity of purpose and the purpose is simply to be and make disciples. It's no wonder that with no experience of the universality of God's saving intentions, many both outside and inside the church are SAD.
5) Inability to accept change. The SAD-est words uttered by Jesus-deficient churches are: "We've never done it that way before!" THE SEVEN LAST WORDS ... OF THE CHURCH. There is a reason that the Spirit is envisioned as a wind blowing through our lives. The wind is unpredictable and ever-shifting in direction, speed and temperature. A GLAD church flings wide the doors to let the Spirit blow through.
6) Boredom. Glad churches are never boring. Genuine Christian life, infused by the living Spirit of Christ, can never be boring. Exhausting, exhilarating, exciting, energizing, but never boring. Last week, Faith was ablaze with a standing room only Faith Explorers Club Rally day, a record breaking Light Service attendance, preschool opening with even more students, the dedication of our Faith Angel and a moving testimonial about the impact of Faith on people's lives. It takes two metaphors to symbolize the Holy Spirit: wind and fire. This "fire" symbol of the Spirit reminds us that when one is truly "on fire," you can't just stand around. "On fire" people are "fired up" people.
The good news is that we do not need to be SAD churches and SAD Christians. We can be transformed into GLAD churches and GLAD Christians, that is, people for whom God's Love Always Delights. There are two ways to make it happen, and the prescription comes to us from the first verse of today's text. Paul, in fact, gives it priority: "First of all, then, I urge ... prayers ... and thanksgivings be made for everyone." If we are praying, and if we are giving thanks, there is no way we can suffer from SAD!
--Feeling overwhelmed by your problems? Pray for someone else whose burdens are equal to or greater than your own.
--Feeling resentment toward a family member or coworker at the office? Give thanks to God for that person, asking God to let him or her be an instrument of growth in your life.
--Feeling alone and in the dark, uncertain where to go next? Pray, asking God to shed the light of divine wisdom in your soul.
--Feeling critical of others? Thank God for the objects of your criticism, and ask God to make them a blessing wherever they go.
--Feeling bitterness toward others who have succeeded where you have failed? Pray for their continued success.
--Feeling impatient with the pace of your spiritual growth? Thank God for your progress so far.
--Feeling unforgiving toward others?
Perhaps this is the heart of the matter. How can we be GLAD Christians, praying and thanking God, unless we have an attitude of forgiveness?
Don Henley, in his song, "Heart of the Matter" (from the CD, End of Innocence) makes the suggestion that at the core of the human condition is the need for forgiveness. The song is about the loss of a friend and Henley wonders: "What are these voices outside love's open door/ make us throw off our contentment and beg for something more?/...Pride and competition cannot fill these empty arms/ and the work I put between us/ doesn't keep us warm."
He then concludes: "I've been trying to get down/ to the heart of the matter/ but my will gets weak/ and my thoughts seem to scatter/ but I thinks it's about/ forgiveness/ forgiveness."
At the end, the heart of the matter is God's love and light that come from Jesus the Christ. The heart of the gospel is that Jesus is our all in all. When, in an atmosphere of forgiveness, we can pray and give thanks, we can be free of a Spiritual Affective Disorder, and be a people for whom God's Love Always Delights.

AMEN