Dependence: A Christian Sermon

A Story by Seth Armstrong

A fictional story of a Christian sermon that I made up that I feel is very appropriate with all the suffering in our world today.

As the final echoes of the choir’s last song died to a low hum, then to a deep silence, a pit of deep unease settled into Pastor Graham King’s heart.

He ran his fingers back through the thick forest of black curls on his head, feeling the sweat that dampened his scalp. He had thought about this moment all night for, not only last night, but every night for the past week. He had been aching to talk about it, to run his idea past someone else in the church, but he kept his lips sealed. The only one he consulted with the idea was God; he had, ironically, prayed heavily for an answer, to know if what he was about to do was right. He had no answer, at least none that he noticed. Had he simply overlooked something, or was this lack of answer meant to serve as a sign that he was on the right path? Certainly, it could be seen as such.

Pastor Graham mustered his courage, rose from his chair, and strode to the pulpit.

“Amen, amen,” he said heartily from behind the pulpit, keeping the lump in his throat down to the best of his ability and hiding the quivering of his leg. “It is always a joy to listen to our voices lifted high in praise for the King of Kings, especially when the singers are good.”

A slight chuckle was emitted from the congregation of-what, two hundred? That’s what the church was averaging now, and today it seemed like there were even more in attendance than usual. A slight wave of discomfort attempted to cloak Pastor Graham, but the positive response wiped it away. Before he became a pastor, his greatest experience in public speaking were poorly delivered papers in front of a school classroom of thirty peers at the maximum. At the first service he ever preached, which was in front of over a hundred listeners, he thought he was going to collapse. He didn’t jump all of those hurdles just to be brought to his knees know, in what he believed may well be one of the most important messages he had ever preached.

Behind him, the large projector screen flashed to life, displaying a screen that was entirely black, all except for one white word directly in the center: PRAYER.

Pastor Graham looked back at the screen for a moment, down to his notes, swallowed the lump in his throat, and began to speak.

“Prayer has many purposes,” he began. “It is the most pure and potent form of communication ever perceived. It’s used as a form of comfort in a time of need, and it is occasionally abused in a time of desire to ask for what we want. It’s a way to feel good about ourselves; it reminds us that we worship a god that is willing to listen to the needs and desires of creatures that are so far below him, and, on that same tangent, it is a way of reminding us that we can solicit help from an all-powerful god that knows and seeks what is best for us. Prayer is the greatest tool of mankind, and the fact that God listens to all that we ask and all that we say to him is one of the most humbling things about being human.”

A few scattered shouts of “Amen!” rose throughout the congregation.

Pastor Graham gripped the sides of the pulpit a bit tighter.

“Philippians 4:6 tells us: ‘Do not be anxious about anything,¹ but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God,’” he continued. “And Romans 8:26 tells us that the Spirit helps us in our weakness, and even when we do not know what to pray for, He will intercede for us with groans that words cannot express.” He paused. “Colossians 4:2 commands us to devote ourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful.”

Pastor Graham paused again for a moment and scanned the room. The near-silence didn’t shock him. He had noticed in many other churches that the congregation typically gave some sort of response to a reading of scripture, but that was almost never so here. He liked to believe that it was because his congregation was waiting for him to make his point; that’s when all the amens came, though he was unsure how many this sermon would be greeted with.

“As I said before,” he continued, “prayer is mankind’s greatest tool. However, there is one thing that prayer cannot do. Not directly, anyway.”

The word on the projector screen changed to: FELLOWSHIP.

“When we pray,” Pastor Graham said, “we talk to God. We implore for His unstoppable help and wisdom. But, sometimes, what we more immediately need, is not merely His help and wisdom; we need fellowship.”

Most of the expressions around the room were passively intrigued.

“Before I became a pastor,” Pastor Graham went on, “I was a counselor. I counseled troubled couples, I counseled people that needed financial help, I counseled people in my personal life, and I even counseled people that were diagnosed with insanity. But the counsels that stuck with me the most were never those with the insane; they were those with the depressed, especially the teenagers.

In all my time as a counselor, I had thirty four teenagers tell me to my face that I kept them from committing suicide, and there were several others that, while they never told me themselves, I am convinced that I managed to keep them going. And those are just the teenagers; that’s not even included the depressed adults I managed to save.”

A round of applause filled the room, sprinkled with shouts of “Amen!” or “Praise God!”

