There are always a myriad of interactions that take place when you prepare for a sermon.  Of late, the most difficult thing I am doing is being honest before the text and grappling with claims that seem, at this time, untrue or at least in this lifetime unfulfilled.  It is not just exegesis or languages or research or delivery-- it is being naked before questions that I hesitate to ask for fear of upsetting my inner apple cart.  I am afraid to ask these questions because I do not have answers for them-- leastwise, the answers that seminary could provide.  There are no guides here, only Jesus, weeping even as he holds me, weeping because he is weakened by love. 

  It is a hard thing to grapple with.

  This is the manuscript of my Christmas sermon tomorrow.  You may not have asked for it, but I'll give it to you now, for what it's worth.

  ************

¹⁴ Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

    --  Isaiah 7:14

The name of the child who would be a sign of God’s faithfulness to Israel was Immanuel.  Translated into English, Immanuel means “God is with us”, and when it was first spoken by Isaiah some seven hundred years before the birth of Jesus, the sign that a virgin would give birth to a child who would be “God with us” was a sign of hope in the midst of darkness.  For at that time, seven centuries before the birth of Jesus in a stable surrounded by farm animals, the city of Jerusalem had been surrounded by enemies, and all hope seemed lost.  But God speaks to the people through his servant Isaiah, and says “Do not be afraid, for though you might be surrounded and outnumbered, this child will be a sign to you that I am with you.”

This is worth remembering today:  that even though we might be surrounded on all sides by difficulty and sorrow, God is with us.  We may ask the question, “what possible good can one little child do against a world that even now tears itself apart in war and famine?  What kind of sign can possibly deal with our broken hearts, our broken marriages, our broken homes, and our broken lives?  What good is one little candle in a darkened room?”

So, thinking that this candle could not possibly be enough, we make up our own answers to these questions.  We may say “Jesus is not enough to light a dark world”, and seek what we think is better, a spectacular saviour who will enchant us with light and music.  We may say “Jesus deserves better than to be born in a barn” and so sing “away in a manger/no crying he makes”, as though this is one baby who would never ever cry.  Yet Jesus weeps for those he loves.  The shortest verse in the Bible is “Jesus wept”[1], as though telling us that if there is one thing worth remembering, it is that God cries. 

          Some of us here have come today because it’s Christmas, and if there is one time of the year we might think about coming to church, it is when everything looks its best and brightest.  If anything, we come thinking that Christians celebrating the birth of Jesus ought to look like how the shopping malls make Christmas feel:  all tinsel and glitter and glamour, all neighborly favours in the form of “buy one get one free”’s, all the strains of comforting music drifting in through hidden loudspeakers.  Some of us come thinking that today ought to be an extension of the consumer culture in which we live, that like the shepherds watching their flocks by night, the skies above us should explode in light and song and that we should walk away nodding and smiling and saying “well, wasn’t that nice.”

Even more, some of us will stay for lunch and sit with strangers and practice niceness with each other, and then we will drive away, nodding and smiling and saying “well, aren’t those people nice.”  What a nice service.  What a nice people.  And then there I am, watching you go, waving goodbye, but inwardly wringing my hands as I hope that you think nice things of me too.  That you say of me “what a nice young man.”  But if this is all we leave with today—that everything is nice—we would be missing something much deeper than that.  We would be missing the very fact that in celebrating Christmas and the coming of God in the flesh, God Himself is with us.

It often seems like such a small thing that we miss it.  It happens so quickly and so quietly; too quickly, too quietly for we who want a dazzling spectacle.  It happens out back, in the stable, witnessed only by goats and sheep and a confused husband who knows this baby isn’t his.  The mother moans, the baby screams, the cows chew their cud, the goats roll their eyes, and the night presses in, cold and deep.  The sign of God with us in the form of a helpless little baby, a candle flame in the dark, seems impossibly useless.  And, by extension, sometimes following a God whose brilliant plan is to send himself in a helpless form feels useless.  Innately, we don’t want this kind of God.  We want the God who will ride at the head of some great army.  We want the God who will heal the sick and raise the dead and make sure none of us ever feel pain again.  We don’t want a God in a manger, a candle flame in the dark, a God who suffers, then dies.

I am not just speaking of you, I am speaking about myself and my own wish for a Saviour, not a baby, not a candle flame in the dark.  Yet the truth insists upon me—God with us is a baby, a baby who weeps, a baby who bleeds, and a baby who dies.  God with us—God with me—is nothing like I want it to be.  And this is the heart of the mystery of God with us:  that God with us looks nothing like what we expect.  The God I want with me is a roaring fire by which I am warmed and can cook and around which we all can be safe.  But most often, God with us feels like a candle in the dark, small and useless; like a baby in a stable. 

