A sermon based on the lectionary for this week: Psalm 30 and Galatians 6:7-16 exploring how we can continue to praise God despite poor mental health. (The links take you to Nathan Nettleton’s paraphrase of the readings which spoke to me particularly this week)

Preparing my sermon has been particularly difficult this week. We’ll be holding a meeting after church about future and whether we might be able to adapt what we do on a Sunday morning to help us to grow in the depth of our discipleship and in numbers. Trevor’s chairing and I asked him if there was any particular theme it might be useful to address to support that meeting. Not particularly he said,  but “we might have a focus on God’s love and goodness towards us and a real opportunity to worship”.

This seems quite innocuous, except that it’s not particularly in tune with how I’ve been feeling recently. For perhaps five years or so I’ve struggled on and off with my mental health. Quite a lot of the time I feel fine but every so often I go through patches when I just feel low and drained. I find it difficult to concentrate and start to feel very tired quite early in the day. Given this there are often days when I don’t achieve very much and this can make me feel worse. Feeling tired I can be tetchy and irritable and my family suffer.

Over the period when I’ve experienced these feelings I’ve got to understand them more but I still don’t know what triggers them. There’s an element of feeling helpless and devastated when I look at the challenges that face us in all in the 21^st century, climate change, Brexit perhaps. It didn’t help to go into Manchester on Wednesday evening and be confronted with all those people living rough on the streets. It doesn’t help[ that my mother is in hospital with much, much deeper depression than I have. But there is something internal as well, something darker, which I can’t explain.

I do know that given time, a couple of weeks perhaps, I’m likely to start feeling better, again without really knowing what drives this. Then I’ll be relatively fine for a period. It doesn’t feel serious, just like having a minor physical ailment that recurs every so often and knocks the sparkle out of life. It does mean, however, that leading a service of worship focusing on God’s love and goodness and offering the congregation a real opportunity to praise is a challenge.

I’m not alone of course. The statistics estimate that at any one time as many as 1 in 6 of us has some sort of “common mental disorder” (that’s the official term). I’m sure many of you will recognise the symptoms I describe. Some will be feeling like me now, others will have been through periods like this in the past. Many may have family members who are affected. An increasing number, like me, will be finding that this is the way life is, and learning to live with it.

Although the statistics suggest an increase in mental health problems within our society it is something that has always been there but has been hidden or has manifested itself in different ways in the past. Today’s psalm was written by someone who clearly knew ups and downs in their life. There is nothing in the psalm to suggest whether this was physical or mental (or indeed whether it had anything to do with health at all), but the words speak to me. I see in them a reflection of my own situation. I also hear, in them, a note of hope. The psalmist is someone who has experienced darkness in the past but has felt rescued by God and he gives thanks correspondingly:

You turned my tears to laughter;
you set my dragging feet dancing;
you dusted me off and dressed me up for a party.
So now I’m singing your praises
from the bottom of my heart,
and no one can shut me up!

I may not feel good about myself now, but I have hope that with God’s help, it won’t be long before I start to feel better and am more in the mood for celebration.

One of the risks of responding to the psalm in this way, and of a certain more general strand in Christian thinking, however, is that we respond to our situation passively. We can get trapped into thinking that all we have to do is to offer our situation to God and wait for him (or her) to act. This is almost exactly the opposite of what modern psychology prescribes. The worst thing that most people with mental health problems can do is give in to the feelings of hopelessness and despair and wait for something to happen. Rather than abandoning ourselves to God we need to open our lives to him and work with him. What is required is not passive surrender but active engagement.

The passage we heard read from Galatians earlier is, at one level, a collection of throw away lines that Paul assembles to encourage the readers after he’s given them a particularly harsh talking to about a completely different issue. But just as in the words of the psalmist I recognise a description of how I am, so in Paul’s words I see a description of what I can do about it.

What you put into life determines what you’ll get back.

This is not a gospel of passive acceptance of where we are, of allowing God to do all the work. It is an invitation to start thinking about how we can make a contribution to life.

If your investments are all in your selfish impulses, they’ll pay out a dividend of degradation and misery.

If when we are low we give into the demons and allow ourselves to sink to where they are dragging us then we will only get worse.

But if you invest in the way of the Spirit your investment will yield rich dividends.

If despite how low we feel we can invite God back into our lives then we are on the road to recovery. The paraphrase uses the concepts of investment and rewards whereas a literal translation would speak of sowing and reaping. Whichever, the important message is that if we do small things now then we set ourselves onto the path to a better place sometime in the future.

If we don’t lose patience, but stay in for the long term, we will be richly rewarded.

If we expect dividends immediately, we will be disappointed. People with mental health conditions very rarely just snap out of it, but if they start taking small steps, moving in the right direction, they can get better. Once we start to walk with God, God will start to walk with us. It is, as Paul says, a matter of patience, and we can trust that if we stay in it for the long term we will be richly rewarded.

The final relevant point that Paul makes in this section is that the key to improvement is to move away from introspection.

Let’s take every opportunity, then, to contribute our energies to making the world a better place for everybody.

The fundamental task of Christians as individuals and the church is to work for the coming of the Kingdom. In the passage that was set from this letter for last week Paul makes the commandment to love our neighbour the single most important test of everything we do. It is through giving for others that we find ourselves. Probably the most restorative action that anyone feeling low can take for themselves, is to do something caring for someone else.

And as a starting point, let’s especially care for our co-workers in the community of faith.

The easiest place to start is with those who are closest to us, our families, our neighbours our colleagues and our co-workers in this community of faith. Let this community be a place in which we can all support each other. Importantly let’s value what each and everyone has to offer. It’s very tempting to be most accepting of what is offered by those who are dynamic and thrusting and forceful, but let’s also be receptive to accept from those who are timid and lack confidence. Let’s welcome the meek, because they will inherit the earth.

There is hope even for those who feel at their lowest. There is hope for me, who’s only feeling a little bit down. The psalmist talks of passing from that place of despair and death to one of hope and healing. This is not some fiction, it is lived experience of how God can restore once we have invited him into our lives. It is an experience that was real to the psalmist 3,000 years ago and can be just as real in our lives. If we don’t experience it today then we can still hope for it in the future. I can give thanks and praise in anticipation.

Paul maps out the pathway to that healing. We need to open ourselves to God and to work with him. Our expectation should not be of immediate, miraculous, recovery requiring nothing form us. Instead we are offered an opportunity to start to walk with God and each other. The progress we make with each small step may be imperceptible, but over time and with patience, those steps will mount up and bring us closer to coming Kingdom. Our lives will be restored and one day we will sing God’s praises once more. Let me give thanks and praise now for that promise of a brighter future.