I almost did not write this post.
That is not how I usually begin. But this week has not been a usual week, and I think you deserve honesty more than you deserve a polished opener.
My wife, Deacon Dana Godsey, is in the hospital this week. She is receiving care for mental health. Depression has had a hold on her, and it became more than either of us could manage at home. She is where she needs to be, being tended to by people who know how to tend to exactly this kind of pain. I am grateful for that. And I am also exhausted, and frightened, and carrying a kind of sorrow that sits in the chest and does not move.
I am telling you this because I believe in a Church that does not pretend. I believe in a pastor who shows up as a human being, not as a performance of competence. And I believe, more than I have ever believed anything, that what I am about to say to you on Sunday about this week’s Gospel is not theory. It is testimony.
This Sunday is Good Shepherd Sunday. We read from the tenth chapter of John, the passage where Jesus describes himself as the door of the sheep, as the one who calls the sheep by name, as the one who came not to steal and destroy but to give life abundantly. And we pray together the Twenty-Third Psalm.
I have prayed that psalm more times this week than I can count.
“For, even if I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils. For you are with me.” (Psalm 22:4, CPDV)
The valley of the shadow of death. I used to read that phrase as metaphor. I do not read it as metaphor anymore. There is a valley. It is real. You can be walking in it without choosing to, without deserving to, without any warning that the terrain was about to change. And mental illness is one of the roads that leads there, not just for the person who is suffering, but for everyone who loves them.
Depression lies. That is the first thing I want you to know. It tells the person in its grip that they are a burden, that they are past helping, that the darkness is permanent and deserved. None of that is true. But the illness is loud, and it is persuasive, and it does not fight fair. Watching someone you love in that fight, and not being able to fight it for them, is one of the hardest things a human being can experience.
What I have learned this week, or perhaps what I have been reminded of in a way that has gone deeper than before, is that the Twenty-Third Psalm is not a poem for people who are doing well. It is a poem for people who are in the valley and need to be told the truth: you are not alone in it. The shepherd is here. Not at the edge of the valley, waiting for you to emerge. Here. In it. With you.
That is the God I believe in. The one who does not wait at the top of the hill with good news until you make it out. The one who comes down into the dark and walks beside the person who cannot find their own way back to the light.
What the Spirit Builds: TEND
This Sunday is the fourth week of our Easter series, What the Spirit Builds. Each week one word names what the Spirit is constructing in this community. We have walked through TOGETHER, OPEN, and WALK. This week the word is TEND.
Tending is what Good Shepherd Sunday is about. Not the picturesque shepherd with the staff on a hillside at golden hour. The shepherd who gets up in the dark when a sheep is missing. The shepherd who knows the difference between the sound of a sheep that is resting and a sheep that is in trouble. The shepherd who goes into the difficult terrain that the hired hand will not enter, because the sheep belong to him and he will not leave them.
I am telling you about Dana this week because I want you to understand that TEND is not an abstract series word for me right now. It is what this community is being called to do. Tend to each other. Tend to the ones who are in the valley. Check on the ones who have gone quiet. Ask the question you have been hesitating to ask because you are afraid of the answer.
Mental health is still, in too many places, a source of shame. People suffer in silence because they believe, or have been taught to believe, that struggling is a moral failure rather than a human condition. I am refusing that silence. Not to be dramatic. Not for sympathy. But because I am a pastor, and my calling is to go first into the difficult terrain so that the people in my care know they do not have to go there alone.
If you are in a valley right now, I see you. If someone you love is in a valley and you do not know what to do with the helplessness of watching that, I see you too. You are not doing it wrong. You are doing the most human thing there is: loving someone through something you cannot fix. That is not failure. That is faithfulness.
On Sunday we will also hear from the Acts of the Apostles, where Peter finishes his Pentecost sermon and three thousand people recognize something in the proclamation and ask: what should we do? They were contrite in heart, Luke says. The Greek word means pierced, stung, punctured through to the core. Something entered them that they could not defend against.
I know that feeling this week from the inside. Grief and love and fear have a way of getting through all the professional armor. And what I find at the center of it, when the armor is down, is the same thing those three thousand people found: a God who does not leave the sheep when the wolf arrives.
First Peter, our second reading, is written to communities of people who are sojourning in lands not fully their own, who are suffering unjustly, who are being told in various ways that they do not belong. And it tells them: the one who bore our sins in his body upon the tree, who endured without threatening, who handed himself over to the one who judged him unjustly, is now the Pastor and Bishop of your souls. He tends.
Come Sunday. Bring whatever you are carrying. Bring the valley and the shadow and the table that seems like it should not exist given the circumstances but does. Bring the grief and the uncertainty and the love that does not know what to do with itself.
The shepherd calls each one of us by name.
That has never been more real to me than it is this week.
Pax et Bonum,
Bishop Greer