“My idea of God is not a divine idea,” writes C.S. Lewis.  “It has to be shattered time after time.  He shatters it Himself.  He is the great iconoclast.  Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?  The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.”[2]

In all truth, I still hunger (as do you) for an easier picture of God.  I want a shinier God, a God who swoops in with bronzed, muscled arms to scoop me out of danger.  But very often, as I get to know God, I’m left with a picture of God that more than anything else leaves me feeling disturbed, because God shows himself to me as weak, as helpless, as a baby.  The God I am coming to know is a God who is vulnerable to love.  The God I am coming to know is a God who weeps.  The God I am coming to know is a God who not only takes on the appearance of being human, but also feels our pain and our dying.  The God I am coming to know is like a candle flame in the dark, sometimes seeming so small, too small, for the task at hand.  Yet there is just enough light to hope for more. 

Maybe the sign of a baby is a sign to us that this God is a different kind of God, a God who willingly suffers with us.  Not a God who stands far away laughing and stroking his beard.  No, this is God who stubs his toe, a God who has his heart broken, a God who has family and friends that never understand him.  At Christmas, we do not only celebrate a cute little baby Jesus asleep in the hay; we remember the mystery of how God is not only with us, but how God is also one of us.

The most difficult thing you might do today is wrestle with God.  It is the most difficult thing I do every day.  What a surprise, then, that sometimes when we wrestle with God, God is overpowered, and we win.[3]  We know full well that God could throw us down and break us over his knee, but he doesn’t.  And he won’t, because for the sake of love, he becomes vulnerable, he becomes a child. 

Which God do you want?  The God you make up in your head?  Do you worship an image of God that is not God after all?  Or, today, can you for the first time draw near to the candle flame in the darkened room; wondering at how such a seemingly insignificant thing could possibly herald the coming of our rescue?

God is here.  He flickers in like a candle in the dark.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
    You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
    You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
    You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
    You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
 --  T.S. Eliot, "East Coker III", from Four Quartets

 
  I hesitate now to even speak of it, even less to write of it should writing and thinking about it give it more power than I ought to give it.  Yet therein is the rub that has rubbed me raw, the prospect that somehow, I have given it more power and that the darkness that consumes me has been fed by my hand. 

  Such is depression.  That dreaded D-word.  Not damnation, though it sometimes feels almost as bad as I imagine.  Not dung, though at times I can scarcely stand the stench of my soul.  Depression, not the economic kind-- the kind that once dwelt upon, can become a bloated spectre that blots out thought of anything else.  I am used to pain of physical kinds.  Right now I am nursing a bout of tendonitis in my left knee, and I am loath to rest it because I am just that stubborn.  But psychic pain is different and more difficult to deal with because there are no salves to reach the inner self, no massage to break open knotted nerves and downcast souls.  There is pain, and I am tired of it, tired and exhausted of waking, as Hopkins once wrote, "feeling the fell of dark and not of day."

  I am coming to see that the gradual arc of all that I have been writing and thinking has been the arc of someone slipping deeper into something he cannot dig himself out of.  Would that there were vaccines for this!  Would that medication would be enough!  Instead, there are only long moments of waiting, waiting for morning when you are almost sure that the night is all there is. 

  A large part of the fear in writing about it is that everyone will seek to offer good advice.  To be sure, I am taking all of it, and the prognosis is good because I trust that attacking instead of laying down is what I need to do-- but how many times can you hear permutations of "turn that frown upside down" and not get a little angry?  Yet here I write, hoping that you who are struggling like me might take a little comfort in reading words that are yours but not yours, and in thinking thoughts that are yours but not yours.  In a way, let this little, oft-neglected cyberspasm be for you a Lorax of the heart.  My name is the Lorax, I speak for the trees-- and for the selves that awake and are not sure they're still asleep.

  I have been depressed for a while, possibly over the course of the entire last year.  During seminary, I held it together in the name of meeting achievable goals:  get that paper in.  Ace that exam.  Memorize and synthesize and push push push.  But once seminary finished and I was cast into that nebulous task known as "ministry", my self-perception shifted.  No longer the open-handed student, the wide-eyed wonder, now the broken amongst the broken, the man whose helmet slips from his fingers as he watches his comrades fall at his side.  I went to Hong Kong last summer in hopes of remembering-- and was duly remembered-- but when I returned, the frustration, the anger of being as I am visited itself upon me, driving me into some deep places, places I had not known could exist in the human psyche. 

