"The Bad Tenants" - Matthew 21:33-46

"The Bad Tenants" - Matthew 21:33-46

A sermon preached by Simon Carver at Dagnall Street Baptist Church  5th October 2014 pm

http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20141005pm.mp3

"My richest gain I count but loss." Sermon from 5th October 2014

"My richest gain I count but loss."  Philippians 3:4-14

Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 5th October 2014 by Phil Palmer

 http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20141005am.mp3

"The Earth is the Lord's III: ... and eveything in it" A sermon for Harvest 28th September 2014

Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 28th September 2014 by Simon Carver

Psalm 19, "The Earth is the Lord’s III: ... and everything in it"

http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140928am.mp3

"The Earth is the Lord’s II: The Importance of being Lost" Sunday 21st September 2014 am

Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 21st September 2014 by Simon Carver

Job 1:6-12, "The Earth is the Lord’s II: The Importance of being Lost"

http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140921am.mp3

"The Four Female Ancestors of Jesus" Sunday 14th September 2014 am

"The Four Female Ancestors of Jesus" Sunday 14th September 2014 am


Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 14th September 2014 by Joe Kapolyo from Edmonton Baptist Church

Matthew 1:1-17

http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140914am.mp3

"The Earth is the Lord's" Sunday 7th September 2014 am

"The Earth is the Lord's" Sunday 7th September 2014 am

Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 7th September 2014 by Simon Carver

Genesis 1:27 - 2:2

http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140907am.mp3

"A Child-like Faith" Sunday 31st August 2014

"A Child-like Faith" Sunday 31st August 2014

Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 31 August 2014 by Simon Carver

Matthew 18:1-5

http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140831am.mp3

"If you want to walk on water..." Sunday 10 August 2014

Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 10 August 2014 by Philip Palmer.

Matthew 14:22-33, "If you want to walk on water..."

http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140810am.mp3

Sermon 3rd August 2014: Is there more to life than this?

Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 3rd August 2014 by Simon Carver

The fourth in a series of "Questions people ask."

http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140803.mp3

Why do I keep messing things up? Sunday 27 July 2014

Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church on Sunday 27 July 2014 by Philip Palmer.

The third in a series of "Questions people ask."

http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/DSBC20140728am.mp3

Will anyone love me? Sunday 20th July 2014

The second in a series of sermons: "Questions people ask".

Originally preached at Dagnall Street Baptist Church 20th July 2014 by Simon Carver

http://www.stalbansliteraryfestival.co.uk/podcasts/dsbc/dsbc20140720.mp3

Appeasing the Masterchef gods - will John and Gregg love me?

Having not watched any of the previous episodes, I turned on the TV last night and Celebrity Masterchef was on. It was the Final and the last cooks standing were two people I didn't recognise, and Jodie Kidd. I hadn't realised quite how tall Ms Kidd is. Normally she would be among others of her exceptionally tall species, but alongside normal people ... The contestants had one task which was to cook a three course meal of their own choosing in two and half hours. Gregg Wallace and John Torode, the presenters and judges of the show wandered around the cooks' tables, making encouraging noises, but rolling their eyes behind the contestants' back. And then they were done.

One by one the contestants brought up the products of their labours. There is an unfairness inherent in this process in that the last person to come forward, has had their food cooling and congealing on the plates for several minutes before it gets prodded and tasted. If my mother was a judge she would mark it down purely on the basis that it would fail to take the skin off the roof of her mouth. 

While I have sat through many Masterchef episodes, I had never before noticed the similarity between the way that the food is judged and the offering up of Ann Darrow to King Kong. This is not a sly dig at Gregg Wallace's pre-diet physique, rather it is a based on the attitude of the contestants. As they lay out the food, their faces show that they are beseeching the gods, "Please like my food. Please love me."

This blog is really an effort not to waste a thought that I'm not going to be able to fit into a sermon which is part of a series of "Questions that people ask". This arose from the idea that the Church is often answering questions that people aren't asking and that if it is answering those questions, it is not very good at letting people know. This week's topic is, "Will anyone love me?" 

The Masterchef contestants demonstrate very visually the desire that is in all of us to know love. That love come from a person, but it may come from being in a place, or returning to a place. As Mad Men's Don Draper once said:

Round and a round, and back home again. To a place where we know we are loved.

If you want to know more, let me know. 

