Rainy days and Mondays Always get me down
January 25th, 2010I am in the middle of a sadness right now that I can’t seem to shake.
Its raining. Its grey. Its Monday (that’s not really a good one for pastors, though considering so many of us take that day off, if we take a day off).
I’ve done my usual this morning: read the Times, the Daily News, the NY Post, Drudge Report, Google News. They all pretty much say the same things: Haiti (lots dead and extreme suffering), bombs in Baghdad, the John Roberts Supreme Court makes people irrelevant to the electoral process, Democrats are impotent and inept, Republicans are channeling Nancy Regan, “Just Say No!”
But this sadness I feel isn’t really affected by the news, just affirmed by it.
The sadness is from weariness.
Yesterday I preached on the Luke 4 text where Jesus claims Issiah’s vision for freedom and release. I said this proclaimed claim of sight for the blind, release for the captives, good news for the poor is real even if we cannot see it, touch it, feel it, internalize it, or find evidence of its full reality.
Think for a moment: Haiti, among the poorest of the poor, has been the recipient of bad news for a really, really long time. Our fellow citizens, who have made good choices, obeyed the law, have been good and faithful neighbors always, are still suffering because they are drowning in medical bills they cannot pay for illnesses that are not covered by the insurance they bought and paid on for decades.
Its just not right. And, try as I might, pray as I do, fighting the good fight, I become weary and sad that we, as a people, seem unwilling to move ourselves forward. We want scapegoats (Pat Roberts: the Haitians made a pact with the devil to win their freedom from slavery & have been paying for it ever since), hoarding (i.e. blame the welfare moms), revenge (Texas executions). We just seem to be unwilling to move beyond fear.
After Jesus’ first sermon, he went on to point out how God’s grace and mercy had been given to non-Jews, a leper and widow who didn’t deserve these gifts, people who were not to be trusted, given anything and certainly they were undeserving of God’s attention.
The people listening to Jesus were so filled with rage that they wanted to kill him, throw him off a cliff. We’ve seen barely restrained rage of late. Tea Party folks depicting Obama as Hitler. Men showing up to rallies with their guns, loaded, fully on display. All legal, of course, but not all right.
Closer to home, my home, people I have cared about, as a pastor and others as friends, just disappear. Some have died and others just leave and I am left without answers. Each person’s departure compounds the others.
And, sometimes in the midst of this sadness, I return to the basics of faith, those things I’ve known for a long time: prayers, songs, scripture. And I am drawn to something I’ve know for a much shorter time comparatively: no matter how I feel, God is still working, making all things new. God’s success is not stunted by my feelings no matter what they are.
Thanks be to God.