Just in case you have been feeling a little bit blue lately, there may be a reason for that more than you thought.  January 23 of this year, just two weeks ago tomorrow, was determined by one British psychologist to be the most depressing day of the year.  On that day, the bad winter weather, broken New Year’s resolutions and credit card debt from the holidays all dogpile people’s emotions, and, according to him, make more people depressed that one day than any other day of the year (“Jan. 23 most depressing day of the year: report,” CTV.ca, Tuesday, January 24, 2006).  Who knows?

At one time or another, nearly every person alive knows what it means to be depressed.  Whoever it was that penned these words of dialogue between God, the prophet Isaiah and the people of Israel knew about depression.  You can hear it!  “Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God’”?  Someone, somewhere, had been complaining that their way was hopeless.  They were not griping just because they didn’t have anything better to do.  Apparently, that was they way they, in fact, truly felt! 

Have you ever felt that way?  Have you ever felt like you were completely blocked in on every side?  That there was no daylight breaking through into your darkness and there was no hope for your dilemma, no matter what?  Perhaps the children of Israel had a better reason to feel that way than most, at least in this particular moment.  The prophet Isaiah had been given a word by God to give them a word of hope and encouragement to people who knew firsthand the oppression of slavery.  They felt and believed that all of their future had been completely cut off, that all of their dreams were dead and, worst of all, that God didn’t seem to care!  Whoever wrote these words, I’m confident, knew something about depression.

Some people only experience depression as a passing, once-in-one-moment-in-time event.  At the end of some terrible tragic loss or crisis in their life, the darkness closes in.  But, just as quickly, they pass through it like a bad cold, the sun breaks through the clouds  and then it’s over and gone and done with and they never again deal with it.  Others, it seems, are predisposed from birth to depression all of their days.  Even when the sun is up, sadness clouds their ability to see clearly, like soot from a poorly ventilated furnace clouds the windows of their minds so that, no matter how brightly the sun shines, their world is always dark.  For them, it’s always wintertime in their soul.  The wind always blows cold.  Sadness, deep, unrelenting sadness, is their constant companion no matter which way the road turns as they travel.  Depression, for them, is not just an emotional experience, like a whale in a troubled ocean, it swallows them whole, body, mind and soul.

These words from Isaiah’s prophecy are relevant, not only to the children of Israel who were suffering under the depression of oppression, but also for anyone, anytime, who has ever felt like they were about to faint or stumble or fall under the load of life, regardless of the cause.  There is one phrase in this text that particularly catches my heart’s attention.  Isaiah reminds the people of Israel that, though they may seem to themselves to be almost insignificant in the grander scheme of things, “like grasshoppers,” the opposite is actually true.   No one has escaped God’s attention.  No matter how small or insignificant they may feel, the creator of all the universe “numbers them, calling them all by name . . . not one is missing.”  The God who created this grand universe knows each of us by name!  How remarkable is that?!

January 19, NASA launched the New Horizons spacecraft.  It was designed to explore the outer reaches of our solar system, all the way to Pluto and beyond.  After launch, it was to reach a top speed of 47,000 per hour.  Which means that, though it took the first astronauts who landed on the moon in 1969 three days to reach the moon, New Horizons reached the moon in only nine minutes!  Yet even at that speed, our solar system is so vast that it will take New Horizons ten years just to reach Pluto!  Ten years at 47,000 milers per hour!  Yet, even when it has gotten to Pluto, it will have just touched the edge of one, puny little solar system, not even the beginning of the end of the universe!  The distances to which our Creator-God stretched the planets and starts are absolutely impossible to grasp. 

Because of our advanced technology, we are able to understand from an even greater perspective what the prophet was saying.  This everlasting God who created all the heavens and the earth, who stood above the earth, this God is so grand and so magnificent to distances no man could ever measure or touch, yet he knows each of us by name.  Individually.  You do not live one day when you escape the notice of God’s attention.

Listen to this promise again.  “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.  He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.  He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.  Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

This scripture paints a picture of a life that has become too heavy for even the strongest, the youngest, the most virile, to handle.  It is a life that even those in the prime of life’s youth and energy will eventually, at some time, find overwhelming.  Even they will stumble and fall under the weight of the load.  The crude translation of this text might well be that there really is no such thing as a superman or a superwoman.  Eventually, life overwhelms all of us.  Yet, the promise of God is that when we stumble, and when we fall, and when we faint, we will not escape his caring attention.  He knows our name, and he is paying attention to our life individually.  If we give him room to work, if we wait on him, in time, one way or another, we will discover that, no matter how it may have felt, we were not in fact standing alone in the darkness.  He was there with us, all along.  We are never left to bear life’s burden alone! 

