Sermon 25th April 2010
As we carry on with our study of the story of Lazarus, one of our Lay Readers, Adjoa Andoh Cunnell, shares with us a very personal account of living with difficulty. The Bible reading is John 11:8-16.
I always thought that if I were to write an autobiography it would be titled ‘Bob Monkhouse saved my life’.
I don’t know how many of you here know who Bob Monkhouse was, but from the 1960’s through to the 1990’s he was one of Britain‘s most popular comedians, along with the likes of Bruce Forsyth, Des O’Connor and my favourite, Les Dawson.
And like many of them Bob Monhouse was a staple of Saturday night Family entertainment Tv …that is to say ‘Cheesy!’
When I was a child Bob had hosted a teatime Saturday show called the Golden Shot . With his immortal catch phrase “Bernie, the bolt!”
The show involved a crossbow attached to a television camera guided by a member of the public shooting a bolt at an exploding target embedded in an apple. There were several rounds. Contestants who’s bolt successfully hit the target in the final round, would set off a flow of golden coins and win fabulous prizes, - a caravan, a holiday…that sort of thing. And meanwhile all the competitive tension was eased by a continuous stream of Bob Monkhouse’s cheesy jokes usually involving mother-in-laws…
As a child I lapped it up, Bob was hilarious!
By the time I was 20, I thought him extremely cringeworthy.
By the time I was 20 I also thought my life was an unbearable burden.
I had developed blinding headaches and for a variety of reasons had gone through anorexia, had a nervous breakdown, flunked my ‘A’ levels and my Oxbridge entrance exams, left home, retaken my ‘A’ levels, dropped out of a law degree; and on a hot August afternoon in my sunny Bristol bedsit – I re-encountered Bob Monkhouse.
I was in the middle of my 2nd overdose attempt.
I had tried at 17, but had taken my migraine pills with neat cinzano, which made me sick and allowed my poor mother time to find me and deal with me.
This time I was more experienced. Everyone who loved me was away on holiday. I had stolen a friend’s supply of barbiturates prescribed to control their epilepsy. Now I took them with water and lay in bed watching my portable black and white TV…waiting for the pills to take effect.
Had I had to describe myself at that time I would have said:
Swamped, overwhelmed, despairing, self-loathing, pathetic, bleak, bad company, out of ideas.
What was happening to me in that moment was all I felt that was left to me.
I was beginning to drift in and out mentally, when up popped Bob Monkhouse on my television screen.
I found myself laughing at some terrible joke he was telling.
I laughed and laughed, and as the laughter subsided I found myself thinking ‘Get Up! Get Up! Get dressed! Hurry! If you can laugh at Bob Monkhouse, you don’t want to die’.
But I did want to die, I had it planned. It was the only thing I was looking forward to, the relief, the release.
And yet there I found myself, weaving down the hot afternoon street to the pub where I knew my friend would be, to make them come up to the hospital with me and tell the staff what I’d taken.
Having your stomach pumped by overstretched, disapproving nursing staff, armed with a bucket, a jug of water, a funnel and a length of rubber tubing is brutal and frightening.
Alone, in an open ward with all the afternoon’s other overdose patients, addicts and alcoholics, - the pain, the noise, the smell, it felt like being in a version of hell. But coming home to that same bedsit, hours later, swollen throat, sore stomach, alone, with no release to look forward to, and no idea what to do with myself, that was worse. Self indulgent, pathetic, weak, was how I felt and very very lonely.
As the Bible tells us, we can encounter God in unexpected places, a burning bush, the road to Damascus, but …Bob Monkhouse?.Really?
I would like to tell you that my life transformed that day, that I was immediately filled with a sense of God in my life and a renewed sense of worthiness and purpose, but I wasn’t and I can’t tell you otherwise.
What I can tell you for certain is that I know now that I encountered God that afternoon in the jokes of Bob Monkhouse. It was God who told me to get up and it was God who kept me walking till I found my friend and got to the hospital. I know that Jesus was squatting down next to that bucket with me in that ward and Jesus was waiting for me when I returned to that bedsit – I just didn’t recognize him yet.
I’d like to be able to tell you that the depression, because that is what it was, went away that day and I have never again yearned not to be here, or been tripped up and overwhelmed by a sense of despair, but I can’t do that either.
I have battled with dark and bleak weights over my life since my teens and some times are better than others. Sometimes I am almost shining with joy, sometimes I am almost immobile with defeat and most of the time I try to keep my horizons at a low enough level as to be manageable on a day to day basis.
There are times when I look at the world around me, with the struggles and sorrows of those I know and love and those I only know of, and I am frustrated by how unable I am to look outwards. And how self indulgent I seem.