God loves dinosaurs!

When I was a boy a lot of friends used to like going to the Science Museum in London because there were things you could do. There were knobs you could press and wheels you could turn that made things happen. There were machines, there were trains, there were even rockets that went up into space. Me, I was less interested in the Science Museum than with another of the museums – the Natural History Museum.

One of the main attractions of the Natural History Museum was that there were animals there that you would never see in a zoo. Huge creatures like the Diplodocus as big as several houses and which just stood and munched grass all day. And then there was the most fearsome of all: Tyrannosaurus Rex, with its funny little arms, but great big teeth – all the better to eat you with.

I say all the better to eat you with, but no human being was ever eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, because they were long gone before the first humans appeared on the earth. The dinosaurs became extinct around 66 million years ago and the first human beings weren’t born until just a couple of 100,000 years ago.

It would have been wonderful to have been able to see these dinosaurs in real life, like we can see the lions and giraffes at a wildlife park. We can’t because they are extinct. We don’t know why for sure, but within a fairly short space of time – at least a short space of time for geologists – the dinosaurs went from being top dogs to having been replaced by dogs – or rather mammals in general. What’s very strange is that almost every animal and plant that has ever existed is now – just like the dinosaurs – extinct. Scientists estimate that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are now gone. They are extinct, shuffled off this mortal coil.

In Genesis 1 we read:

And God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.’ And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds.

God made all these things. We might think that it is a little strange that God made all these things and yet he has allowed 99.9% of all the things that he has made die out. Human beings often take the blame for animals become extinct, but almost all of those species that have disappeared since life began had gone by the time the first human beings appeared, so it’s not all our fault. So why has it happened?

I don’t think that the dinosaurs disappeared because God hates dinosaurs. I think that the opposite is true – God loves dinosaurs – although it doesn’t specifically tell us that in the Bible. The Bible doesn’t actually mention dinosaurs, but that’s because the people who wrote the Bible didn’t know about dinosaurs. If whoever write Genesis had known what we know about pre-historic animals we might read this in Genesis 1:

And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the diplodocus and he woolly mammoth to chew grass and the tyrannosaurus and sabre-toothed tiger to eat meat, each according to their kinds.

And that verse would have ended in the way that all the other verses end in the story of God’s creation … “and God saw that it was good”.

God has made more animals and plants than we will ever see and I’m fairly sure that he has made lots more things than we will ever know about. God has made exotic animals, birds and plants that disappeared long before human beings were ever born. God has made all these things because that is what God does and that is what God loves. God loved the dinosaurs when he made them and I believe that God still loves dinosaurs. Just because the dinosaurs are no more, does not mean that God has stopped loving them. They are part of God’s creation and earthly death has no bearing on God’s eternal capacity to love and to hold his creation close to his heart.

Even if we ignore all the plants and creatures that have disappeared unseen by us, we can still marvel at God’s extravagance all that we can see. Why do we need so many different plants and animals? Who knows? Well, the answer to that, I guess, is that God knows and we must presume that God loves variety.

One final thought to end with and once again it concerns life and death. I suggested that God loves dinosaurs and I want to emphasise that I said that God loves not that God loved. God loves all that he has made and he continues to love all that he has made. God does not cease loving when one of his creatures no longer has life on earth. The implications of this are huge for us as human beings. We speak about knowing us and loving us, and that is all well and good for the here and now, but I believe that if God truly loves his creation and all of his creation then he continues to know us and love us long after we are gone from this place and into eternity. God has always loved us and will continue always to love us.

God loves the dinosaurs, even though they are long gone from this world. And he also loves my Dad, your Mum and Dad, your husband or wife, your son or daughter and he will continue to love you, long after you’ve gone, because God is the God of creation and he holds all that he has made in his hands and close to heart.

If Judas had lived ...

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Matthew 27: 5 records that Judas, ‘went away and hanged himself’ having become full of remorse at seeing the result of his actions. The remaining eleven disciples elected a replacement for Judas by taking a vote amongst themselves. And so Matthias was chosen. But what if Judas had lived? What if his remorse led to his begging forgiveness of his brothers – and sisters? What if the eleven and their more loyal female companions decided that Judas had simply acted on the doubts about Jesus that they all shared?

These ‘what if …’ scenarios are interesting, but, ultimately, they tend to be not just hypothetical, but also speculative. However, ‘what if’ a real-life Judas was able to share his thoughts?

