“Antidote for Depression”

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
On October 7, 2001

Rather than reading the whole scripture, I just want to read the last two verses, verses seven through eight. These verses have been full of power for me this week. Sometimes I’ll find some verses of scripture, and I’ll find myself just reciting them to myself. All week long, over and over again, as a way of kind of stealing myself, or caring for myself, or perhaps it’s a way of the Spirit caring for me in difficult times. And the last two verses in Psalm 138 are like that.

Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve me against the anger of my enemies; you stretch out your hand, and your right hand delivers me. The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; thy steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever. Do not forsake, O Lord, the work of thy hands.

        Psalm 138

Bill read the lectionary passage from Second Timothy. It’s the epistle text that congregations around the world are reading as we celebrate the sacrament this morning. One of the things that I hear in the text, and I’ve been hearing it ever since I studied it last May, getting ready for this morning. One of the things I hear in it that I haven’t heard in encountering it before is I hear the apostle telling Timothy not to be ashamed. It says it just very clearly. Don’t be ashamed, Timothy.

I think Timothy was discouraged. I think he was discouraged and I think he was ashamed. Maybe he was ashamed because he was afraid. You heard Bill say it in his preface to the text, he was afraid of being persecuted. Suddenly he found himself in a position in the world where there were people who were out to harm him. It frightened him, and then he was ashamed that he was afraid.

I think he was embarrassed. I think he was embarrassed because Paul says to him, “Don’t be embarrassed,” which makes me think he must’ve been embarrassed for Paul to say that. It doesn’t say exactly what he’s embarrassed about or ashamed of, but it may have been the fact that Paul was in prison. Maybe it’s embarrassing, shameful, when your mentor, the person who sent you out, whose God’s power is supposed to be emanating from, that person’s been arrested and placed in prison.

I think Timothy is discouraged. I think he’s ashamed. I think he’s afraid. And I also think he may have just about burned out. At the end of his energy. Fatigued and maybe emotionally fatigued as well. And maybe spiritually fatigued.

So Paul, I think, is writing him in that context. And if so, maybe that’s the word of the Lord for you this month. Because I’ll tell you, pastorally, part of what I am hearing come into the community of the church is real anxiety from people. Kind of quietly, you stand with real patriotism and support our nation. We are vigorously trying to do the right thing, seeking justice and supporting those who are governing and working in this crisis.

But I am hearing people begin to talk about their fears. Talking about wondering whether or not they should buy gas masks. And they may be a little ashamed as they are wondering that. Talking about creating safe rooms in their homes. Worried about going to public entertainment events. Worried about what’s going to happen not only to themselves but to those they love.

We may be discouraged. Some of you may be carrying the burden and anxiety. You may be carrying a sense of shame, and some of the shame be shame about the anxiety you feel. And a lot of us are fatigued. We are ready for this problem to be over, you know. Americans get used to being able to deliver quick fixes, don’t we, and maybe American Christians even more than Americans in general. We want everything to be as fast as the ATM machine. And now I read in the Wall Street Journal that studies show that Americans are now impatient with the amount of time the ATM machine takes.

We’re tired of having to carry this burden, and it’s only been a month. You may be discouraged. Ashamed. And maybe fatigued. Not just physically, but emotionally. Maybe even spiritually.

So the apostle is writing Timothy, and he is trying to encourage him. He is trying to help him. He is trying to give him some resources. To help him with what he detects, I think accurately, as a sense of shame and anxiety on his part. He says a number of things to him, more than I am going to list this morning. You can re-read the text if you’d like, from Second Timothy to see if you can find the many different resources that the apostle tries to bring forward for Timothy. But they all seem to be based around the schema of remembering. He says, “You remember… remember this, remember that, remember this, remember that….” He wants Timothy to use his memory as a way of helping himself in the midst of this discouragement. It’s an interesting kind of tool.