Nor can I deny the deep sense of shame I can feel that when Jesus tells us in John 10: 10
“I have come in order that you may have life - life in all it’s fullness“
(ST P.“ I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.“
my response has been, “I don’t want it, I can’t cope with it“.
How can I be a Christian, knowing the love of God and the sacrifice of Jesus and the guidance of the Holy Spirit and still feel this way. And even as I say that, I am aware of the nonsense of that sort thinking, as if I would be ashamed of being Diabetic, or of having a broken leg! Depression is a condition not a lifestyle choice.
So then I become perplexed and cross, why doesn‘t my heavenly father heal this condition, make it go away and free me to live more fully for him and in his abundance.
And yet, despite my best efforts God loves me in all my confussion. I know this, even when I’m lost in heavy cloud and can’t see or feel him close by.
Like Martha and Mary feeling abandoned by their friend Jesus who does not heed their call when they are in desperate need of him, still I wait , alert for his arrival once more. Till I hear him “Get up! Get up! There is more for you to live yet“.
Recently Correspondance was published posthumously, from Mother Theresa of Calcutta, the catholic nun who devoted her life to the care of the very poorest people in what is now Colcatta. In it she writes that for the last 50 years of her life, while continuing to do her work on the streets of Colcatta, she could no longer feel God’s presence and longed for his return in her life. I don’t know if she felt him with her again before she died, I hope so.
Still it was shocking to hear of that despair, from someone so devoted to doing God’s work, to being those hands and feet, and yet Mother Theresa kept faith, kept working, kept waiting.
I keep coming back to Verse 14 in this morning’s reading;
‘So Jesus told them plainly “Lazurus is dead, but for your sake I am glad that I was not with him, so that you will believe. Let us go to him.”
(ST P. ‘So then he told them plainly, “Lazurus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.“‘
I keep tripping over this verse. Was it a good thing, that this bad thing happened to Lazarus so that in resurrecting him, Jesus could show to his disciples the power of God? Is it a good thing when I feel overwhelmed and overcome? How is the glory of God present or about to be made present in those times? Can depression ever be seen as a blessing, this thing that reduces my ability to rejoice in God’s abundant life? Haven’t I failed? What kind of a witness to the joy of a Christian life do I present?
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 1;4
‘He (God)helps us in all our troubles, so that we are able to help others who have all kinds of troubles, using the same help that we ourselves have received from God‘.
(ST P. (God) ‘comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.‘)
So perhaps there is a strange blessing here. It’s neither a good thing or a bad thing when I am overcome, it is simply the thing that happens to be lived with in God’s strength, and the blessing that can fall from it, is a matter of empathy, of simply being in a position to share, to say, ‘I am a Christian and this happens to me I get depressed.
We, here, are all God’s beloved but imperfect creation, we all have challenges and difficult times and it’s alright.‘
In his book ‘The Jesus I never Knew‘, Philip Yancey writes,
‘We are all desperate, and that is in fact, the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.
I reflect on those words and those of Paul’s to the Corinthians. That Paul ,who as Saul persecuted Christians unto death before coming to know Jesus as his own personal saviour, should become the great spreader of the Gospel of God’s safety net of absolute Grace.
God can use the most unlikely candidates to be about his business.
On the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That is the ideal we strive to attain and yet Simon Peter, the disciple who three times denied ever knowing Jesus after Christ was seized in the Garden of Gethsemane, this denying disciple is the one Jesus chooses to found his church.
Peter and Saul who became Paul, How comforting for those of us awash with imperfection, what an encouragement, that the forgiving Christ should use those two in all their imperfection to spread his message of perfect love.
As Cameron said last Sunday, we humans lack God’s divine perspective. In the midst of hard , dark despairing times , we know only the part of the story we are immersed in, God knows beginning to end.
In the midst of our griefs we continue to be held in the safety net of God’s absolute grace; and that perhaps is where faith lives, in the trusting to God’s perspective in the dark times, like the disciples following where Jesus tells them, in this mornings reading, even when they are confused about why: May we keep faith in continuing to be about God’s plan like mother Theresa, even when we feel far from Christ’s presence. Keep faith in trusting that Christ is sitting alongside us in our sorrows, as he sat alongside the grieving sisters Martha and Mary, as he sat alongside me in that hospital ward in Bristol. May we keep faith in the knowledge that we will continue to experience bursts of joy in our dark times. That Christ will come to us in our own Bob Monkhouse moments and still we may not recognise him at the time.
Perhaps our blessing is a Godly community here in Herne Hill, in which to stand in all our imperfections, in all our struggles and say thank you Jesus that I am given the gift of your safety net of absolute grace, thank you Jesus that unworthy as we are, you love us beyond anything we can imagine, thank you Jesus that you walk alongside us in our dark times, that in our failures the forgiveness of Christ on the cross can be ours, the abundant life can be ours and in your time with your perspective if only we keep faith your plan for us will become clear.