One of the ways I like to look at this scripture is to be reminded of the fact that, of all the people in the world, no one has God’s attention more than those who are fainting, powerless, weary, and exhausted.  If you fit into any one of those categories today, no one in this room has God’s attention more than you.  God has promised that, in that moment of supreme weakness, he will be supremely present.  How do we know?  We know, because in Christ, God has come into our puny little worlds to be with us.  He did not FedEx his power to us.  He didn’t even send it by messenger, through a prophet or a preacher.  In the person of Christ, he has come to get into this human dilemma with us.  To live with us.  Under the burden of it all.

There is a pretty clear indication that, after a night of torturous beating before his crucifixion, even those who had tortured Jesus knew the cross would be too heavy for him to bear alone.  So, they pressed a man named Simon, a Cyrenean, into service to help Jesus bear the cross all the way to Calvary (Matthew 27:32).

There are two things about Jesus and his cross bearer that are worthy of note.  One of them is something T.D. Jakes expressed well not long ago.  He said that, unless you see something of yourself in the person who is coming to you for help, you will not be able to help those who come to you for help.  Unless we have suffered something of what they are suffering, we will not be able to be the sympathetic presence of Christ in their life.  Which means one of the reasons that God allows us to suffer depression, discouragement, and failure is because it enables us to actually be more helpful to people when they are suffering and broken.

It’s taken me a long time to learn this.  The call to ministry, and not just the professional ministry, but any ministry, is not just a call to preach the gospel.  It is a call, in fact, to help people reconcile their conflicts with God and with each other.  I have learned that we cannot help people resolve their conflicts with God and with each other unless we are willing to enter into that conflict with them.  A parent could never help a child deal with the conflicts of growing up unless that parent had been a child once, even if it’s impossible for our children to believe that their parents weren’t born full-grown adults.  We cannot sympathize with pain we are isolated from ourselves, especially if we choose to isolate ourselves from conflict in order to avoid pain.

Jesus is God, coming to live with us in our own experience, to be bloodied in this human conflict with us so that when we are oppressed, and when we are down, and when we are desperate, we have the sympathy of the Jesus who cried out a cross, “My God, my God, how could you have possibly forgotten me?”  Because of this table (referring to the Communion Table), because of what Jesus did, we can be as angry at God as we ever want to be for how our lives have turned out, but we can never legitimately say to God, “You don’t know how I feel.”  This table reminds us every time we take the supper that God indeed does know our experience of suffering intimately.  He is truly, legitimately, our sympathetic savior (Hebrews 4:15). 

There’s one other lesson we can learn from Jesus’ cross bearer, as an image of the truth promised in Isaiah 40.  Simon almost certainly would have been just another nameless face in the crowd that gathered to watch Jesus stumble to the cross had he not been pressed into cross-bearing service.  Now, as long as there is scripture, his name will never be forgotten. 

You may forget the name of your first grade teacher.  I know I have.  You may forget all of the geometry you ever learned in high school.  I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten all of that.  You may forget all the history you learned studying for a college final exam.  You may even forget your wife’s birthday - once.  But you will never, ever, as long as you have memory at all, forget the names of those who got with you under the load of the cross you are called to bear.  Never.

Those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength, in part because, by the grace of God, they never wait alone.  If nothing else, in the presence of his Spirit, God’s waits with us while we wait, even for God.  Waiting is the harder part.  Partly because we don’t understand what it is to wait.  It seems passive, indifferent, powerless.

Someone recently passed these words along to me, spoken by Henri Nouwen, the great priest who spent most of his ministry with the mentally disabled.  People whose lives would never make sense.  People who suffered in emotional and mental darkness all of their existence.  Nouwen once said, “Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something.  Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are.  When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are.  We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else.  Be patient and trust that the treasure you are looking for is hidden in the ground on which you stand” (Source of Nouwen’s quote unknown).

We’ve come here this morning to worship.  Worship is the practice of patience and waiting.  The practice of giving room for God to work.  Of waiting to see what God might yet make of life, despite what we’ve made of it or others have made of it for us.  Patience . . . waiting . . . is the willingness to believe the treasure we are looking for in life, the treasure of hope, the treasure of meaning, the treasure of deliverance, is hidden in the ground on which we stand in this very moment, where we do not wait alone, but indeed God has come to wait with us.