  And I do not use the term "psyche" loosely.  A student of Greek will tell you that it comes from the Greek word, well, "psyche" (pronounced "ps-oo-kay"), meaning our souls, our lives, our selves.  It is not merely my thoughts, but my feelings, my cognitions, my habits, my unpredictable inner jig with God.

  It was a hard late summer, autumn, and winter last year.  I thought of suicide once, and that alarmed me enough to seek counseling, something I have been regularly engaged in throughout the last year and a half.  Some who read this and who know me would say "why would you think of suicide?  Do you know who you are and what you mean to me and us?"  Even more, those who only see me on Sunday morning or leading a group would probably be surprised that I, the somewhat sought-after bachelor, the spiritual-seeming guy, the athlete, the scholar, the preacher, the speaker, the writer-- that this man would want to destroy himself.  But for those who have thought of it, you know that this is precisely the most difficult thing to realize when you contemplate it:  your worth.  I could only consider killing myself if I thought there was no one counting on me, no one loving me, and no one caring for me.  And still, I am strong enough in my self-monitoring and dead enough to my pride that upon realizing the thought was taking place, I sought help.  I reached out, perceptions be damned.  I was not in a good place, and I needed help.  The reverse is true:  I do have people who love me, who care for me, who think I'm the bees knees not because I contribute meaningfully to their lives, but because of who I am.  This is the truth that I still cling to as a tangible sign of God's pleasure in me.

  Months passed.  The dawn came and I felt better for a while, then went.  The last half year has been one crushing blow after another, such that each little thing, each little bump, has opened up wounds anew.  I was weakened in the early summer, and after a series of events and circumstances that I was helpless to control, I was left empty by early fall-- yet, apparently, not emptied enough. 

  It came to a head a week ago when, after being saddened by something I saw, I sank even further, and the pain became too much to bear.  I returned again to thoughts of ending my life.  Yet here is where a measure of grace breaks through:  I knew enough to know how severe it was becoming.  I had no real plan, and the momentary plan I had I knew would not really be enough and that I would probably make a mess of it.  It was not an attention-getting device, for I knew that many people were praying for me.  It was that I wanted the pain to end, to stop feeling so crummy that much of the joy of life was being systematically drained from me like a vampire bat latching onto the leg of a cow.  I realized then that many things had become difficult for me not because they were inherently hard to accomplish, but because the joy I had taken in them (yes, I am acquainted with lines of thought that we ought to "take joy in the Lord", but what I mean is that the joy I had was the joy of "feeling God's pleasure" as I did them) was gone.  Writing, running, reading, preaching-- it was all so difficult.  Most Sundays I put on a brave face and walked away wounded within, knowing that even though I had done my best to be honest about how I was feeling my way through some text, most people could not understand that I felt as though I was being torn apart by wild horses.  And it felt that evening as I sat, staring but not seeing, that the tearing was complete.  The night closed in.  I was alone.

  I struggled into bed at around 4 that night, and slept violently, hoping that the drink would finally work and that the pain would ease.  It didn't.  I awoke the next day with a headache and still wondering why I needed to continue in this pain.  I knew the arguments against suicide because it is, for some, a forfeit of your salvation, but whoever is considering it is not in a good frame of mind.  In fact, it is a psychic (that word again) illness, something I am not sure God's mercy does not cover.

  What kept me from it?  By dwelling on how much my premature, self-inflicted departure would hurt the people I love.  I am not a coward in the typical sense, but in the final analysis, more a lover than I thought.  I could not bear the thought of my parents having to bury me.  I could not think of my sister's face at the funeral.  The sight of my congregation's ashen countenances and self-recriminations about what more they could have done to stop it made me gag.  No, despite the pain, I knew I was loved.  Not just by God who seems so distant, but by real people and in real time.  I could not and cannot do it because I care too much for them.  I wanted to escape the pain, to finally be free of it, but not when it means burdening others with the questions and my pain, now magnified and diffused amongst them all.  I could not do it because I am loved, and in my little and halting way, I love them also.

  You who read this and are similarly depressed and deep in your isolation will ask "so what about me?  What about me whom no one loves, whom no one sees, whom no one remembers or cares for?" 

  I cannot answer you.  I don't know.  But I only know that you are in pain.  As am I. 

  A thought occurred to me as I lay there.  I had done everything I possibly could over the years to manage my stress in healthy ways.  I had been running four or five times a week, totaling up to 65k as I had trained for and completed my second marathon in October.  I had been eating well, aside from occasional indulgences in chips and beer (all right, all right, and dark chocolate and red wine) to enhance the experience of watching professional sports and/or cheesy mood-elevating melodramas.  I had, for the most part, been sleeping as much as possible and monitoring my stress levels.  But due to the circumstances of the months, the stress had gotten unmanageable, and my capacity had gotten overwhelmed.  I was seeing a counselor, but it wasn't enough.  I was being prayed over, but it wasn't enough.  I was talking my way through it with loving friends and family, but that wasn't enough.  For the first time, I actually began to wonder if something was physiologically wrong with me-- that the wiring in my brain had finally blown? 