There are three things he lifts up, in particular, that I’ll note out of the many in the list. One is that Paul tells Timothy, “You remember God’s purposes and God’s plans are not your purpose and your plan. They are not the same thing.” It’s important to remember that, so that what may look discouraging to you at the moment, may not be discouraging in God’s total plan. “Remember, Timothy,” he says, “that it’s God’s purposes and God’s plans that we are counting on.” So don’t let your own limited ability to see how your purposes are being worked out cause you too much discouragement. You want to remember the long picture. You want to remember the movement of God through history. You want to remember the stories about how God helped the Hebrews when they were in slavery in Egypt, and how God provided leaders for Israel, and how God sent prophets to call them back to justice and to morality. And how God sent Jesus to teach them love and to bring healing to a broken world.

“Remember, Timothy, it is God’s purposes and plans, not yours.”

And then he tells him, “Remember, even in the midst of your discouragement and your fear, that God is giving you gifts. God is giving you gifts. God is giving you the gift of the Gospel, which is true and is victorious.” Already, and it isn’t dependent on what you see in the world around you.

Remember that God is also giving you gifts within yourself. And you may hit some hard times, Timothy. And, I don’t know, maybe we as a Christian community in the last fifty years in American history, have lived in really a golden age. But the reality of the history of the Church is that the Church has been through some hard times. Some times where there was threat and famine and persecution. And God always sent gifts to his people and placed those gifts inside them to comfort them. To give them power.

The apostle says, “God has placed within you not a spirit of cowardice (I don’t think he means to shame him there, but rather to acknowledge something of what he is struggling with). God has placed within you not the spirit of cowardice but rather, God is giving you a spirit of power, a spirit of love, and a spirit of self-control. God will give you those gifts when you need them. “

I remember when I was early in my work as an associate pastor here, I got invited to speak at a big United Way dinner. They really had asked three people to talk about their own participation in the United Way, and also how they thought the causes and the agendas of the United Way were reflected in their lives as well. One of them was a businessman (I forget who it was), and another was a clergyperson (that was me), and the third one was an athlete.

He was a quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And I think maybe it was Steve DeBerg. Maybe it was Steve Young. I don’t know. I remember, though, what had happened was that between the time they had asked this quarterback and the time he had to speak, the Bucs had traded him. But then they always kind of have a quarterback leaving, don’t they. So he was honoring his commitment to speak at this gathering, even though the whole community knew that the team had lost some of their sense of his value and that they were trading him.

I had prepared, thinking about this guy in particular. Knowing I was going to be on the diocese with him, and wanting to speak not just to the crowd but to him. I had drawn from Second Timothy, from this passage, these words about God placing within you the spirit of power and the spirit of love and the spirit of self-control.

The businessman spoke. I forget what he had to say. The quarterback was going to speak next, and I was imagining I was going to go third and just sort of wrap it, personally speaking to him as well as the audience.

The quarterback got up and he approached the podium, and he said, “I’d like to say to you something about my faith this morning. I want to use a verse that is very important to me. God has given me a spirit of power, and a spirit of love, and a spirit of self-control….”

It was speechmaking nightmare for me! But because the exact thing I was going to say, not just in that verse, but in his outline of it, he used up completely ahead of me. And rather than being able to creatively draw something else at that minute, I just kind of froze. All I could think of was an old Dick Van Dyke rerun. Maybe somebody has seen this, where the same thing happens to him. And the person right before him gives exactly the speech that he’s going to make. So he comes to the podium and he sings this little song… “Jeepers, creepers, where’d you get…”

So that’s what I did.

It’s funny. I don’t really remember what I said either. What I do remember, though, is what this quarterback said, who was going through such a hard time. He said, “God has given me a spirit of power, and of love, and of self-control.” And he was holding on to that.

I think that’s like Paul speaking to Timothy here, saying to him, “You should hold on to this truth. Repeat it to yourself and remind yourself of it as a way of helping yourself in the midst of this discouragement.”

Then Paul tells Timothy, “You need to remember, also, God’s power.”

You are really focusing on your lack of power now. And the reality is in this situation that it is God’s power that is going to prevail, and it isn’t going to be your power at all.