In 1966 Mao Zedong launched a Cultural Revolution in China. His perception was that Communism needed to be enforced and that the way to do this was to remove any vestiges of China’s historical and cultural heritage. There were echoes of earlier movements in the USSR and Nazi Germany as family members were encouraged to give up other members of the family who were not ‘on message’. Persecution was wide-spread and it was stated in court in the trial of the Gang of Four that 729,511 people had been persecuted, of whom 34,800 were said to have died. These are certainly conservative estimates as it is estimated that between 1966 and 1969 half a million people were killed.

One of those who died was Fang Zhongmou. She was 44 when she was beaten and arrested. She was forced to kneel in front of a crowd while her ‘crimes’ were denounced before she was taken outside of town and shot.

The similarity between Fang’s story and that of Jesus is uncanny – including the execution outside the town. One difference is that Jesus was betrayed by a friend. Fang Zhongmou was betrayed by her 16-year-old son.

Now aged 60, Zhang Hongbing is seeking to atone for what he did by telling his mother’s story. Fang was cleared of her crime – tearing down a poster and accusing Chairman Mao of encouraging a personality cult around himself – in 1980 and a headstone was erected where she had been buried.

WWJD? What would Judas do? Would he tell the story of Jesus? Would he, like Paul, have become a changed man and an advocate for faith in the Risen Messiah? Would Judas have been challenged as, on the lakeside, Peter was challenged by Jesus? Of course, we cannot know, but I’m sure he would have been – and is – forgiven, because that’s what Jesus does.

Happy Memories

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It was my father’s birthday in January: the first since he died last summer. It felt odd not to send him a card and I wasn’t sure how we should mark the day. My mother and I decided that we would have lunch together and raise a glass to Dad.

I have been surprised at how my father’s death has affected me. Death is never far away from the working life of a minister and I have lost count of the number of funerals I have conducted. I have worked with hundreds of families in their time of grief, but my father’s funeral was the first that I have arranged myself. It all went well, but it also went quite quickly. The funeral and thanksgiving services were on a Friday and we were off on holiday on the following Monday. After our holiday I was back to work for the start of the busy Autumn programme and I thought that this would mean life was back to normal.

I have been surprised at how often I have thought about my Dad over the last few months. These have not been sorrowful moments, but rather occasions of fond remembering. If I have any regrets it is that I had no opportunity for last words. Perhaps I have watched too many films – something for which I can blame my father – but I have felt that there were many things that I might have said if my father’s death had been more predictable. 

It is hardly surprising that death does not follow a script, when life – as our American friends might say – tends to throw us so many curve  balls. Why should we experience life any differently at its end?

The Book of Ecclesiastes is full of sombre Hebrew wisdom about the inscrutability of God and the mystery of life. One of the more encouraging passages is this: … there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil – this is the gift of God. [Ecclesiastes 3:12-13]

Life is full of mystery, and there is much that we cannot control, not least the last words that we might say to our loved ones. However, our role is fairly simple: to enjoy the life we live, to do good to one another and to love God.

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One of my favourite Christmas songs is Perry Como’s “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”. There’s something about his easy crooning style that seems just right for the song, but there’s also something about the sentiment – the excitement that Christmas is coming near.

In church we have particular Sundays that mark the passage of Advent and the coming of Christmas. On the first Sunday we consider the Last Days – the Mayans were three weeks late. Later we think about the Prophets and John the Baptist and then finally the prophecy that Gabriel gave to Mary, that she would bear a son who would be the Saviour of the world. These are the markers that we have in church.

There will often be another set of Christmas rituals that we have in our homes. One of mine is getting the poinsettia from the supermarket, marvelling at how its still the same price as last year and congratulating myself on what a fine specimen it is. Then there is the purchase of the Christmas Radio Times which I pore over and see lots of films that I’d like to see. A small percentage I’ll get round to recording and these will then stay unwatched until next Christmas comes.

Other Christmas markers are the stories that appear in the news. These are the mixture of good and bad news stories – with nothing in between – that are peculiar to Christmas. They are designed to show that either a) individuals or organisations are Scrooges, or, b) that the spirit of Christmas is not yet dead. There have been a number  of these this year.

