Sermon: Overcoming Despair

Overcoming Despair

By Charles Rush

October 25, 1998

ere is a story about a woman who rode the same bus to work every morning. One day an old man got on the bus. He was shabbily dressed, obviously down and out. She though about what she could do to express Christian love to this poor man. How could she reach out and help him? She got up, took a dollar out of her purse, went over to the man, pressed the dollar into the palm of his hand, and said "Never despair, just remember never despair."

The next day, the woman was on the bus again. The man got on at the same stop, and came back to where the woman was sitting. He took eight dollars out of his pocket and pressed into her hand. She said, "what is the meaning of this?" He said, "Never Despair won the eighth race at Monmouth Park."

Despair is a key theme of our epistle lesson this morning. Paul wrote his letter to a group of churches located in what is today Turkey. In those days the whole region was entirely Greek. He wrote to a group of people that were trying to overcome a culture that dealt with spirituality principally through the lens of despair.

It was the Greek world that invented the idea of tragedy, the idea that our lives are controlled by fate, by some cold and indifferent power that has no concern about our feelings or aspirations. You may remember that Oedipus was fated to a certain destiny with his mother and father. Try as he might to evade that destiny, it happened to him anyway, and he was filled with pain and remorse.

The curious thing to the modern reader is the fact that Greek culture largely disconnected fate from righteousness, virtue, or justice. As a result the gods appear somewhat arbitrary. In the Iliad, the gods simply favor the hero Odysseus. It is true that he is clever and cunning but so are many of the other generals. The gods, we are told, favor Paris, because he is so handsome but this doesn't keep him from death in battle. Indeed as the tale unfolds and the fate of the war changes hands between the Athenians and the Trojans, sometimes a massive slaughter befalling one side or the other, the gods always appear in the background controlling the destiny of the soldiers. But the gods themselves are in a battle with each other, often for very petty paybacks, from vain egos hurt a long time ago. Throughout, there is this despairing sense, that people die because it is their time, and nothing they could do, would seriously alter that future.

We have a little bit of this thinking in the bible in the book of Ecclesiastes. It is in the Old Testament but it is really Greek literature. It is the book of Ecclesiastes that gave us the line made famous by Pete Seeger and the Byrds 'For every time there is a season under heaven'. But just before that are written some pretty despairing words, 'Vanity, vanity, all is vanity'. It means that this life is largely meaningless. Everything is temporal and thus vain.

Paul's job was to preach to this despairing culture. He went out to tell them the good news of what God had done in Christ. In the first century people believed that their lives were controlled by forces, especially supernatural powers, alien powers in the heavens. We still have a remnant of that thinking in the astrology columns, the psychic hotline, and palm readers, which I assume people consult today out of curiosity, or innocent amusement. Thought the other day I read that Robert Citron, the Controller of Orange County, who got into trouble investing pension founds in high risk instruments and lost millions of dollars, consulted an astrologer before making those investments. He presumed that the ups and downs of the stock market are tied in some way to the rise and fall of the sun and the moon. When I read that, I thought it was terribly superstitious and irresponsible. I shared that with Ed McKelvey, since he is an economist at Goldman Sachs. He had a laugh and then he confided. 'We actually put our economic predictions out just after the first full moon You know, just to be safe.'

No, today it is the exception that somebody believes that our lives are controlled by alien supernatural powers, but in Paul's day it was the rule. No one is superstitious. Nobody, I mean unless it is play off time, and then it is perfectly acceptable for a college coach to wear the same old sweater game after game as long as his team is winning. Nobody is superstitious anymore. Nobody, I mean unless they are playing the lotto, and then they go ballistic if the guy accidentally screws up behind the counter and doesn't enter their lucky numbers. Nobody, I mean unless you're holding steady at one over par after 7 holes and you automatically give your club three ritual little swings each and every time before you address the ball. No, we don't believe that.

