1 Samuel 16:14-23 | David Plays for Saul

I stand before you today not as someone who is hale in mind and body, but instead replete with infirmities. In addition to physical ailments such as sugar sensitivity and arthritis, I also suffer from two distinct varieties of mental illness. How shocking! You might be saying, that someone should simply stand up and publicly announce that they are mentally ill. Why, that is enough to label you a menace to society, or unfit for the presence of children. Hardly. Mental illness are far more prevalent in our society than we like to admit, and like many physical illnesses, are often not fatal nor are they untreatable. Unlike physical maladies, however, mental illnesses are considered impolite to discuss. In some circles it is still shameful to admit that you are seeing a therapist. Well, for my generation, the psychiatrists office is just as familiar as the family practitioner's office, and no more shameful than going to the dentist. Nor should it be. So, flying in the face of social convention and propriety, I choose to come out of the closet and announce to you that, yes, I suffer from mental illness, and no, I am no more ashamed of this fact than of the fact than I am my occasional dandruff.

Nor am I proud of this fact. It simply is, and since it is no fault of my own, I see no reason why I should feel any shame about it. Specifically, I have suffered from depression and an anxiety disorder, though rarely at the same time. These days, the anxiety is much more of a burden, but in my early twenties, I was literally suicidally depressed.

Imagine, if you will, what it would feel like to wake up every morning feeling as if your mother had just died, and yet your searching brain can find no outward event to which it may link this feeling. It is enough to drive a person a little batty, to feel so awful, and yet have nothing to pin the feeling to in real life. Things seemed to be going well, I was gainfully employed; I was surrounded by people who love me, and yet, I was so crushingly depressed that I didn't want to go on. The mind races to find something, anything in the exterior world to attach the feelings to. If I was 5 minutes late for work, then ah! That is something! My depression is about the fact that I am a careless, lazy, irresponsible slob who can't even make it to work on time. Do you see how this works? Because the emotions are so intense, little things in life are exaggerated in their importance to somehow match the feelings. This kind of activity will grant you another label: compulsive.

It all seems so unfair. I was a moral lad, I got decent grades, I went to church, and yet the depression that was visited upon me seemed completely unrelated to anything in the exterior world, as if sent upon me by some malevolent power from beyond.

Even more distressing is that, when you are in this state, the people around you simply don't know what to do. What can they do? I can't tell you how many times I heard people say, "Hey, just be happy! Buck up!" I can't tell you how many times I wanted to punch someone in the nose for saying things like that. Even worse, though, were the people at church. For these people seemed to reenact the book of Job, telling me that if I just prayed enough, God would deliver me from this "evil spirit." Or if I were "right with God" I wouldn't feel this way.

Now, I am someone who generally suffers fools well. But when you are in the midst of this kind of illness, such fools are enough to make you run screaming from the church and become an atheist. For this kind of theology implies that God is somehow in control of my depression; or even, far worse, that God is somehow responsible for the illness.

This is certainly the case in our story from the first scroll of Samuel today. In this reading, God has taken his Holy Spirit away from Saul and sent into him an evil spirit, ostensibly to make him depressed. Apparently this manipulation of Saul's mood is to get David into the court, so that they could become better acquainted, so that their fates would begin their inevitable intertwining.

This sounds strange to our ears today, doesn't it? We don't normally think of God as being the source of evil spirits, do we? We normally ascribe the source of evil to Satan. But we have to be careful here, and be aware that theology changes through time. There was no conception of Satan at this point in history. The Israelites at this point were henotheists, meaning that they still believed in many gods. But the gods were territorial. Yahweh was the god of Israel, just as Baal was the very real god of the Philistines. If you were a Jew and you crossed the border into Philistia--watch out! For you were no longer under Yahweh's protection. That was part of why it was so scary for the Jews to be carried away into exile, for when they left the land, they left the god of their land, their hope, their protection, and their salvation, far behind.

In this version of the universe, Yahweh God is the only supernatural power of any note in Israel. If a good spirit is visited upon your house, it comes from God. If an evil spirit visits you, it, too was sent by God. God to the early Israelites was the source of both good and evil. Now, as I pointed out in last week's sermon, we are too steeped in the philosophy of Plato to feel comfortable with such an amoral deity. But we are products of our times, and the author of the book of Samuel was most assuredly a product of his.

