OUT OF THE DEPTHS

‘Out of the depths I cry to you’ – Psalm 130
‘For you know the generosity of our Lord Jesus Christ’ – 2 Cor 8: 7-15
‘Do not fear, only believe’ – Mark 5: 21-43

A sermon by Joanna Tulloch - Littlemore Parish Church 28 June 2009
Joanna is a Methodist Local Preacher and an artist.
Her paintings and poems will be exhibited in Littlemore Hospital until the end of July.

First of all, I’d like to thank Margreet for inviting me to preach to you today. It’s good to meet her again, and also several others of you who attended the ‘Embracing the gift’ workshop, which I know she preached about here a few weeks ago. The workshop was about the possibility of seeing mental health issues not so much as a problem, but as a gift, and part of a search for meaning, a spiritual journey that we all share. I was very impressed by the fact that four people from your church came, and what that had to say about your commitment to spirituality and mental health in this community.

Mainly I want to tell you today about my exhibition of paintings and poems that you can go and see at the moment in the Learning and Development Centre of Littlemore hospital. It’s called Only a Whisper – WISDOM from Depression. It contains about 35 watercolours and 40 poems arising from my journey of faith and also from about forty years on and off as a mental health patient. But I want to relate it, too, to today’s readings, and briefly to topic 5 in your ‘living faith’ series, which the copy of Window that I picked up here last week says is about ‘using all the resources available to the local church’.

The first section of the exhibition is called ‘The Song’ and is inspired by the psalms, those wonderful, honest-to-God songs that express every human emotion, from joy and exultation all the way even to anger and despair. Psalm 130, which was read earlier, begins ‘Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord’, and the poem from which the exhibition takes its title, Only a Whisper, represents just such a cry to God from the depths. It was written during one of my longest stays in hospital and its starting point is Psalm 63 verse 7, which says ‘Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings’:

Psalm 63: 7
‘Sing,’ said the psalmist,
‘Sing in the shadow of His wings.’
So I opened my mouth
and out came a plaintive keening,
not so much a melody
as a frightened howl of pain.
And I knew that my song could never be good enough,
I knew that the darkness could only get deeper,
and I bared my back and tensed me for the punishment.

‘Thank you,’ He said,
‘yours shall be a precious song,
born as it is from suffering and grief.
Thank you for your honesty,
for you have sung yourself.’

Instead of the whip
I felt only a whisper,
the stroking of a feather,
the shadow,
the shadow of His wings.

So, out of that cry of desolation came a glimpse of grace, of the unconditional acceptance God offers to us all. In today’s Epistle we were reminded of the generosity of Jesus Christ, who in coming to share our humanity showed us the supreme example of God’s grace. The second section of the exhibition is called ‘The Garden’ and is based on another occasion when I was given a glimpse of this grace. When I was a child playing in the woods near our house, I once fell into a boggy ditch and was afraid I would be sucked down – I called for help and our gardener came and pulled me out and carried me home, leaving my Wellingtons behind. Years later, in the middle of a series of seven admissions to hospital in three years, I found myself transported to that boggy ditch again during the prayers of confession – only this time it was the bog of my sin and failures that was sucking me down, and the Gardener who came to rescue me was Jesus; he graciously invited me into the garden of God’s love with these words:

‘Come, this is all for you,
please be my guest.
Without you there cannot be a garden.
Come, if you will—but only if you will—
to make my garden complete.’

But it was really what the Gardener went on to say to me that changed my life; and I have come back to his words again and again whenever, as has often happened, I have become bogged down in recurrent depression. This is how Jesus answered my sense of sin and unworthiness:

The Gardener Speaks

Be still, my child, and do not fret.
Be still, and stop your frantic struggling.
You only need to seek me in your heart,
incline the ear of your heart,
open the eyes of your heart,
and you will know me with you once again.

Turn to me,
gaze on me
and see how much I love you.
Do you think I’d ever give you up?

Turn to me,
gaze on me,
try to turn away from all your failings.
Don’t you think I know you through and through?