But do you ever feel like the forces of fortune are just lining up against you? Do you ever feel like you just caught a great pass only to look up and see 5 big, ugly defensmen bearing down on you full throttle? I wonder if the German soldiers on Normandy beach felt like that, looking out of their little pill boxes to see this never ending armada coming right at them. 'No, no, no, you guys are supposed to be south of here Why our beach? 1500 miles of coast, they have to land right here.'

I read about two businessmen in Singapore that had built their business into very solid position, secured the biggest loan they could imagine earlier this year, with every reason to expect great growth. Within a few short months, a trillion dollars of capital ran out of Southeast Asia, their market dries up, their loan is called, and they are bankrupt. Fourteen years of hard work and it is all over, mainly because of these world wide economic forces that are so beyond their control, it almost seems unfair. Do you ever feel victim of the forces of destiny?

Do you ever feel yourself being shaped by the media? You ever find yourself flipping channels on cable TV and sense that you are no longer watching something that you want to watch. Rather, you are sort of flipping, flipping and all of these images that are coming at you- all of these action movies with people dying a dozen a minute, all of these sitcoms with laugh tracks to stuff that is not funny, all of these vain and shallow lives that are projected before us they just fill you with a kind of deadening images. Do you ever feel that part of you is becoming an Al Bundy idiot rather against your will?

Do you ever feel like you are fighting a losing battle for the soul of your teenagers? Do you ever get the sense that the alliance that is formed between their peers, the values of our town, and the marketing genius of the Short Hills Mall is so great that you can never really do more than damage control?

Do you ever begin to wonder if maybe you are cursed or something? Your sister dies, the sister that you really love more than anyone, your marriage is really rocky and the smart money is saying that this thing just won't last unless some major changes happen and your husband just doesn't look up to the challenge, and then you get called in by your doctor because your mammogram and follow up look like cancer. You ever just wonder if maybe this some cruel joke being played out in the heavens at your expense? And what kind of world is this anyway and what kind of God inhabits this world?

Do you ever feel like you just can't escape the cycle of your bad habits? You tell yourself that you are not going to drink tonight, come what may. But something happens and before you know it your are driving home from the liquor store. And you drag out of bed in the morning to the coffeepot, achy and tired, sick of your own breath and you are thinking to yourself, 'man every day is becoming the same day.'

If you know what I am talking about then you are acquainted in some form or fashion with the despair that comes from the goddess Fortuna turning against you.

Paul begins his letter to the Colossians with these beautiful, despair-breaking words. He says, brothers and sisters, it is Christ who is the meaning of the universe. "He is the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."

Bold claim, beautiful, hopeful words. In the Revelation to St. John they say something similar. In Christ "there is a new heaven and a new earth." And the point of the text this morning is this. It being the case that in Christ there is a new heaven and a new earth, live accordingly. Don't live as though you are trapped in the life that you have to live now. Don't live as if the forces of the economy, the forces of your culture, and the unfolding of history around you determine exhaustively your progress in this life. Don't live merely as a victim of circumstances over which you have no control.

Surely one of the most audacious claims of the New Testament is that the resurrection of Jesus opens for us a power that is available now. It can change you. "If you have been raised with Christ, there is a new creation." You are a new creation. "The old has passed away, behold, the new has come.' Resurrection is not something that just happens in the after life, that you die and go to heaven. It opens us to authentic living right here and now.

Evidently the Colossians just weren't living out of the faith. They were living as though they were caught in despair and not able to overcome it. They kept doing those things that were destroying them. Paul makes a quick list of vices. The first part of the list was 'sins of the flesh', the lusts and addictions that keep us from attaining our spiritual potential: fornication, impurity, unhealthy lusty passions, evil desires, and greed.

They are a constant temptation for all of us and for some of us they start to take us over at some point in our lives. But, says Paul, we have a choice. We do not have to remain trapped in them forever. In Christ we can be freed, even though it may be hard to feel that when you are in the midst of their grip.