Thank you Jesus.
Amen
I always thought that if I were to write an autobiography it would be titled ‘Bob Monkhouse saved my life’.
I don’t know how many of you here know who Bob Monkhouse was, but from the 1960’s through to the 1990’s he was one of Britain‘s most popular comedians, along with the likes of Bruce Forsyth, Des O’Connor and my favourite, Les Dawson.
And like many of them Bob Monhouse was a staple of Saturday night Family entertainment Tv …that is to say ‘Cheesy!’
When I was a child Bob had hosted a teatime Saturday show called the Golden Shot . With his immortal catch phrase “Bernie, the bolt!”
The show involved a crossbow attached to a television camera guided by a member of the public shooting a bolt at an exploding target embedded in an apple. There were several rounds. Contestants who’s bolt successfully hit the target in the final round, would set off a flow of golden coins and win fabulous prizes, - a caravan, a holiday…that sort of thing. And meanwhile all the competitive tension was eased by a continuous stream of Bob Monkhouse’s cheesy jokes usually involving mother-in-laws…
As a child I lapped it up, Bob was hilarious!
By the time I was 20, I thought him extremely cringeworthy.
By the time I was 20 I also thought my life was an unbearable burden.
I had developed blinding headaches and for a variety of reasons had gone through anorexia, had a nervous breakdown, flunked my ‘A’ levels and my Oxbridge entrance exams, left home, retaken my ‘A’ levels, dropped out of a law degree; and on a hot August afternoon in my sunny Bristol bedsit – I re-encountered Bob Monkhouse.
I was in the middle of my 2nd overdose attempt.
I had tried at 17, but had taken my migraine pills with neat cinzano, which made me sick and allowed my poor mother time to find me and deal with me.
This time I was more experienced. Everyone who loved me was away on holiday. I had stolen a friend’s supply of barbiturates prescribed to control their epilepsy. Now I took them with water and lay in bed watching my portable black and white TV…waiting for the pills to take effect.
Had I had to describe myself at that time I would have said:
Swamped, overwhelmed, despairing, self-loathing, pathetic, bleak, bad company, out of ideas.
What was happening to me in that moment was all I felt that was left to me.
I was beginning to drift in and out mentally, when up popped Bob Monkhouse on my television screen.
I found myself laughing at some terrible joke he was telling.
I laughed and laughed, and as the laughter subsided I found myself thinking ‘Get Up! Get Up! Get dressed! Hurry! If you can laugh at Bob Monkhouse, you don’t want to die’.
But I did want to die, I had it planned. It was the only thing I was looking forward to, the relief, the release.
And yet there I found myself, weaving down the hot afternoon street to the pub where I knew my friend would be, to make them come up to the hospital with me and tell the staff what I’d taken.
Having your stomach pumped by overstretched, disapproving nursing staff, armed with a bucket, a jug of water, a funnel and a length of rubber tubing is brutal and frightening.
Alone, in an open ward with all the afternoon’s other overdose patients, addicts and alcoholics, - the pain, the noise, the smell, it felt like being in a version of hell. But coming home to that same bedsit, hours later, swollen throat, sore stomach, alone, with no release to look forward to, and no idea what to do with myself, that was worse. Self indulgent, pathetic, weak, was how I felt and very very lonely.
As the Bible tells us, we can encounter God in unexpected places, a burning bush, the road to Damascus, but …Bob Monkhouse?.Really?
I would like to tell you that my life transformed that day, that I was immediately filled with a sense of God in my life and a renewed sense of worthiness and purpose, but I wasn’t and I can’t tell you otherwise.
What I can tell you for certain is that I know now that I encountered God that afternoon in the jokes of Bob Monkhouse. It was God who told me to get up and it was God who kept me walking till I found my friend and got to the hospital. I know that Jesus was squatting down next to that bucket with me in that ward and Jesus was waiting for me when I returned to that bedsit – I just didn’t recognize him yet.
I’d like to be able to tell you that the depression, because that is what it was, went away that day and I have never again yearned not to be here, or been tripped up and overwhelmed by a sense of despair, but I can’t do that either.
I have battled with dark and bleak weights over my life since my teens and some times are better than others. Sometimes I am almost shining with joy, sometimes I am almost immobile with defeat and most of the time I try to keep my horizons at a low enough level as to be manageable on a day to day basis.
There are times when I look at the world around me, with the struggles and sorrows of those I know and love and those I only know of, and I am frustrated by how unable I am to look outwards. And how self indulgent I seem.
Nor can I deny the deep sense of shame I can feel that when Jesus tells us in John 10: 10
“I have come in order that you may have life - life in all it’s fullness“
(ST P.“ I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.“
my response has been, “I don’t want it, I can’t cope with it“.