  I didn't want to get out of bed that day, but I did, resolve strengthened to fight.  I would get medication, a thing I am reluctant to take part in because what I know of it is that it never cures one's depression, it only, in the words of a friend who had taken them at one time, "keeps you from bottoming out."  The issues that caused the depression are still there, the circumstances that feel like death by a thousand cuts still real.  Drugs were the one thing I hadn't been trying, the one way I had not been attempting to, as someone (thank you) has said for me, "rage, rage against the dying of the light."  I called some people.  They responded, and spent the afternoon and early evening with me, their very presence alone a comfort and reminder of why I had not ended my life the night before.  When they were with me, it did not have to be a lengthy existential discussion.  In fact, the most helpful thing I talked about that day was football.

  I got medication, but only as a last resort, a resort which I have yet to visit.  It sits in a bottle in my cupboard next to some Tylenol 3's I never took for gum surgery I had last year.  It sits in my cupboard like a safety net, in case the darkness gets too much and no one is answering their phones.  It is not as though I am disobeying doctor's orders to be on medication-- my doctor has only prescribed it as a measure at hand, one more resource to bring in while I wrestle, while I, it must be said, fight the good fight.  (at least, I hope this fight is good.)  My doctor and counselor tell me I am doing all the right things in managing it, this quiet, shadowy monster under my bed.  I am talking about it with close friends and family.  I am receiving prayer without responding to the obligation to pray for others (in other words, letting myself be ministered to).  I am in the counselor's office and our sessions have been more intense and aggressive:  I walk out feeling hollowed and clean, and though I often cry at these sessions, it is cleansing.  I have also stopped drinking alcohol and have moved onto warm milk with almond powder.  And, despite a nagging knee injury, I am still running and in the gym whenever I can gather myself enough for the act. 

  It is still difficult, though.  I hate the feeling of being useless, and now being down for the count, I am feeling even more useless as I want to be productive and useful.  At the very least, part of me whines as I rest, wanting to be the good shepherd and out visiting the flock-- until I force myself to remember that I am not the Good Shepherd after all.  Someone else is.  I have years upon years (I think) to work and play in the fields of the Lord.  Now is my time to work through the pain, to sift my ashes, to rise up against that most impenetrable of walls, myself.

  I took last Sunday away from my congregation and went to First Baptist, where I hoped to hear Darrell preach.  I bused downtown early last Sunday, feeling the nip of early winter air making my nose run.  My heart made a peculiar flop as I approached the grey stone church, for on the sign out front, I knew Darrell would be preaching exactly what God wanted me to hear that day:  "The Bright Morning Star."  It was a sermon I'd heard from Darrell at least twice before, and it was, in a strange way, exactly what I'd hoped he would be preaching again.

  In it, Darrell speaks of his own experience with depression and suicidal thoughts.  Unlike mine, his occurred at moments when things seemed to be going well, but the will to live was somehow gone.  It was on a leave from his church one night 28 years ago that he read in the last chapter of Revelation, "I am the bright Morning Star."  The appearance of Jesus, the insignifcant-seeming little pinpoint of light in the midst of so great a darkness, is the point at which the night is at its most complete, its deepest-- and yet at the beginning of its decline as the bright Morning Star pulls the day in behind it.

  It had much to do with what I was feeling.  As Darrell quoted Thomas Torrance, "John was left to bleach and rot on the rocks of Patmos."  It was the same with me:  I could theologize and say that Jesus had beaten death, that the resurrection had happened, that my faith was not based on an unfounded rumour.  But here, in the middle of so deep a night, where was the evidence of that great victory over sin and evil and death?  Should there not be some difference?  Some change?  Should the world not be different and things become well?  And, I asked along with Darrell as tears started from my eyes, should I also not become well?  I am tired of being sick.  Tired of being sad.  Tired of finding ways to manage my pain.  So tired.  Bleached and rotten and wondering whether I am forsaken after all.
 
  He said several key things that I am still holding onto.  The first is that Jesus is the bright Morning Star, and his appearance hails the end of the night contrary to all evidence that surrounds it. It is unbelievable that the night should end because it seems so completely overwhelming, yet this is the word of Jesus to us.  The second is that though I am often led to wonder if Jesus is true to his promises that the night shall end, the ferocity of the night does not negate the word of Jesus, it validates it.  This valley of the shadow of death I walk through is this deep and difficult not because the Gospel of Christ is that weak, but that the Gospel of Christ is that strong, and knowing this, the night does everything it can to keep it from coming in. 

