Jesus: Physician of Body, Soul and Mind - Mark 1:29-39

 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“My doctor says I am clinically depressed. I need some help.” I got ten words out before I broke down, weeping. That happened five years ago, this past week, the day I walked into my pastor’s office and spoke those two sentences to Pastor Sawhill. It had been a terrible, terrible weekend after a terrible, terrible week at the end of a terrible, terrible month. To say it was a “dark time” is an understatement. For months, I had been fighting ugly thoughts. Truth be told, looking back, I had been fighting depressive tendencies since I was a kid, but things had finally come to a head. Layer after layer of shame was weighing down on me. I saw myself as a failure-writ-large. Woulda, coulda, shoulda…those words echoed in judgement in my head. You remember the book, The Scarlet Letter, and how Hester Prynne wore that infamous A on her blouse with an admixture of pride and guilt. If she wore an A for adultery, I mentally emblazoned a giant F on my chest. F for failure.

All I could see in myself were the mistakes I had made as a parent, doubting that I had done enough to prepare them for life and remembering seemingly each and every mistake I made in rearing them. I perceived failure as a husband. My sins of omission and commission, both real and imagined, were magnified in my head. At church, attendance was down. Must be my fault, somehow, I thought. The budget was getting tight. There were some grumblings and I felt, truly or not, that they were about me, and I felt a growing pressure to change in both style and substance. There was tension between members after some tumultuous choices were made. Meetings were uncomfortable. I hated going to work, having to sit in the parking lot almost every morning, just to work up the chutzpa to go inside.

My inner voice became more and more corrupt. You know the voice I speak about. You have one. It’s the voice in your head that praises you for a job well done, that warns you about dangerous situations, that encourages you to be wise, that laughs at your dad jokes that make everyone else groan, that offers commentary on things around you, and calls out bad choices. That’s how your voice, your conscience is supposed to work – identifying how we, as children of God, are to live in the freedom God gives to love Him and our neighbors. But my voice was corrupted. It became an absolutely cruel, demanding and damning monster. I could never please, appease, or satisfy it. And, then, it doubled down. A good father, a good husband, a good pastor would know what to do, how to fix this, what direction to take, but you....you are so stupid, incompetent, a failure. I hated shaving and combing my hair. I could not look myself in the eye in the mirror.

This probably makes no sense to you – how I let myself get in that deep of a hole, what was going on in my head, why I felt this way – but I assure you, it was very, very ugly. Imagine the worst, most sadistic bully you had ever seen, like R. Lee Ermy as Sgt. Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, and you have an idea of what was going on. As bad as bullies are, and they are cruel, they are outside of you. The worst part was my bully was in my head using my voice, calling me the most unconscionable names you could possibly imagine. I was my own internal enemy.

I grew to hate Sunday mornings. I would preach of Christ’s atoning sacrifice for sinners, but my inner voice would say, “Except for you.” I would raise my hand and say, “I forgive you all your sins,” and see only the backside of a hand raised against me in judgement. I would speak of grace through faith and my voice would mock, “What faith? Good Christians, faithful Christians, Baptized Christians should not think this way. Such a disappointment.” And during the week, I would sit in the last pew – I couldn’t make myself get closer to the altar – and weep, huge tears running down my face, part of me praying no one would come in; part of me hoping someone would find me. I remember thinking of Jesus’ miraculous power and might and how the townspeople brought all their sick and their lame and their demon possessed for Him to heal. And He did! With a touch, the fever left Peter’s mother-in-law and she got up, not at all fatigued, but able to serve. The deaf could hear the voice of the one who made their ears come to life; the blind could see the one who brought light to their darkness; the lame could leap like the deer; lepers could return, whole and healed, into the community; and formerly demon-possessed souls could again give thanks to the Lord for He is good and His mercy endures, Amen! But, there I sat, alone in my misery. I would stare at the font and repeat over and over, out loud so to be heard over my inner voice, “I am baptized, I am baptized. I am God’s child and He won’t leave me in this. But, why isn’t he helping me?” I hung there in the tension: baptized but suffering terribly.  

