A Sunday Hymn

Nobody gets away with anything. Not even the ones who look like they did.

Bottom Line

Some people think Pope Francis is a marxist, socialist, radical for his idea of restructuring the global economy so that it revolves around human need rather than "the bottom line." This may be true, but he is in good company.

A girl in India

Courtesy of Varun Chatterji

Those who enact unjust policies are as good as dead,
those who are always instituting unfair regulations,
to keep the poor from getting fair treatment,
and to deprive the oppressed among my people of justice,
so they can steal what widows own,
and loot what belongs to orphans.
What will you do on judgment day,
when destruction arrives from a distant place?
To whom will you run for help?
Where will you leave your wealth?

(Book of the Prophet Isaiah 10.1 - 3, NET)

God of the Pit

<< Read the first part of this series
On Tuesday I told you about a blunt, obscure sentence in the Bible's most pessimistic book that speaks to me like nothing else when I'm depressed. It helps somehow that the book Jesus taught from is quite open about the fact that life stinks and seems utterly meaningless sometimes.

'Job's Despair'
by William Blake

Actually, Scripture is full of depressed and depressing people, stories, and poems. The 42nd psalm (psalms are just poems and song-lyrics) is a real downer. In the Book of Job one man's utter depression over losing everything leads into one of the world's great epic poems about why people suffer. Even God shows up at the end but gives no real answer other than, "It's way, way over your head, but ultimately I'm in control."

This could be an intensely frustrating response, but oddly many people find it comforting. Abraham Lincoln for one is known to have read Job through several times during the Civil War and somehow it strengthened him. Sometimes you're way beyond the point where an explanation would help. But knowing you're not alone, that this is in some awful way 'normal,' that God fully acknowledges what you're going through and neither condemns it nor tries to pull you out of it with platitudes and happy-talk -- you may not be beyond that.

The Depressed God

One of the most mind-blowing things about the Christian Movement, if we can disengage our minds from two millennia of fairy tales and idealized pictures that have built up around it, is that we are worshiping a man who was tortured to death. The records tell us that Jesus did it willingly, the way you might willingly die to save your child. But they also tell us that he did not do it easily.

Mark's rough-n-ready, just-the-facts-ma'am gospel says that in the hours before his arrest he, "became very troubled and distressed. He said to [Peter, James, and John] “My soul is deeply grieved, even to the point of death." Then he proceeded to beg God not to make him do the thing preachers often say was the very reason Jesus was born -- die. The Saviour of the World did not walk evenly and impassibly to his cross. He was depressed and didn't really want to go. (What he did want to do right down to the end was to obey God, but that's another topic for another post).

Co-Sufferer

The thing about the Christian Movement, the thing about the Holy Scriptures, the thing about Jesus of Nazareth that gives me a ledge to hang onto when I'm deep down in "the hole," is their utter realism. They don't deny or demean anything I'm going through, they don't tell me to cheer up or grow up.

When I cry out, "'Futile! Futile! Absolutely futile! Everything is futile!'" (Ecclesiastes 1.2) I say it -- even when it seems for all the world that I'm alone -- to a God who's yelled something similar,  and can look me straight in the face and say, "Yeah, I know. I wrote that."

The Verse That Keeps Me Christian (It's probably not the one you think)

Read Part 2 >>

Van Gogh's 'Sorrowing old man'
("At Eternity's Gate")

Sometimes you just feel like your whole life has been a waste. At least I do, and I can't imagine that I'm the only one. Sometimes it just impacts you that your life hasn't turned out at all the way you wanted, that all those hopes and dreams have come to nothing. Sometimes it seems that nobody really cares about you, that no one actually loves you, and when you look at yourself you really can't blame them. Sometimes you just reach bottom -- the bottom of bottom, and it really aches.

Now I hasten to point out that generally I'm a happy-go-lucky, easygoing guy. Ask anybody. But I have been right down in that dark hole. Maybe you have too. The worst part is that it's almost impossible to communicate what you're feeling to anyone else. Nobody seems to get it. You're in that hole by yourself.

Everybody, I would think, handles 'the hole' differently, hopefully in healthy ways (e.g., not drinking yourself into a stupor and deciding to live there). Being a follower of Jesus of Nazareth you'd think I should be able to pull out a magical Bible quote to sustain my soul. And I do have a verse... but it's probably not the one you think.

The Depressing Book

Back in the Old Testament there's a rather depressing little book called Ecclesiastes (or sometimes Qoheleth, after the title of the person who wrote it). It's one of those books that theologians -- Jewish and Christian alike -- have wondered what the ancients could have been thinking when they included it in Scripture. But there it is. Ecclesiastes is the kind of book that doesn't encourage you with the idea that one day you'll go to Heaven; it says, "Who knows?"

That's the book that helps me when I'm in the hole.  My 'magic Bible verse' is in the 2nd chapter:

This made me hate life. It was depressing to think that everything in this life is useless, like trying to catch the wind.

Ecclesiastes 2.17, (ERB).

Not exactly the 23rd Psalm. But this guy gets it, at least for me.  This is God saying, "Welcome to the hole. Yes, I even know about this place."

In my life I have found that what helps me in the depths is not all the encouragement in the Bible, but God's frank acknowledgement and full comprehension of the fact that at that point I hate life and it looks useless.

I have often thought that without a book as 'real' as Ecclesiastes in the Bible, I probably wouldn't trust it as much as I do. The Christian God isn't a fluffy bunny God who doesn't want to hear about certain parts of our little human lives because he'd rather ignore the hard stuff. He's not a Disneyland God; he's a battlefield God, a bad-side-of-town God.

Somehow this sharp little verse sums that up for me.