Romans 15 : 1-13

On the Road to Emotional Health

Some of the materials for this message are drawn from Robert Hudnut’s book, This People, This Parish. Context is a one hundred year old congregation in a medium sized Midwestern USA city

Robert Hudnut is a pastor with a pastor’s deep and caring heart. If you have ever been in my study and noticed the books on display, one of them is a little book by Robert Hudnut, entitled this people, this parish. This morning I’ll be using some of his stories to help us see that the church is the place where we can be building one another up. It is here that God chooses to work in a way that is different from any other.  As Hudnut tells stories of real people in his churches, he helps us to realize the power of the word of God to heal broken people.

For example, he writes, the woman was telling me about her father. You see, her older brother was accidentally killed by her father. He fell off the back of the car as his father was backing up. Oh daddy, the boy said in his father’s arms as he died. Her father never got over it. She says he was broken down for two years and then it was with him for the rest of his life.

There are such things that we walk with for the rest of our lives. They haunt us day and night. They’re the images of failure and despair that we can’t seem to break. Of course, there are major images of success and hope, too, which we also have with us day and night. The object is to make sure the first set of images does not overwhelm the second.

Emotional health is that which is realistic. It doesn’t sugarcoat the evil and the effects of evil. But neither does it wallow in despair and give in to evil. We were created to be whole people – -people in whom our physical health, our spiritual health, and our emotional health are all balanced. To be on the road to emotional health means that we are pursuing a set of principles that I want to share with you this morning. I do not intend these to be a complete guide to emotional health, rather they are principles we can glean from God’s word knowing full well that God wants us to be emotionally healthy. The ones I refer to this morning will all be taken from Romans 15, our scripture.

The first one is this from verse 7, accept one another, just as Christ accepted you.

Acceptance by God in Christ is the place where all emotional health begins. Do you know why? It’s because our lives are full of rejection. We can’t take it when someone turns away. Our feelings crumble when another person is chosen over us.

Boys and girls who aren’t athletes know what I’m talking about. You know, don’t you, what it’s like to stand there in the middle while others choose sides for a ball game and you’re one of the last ones, or maybe even the last. No matter if the last to choose had to take you and they said, OK Andy will take you. You know you were last. you knew rejection. You know the pain, don’t you?

But when you come here, I want you to know that God in Christ, accepts you. He chooses you. He sets his sights on you. God doesn’t look to see if you are talented. He doesn’t check your resume to see if you’ve ever been fired. God accepts you. When the greeting is spoken from God, he makes us all his friends, he makes us all equals. In Christ, no one is better than someone else. So, then we can accept each other, too.

Do you know what that means? It means that we do not play favorites as Christians. It means that each of you is important to me because you are my brother and my sister in Christ. It means that when one of you gets a promotion, I feel happy with you. It means when one of you is suffering, I suffer along with you. And so do all the rest of these people.

Here’s another story from Robert Hudnut

My young friend came to us, her church, for help when a friend of hers committed suicide. Now when this teen faced the bleakest moment of her 16 years, she came to this people, this parish. She had been coming regularly since she was 11. We had given her the strength sought. We had been there for her, cried with her, laughed with her, shared her troubles.

Her friend had no church. She had no place to turn, no very present help in trouble as the Bible says. She had no kids her own age to love her unconditionally, the same way they felt God loving them. That was it. That was the key to what went wrong. Throughout all her failures, throughout her inability to measure up or to get good grades and to be the perfect daughter, throughout, in other words, what the normal teenager goes through, there was no one anywhere in her life, who loved her unconditionally, who mediated grace to her. And so, without grace, there was no hope.

Accept one another, as Christ accepted you. Or as the apostle John put it, love one another, for love is of God.

The second principle grows from the first one: and that is this: God is the God of hope. We accept one another as we are in order that there may be a new future.

This shows up in verse 4 and in verse 13. Verse 4 has the line, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. And then in verse 13 it says may the God of hope and so on.

What Paul is seeking to have us realize is that we should never be content with the way the world is. There’s a whole different world awaiting us. There’s a new future that is in the hands of the one true God. When we confront the evil of our world, we cannot be content that that’s just the way things are. Such is not the case. The God who is in charge of the world is our God, our father. He wants us to see that we can grow to be more and more like him. He wants us to know that emotional dis-ease comes from a too easy relationship with sin. For then, our conscience plagues us and we find there is no hope for the future. There’s no way to escape. Depression, one of our country’s most pervasive and debilitating illnesses, is nourished by despair. As Kevin Lehman puts it, depression is doing housework after 8:00 PM. There’s no hope of ever getting done.

Until we get our lives in tune with God, our despair and depression sound like a noisy gong playing in our everyday lives, until the hands of the Potter stills the Clapper, and instead he works in us until we find the tune he created us for. And then he sets the Clapper free and we sound a beautiful note of hope. He is, after all, the God of hope.

Here’s another story from Robert Hudnut.

My wife came after me with a butcher knife. My son decked her. She tried to drown our nine month old baby. She kidnapped the two smallest children, and I didn’t know where they were for eight months. And one day they appeared on my doorstep.

My friend is asking for a blessing. He wants to be able to see God in the horror of his life. I, his pastor, am the one he has come to.

I have a hunch the reason people seek out their pastors is a need for God. They want God to cut off the runaway spiral of their lives. My friend’s life is off course. He knows that. And he knows that he needs something, someone as powerful as God, to get him back on course.

That’s hope. That’s what God gives us. That’s what you and I need in the midst of our struggles with our lives and our sufferings.

The God of hope fills us, says Paul, with all joy and peace as we trust in him so that we may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Emotional health does not come easily in our world. We’re all at least a little bit off center. But God calls us to move on down the road toward him, toward healthy emotions.

Principle #3 was there at the beginning of chapter 15. I put it third, not because it is less important, but because for this one to be put into practice, we need numbers one and two first.

Principle #3 is this, we who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not please ourselves.

In our world which is so affected by the line, the survival of the fittest, it isn’t easy to bear with the failings of the weak. Notice now, this isn’t just some tolerance we’re encouraged to have for one another. It is actually to bear with them, that is: we are to be there with the weak in their weaknesses. Being God’s compassionate hands in a world that understands a clenched fist, or lives by the creed, looking out for #1, being God’s compassionate hands in a world like ours requires that we believe God has to come to us first.

You and I have an inborn desire to be in charge of our own destiny. We want to rise to great heights. We want to be the best. And we don’t have time for weak people. We don’t have time for the dumb things people do. We live with the desire for success, and weak people usually aren’t a part of how we plan for success.

But the reality of life is that weak people are all around us. In fact, each of us is weak somewhere along the line. Not because we have necessarily weaknesses, but because we live in a broken world. We are broken people. And the strength of my brother or sister in Christ is what heals my brokenness. That’s what Paul calls building each other up. It’s what people who live in God’s presence know to be the best way to deal with life and with reality.

Robert Hudnut puts it this way, we miss the screams. The person beside us in the Pew could be dying, and we would never know it. What do you get in church that you don’t get anywhere else? The chance to share how you feel? Last Sunday a man talked about his son on drugs. A woman asked for help with her excruciating back. A man shared every week for four weeks  the progress of his dying friend.

Would life be any different without churches? Without this people, this parish, we might never hear the screams. We might not even hear the groans. We would be so intent on pursuing our own lives that we could be out of touch with the rest of life. Churches give us perspective. They keep us in touch with reality. Churches won’t let us get along with avoiding life.

So who wants to get up on Sunday morning for that? About a billion people.

God is interested in how you are emotionally. He’s giving you these people to care about you. By opening yourself to them, you will be on the road to emotional health.