 And finally, something new that I had not heard Darrell say before:  "no matter where you run, you will run into Jesus.  He has you in his hands.  You cannot outrun God."  We made eye contact a few times during the sermon, but I am never completely sure whether preachers see me or whether they gloss over my head.  But part of me wondered if this was what Darrell was saying to me in a tacit way.  He knows I am a pastor of my own church in Vancouver.  He knows I ought to be with my people on a Sunday morning.  Was I now burned out and running from the flame?  Was I now just another statistic, another young one fallen by the wayside as the night became too much, too deep?

  The night is deep.  The darkness complete.  Yet, and I hold this lightly, I am wondering now why Jesus has appeared to me.  I have neglected my life of "seeing" prayer for months now because of some very difficult and indigestible things that have been said to me because of it.  Yet last week, a new picture that I have been turning over in my head was given.  By reason of this post already being too long (and days in the writing), I may need to share it some other time-- yet it has been a constant source of comfort as I struggle, waist deep and helpless in dark waters.  I am only starting to see that Jesus has appeared because the night, I hope (but do not yet see!), is over, and the day is coming, the Kingdom coming, the hope of glory being revealed in everything now coming clear.

  I shook hands with Darrell after the service. 

  He said, "I saw you in the congregation."

  I said, "Yes, I thought you might have.  Good to see you."

  He said, "Good to see you too."  Then, he leaned in with that meaningful look I have often seen in his eye.  "Did it come through?"  he asked.

  "Yes," I said, thinking that he was simply asking whether God's Word had come through to me that morning.  Darrell, being the best preacher I know, is not known for being unable to deliver God's Word accurately and on time.  I had thought it was a simple preacher's question about how he did. 

  But later, when in my counselor's office and telling her of this, she rolled her eyes.

  "Don't you see?  He was talking to you," she half-laughed at my lack of understanding.  I laughed too, and smiled at the thought that Darrell was thinking of me even as he was preaching, and that the words I had taken and written so that I might not forget them were words that he was inspired to speak to me, the lost sheep, that day.  Yes, the lost sheep-- but even now as I write, strangely assured again that this ridiculous lost sheep cannot be snatched from the Father's hand. 

  That Sunday, I went to Chapters on Robson and browsed through books, feeling saddened by the prospect of entering so wide a market.  Yet my hands were led to the Complete Works of T.S. Eliot, and there, after a few flips, I read what I have reprinted above.  I felt, and still feel, that God is speaking to me not only through inspiring Darrell, but by the words of the poet.  These are watchwords for me even now in the night.  I am to go by a way I do not know to become what I am not yet.  To arrive where I am, I must go where I am not, by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.  The comfort is small, the light of the Morning Star so dim, the night so great and so cold.  Yet with what strength these palsied hands have, I will cling to these words, to these hopes.

  I have been wondering whether I ought to make this post public or not, but in the end, have decided to make it so.  Those of you who are in my congregation who are reading this now (and have read this far into the longest post I have ever written-- I'm sorry, but there is so much to say!  And in this instance, I think, you have been better served by a longer excursus than a brief one) I would ask of you to, for the moment, keep such knowledge to yourselves and not discuss it over Sunday lunch-- at least, not until I have a moment to speak of this honestly with the congregation at large.  We are not, as you know, in the business of hiding pain in our little podunk church-- but we need time to figure the best way to share such pain, since not everyone is capable of handling such things as sensitive as their pastor's psyche.  We will likely talk about it in public, but not before the time is right and the people prepared. 

  And for you, the casual surfer who has stumbled onto this, you will likely have read this far for one of two reasons.  First, that you are now wondering who I am and what sort of fool shares so intimately?  And I would answer that I am the only sort of fool who gives what he does not own, himself, and freely, so that you might in your own way be encouraged.  Or perhaps, you are in a second party--at the end of your rope and free-falling.  In that case, I am sorry for your pain.  I wish I could make it instantly better, but if I have learned one thing in the last while, it is that I am helpless and cannot even cure myself.  However, for what it's worth, I too am waiting for daybreak.  I too, am thrust into darkness.  You are not alone, for if you are cast down and waiting as I am, then, for as much comfort as this may bring us, we wait and suffer together in our separate agonies.  We each have our own crosses to carry-- and they are not light!  Nor is crucifixion painless.  But even as we are torn apart, perhaps we can hope together that somehow, somehow, we might attain to the resurrection of our deaths.