“But you want to know something?” Pastor Graham said after the applause died down. “With all of these children, I rarely ever prayed for them, and I never prayed with them.

I grew up, as many of you know, in a deeply Christian family. But like most of us, I started getting doubts as a teenager, and they followed me into my twenties and my career. I never fully renounced God, but I wasn’t always a very loyal Christian. I didn’t believe in the power of prayer. No matter how hard I prayed for those starving kids in Africa to get food, no matter how hard I prayed for the homeless on our streets to be sheltered, no matter how hard I prayed for crimes like murder and rape to come to an end, my prayers never came true, not even while I was a devout Christian when I was younger. At best, all we saw were meager changes in the situations, so I thought to myself, why even bother?

Now, I pray religiously, no pun intended. But while I was treating all of these depressed people, I rarely ever prayed for any of them. As I said, what was the point, right? When I did pray for them, it was in the confines of my home, and I would’ve never even thought to ask them during one of our sessions if they wanted to pray about it. Of course, practically, I didn’t want to start to seem like I was prying into their lives by pounding them with questions about religion, even though I most often knew what their religious beliefs were. Most of them were Christians, a couple Jews, one or two Muslims, three or four Buddhists, and I think I only ever got one atheist. But their religious views are completely and utterly beside the point; the point is this: whenever I prayed for them, it was a rare event that was half-hearted. But I still saved them.”

He paused and looked around the room. There was no applause or shouts of praise this time, not yet. The room was still as if the entire room had been frozen in time. He wondered what the congregation was thinking of him, shook the thought away quickly, and continued.

“After thirteen years in the counseling field, I had changed a lot. By this point, I had firmly rebuilt my faith in God, and I left the counseling field because I felt that God had been calling me to be a preacher. Or maybe He said a teacher; I’m not quite sure, but it’s a fifty-fifty chance, right?” The crowd chuckled. “However, although I left the counseling field, I was still called upon to do the work. By both other people and God himself. It was never anything official, but if a couple was having a problem with their relationship, someone was getting depressed, a financial crisis arouse, or something of the sort, I was called. This time, I did pray. I prayed with the people unless they declined the offer, and I prayed constantly for them while I alone. And you know what happened? The exact same thing. My counseling was almost always successful. When I talked about the amount of people that I kept from committing suicide, that wasn’t a part of a whole; I never lost a depressed person to suicide, whether I prayed for them or not. Not once.”

The congregation was clapping, but Pastor Graham hardly noticed it. Still, he stopped himself from continuing long enough for them to get it all out.

“But there’s a first time for everything, right? That’s how the saying goes, anyway. Last summer, I was called upon to help a boy by a family that attends a different church. I said that I never lost a person to suicide, but there were several times that I came close, and it was never an easy or fast process. I was helping this boy for a couple weeks. As per usual, he didn’t seem interested in help, and he didn’t want any at first, but he gradually began to open up. And one night, he called me. It was, I think, one in the morning. Woke my wife and I up. I went outside and talked to him a little bit, but I was tired, and my mind was elsewhere. I had dealt with several cases of suicidal people, and he had never seemed like one of them. After a while, you get to the point where you realize that there are certain people that, no matter how depressed they seem, you know they aren’t going to off themselves. And, after a while, you can tell the difference once you get to know them. Of course, just because they won’t kill themselves doesn’t minimize their suffering, but it gives you a cushion to know that you don’t have to worry about things getting too crazy. That night that this boy called me, I made a rash choice. Until then, I hadn’t been able to really tell if he was really willing to kill himself. That night, I decided that he wasn’t. And earlier in my career, I’m better at it now, when I realized that a person wasn’t going to kill him or herself, I didn’t really work as hard as I could’ve because I knew there wasn’t going to be a huge threat. I cared about them, and I wanted them to get better, and I did try, but why work more than you have to? For a typical depressed person, it usually takes less work to get them out of their rut than it is to talk someone down from a ledge. So, if they weren’t going to kill themselves, I didn’t always put the pedal to the metal because I knew it would work out. That night I talked to this kid, I labeled him as someone that wouldn’t dare commit suicide. Looking back on it, it was a stupid and rash decision, but I was tired, and my mind had been wandering, so I wasn’t quite thinking straight. I helped him as much as I thought was necessary because sometimes people will get offended if you get too sappy on them, and after a while, he seemed okay, so we said goodnight, I promised to pray for him, and we hung up.