Turn to me,
gaze on me,
leave me to decide how best to show you
that you,
your depression,
all the world’s pain
are for me to gaze on.

You can look at me and find great beauty:
when I gaze on you I find the same.
Be still, my child, and do not fret.
I am with you, always.

‘Be still, my child, and do not fret’. In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says similar words: when news comes that Jairus’s daughter has died and there is no point in bothering him further, Jesus says ‘Do not fear’ (or ‘do not fret’), ‘only believe’. And then when he comes into the girl’s room and wakes her, he calls her ‘little girl’ (or ‘my child’). The third and longest section of the exhibition is called ‘Touch’ and has to do with experiences of healing. As I said earlier, I have been a mental health patient on and off for forty years – starting in my early teens, when I was about the age of Jairus’s daughter, and nearly died of anorexia. Years later, I was studying this Gospel passage in a group on retreat when someone had the insight that maybe Jairus’s daughter was an anorexic – after all, Jesus’s prescription for her is to give her something to eat – and this made perfect sense to me, inspiring me to get alongside her in an imaginative meditation:

I was dreaming, dreaming of a long dark tunnel with walls that were pressing against me. No matter how hard I pushed against them, they seemed to want to crush me, squeeze me into a tiny space, and I couldn't make myself small enough to fit into the crack. I was losing the fight, there was no space left for me to live in. And then He came. Lighting up the tunnel, speaking gentle words. He reached through the crack and took my hand. ‘Get up, little one.’ Suddenly everything opened up and I could see my long life, abundant life spread out before me.

Lord Jesus, you are not like the others.
I see now that I cannot hold you at a distance with radius arms,
insisting on my own place at the centre.
For you are God, you are distance and radius and centre,
you are in and through me, for and round me,
where I am, but also where I am not.
You know from inside what they can only see through armour-plating,
you touch the raw unanswered place of pain.
Why did I think that I could tuck it round the corner,
swaddle it in darkness, suckle it with a dreech, denying milk?
I cannot hide this poor emaciated child from you,
nor shall I wish to, when your light alone can make her whole.

Healing can come from unexpected places and sometimes you have to reach out for it, as the woman with the issue of blood did. She had gone from one doctor to another and lost not only her money but her sense of identity, as she became a nameless set of symptoms. Jesus turned her from a nobody into somebody again as he said ‘Somebody touched me’; and in her faith and healing he makes her an example to everybody.

Often in hospital it has seemed to me that the patients have more to offer one another even than the doctors and nurses have for them, and maybe that’s because as patients we are just human beings together on a common journey, whereas to the professionals we are a problem to be solved, or a case for treatment. And in society as a whole, mental health patients are often treated as nobodies, despite the fact that one in four people will seek help in their lifetimes, and everybody has some experience of disturbance – for growth itself is a type of disturbance. Yet we have wisdom to share. The subtitle of the whole exhibition is WISDOM from Depression, partly for this reason; WISDOM is also an acronym for ‘Word, Image, and Story, Doors of Mystery’, because it is the combination of the images with the poems and story that provokes a powerful response in people and opens doors to the spiritual journeys we share. I’ve been able to give you an idea of the word and story elements today, but I hope some of you will go and see the exhibition, where the combination with images gives these more impact.

Finally, I’d like to come back to your topic 5, just to say that as you shape confident, collaborative leadership using all the resources available to the local church, I hope you will be able to recognize and value the special resource you have here in Littlemore in the form of the mental health centre, its staff and – I hope you will not forget – its patients, with the WISDOM they have to share.

Amen

Our Vision - the transformation of all human life under God

Purpose To join with God in creating a caring, sustainable and growing Christian presence in every part of the diocese of Oxford, enabling every Christian and every Christian community to live and share the love of God, seen in the life of Jesus Christ.


1. Sustaining the sacred centre
How can we deepen our enjoyment of God, and recognize God's presence in everyday life?

 2. Making disciples
How can we accompany people on a journey to (deepen) their faith?

3. Making a difference in the world
Social justice and prophetic witness are at the heart of the calling of every Christian community in its own context.