Now before we get on our high horses and think, "Well, weren't they silly back then," I would like to suggest that things have not changed all that much. Oh, sure, we now believe that there is only one God in the entire universe, and we conveniently ascribe all evil now to the devil, so that we can wash God's hands of anything untoward. But is this really true? Do we believe that God is all good, all loving, all powerful?

No, of course we don't. I don't want to shock anybody, but it's true. The majority of Christians in the world today still believe that God is an almighty judge who, at the end of the world, will send the majority of the earth's population throughout all of human history into an eternal place of punishment. And all for the outrageously grievous sin of NOT BELIEVING IN THE RIGHT FORMULA. Now, you can talk until you are blue in the face, but you are not going to convince me that THAT is a MORAL deity. Would YOU send your beloved child into a place of everlasting torment because they disobeyed you, especially if they didn't even know what they were supposed to be doing for you? Of course you wouldn't. And if there's anyone here who would, I'm not sure I want to be friends with you. And since you wouldn't send someone to such an unjust fate and God traditionally would, that would make you God's moral superior, wouldn't it?

Not only would I not want to be friends with YOU if you were like this, I don't want to have anything to do with a God who treats people like this, either.

Fortunately, I don't worship a God like that at all. Just as we no longer believe that gods are territorial, theology has progressed beyond the capricious god of wrath preached in so many fundamentalist churches. For these people try to hold three mutually exclusive truths in tension: God is all-powerful, God is all good, and evil is real. Now you can logically hold two of these positions, but you cannot hold all three. If God is all powerful and all good, why does God not eradicate evil and all the senseless suffering it causes?

Now you can believe God is all powerful and all good, but that evil is NOT real, but then you have Hinduism or Christian Science. You can believe that God is all-powerful and that evil is real but that God is not good, but then you have Gnosticism.

I choose to let go of the notion that God is all-powerful. This is the God of process theology, which says that though God is present with all of Creation, suffers with all of Creation, and tries to influence creatures through the suggestive power of the Holy Spirit, God does not have the power to coerce or to suspend the laws of nature.

This is not a God who would send an evil spirit into Saul to orchestrate some capricious design, but a God who feels the pain that Saul feels, and moves him to send for David to ease his pain.

A myth that more accurately describes this God is the story of Shadrack, Meshak and Abednigo in the Book of Daniel. These three young men were sent into the fiery furnace to punish them for refusing to worship the king. But did God rescue them, did God intervene somehow to prevent them from being thrown into the furnace? No. Instead, the story says that when the king looked down into the flames, he saw a fourth man in the fire. No, God did not deliver the three young men from the furnace, instead, he went into it with them. God did not deliver the Jews from the holocaust in Germany in World War II, but God certainly went into those gas chambers with his beloved people. God could not coerce the Nazis to cease their reign of terror, but he did move the hearts of Americans to enter the war, and he did go into those gas chambers, he did suffer the pain of their dying, he did weep with them for their children. There was indeed a fourth man in the fire.

This is the kind of God I need. Not a capricious judge who sends mental illness upon his children for the sake of some whimsical design. Instead, I need a God who can walk into that furnace with me, to hold my hand, to feel the pain that I feel, to give me hope, comfort, and strength in my times of trial. I do not need Superman to come and save me. I need a heavenly Father who will hold me, comfort me, and sustain me.

Mental illness such as I suffered from as a young adult, such as Saul suffered from in his own time is not God's punishment. It will not go away if we pray hard enough or say enough Hail Mary's. It will not go away if we would simply "buck up", nor will it go away if we simply ignore it. Like any other illness, it is simply part and parcel of the human condition, for better or for worse. Human biology is a crapshoot, no matter how you look at it. But we are not abandoned to our despair, for we have a loving and supportive God, who like a strong Father goes fearlessly with us into our myriad furnaces, who like a comforting Mother, holds us to her bosom and tells us we are precious and important, no matter what horrors we will have to face.

This is light-years from the God who is the source of both Good and Evil. Thank God. Thanks be to that fourth man in the fire. Amen.

Let us pray. God of comfort, you attend us in all our times of trial.
You stand in solidarity with us even when it seems we oppose the whole world. Help us to have faith that you are there, even in our darkest hours, even when we do not understand why or exactly what we are feeling. For our feelings are not all that there is in the universe, O God. For even though we go down into the depths of Hell, your Holy Word promises that we do not go there alone, for behold, even in Hell, you are there. Help us, as we pray the prayer Jesus taught us to indeed fear no evil, for thou art there, comforting, loving, sustaining us, world without end. Amen.