I got an e-mail this week from one of my fraternity brothers. He had just returned from an annual physical exam at the doctor. The doctor came in and said to him "You are in terrible shape. If you don't change your lifestyle, you are going to die."

That got his attention. He sat there for a minute and said "Well Doc, what should I do?"

Knowing him fairly well, the doctor said to him "Stop smoking, stop eating fried foods every time no one is looking, and stop staying out half the night drinking when you are on the road."

He was silent for a moment, and then he said 'What's the next best thing I can do?"

Sound familiar? But we are not trapped in the cycles that we have comfortably settled into.

Paul has a second list, the sins of the Spirit. They are just as deadening to our humanity, just not as visible or as visceral as the sins of the flesh. Anger, wrath, malice, slander, gossip, abusive language, and lying. When you spew puss, when you demean people, when you deceive. A spiritual callus appears on your soul. It is unhealthy and inauthentic spiritually speaking. So Paul asks us, 'why do you keep doing the things that are symptoms of bondage?'

You are a new creation. Live that way. Seek the things that are above. Then he names the things that are above. "Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, true humility, patience, forgiveness, and above all else love, which binds all things together in perfect harmony." That is a selective list. Scholars think that he chose it because there was a fight between some people in the church. They don't like each other. Some issue divides them. So his list includes qualities that will bring about reconciliation between people that are at war: compassion, kindness, humility, patience, forgiveness, especially love, which binds all things together in harmony.

But there are other qualities that he lists elsewhere: honesty, integrity, faithfulness, courage, and self-sacrifice. "If you have been raised with Christ, think upon these things. Make them the goals of your life. You can do that now. You can choose to live that way.

Don't despair. Don't say, "I can't do it." Don't say, "I'm not strong enough". Don't say "I'm not important or I just don't amount to much." Don't say, "I'll never change. It is no use."

If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above. Put to death, all the things that are unworthy of being a child of God. Take control of your destiny. You cannot control the tragic events that life throws at you, nor can you set the timetable in which they happen. So do not also cede the way that you respond to them too. Take control of your spiritual character. There is a new self that it is in you. Paul says, it has been there all along but you have not been tuned in to how to use it. It is the image of God that is in you, left undeveloped because of all the clutter that you have thrown on top of it. It may be deeply buried but it is there. Resurrect it. Become your true self. Remember it.

For most of us, our problem is that we have low self-esteem, spiritually speaking. Most of us are like the man Fred Craddock ran into a few years ago. Craddock taught at the Divinity school at Emory. He went back near his childhood home in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. He gets to a restaurant in the mountains where the owner is also the waiter, cook, and greeter. He came round to Fred Craddock's table and introduced himself. The man said 'What is your name? What do you do? Craddock made the mistake of admitting that he was a minister. So the man pulled up a chair, turned it around backwards, straddled it, and started his life story. This happens to preachers, particularly on airplanes when the flight is delayed.

The man explained that he had been born just a few miles away, in a little town up higher in the mountains, to a mother who wasn't married, in the days when that was a terrible scandal. There was a label on a child that they carried like a leper's bell. When he went to school the other children would say that name above all other names that he hated to hear. When he went downtown he would hear people whisper about him. The forces of destiny had arrayed against him before he was old enough to even know why. His mother wanted him to go to Sunday School. He went once and was told that he was a bad influence, so he never went back.

One day a new preacher came to town. The boy decided to go hear him, along with everyone else. When the service was over, the preacher was at the back door greeting people. The little boy tried to sneak around behind him so he wouldn't be seen. The preacher saw him, asked 'Who are you? Whose boy are you?" The kid froze. He thought he'd been found out. Before he could answer the minister said 'Wait a minute. I know who you are. I can see the family resemblance. You're a child of God." Then he put his hands on the boy's shoulders and said, 'Son, you have quite an inheritance. Go out and claim it."

Brothers and sisters do not despair. You have been raised with Christ. Take control of your situation spiritually, claiming the things that are above. You have quite an inheritance. Go out and claim it too.

Amen