 4. Creating vibrant Christian communities
How can we shape a 'community of grace' which exhibits the character of Jesus, i.e. is genuinely hospitable, deeply engaged with the wider community, and passionate about God?

 5. Shaping confident, collaborative leadership 
This is about developing leadership using all the resources available to the local church.

Christian Love "Agape" (1 John 4.7-21)
sermon by Teresa Morgan

‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God…’ Christians, we talk a lot about the importance of love. Today I want to ask two specific questions about it. What is Christian love? And whom should we love?

Many people know that early Christians used a rather rare Greek word for love: agape. Because it’s rare, we’re not sure what it meant. But it does have a related verb, agapan, which is quite common. agapan means, to be pleased or contented with someone, to love them like family, or to be a good neighbour. And it is the word which is used in the Greek version of the OT, for the love between God and humanity. So when God says, ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord your God is Lord alone. And you shall love the Lord your God…’ the word is agapan. So it’s reasonable to assume that Christian agape is related to agapan: and means something like family or neighbourly love.

The only passage of the New Testament that tries to describe love, is 1 Corinthians 13. We often hear this chapter these days in the NRSV, which begins, ‘Love is patient; love is kind…’ But that translation doesn’t quite do justice to St. Paul, because Paul doesn’t say that love is various things. Paul says that love does things:
‘Love suffers long, and does good; love does not envy; love does not boast or puff itself up; it does not disgrace itself; it doesn’t seek its own advantage; it does not stir up trouble; it does not speak evil; it does not rejoice in injustice, but rejoices with what is good. It bears everything, believes everything, hopes everything, endures everything.’

It’s a very practical list, and it boils down, I think, to three kinds of action. Love does good. It lives in harmony with people. And it believes and hopes for the best.

What Paul is not very interested in, is how love feels. The same is true of St. John, in his great chapters about love. On the last night of his life, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ ‘If you love me, keep my commandments.’ ‘The one who keeps my commandments is the one who loves me.’

In modern western culture, we tend to talk about love as a feeling, and we’re very interested in how it affects us. Early Christians were more interested in love as an action that affects other people. I’m sure Paul and John had feelings, and I’m sure they wanted our feelings to match our behaviour. The New Testament certainly doesn’t approve of hypocrites. But what makes love important to early Christians is what it does.

So what does family or neighbourly love do, that makes it good model for Christians? I think the first thing it does, oddly enough, is simply accept that people are there. We don’t choose our family and neighbours, or we choose them once for many years to come. Often our relationships last a lifetime. So unless we’re going to spend our whole lives fighting, we have to learn to get along. In the process, we get to know each other very well.

We find out the good and bad things that aren’t obvious at first sight. We gradually learn why people are the way they are – what’s happened to them in the past; how they have changed and are still changing. And the better we get to know people, the more we realize that we are all much more alike than we might seem. We all hope, and dream; we all make mistakes; and hurt people, and get hurt ourselves; we all change, and learn to live with change. We all need to give and receive love. We all have things about ourselves we wish were different, and we all long and hope to be happy and fulfilled.

And the more we recognize how alike we are, the more we realize that we’re more than alike: we are one – one kind, one kin. One body. Because for good or ill, the way we are, is in large part the way we’re made – by family, friends and neighbours. In all our individuality, we all help form one another. So the way other people develop is just as important to us as the way we develop. If we want to be happy or loved or fulfilled, we must want the same for others, because our life depends partly on them and vice versa.

That understanding changes not only our relationships, but ourselves. It makes us think, not in individualistic terms of our own needs and desires, but holistically, of the needs and desires of the whole world. And that makes us a little more like Christ – a little more like God. We are told that God loves the world with the love of a father for the family he has created. Jesus loves like a man who knows he’s God’s son and brother to all creation. When we acknowledge that we are one body, we are loving others the way God loves us, and following the example of Jesus.