You might have seen the story about the NYPD cop and the homeless man. The incident happened at the end of November, so if we work on supermarket scheduling, that’s well inside the window of Christmas. New York police have not been always received good publicity as one headline suggested: NYPD Officer Caught On-Camera Doing Really Nice Thing. The nice thing that the 25-year-old Officer Lawrence DePrimo did, was to buy a homeless man a pair of shoes.

The homeless war veteran, in his fifties, was begging on a cold night, when the officer seeing he was homeless, went into a shop and bought the man some shoes. A nice touch was that he used his police department discount card to get 25% off. A tourist took a photos of the officer giving the man the shoes and by the power of the internet the policeman became famous.

A British policeman wasn’t so lucky. He interrupted a school Nativity Play to ask parents to move their cars because they had parked on double yellows and were obstructed the entrance to a doctor’s surgery. There were mixed feelings about whether to boo or cheer the policeman’s action as although he disrupted the play, the parents’ parking was clearly causing a problem and besides, it was a fee-paying school and the cars were all 4x4s, BMWs and Mercs, so they could be said to have deserved it.

There was no ambiguity about another story involving a traffic warden. The warden booked two coaches that were loading on a party of disabled children and their wheelchairs. To make matters worse, the children had been carol singing for a homeless charity. The two £70 fines have since been waived – although it would have been a bit of a waste for the Council to collect a fine from a school that is funded – yes, you’ve guessed it – by the same Council.

But let’s end with a good news story. Did you see the teacher whose boyfriend turned up at the school where she worked and interrupted the Nativity Play. This time, it wasn’t about getting the parents to move their cars. It was so that he could ask his teacher girlfriend to marry him. Like all public proposals, this was clearly a high risk course of action, but the lady said ‘yes’ and so the children and 200 parents went away happy.

School Nativity plays have a long tradition in schools, although it is unusual nowadays to see a straightforward take on the story of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem. For example, I know of one school that this year told the story of aliens helping the crew of a crash landed spaceship return to earth for Christmas Day. Those schools that do have Nativity Plays often include extra characters. The film Love Actually has a scene in which a child plays an octopus in the school Nativity. I also heard a newsreader on the radio this week say that as a child she was a Spanish lady who brought a net of satsumas to Jesus. We saw something of this creativity with our own Travelling Nativity set when our wise men were photographed on the back of a stuffed toy rabbit.

I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I’ve always liked the story of the young lad playing the inn-keeper in  the Nativity story. Rather than turn away Mary and Joseph when they came to his door, he greeted them with a big smile and beckoned them saying, “Come on in, there’s loads of room!”

I like that inn-keeper, because it seems to me that he epitomises the essence of the Christmas story. OK, so it rather messes up a significant element of the story, but if truth be told, there wasn’t an inn-keeper in the version in the Bible. There were shepherds – generally considered undesirable people on account of their smelling of sheep. Then there were the wise men – they weren’t even Jewish and they were astrologers … and we know what Christians think about astrology. These shepherds and wise men were the first people to welcome God’s Son into the world. The outsiders became insiders, because that’s what Christmas is all about – God turning the world upside down. The Church hasn’t always been very good at demonstrating it, but God’s love is for all and there are no exclusions. The message of Christmas is, “Come on in, there’s loads of room”.

The Curse of Fred Perry

With England out of the Euros – those pesky penalties again – we can concentrate on what we do best – cheering on a Brit at Wimbledon in the hope that this year the name of Fred Perry will no longer need be mentioned as the last British male singles winner. A little research has reveals that the last British man to win the men’s singles at Wimbledon was not Fred Perry, but Jaroslav Drobný. As his name suggests, Drobný was not born within the sound of Bow bells or anywhere near Sauchiehall Street. He was a Czech, but he defected to Egypt and won Wimbledon while playing under their flag. He was already a UK resident at the time, but only his last Wimbledon appearance came as a British citizen.  At the time of his death, Jaroslav Drobný had held a British passport for longer than he held allegiance to any other nation and so I think that we can say that he is the last British man to have won the Wimbledon men’s singles. Although, we shouldn’t get excited as it was 58 years ago!