I prayed for him. I prayed a ton. I always did after talking to my patients. Of course, I mentioned them in all my prayers, but my prayers that were devoted entirely to them came after our meetings. That’s when I had the best perspective, you know? So, I stayed in my living room and prayed for…well, I can’t remember how long it was, but I was there for a while, practically praying my soul out for this kid. Did I think there was any real danger in him? No, but I prayed as if there were.

That next day, I was notified at exactly twelve forty one that he had been found dead in his garage, hanging from the ceiling. He was fifteen years old.”

Pastor Graham paused and took a moment to wipe the stinging tears away from his eyes. “Sorry,” he murmured to the crowd before going on.

“I said at the beginning of this service that prayer is the greatest tool of humankind, for it is our way of speaking to God. Do I stand by that? Of course. But the powers of prayer have become, it seems to me, perverted over the years. How many times have you seen a tragedy on the news like a flood or a murder or a terrorist attack and thought, ‘well, I’ll pray for those people.’? I’m sure that happens often. It does for me. But in the wakes of these actions, does it very often occur to you how much you can donate to these people? Does it occur to you that you can send them something as simple as a card to sympathize with them? How many charities do you donate to? How many research foundations? Whenever you hear that someone you know is having a problem, are you right by his or her side, ready to let them lean on you and pour out everything, or do you just say a few nice words, vow pray for them, and move on? God’s power is unstoppable, but it isn’t always used. Folks, let’s not kid ourselves; God could heal every disease in this world, feed and shelter every person, and altogether eliminate all hatreds and violence from this world at any given moment, but He doesn’t. I’m not saying this to challenge Him or anything; what He does is His will. What I’m saying is that there are billions of people suffering in one way or another in this world. In fact, over one billion people in this world live on less than a dollar a day. You can pray for these people all that you want to, but I believe that if God had wanted to snap His almighty fingers and cure all the ailments of people in this world, He would’ve done it by now. Yes, there is suffering in this world. All around us. But it will not end by us sitting in here and praying. If we want this suffering to end, we have to do something about it ourselves.

Do I blame myself for the suicide of that fifteen year old boy I couldn’t save? Yes and no. No because it’s not my fault that he was depressed but yes because I could’ve saved him. There were so many other things that I could’ve done to save his life, but I didn’t. And I’m not talking about things that I’ve thought up since then; I’m talking about methods I’d used since the first depressed person walked through the doors of my office when I was a counselor. But you know what? I had stopped doing that. Not completely, and not all of it, but I had stopped doing a lot of that to an extent because I was so focused on the healing powers of God. I was so convinced that the harder I prayed and called out to Him, the easier it would be to heal my subject. But I was wrong. Dead wrong.

You see, God can heal every ailment in the world at any moment if he wanted to, but He doesn’t. He doesn’t. Just let that sink in. Before I finish this sentence, at least one child will die from a preventable cause. During this sermon, do you have any idea how many people will be raped? I don’t, and I don’t want to think about it. So much needless suffering is constantly going on in the world, and I agree that evil is of Satan, and it is by his influence that evil exists at all, but I don’t believe he’s the entire reason. Forgive me if this sounds callous, but I believe that one of the major reasons for all this suffering in the world is us.

Yes, us. I’m not pinning it on just, say, everyone in this room, so don’t misunderstand me. I’m pinning it on most all of our brothers and sisters in Christ. That’s not to say that the entire burden of saving this planet is on our shoulders, for there are countless moral and outspoken people that are of other religions or atheists of no religion at all. However, I believe that we have an obligation through our lord and savior to fixing this world that we screwed up. This world that we as a species screwed up. For this moment, forget the story of Adam and Eve or any other creation theory. In fact, forget the concept of original sin. Think instead like an atheist about the origins of the world: it’s random. The reason I tell you to do this is so when I say ‘we screwed up the world,’ you know I’m not just talking about original sin. As a species, we have corrupted and vilified this beautiful gift God has given us, and it’s our job to fix it; it’s not God’s job.