Well, so much for what love is. My other question was, whom should we love? And that question has a surprisingly wide range of Christian answers.

At one extreme is Matthew Chapter 5: ‘You have heard it said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.’
This is one of my favourite sayings of Jesus, but it isn’t actually picked up very often in later tradition. It seems that most early Christians found the idea of loving everyone a bit much.

More popular is the idea that Christians need only love other Christians. St. John’s gospel tends in this direction. Although John says that God so loved the world that he sent Christ into it, he never seems to expect the whole world to respond. Instead, he describes Christians as a small group who show their love for Christ by loving one another, and fortify themselves against the hatred of the rest of the world.

The Book of Revelation is even more exclusive. In Revelation, the number of people who will follow Christ and go to heaven is fixed from the foundation of the world. There are 144,000 of them, and their names are written in the book of life, and if our names aren’t on the list, we needn’t bother hoping for love.

The Acts of the Apostles take a different view again. One of the beautiful things about Acts is its description of how the first Christians take care of each other. But they are also interested in people who might want to join the community, like the Ethiopian in today’s reading. And many Christians have felt that this was the best interpretation of Christian love: that you love current Christians and potential ones – the ones you might convert.

So here we are, worshipping together this evening. Whom should we love? There is no one authoritative answer. But I believe that there is an answer, and I believe that Matthew was right. Because if we don’t love other people, then what is our relationship with them? At best it’s indifference; at worst it’s envy, contempt, hatred, conflict…. And the New Testament tells us again and again that those things are wrong.

Ultimately, the only way of life which is commended to us, is that we love everyone. Everyone on whom the sun rises; everyone on whom the rain falls.
First of all, simply by accepting each others’ part in our lives. By helping each other practically. By being prepared to get to know one another, and recognize that alongside our infinite diversity, we are all also very much alike.

We love by accepting that what we have in common comes from sharing a world, a community – a family – a God – and that by sharing all those we help shape other people, so it makes no sense to think only of ourselves and our own good or happiness, but we must think of everyone. By responding to what is loveable about each other, and trusting that what is not yet loveable will be so one day.

Finally, we love by letting our love act not only on each other, but on ourselves, making us a little more like Christ; a little more like God. Because, ‘God is love, and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.’

Amen

I am the vine you are the branches (John 15. 1-8)
Philip and the Ethiopian ( Acts 8. 26- end)

sermon by Margreet Artmitstead (10th May 2009)

Yesterday four people from our church attended a workshop organized by an organization called OCIC, which stands for Oxford Christian Institute for Counseling. It’s an organization that offers counseling but also organizes quiet days, conferences and, like yesterday, workshops. The workshop yesterday addressed the issue of mental health. I advertised the workshop in our Window sheet because our church life is enriched by a steady flow of people connected to Littlemore Hospital.

The workshop was called, ‘Embracing the Gift’ and this morning I’d like to explore that title. ‘Embracing the Gift’. Yesterday, as the morning progressed, a very interesting picture about mental health emerged. It was clear that there was no room for the divisive labels ‘them’ and ‘us’, those with and those without mental health issues, because everyone who has truly lived will have dealt with darkness and chaos to various degrees at some point in their life journey.

We were shown examples of artists, those people in society who bring to the surface that which normally lives in our unconscious, safely tucked away. In paintings, in poetry, in music, we come face to face with both the beauty and the frightening chaos of life.

Why was the workshop called ‘Embracing the Gift’? People at the workshop shared their experience that those with mental health issues bring the gift of articulating spiritual struggles and embodying spiritual struggles that everyone goes through at some level and therefore open up that which is hidden in others. At some point yesterday someone offered the humorous and profound saying, ‘Blessed are the cracked, for they let in the light.’

The disturbing point was made that in reality people with mental health issues are not seen as bringing a gift to their environment. For instance, if people talk about visions of beauty and peace and joy, they are hailed as being open to the divine, as examples of saintly people. But if the visions are negative, for instance disturbing pictures of demons or violence, or chaos and darkness, the people are often locked up in institutions and labeled as’ insane’. We were encouraged yesterday to try and learn to translate or interpret the visions and images that the people come with into issues that all of us deal with. For instance, what are the demons in our own lives, where is our chaos that we are trying to hide?