I’m guessing that Drobný spoke his English with a Czech accent, but we have become used to hearing accented English spoken by international sportsmen and women. Of course, the accent that we usually hear is American. Whether the player is Czech, Russian, Croatian or Serbian, he or she will be guaranteed to speak good English, but like an American. This is something that I find slightly irritating. If these players are going to speak English, why can’t they do so with an English accent?
You will already see the flaw in my argument. Is Andy Murray’s accent less authentic, because he is Scottish? I would say not. Murray learned his accent from his parents and from the people amongst whom he grew up – his cultural influences. Like it or, the majority of cultural influences that young people experience are not from this side of the Atlantic. So Sharapova and all the other –ovas speak English with the accents that they have heard – American.

It is almost impossible to separate the Christian Gospel from a cultural setting. It was given to us in a cultural setting – 1st century Palestinian Judaism – and it has been transmitted through the ages by Christian missionaries who have their own cultural baggage. Acknowledging this is important, because it might help us to understand that some of what we think of as Christian is simply the package in which the Gospel came to us. The trouble is that when we receive the Gospel we tend to hang on to the box it came in once we have unwrapped it.

When a parcel comes mail order, there will often be instructions that we should keep hold of the packaging in case we need to send it back. The Gospel comes in a package, but we must be careful not to pass it on. This is true for mission overseas, but it’s also true for communicating the Gospel in our own country. The Gospel might look very different in affluent London suburbs from how it looks in a deprived urban estate.

Our job as Christians is to try to understand what is transferable and what is just for us and our day. It’s a difficult task, but it’s one that Paul faced in Athens and elsewhere and reading the accounts of his journeys abroard is a good place for us to start.

Hope of Promotion

As a supporter of a football team who rarely achieve any success, I find it hard to sympathise with those who follow clubs at the top of the Premier League. Their games are televised every week, they have the best players and yet still their supporters complain that they haven’t won any silverware for the past three years.

This season, my team, Brentford, known by their fans as ‘the Barcelona of the lower leagues’, have finished 9th in League One. The top two teams are promoted and the next four play-off for the opportunity of playing in the Championship. The ‘Mighty Bees’ will have finished about six or seven points short of that elusive 6th position and that was how it has been for most of this season. However, for a period of about three weeks, having won five games in a row, it began to look as if they might just sneak into that 6th place.

It was at this time that I remembered a quotation from Clockwise, a film from the mid-1980s in which a character played by John Cleese said, “It's not the despair. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.” You see, it is the lot of a supporter of a middling football team to know every so often that hope, only, inevitably, it seems, to have that hope dashed. Having hopes raised before being  snatched away in this fashion must surely be worse than following a team who haven’t scored for weeks and who are already destined for relegation by January.

I’m not sure that hope of promotion is much like the way that the Bible describes hope, although one used to hear elderly church members describing deceased friends as having been, ‘promoted to glory’. Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, defines ‘hope’ most clearly: “But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” No one ‘hopes’ for what they already have. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews adds his or her two penn’orth: “Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” Faith is hoping with confidence, ‘playing to the best of your ability until the end of the season’ or, to use an expression I discovered a few weeks ago, “Faith is not being sure where you’re going … but going anyway.”

John and Mary - not their real names - were expecting a baby. A day before the due date Mary was concerned because she couldn't feel the baby moving. She thought that it might be because it close to delivery and getting ready for the final part of the baby's journey into the world. However, a visit to the hospital, an ultrasound and connection to a foetal heart monitor, told them that the fear that lay at the back of their minds was a reality. Their baby had died. For not apparent reason, just one day before they were due to meet their first born, he died. Mary had to go through the process of giving birth - a painful experience, but now without the promise of bringing home a bouncing baby son.

Matthew was born and, after a time with Mary and John, he was taken away. Certain tests were done to try to establish cause of death, but the parents were reluctant to add the trauma of a full post mortem examination to what had already happened to them and their son. So, Matthew was collected by a local Funeral Director and this was where I came in.

I was asked to conduct a service for Matthew and his parents and we arranged to meet. It was a good meeting as we discussed what form the service might take. We touched on some of the deeper theological issues and I suggested that the Psalms are full of the cries of people who are angry with God for allowing 'bad things to happen to innocent people', while the wicked appear to prosper. We looked at possible Bible readings and Mary and John liked the passage in Psalm 139 in which Psalmist speaks of God's knowledge of us and how he "created my inmost being," and, "knit me together in my mother's womb."