How can I be a Christian, knowing the love of God and the sacrifice of Jesus and the guidance of the Holy Spirit and still feel this way. And even as I say that, I am aware of the nonsense of that sort thinking, as if I would be ashamed of being Diabetic, or of having a broken leg! Depression is a condition not a lifestyle choice.
So then I become perplexed and cross, why doesn‘t my heavenly father heal this condition, make it go away and free me to live more fully for him and in his abundance.
And yet, despite my best efforts God loves me in all my confussion. I know this, even when I’m lost in heavy cloud and can’t see or feel him close by.
Like Martha and Mary feeling abandoned by their friend Jesus who does not heed their call when they are in desperate need of him, still I wait , alert for his arrival once more. Till I hear him “Get up! Get up! There is more for you to live yet“.
Recently Correspondance was published posthumously, from Mother Theresa of Calcutta, the catholic nun who devoted her life to the care of the very poorest people in what is now Colcatta. In it she writes that for the last 50 years of her life, while continuing to do her work on the streets of Colcatta, she could no longer feel God’s presence and longed for his return in her life. I don’t know if she felt him with her again before she died, I hope so.
Still it was shocking to hear of that despair, from someone so devoted to doing God’s work, to being those hands and feet, and yet Mother Theresa kept faith, kept working, kept waiting.
I keep coming back to Verse 14 in this morning’s reading;
‘So Jesus told them plainly “Lazurus is dead, but for your sake I am glad that I was not with him, so that you will believe. Let us go to him.”
(ST P. ‘So then he told them plainly, “Lazurus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.“‘
I keep tripping over this verse. Was it a good thing, that this bad thing happened to Lazarus so that in resurrecting him, Jesus could show to his disciples the power of God? Is it a good thing when I feel overwhelmed and overcome? How is the glory of God present or about to be made present in those times? Can depression ever be seen as a blessing, this thing that reduces my ability to rejoice in God’s abundant life? Haven’t I failed? What kind of a witness to the joy of a Christian life do I present?
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 1;4
‘He (God)helps us in all our troubles, so that we are able to help others who have all kinds of troubles, using the same help that we ourselves have received from God‘.
(ST P. (God) ‘comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.‘)
So perhaps there is a strange blessing here. It’s neither a good thing or a bad thing when I am overcome, it is simply the thing that happens to be lived with in God’s strength, and the blessing that can fall from it, is a matter of empathy, of simply being in a position to share, to say, ‘I am a Christian and this happens to me I get depressed.
We, here, are all God’s beloved but imperfect creation, we all have challenges and difficult times and it’s alright.‘
In his book ‘The Jesus I never Knew‘, Philip Yancey writes,
‘We are all desperate, and that is in fact, the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace.
I reflect on those words and those of Paul’s to the Corinthians. That Paul ,who as Saul persecuted Christians unto death before coming to know Jesus as his own personal saviour, should become the great spreader of the Gospel of God’s safety net of absolute Grace.
God can use the most unlikely candidates to be about his business.
On the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That is the ideal we strive to attain and yet Simon Peter, the disciple who three times denied ever knowing Jesus after Christ was seized in the Garden of Gethsemane, this denying disciple is the one Jesus chooses to found his church.
Peter and Saul who became Paul, How comforting for those of us awash with imperfection, what an encouragement, that the forgiving Christ should use those two in all their imperfection to spread his message of perfect love.
As Cameron said last Sunday, we humans lack God’s divine perspective. In the midst of hard , dark despairing times , we know only the part of the story we are immersed in, God knows beginning to end.
In the midst of our griefs we continue to be held in the safety net of God’s absolute grace; and that perhaps is where faith lives, in the trusting to God’s perspective in the dark times, like the disciples following where Jesus tells them, in this mornings reading, even when they are confused about why: May we keep faith in continuing to be about God’s plan like mother Theresa, even when we feel far from Christ’s presence. Keep faith in trusting that Christ is sitting alongside us in our sorrows, as he sat alongside the grieving sisters Martha and Mary, as he sat alongside me in that hospital ward in Bristol. May we keep faith in the knowledge that we will continue to experience bursts of joy in our dark times. That Christ will come to us in our own Bob Monkhouse moments and still we may not recognise him at the time.
Perhaps our blessing is a Godly community here in Herne Hill, in which to stand in all our imperfections, in all our struggles and say thank you Jesus that I am given the gift of your safety net of absolute grace, thank you Jesus that unworthy as we are, you love us beyond anything we can imagine, thank you Jesus that you walk alongside us in our dark times, that in our failures the forgiveness of Christ on the cross can be ours, the abundant life can be ours and in your time with your perspective if only we keep faith your plan for us will become clear.
Thank you Jesus.
Amen
posted by Parish Administrator at 12:07 pm
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