On Friday, the 8th May, we remembered in the Church of England Julian of Norwich, a lady who had powerful visions at one point in her life. The 8th May 1373 was not the date of her birth or death, but it was the date of those visions. It changed her life as well as the lives of countless people after her. Julian had been desperately ill for about a week. Neither she nor the people around her expected her to live. Three days before she had been given the last rites. She was only about 30 years old but the prospect of death did not frighten her. She prayed, ‘Good Lord, let my ceasing to live be to your glory’. She writes, ‘Reason and suffering alike told me I was going to die.’

On that day she was given 16 ‘shewings as they were called.’ She didn’t die, but made a recovery and wrote these visions down within a short time of receiving them. She reflected further on them for the next 20 years. She then wrote her book for which she is now remembered: ‘The Revelations of Divine Love.’

Julian of Norwich has become a tremendous inspiration to generations of Christians. Her basic message from her visions was that God is a God of love, unending, forgiving, enfolding love.

‘He is our clothing. In his love he wraps and holds us. He enfolds us for love and he will never let us go.’

The love that God most high has for our soul is so great that it surpasses understanding. No created being can comprehend how much, and how sweetly, and how tenderly our maker loves us. Our in-born will is to have God, and the goodwill of God is to have us.

The piece on the front of our weekly Window sheet, put together by Simon Thorn, contains another beautiful piece on the love of God.

In our gospel reading today Jesus says ‘I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.’

A vine needs a lot of caring and nurturing in order to thrive. The soil needs to be right, stones need to be removed, it needs the right amounts of water. The vine also needs to be pruned, and dead parts need to be removed completely.

We get a picture presented here that even if we stay at one with God, stay connected with God, the caring, nurturing God, pain is inescapable. Branches are either cut off completely or pruned, both involve pain. But both are needed for the growth of the vine. Yesterday at the workshop people agreed that growth in life often comes through a disturbance of our mental or physical or spiritual peace. We will all have life stories to tell where the painful times turned out to be the times where we grew most as people.

What jars with me in this picture of the vine and the branches is that it could be concluded that God sends all suffering into the world. We don’t know the full picture of why things happen. We do know that things happen and when they happen God is there to love us, to help us and nurture us back to health, to take us through the storm. Julian of Norwich was on death’s door when she had her visions, suffering great pain, yet when she was in her greatest pain she had her visions of Divine Love.

Yesterday’s workshop was entitled ‘Embracing the Gift.’ It focused on people with mental health issues, but the strong message was that we are all human beings carrying with us levels of hurt and inner darkness and we all have our different ways of being both loveable and challenging. Are we willing to embrace the gifts that all people bring, however difficult, challenging, strange, thought provoking people may be? Our church is a church where we have a full range of people, very diverse in many different ways. There will be people who we warm to instantly and people who we find intensely difficult for all sorts of reasons. It makes our church such a rich church. We are all here together, embraced by God’s arms of love and compassion and forgiveness. Our Eucharistic Prayer today is a different one from our usual one, it expresses the idea of God embracing us. God paid the price for that costly love with death on the cross. Are we willing to really try and embody that love by embracing the gifts of all people here in church and in our daily lives?

In the silence today let us thank God for the people who offer us gifts that we cherish, and let us especially bring before God those people whose gifts we can’t see. Let us ask God to show us what those gifts might be. We are all embraced together by God’s love, we are all one in Christ.

Amen.

Little Marsh: A Parish Year, by Teresa Morgan, is a collection of reflections on Littlemore parish life through the Church year - more...

The book is available from Revd Margreet Armitstead at Littlemore Vicarage, or from teresa.morgan@oriel.ox.ac.uk, price £5 + p&p (cheques made payable to ‘Littlemore PCC’). All proceeds go to the work of the parish.