This wasn't the first such service I had conducted, but it had been a while since the last one. I still knew to expect to experience a visceral reaction when I saw John carry the tiny coffin in his arms. The service went OK. The family and friends were subdued, rather than audibly sobbing. What does one say about the life of a child who died a day before taking his first breath? This is what I said:

One of the particular sadnesses of this service is that at the time when we come to remember Matthew’s life we feel we have nothing to say.

Yet there are aspects of Matthew’s life that we can celebrate. We can celebrate the love of Mary and John that led to Matthew’s conception. While we are deeply saddened that we had Matthew for such a short time, we celebrate the joy experienced by Mary and John and their families and friends through their period of expectation.

Matthew was a person, yet a person that none of us have yet met. Matthew’s life was lived in the safety, security and warmth of his mother’s womb. His fate was not to know the joy of childhood, first love and parenthood, but nor did Matthew experience the suffering that is part of normal human life through all our years. Matthew’s life was different from ours, but no one life is identical to any other and God loves Matthew as he loves each of us. And he has loved us since before we were born and he will continue to love us long after we have left this earth, as this reading from the Psalms tells us.

I then read the passage from Psalm 139, most of which didn't seem as relevant. The passage from Mark 10 about Jesus welcoming children didn't help me much either - I felt that I was saying that "Jesus wanted another little flower in his garden".

Out we went to the grave - a considerably smaller area than full-size, but it seemed disproportionately deep. I led prayers and offered Matthew into God's hands. Rather than sprinkle dirt on to the coffin, the funeral director had some white rose petals which he offered to Mary and John and the other mourners. Things then took a slightly unexpected turn as John asked if he and some of the other male mourners could fill in the grave themselves. I'd only been involved with this once before - a funeral of a man born in the Caribbean - and then the women sang a funeral hymn while the men shovelled. This time it seemed different. There was silence apart from the sound of metal shovels dragging across the plywood on which the Council gravediggers had left the soil. But the sound of the shovels made little impact on the sound of straws being clutched.

As John finished moving the soil he muttered something like, "9 months and it comes to this". It was hard not to agree. For all the words about God's love and his knowledge and caring for the unborn, the truth was that none of us could really make sense of it. And I guess that this is what we - clergy and people - are not good at: accepting that things don't always make sense.

The balance of his mind was disturbed ...

The inquest into the death of Wales Football manager, Gary Speed, ended with a narrative verdict which told us that Mr Speed died by his own hand, but that this may not have been his intention. Therefore we do not know whether or not Gary Speed was part of the 1 in 6 proportion of the population who currently suffer from some form of depressive illness. While there is still some stigma attached to depressive illness, more and more people in the public eye revealing that this is a burden that they have borne has probably made it easier for ordinary people be recognised as sufferers.

The diagnosis of mental illness is not new, but ‘treatment’ often consisted of removing a patient to a place of safety for them and society. Surgery and Electric Shock Therapy remain controversial treatments into the 21st century, although execution for cowardice has been replaced by treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in cases of ‘shell shock’.

The relationship between mental health and the religious world is reflected in the changing times. Although there is the added dimension of whether or not the symptoms of what the Bible describes as demon possession are the manifestation of mental illness. However, a number of Bible characters and religious figures in the church have also shown signs of suffering from depressive illness. Both Elijah and Jonah in the Old Testament seem to have been unable to cope with circumstances in the lives. In the 16th century, Martin Luther seems to have recognised depression in a colleague who took his own life. He referred to his deceased colleagues state of mind: “This is the tragedy of our human condition, that we fall so far we can no longer see or hear the true God, and we imagine the condemning God is the only God. And then, the God we imagine becomes the God we get.”

Of all people, it is Jesus to whom we might look for an example of God’s presence at the time of greatest despair. It was Jesus who knew the sense of desolation that can come with depressive illness as he cried from the cross about God having forsaken him. The message is that God follows us to the very deepest point that we can reach.

However, this is not a claim that trusting in God will make it all OK. Mental illness requires just as much expert medical care as an illness that affects the body. A part of that care is a person’s need to know that they are not travelling alone. This is the sort of care that we can all offer. We may not know just how the other person feels, but most of us have experienced time in the wilderness and have experienced despair. We don’t need to know the pain of mental illness to walk along side someone who does. We simply have to follow our calling and take up our cross and follow Jesus to the Dark Place. In so-doing we share the darkness, while holding on to the light.