Talking to myself after yesterday’s worship service

A friend of mine in the USA sent me the following article early this morning. After my experience of worship yesterday it seemed to be very much addressed to me. So I've done a bit of re-writing on it to make it mine too.
The idea of a Misery Index has been around for a long time — since the early ’70s. It’s actually an economic bellwether that’s determined by factoring inflation and unemployment. Economists reason that when unemployment and inflation are high, that generally spells misery for consumers.
The current Misery Index (for June 2009) is 8.16.
Yesterday was a particularly “low” day in our worship service. It was cold. Many people were away with all manner of ailments, many related to winter. Others had been on holiday and were ill. Others just stayed home, I’m told, because they just don’t feel like coming out at the moment. We struggled with hymns, Bible reading and Prayers. Many parents with children were absent, so our Sunday School was “light on”. I preached as fervently as I could, but the faces looking back at me seemed blank and bored. I came home to a time of “low prayer” – O Lord help me, I feel as if I have been laid low. (Sort of like a ‘Lamentation’.
How does one preach when people are miserable – and the preacher feels miserable too!. Along with the above “winter stuff” I have people in my congregation who have lost their jobs, maybe they might lose their homes, their retirement packages. They’ve watched their stock portfolios plunge in value, and many are delaying retirement because they simply can’t afford to retire right now. People are struggling to make ends meet. How does one preach in such contexts?
This brings me to the Mystery Index, which is suggested to me by what I remember of Gabriel Marcel’s ruminations on the general subject. How one can keep faith and have hope when utterly miserable has got to be the greatest mystery of all time.
Marcel, a philosopher and playwright, has been dead for more than 25 years now, but he’s still worth a read. Called by some a Christian existentialist, he addresses our subject in his book The Mystery of Being, originally delivered as the Gifford Lectures at Harvard.
Although Marcel doesn’t refer to a Mystery Index, in my thinking the Mystery Index is determined by the factors of faith (what Marcel calls “creative fidelity”) and hope. His ideas about being and having, availability and nonavailability are worth review. He says that too often people talk about trying to “have” this or that, when in fact, it isn’t a question of having something, such as love or hope, but being love and hope. A key component in this mystery is how we relate to others. When we make ourselves available to others, we link ourselves with their world and experience. We are present to them and for them, in communication with them. We are at their disposal when they’re in need. They aren’t alone.
When we are present to others, i.e., available to others, they are enabled, or empowered, to be faith and to be hope in miserable times. The problem with faith is that it must be constant and must have someone or something as its object. While God is the ultimate object of faith, our preaching helps mediate that object.
As for hope, Marcel argues that a person who is hope doesn’t accept the current situation as final. Hope isn’t fixed on any particular method of deliverance. Surgery to remove a cancer, for example, may not produce a desired result. But as a person of hope whose hope isn’t linked to a particular soteriological methodology, regardless of a surgical outcome, I am not shaken.
This doesn’t mean that hope is passive or merely a form of stoicism or resignation. Hope might be called “active patience,” and one who is hope is one who knows that God is for him or her, in partnership with him or her.
Our preaching must aim to elevate the Mystery Index, the mystery of faith and hope. It must be a sign that we are making ourselves available to others, helping miserable people become mysterious people! That is, people who understand that their constant faith in God is not misplaced. People of faith and hope are people whose hope and faith shall not go unrewarded.
The alternative is despair, which says that there is nothing — really — worth living for. The reward of faith and hope is that, well, yes, there is much in my current and future reality worth living for. And, by God, I am going to do it. I am going to live — in faith and in hope. In mystery.