I know we are not Catholic, but one thing we have in common with Catholics is that we are Christian. The Vatican is estimated to be worth ten to fifteen billion dollars total, and they pay no taxes on any of this. Do you know how many people could be fed with that much money? How many people could be clothed? How many homes could be built for the homeless? Jesus very famously challenged the faith of a rich man in the Bible by telling him to sell everything he owned and to give all the money to the poor. But as the Christendom of our modern world continues to grow richer, and the world’s wealth gap continues to grow larger, and more and more people are being led to suffer, I’m beginning to think that Jesus challenged the wrong rich person; I’m not questioning Him, but I feel that the challenge He issued in the Bible is a challenge that should be sent to the Vatican and to every other rich Christian organization in this world because that’s not who we are; that’s not who Jesus founded us to be. In fact, when Jesus found out that there was commercial business happening in the church, he started flipping over tables and chasing the merchants around with a whip. That’s one of my favorite passages to think of when I’m in need of a good mental image. I mean, just imagine Jesus chasing people around with a whip while flipping over tables. Jesus was a selfless man that hung around prostitutes and cripples, was never rich, healed and fed people without asking for money in return, and lived life as a poor man. He did all this to show that our faith has nothing to do with money. There is no church that can be built that is worth more than the lives of all the suffering people that could otherwise be saved with the money funding it. These megachurches that keep popping up are an insult to the beliefs that Christianity is supposed to be founded on, and the Vatican is the worst insult of them all. In Biblical times, Christians were a poor people that did what they could merely because it was the right thing and most usually tried their hardest to help others, no matter the cost. That’s what Jesus taught us to be. But instead, in this modern world, we have transformed ourselves into a cult that, for the most part, spends so much time amassing more and more money and rarely increasing the amount we give to other people. We take in money, and instead of using either our money or time, we just pray harder and rely on God to take care of everything. But that’s not how it should work.

Jesus was selfless. Why aren’t we?

Now, I’m not standing up here to tell you to go home and sell everything you own and donate all the money to the poor. In fact, that’s a rather broken system; if you sell everything you own and give all the money away, then you’ll be poor, and all the people that now have money will have to sell everything they own to fund you. But what I’m saying is that we, as a religion, have been constantly shying away from our duty to save this world. I’m not saying that if we start donating to cancer foundations and talking a couple kids out of suicide that sin will evaporate, but there is so much more that we could easily be doing that we’re not.

I was recently at a church in Florida when I went there for vacation in the summer. When they took up their offerings, the pastor said that all of it was going to fund a new church because the one they were at was so full. At the time, this seemed logical to me. I mean, the church was pretty crowded and all. But now that I look back on it, I find it offensive to the foundations of Christianity. All the offerings that were collected for that new church could’ve been used to save so many lives. Capacity issue? Okay, well sell the church, donate all that money, and have service in an open area outside or in a big community building. I guess I sound like a hypocrite since I’m preaching from my pulpit in this air-conditioned church, right? But this is one of the last services we will be having here. I am selling this church, and all this money will be appropriately spent to help the rebuilding of this world. We will still be having service, don’t get me wrong, but much of our service from now on will be held either outside or in a community center or something. I don’t know. This is all kind of rash. But over this past week, I have been revisited by a dream that hasn’t hit me in a long time. It was a dream of that fifteen year old boy that I lost to suicide. Let’s call him Bobby. It’s not really of him doing anything, but I can’t sleep without seeing him and thinking about everywhere I went wrong. I could’ve done so much more to help him if I hadn’t been so reliant on God to do all of the work. And I don’t want to think about all the children that are going to starve to death that could’ve been saved with a donation of the money that keeps this church going that we could be saving, but we aren’t. So, the church will be sold.”

The look on the face of every member of the congregation told Pastor Graham that they were floored, and he felt absolutely crazy, but there was a driving feeling behind this feeling, like a lift from God himself, and he knew that he was doing the right thing with this sermon.

“I’ve probably floored you all, I get that,” he continued. “I know. I didn’t even tell my wife about this. She’s probably going to kill me now.” The crowd chuckled.

He gripped the sides of pulpit even harder and dove into the endgame.

