by Dr Liz Young
(Based on Matt 9:35-10:23; Ro 5:1-8)
My sermons are often influenced by my current reading: this week’s New Scientist had a great article on why we should improve our mindset, and our book club book for this month is a junior mental health nurse’s reflections on her experience in the United Kingdom. It’s titled The Language of Kindness. Until recently, kindness was the only treatment we could offer the mentally ill: and still the most effective treatment for depression is cognitive behavioural therapy, where the patient learns to talk more positively to themselves and so improve their mood, though psilocybin, from magic mushrooms, can be a one off shot to reset our mood (but no good for schizophrenia).
What can we do to improve our community’s mental health? How can we use our stress positively?
Offering kindness to others always improves our mood. I have appreciated the many kindnesses I’ve received over the past year, and our Op Shop radiates mutual kindness.
The other book I read (and cried over) – recently been released as a film – was the ultimate act of kindness: the story of the donation of a heart transplant to a terminally ill boy. The donor was brain dead after a car accident, and her younger sisters pushed her father to offer up her heart for organ donation, for transplantation, as she’d always been so giving in life. Because of the publicity about the boy who received the transplant, the donor family realised who their sister’s heart went to, and the families got in touch, although it was not current professional policy, for privacy reasons. The resulting friendship led to joint work on publicising the need for donors for the many parts of the body that we can donate, as we’ve been designed with replacements: something we need to work on.
Our mindset is our mood default button.
What is mindset?
It’s our intuitive, usually unspoken, internal ‘theory’, about how things work; a theory that shapes what we look for, how we make sense of things, that forms our expectations and our subsequent acts. The writer of the article I read in the Listener was a man – his father had Alzheimer’s, his wife was wanting to divorce him, and he’d recently left a steady job to be self-employed. He was stressed. But he wrote of two ways to respond to stress: he could get anxious, ruminate, dither … Or he could use the adrenalin to focus … if you view stress as enhancing, if you complete written exercises on the power of a positive mindset … your depression and anxiety levels can reduce.
Thinking of this made me wonder how to rewrite it in ‘gospel terms’.
Most of Jesus’s miracles involved altering mindset. In the feeding of the five thousand, for instance, everybody was hiding their food for the day from each other, until one small boy shared his loaves and fishes, and then everyone sat down to share with each other. What a lot of leftovers there were!
Paul, in the reading from Romans, weaves together the themes of faith, love, hope and glory, noting the past work of God helping us, how Christ came to die for us, how we now stand as God’s children. (Jesus charged us to be like little children, and children are usually full of hope, or should be.) These Pauline perspectives give us reason to hope for the future. While we accept that the future for humanity is uncertain, especially at this time, we can trust that God has a plan for us and that he will give us the strength to cope with whatever life sends us. So we can live in hope.
So, what can we do to improve the hope and happiness of those around us? Don’t moan; don’t let the news get you down; take time to enjoy the beauty around us; give thanks for our daily blessings; for friendship. And do something caring for one another each day. Amen
Romans 5:1-5:
Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
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