I went on the Internet Sunday afternoon, the Sunday after the eleventh. It was Sunday the sixteenth. I went to the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church  in New York site. Somebody, I think it was Hilliard Eure, who turned me on to going to that Internet site. You can get the real audio player of the sermon. Tom Tewell, who is the pastor there, and a fine preacher, preached that morning. I just wanted to hear what Tom Tewell had to say the Sunday after September the eleventh.

He started out talking about that morning, how he and the rest of his staff had been in his office there on Fifth Avenue, right up from where the World Trade Center towers were.  Right at the Rockefeller Center there is where that church is. They suddenly heard all of this commotion out in the street, and so they went out on the street. They didn’t know what had happened. He said, “Suddenly we found ourselves, all the members of the staff, with people all around us in groups, asking us to pray with them. They weren’t necessarily Presbyterians. They weren’t even necessarily Christians. Just all kinds of New Yorkers, gathering in groups, and they could tell we were clergy. We found ourselves, for about the next five hours, literally standing in small circles, holding hands with people from St. Patrick’s Catholic Church across the street, and from St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal, and business people from the Disney store across the street, and from Rockefeller Center, and from Macy’s, all standing there in the street, praying together, for the longest time.”

Dr. Tewell went on and said, “ I didn’t really get to my own house until about eleven o’clock that night, and then I had to go into a conference call with many other pastors from the community, as we planned an interfaith prayer and grief service for the next day. I didn’t get to bed until about two a.m. It wasn’t until that next morning that I woke up at about 6:30 and turned on the television and saw, for the first time, the images” (that we all of course saw throughout that day). The images of the planes crashing into the buildings.

He said, “I found myself there, suddenly, just breaking down in tears. Kind of shaking. I said to my wife, ‘I just don’t think I can do this. I just don’t think I can go over to that church and help this community get through this. I just don’t have what I need to do this.’ “

He said, “She put her arm around me, and she said, ‘Tom, you don’t have to have the power to do this. God has the power to do this. All you have to do is get dressed and go down there, and God will meet you there. And God will see these people through this.’”

That’s what the apostle, I think, is telling Timothy, you see. When you are feeling discouraged or at the end of your emotional energy or your spiritual energy, or if you’re afraid. You don’t have to have the power to get through this. God will see you through this. Just as God has always seen the church through this.

God will give you a spirit of power and of love and of self-control. In bad times as well as in good. God will be present for us. It is God’s power you should focus on.

Sometimes I forget that, and then the discouragement can get the upper hand on me. I find it helpful, when that happens, to actually have written down someplace, on a card, a Bible verse.

For the longest time it was just “The Lord is my Shepherd.” I just would repeat that to myself.

Sometimes it’s the verse from the Gospel of John: “I will not leave you comfortless.” It comes to help me in the darkest times.

This week it’s been these verses from Psalm 138: “Though I walk in the midst of trouble, O Lord, you preserve me from the anger of my enemies. You stretch out your hand and your right hand delivers me. O Lord, you will fulfill your purpose for me. Your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever.”

Maybe that will help you. I’ve printed off a bunch of them and placed them here on the communion table. If you want to pick one up and put it in your pocket, you come up afterwards, and you can do that. Or just write it on a card yourself and carry it around.

I think the apostle is telling Timothy, focus on those kinds of things. They are meant to help you when your own resources start to give way. Remember. Remember, he says. That’s what we’re doing this morning, when with the rest of the world we gather around this table. We are remembering here that the world is not dependent upon our  ability to solve this, or our ability to be powerful enough to overcome this.

The world depends on God’s ability. God who loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten son. We gather around this sacrament and we remember that God has already achieved the victory in the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We remember as we lift up these signs, and as we eat them, and as we ingest them, and as we make ourselves one with them, that God has promised us that what we saw in Jesus Christ will be what we will see at the end of history. Not only the history of the world, but even our own personal stories.

Let us prepare to remember what God has already done for us in Jesus Christ.

© John T. DeBevoise, 2001