I tell you this story, not because I am vying for sympathy, but to do two things: one, to expose the lies that satan tries to tell us that something is wrong, that because you have sinned, or because you have been sinned against, or because you are being faith-tested, or because perhaps you are in the midst of your own Job-like moment that you have somehow hurled yourself outside God’s grace. Seventy times seven is for everyone else; you get one times one. Rubbish. He’s called accuser and father of lies for a reason. Christ has defeated satan and that is truth beyond all truths. And, two, when satan does attack you with his best – or his worst, as the case may be – the solution is not to go it alone in prideful arrogance like I tried to do, saying that it’ll all be OK, pretending to keep swimming, fake it ‘til you make it, blah blah blah. The solution is to seek help from outside you, from another Christian, another child of God, and preferably your pastor, so you can hear of Truth – with a Capitol T - that is outside yourself: the Truth of Jesus Christ crucified for you.

It's very easy to read this section from Mark 1, starting already with last week’s Gospel lesson, the ten verses previous, and think this is all the kind of Jesus you need – a miraculous, healing Jesus who drives out sickness and illness and demons and every other kind of force that works against us as human beings. Yes, He does these things, but remember: every one of those people whom Jesus healed would one day die. If that’s all Jesus is, just a miracle-working physician, something is missing – something eternal. I want you to notice something else: Jesus disappears, early in the morning, to pray. And, when the disciples find him, he doesn’t say, “Let’s go set up another Messianic clinic so I can miraculously heal.” He says, “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.”  He comes to preach a Word that gives life, now and into eternity, to heal from the eternal sickness of our sins, to bring immortality to life amidst death.

“Preaching” is such a negative word in today’s vocabulary. A father is scolding his teenage daughter and she snaps at him, “Don’t preach at me!” When the boss is giving a presentation that everyone knows about already, we say he’s preaching to the choir. When we see Mom or Dad putting brother or sister in his or her place, really letting them have it, we smile at the parent and say, “Preach it!” It sounds so negative. But this is what Jesus comes to do: preach.

Preaching is proclamation. It is saying, “Thus saith the Lord” and “This is most certainly true!” When Jesus proclaims, it is to proclaim the Kingdom of God has arrived and is standing among the people. In Christ, God reigns. The Kingdom has come. And the only response to the Kingdom’s arrival is repentance. Lord, have mercy on me a sinner! He does! His purpose is to have mercy, to offer Himself as the vicarious atonement, the substitutionary sacrifice, for sinners. His preaching declares that: His coming is not only for repentance, but salvation. Even from the cross, the proclamation sounds forth in a great victory sermon: It is finished! Not His life, not His suffering, but Satan’s lying hold over God’s people.

Finally, the weekend of my 42^nd birthday, my façade broke. I knew I had no choice. Something was very, very wrong. I saw my physician. I made an appointment with Dr. Allain. And then I saw my pastor. My pastor stood in the stead of Jesus Christ and he preached, not to a church full of people, not to a congregation, but to me: a dying, hurting soul. Pastor Sawhill proclaimed to me that satan was a lying and defeated fool and that he was twisting my conscience. He spoke to me what I had spoken countless times for others. He assured me that, even in the midst of what I was going through, that my Baptismal covenant was secure. He proclaimed that it’s not the strength of my faith but the strength of the One in whom our Christian faith rests. He proclaimed Christ’s power is made perfect in our weakness, and His weakness is greater than our strength could ever be. He proclaimed that nothing – not even the prince of darkness – can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And, he proclaimed there is now no condemnation for you in Christ Jesus our Lord. He placed his hands on my head and announced the absolution to me. And he prayed for the Lord to heal my soul, drive satan’s lies from me, and enable me to live free in Christ.

That day, a few days after my 42^nd birthday, this preacher was the preached-to with my pastor proclaiming the Good News of Jesus to me. That day, perhaps for the first time in a long time, I heard Jesus proclaimed in the clearest of words. I wish I could say there was miraculous healing of my illness, that those words of proclamation were all it took to rid me of my clinical depression. It wasn’t. It took medication, some very painful visits with a therapist, and some more visits with my pastor. It’s been an interesting time since then. God used a physician, a therapist, and a pastor as instruments of healing for me. I would never do it again, but I thank God for those dark days because that darkness let me hear, receive, and experience the power of the proclamation of the Good News of Jesus as never before. Remember, I said I used to see myself with a giant letter F for Failure? I was wrong. It’s not an F. It’s a cross, placed on my in my baptism by another pastor, as a servant of Christ, a cross in token that I have been redeemed by Christ the Crucified. And so have you. Receive the sign of the cross: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.