Transcribed from the sermon preached March 14, 2004

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

What can we gather from our scripture passage about the nature of mental health?  The dominant model of modern psychology has assumed mature health is autonomy.  More recent psychologies have begun to recognize the importance of relationship.  First Century Judean psychology would typically find individual identity deeply embedded within the family and tribe.  It is likely that people with mental illness or psychosis were identified as possessing unclean spirits or demons.  But there is also a sense that spiritual well-being or mental health is influenced by our connectedness to the source of life, God.  Jeremiah, over a half a millennia before Jesus writes, "Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord....Blessed are those who trust in the Lord.  They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream....It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green: in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit." Here is the image of God as moist Earth, and stream.  The further we are from the water source, the more anxious we become during difficult times.

Our Luke passage is the beginning of the sermon on the plain, Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount.  People, both Jews and Gentiles are gathering, and people with diseases and unclean spirits have come to be healed.  As a tree stretches its roots into the earth in search of water, so the people stretched out to touch Jesus.  They were thirsty for his power.  They wanted to connect with it.  When they did they were healed.

Today we are going through an explosion of diagnosis.  Everything is being labeled a disorder; there are all sorts of nuanced labels for depression.  There are all sorts of anxiety disorders, and a bazillion phobias and psychotic disorders.  You can be bipolar or schizophrenic, narcissistic or have a dependent personality disorder.  You may be obsessive compulsive or passive aggressive.  You may have an eating disorder:  perhaps you eat too much or perhaps you have anorexia disorder.  You may associate too closely with some thing or object, or you may disassociate from yourself.  Disorder initials seem to have some sort of power today as well:  ADD, ADHD, PTS(Post Traumatic Stress).  The other day I heard a new one on the radio: EDD Erectile Dysfunction Disorder.

While there is consensus that a multiplicity of mental symptoms exist, I have been surprised in my study at how little consensus there is on why people have these symptoms.  This doesn’t mean we are not being led in a particular direction.  The pharmaceutical companies are way ahead in the race to become our gods.  They have tons of money for research.  And it is much easier to get quality measurements from study of physical objects like the brain or heart, than it is to measure things like family relationship, the impact of materialization of value, or rapid cultural change.  Also, we are a culture of quick fixes and would much rather take a pill than open our soul or change behavior.  A general rule is that when we decide to really deal with the pain, grief or trauma that causes which ever symptom, things will get worse for a while before they get better.  In Christian terms, the cross comes before the resurrection.  Insurance companies don’t like to hear that.  They would rather have us take a pill and go on with life than have us pick up any cross, struggle through costly therapy, or pay for mom and dad and brother’s therapy too.  Of course, insurance companies would never pay for you to take a retreat in a monastery.  While insurance companies will tend to seek the quickest fix, the capitalist market will always favor specialization and individualization:  The greatest number of products for the greatest number of consuming units.  So, we can expect to see within the field of psychology a continued bias or tendency to locate the cause of mental illness within individuals, a continuous increase in disorders labeled, and ever more specialized treatments.  Physical, individualized origin, specialized, quickly treated with medicine.

The direction of our understanding of mental illness is not only driven by greed and market tendencies.  Certainly we will be helped in this direction by some good science, real significant breakthroughs, and real relief of serious and dangerous symptoms.  Nevertheless, it remains to seen if psychology or medicine can have a long term, positive and broad impact on the mental health of our society.  For while we claim we know more and more about diagnosing and treating mental health, more and more people are feeling ill mentally.  The rate of depression and anxiety has continued to sky rocket over the last fifty years.  One might think that if we have so much more knowledge about mental illness that the rate of mental illness would go down.

We might think that as the rate of consumption goes up, our sense of poverty would go down.  Why is it that more of the poor in our country have the purchasing power and consumption rate three or four times as high as people in many developing countries, but are very often less satisfied, less happy?  Aren’t we supposed to be the rich, smart, happy and powerful? 

Perhaps we have become puffed up with our newfound knowledge, prideful of our ability to address those material problems which so much of humanity had struggled with for so long.  Perhaps in our pride we have broken loose from the moist earth, from the spiritual stream of God.  Yes, we are free, but without connection we are drying up, and like a thousand tumbleweeds blowing across Bakersfield in August, our freedom begins to feel more like slavery to the dry wind, which blows us at will where it may, or until we hit a barbed wire fence or wall and pile together, our brittle thorns scratching, snapping and sticking until we fall apart back to the Earth.

Whether we call what disturbs us an unclean spirits or a disorder, the Bible says we need to have roots growing toward and drinking from the Spirit of life.  As Christians, we believe that Jesus was so in tune with that Spirit that he embodied it.  He became the river, the spring of living water. 

A couple of years ago I took my family up to Tahoe.  We stopped along the highway and hiked up to the Horse Tail Falls.  On the way we came to a part of the creek that was safe to approach but fast moving.  Beautiful ferns moist from mist clung to the rocky side.  Kevin had previously always drunk water from the faucet.  He had been by streams and rivers before but never one this clear and cold.  Out of instinct my son Kevin bent over between the ferns and filled his hands to drink.  He drank a couple of handfuls and looked up with a big smile on his face, "Yum, this is the best water in the world."

I thing we have built into us the same instinct for Spirit.  I am not an expert, but I have met with hundreds of struggling people and I have always felt that no matter what the symptoms, a huge part of the solution was grace.  Some area of their soul was at some point in time blocked or clogged by pain or shame, choked off from God’s nourishing and sustaining love.  Take the risk, unclog that dam, and allow God’s grace to flow over your whole life that you may thrive.