“I’m approaching the conclusion of this sermon,” he said. “The theme of this sermon may sound like it’s about greed, but it’s about dependence. I had so much dependence in God that I let a kid commit suicide. You might argue that it wasn’t my fault or that God wanted him back right then, but I disagree. Because I knew that kid well enough to know what would work, but I didn’t do any of it because I was too busy praying. Prayer is like medicine; it’s wonderful and healing in appropriate proportions, but too much of it can be destructive. Now, that’s not all types of prayer; you can pray to simply talk to God whenever you want and not get enough of that. What I’m talking about is when we pray for other people. As I said earlier in this message, if God were going to snap His fingers and save the world, He would’ve done it by now. God does want suffering on this Earth to end, I’m sure he does, but he’s not going to do it himself; we need to stop asking Him to solve all the world’s problems and start fixing them ourselves. People are starving. Murder runs rampant. Terrorism is all over the news. People are getting raped, stolen from, kidnapped, everything. Homeless people need shelter. Our infrastructure and our climate need fixed. Our people need saved. World corruption needs ended. But us sitting down every evening over a meal to pray for those that don’t have meals isn’t going to get them one. I asked this before, and I’ll ask it again: whenever you see large amounts of refugees fleeing from their war-torn countries, is one of your first thoughts about what you’re going to donate and how much to help them out, or is it merely you saying that you’ll pray for them? When you see hear about some deadly disease, how much do you donate to fund the cure and how often? When there’s an opportunity to work in a soup kitchen or give clothes to those that need it, how often are you volunteering? I could go on, but in short, when it comes to being Christ-like, how Christ-like are you? I like to think that Christians are some of the most generous people in the world, and even if it is true, we’re not nearly generous enough. Now, I’m not saying we should all go sell our houses and go wandering around in poverty like Jesus did, but there is so much more that we could and should be doing that we’re not. Christianity, in the regard to helping others, has become a culture more of dependence than charity; we could be donating more of both time and money, and we should be, but we aren’t. We aren’t doing so because we’ve adapted this idea that if we just shoot up a prayer to God every now and then about the people that are suffering from real, true problems, that that will somehow fix everything. But it won’t! It won’t! You want to get the homeless people off the streets? Help them! You want the starving fed? Feed them! You want the sick healed? Fund them! Look, my people, praying to God is a wonderful thing, and asking for His help is great, but with issues like these, He isn’t going to help. Not on a large scale, anyway. If we want the homeless sheltered, we have to build the houses. If we want the hungry fed, we have to get them food. If we want the sick healed, we have to fund the cures and make sure they can afford it. If we want crime rates to go down, we have to fight them. God will not fix this for us. He gave us this world, and we screwed it up. So when we want to fix it, we have to do so. We’ve grown too much dependence on God, and we’re not focused enough on doing what we as humans can do.”

It felt as if not only all the eyes of the congregation, but all the eyes of the world, were upon him.

He took a deep breath and finished.

“I could’ve saved Bobby’s life. But his life isn’t the only one I could’ve saved that I haven’t. The world is starving. People are homeless. War tears nations apart. Terrorism strikes fear and paranoia into the hearts of all. Murder, rape, torture, kidnappings, mutilation, and any crime you can imagine are running rampant through our world. Yet here at home, Christians are more concerned with whether or not two men can be joined in marriage, whether or not Caitlyn Jenner is a man or woman, and whether or not prayer should be mandated in schools. I’ve got a wake-up call, folks: there are real problems in this world. Starvation. Homelessness. Disease. Murder. Rape. Suicide. Theft. Terrorism. Real problems. But whenever these problems arise, it seems that most Christians are merely content to pray about it and say ‘what happens is God’s will.’ But I’m not sure it is. I think God’s will is for us to fix this problem. And I’m not even just talking about us as a religious group; I mean us as a species. The human race has to work together, no matter the skin color, no matter the sexuality, no matter the nationality, no matter the religion, no matter anything. Jesus worked with unrighteous people to achieve righteous goals, and those people thereby became righteous. But in our world, we’re too worried about making people righteous before we work for righteous goals; we’re going at it backward.

There are real problems in this world; there are problems we need to be fixing. But we’ll never get that far if we don’t shake off this culture of utter dependence on God for every little thing. Yes, God wants the world to be saved, but that’s what he made us for. If we want this world to survive, we have to save it ourselves.

When it comes to these problems that we face, no matter what it is, I want you to think like an atheist, much like I asked you earlier. This idea that I’m about to propose was popularized in a story told in Chassidic literature. In short, a student asks his master why God created atheists, and the master answered that it was to teach us the art of compassion, for when an atheist does something compassionate like donates to charity, visits a sick person, helps someone in need, or cares for the world, he or she is not doing it because he or she was commanded to by God to be good; atheists do these things out of mere compassion. So, the next time you hear about something in this world that is terribly wrong, don’t let your first thought be ‘I’ll pray for that.’ Instead, imagine that there is no God above that would be willing to help us; imagine we are all on our own, and instead of imploring for help from this higher being, let your first thought be ‘How can I help?’

And now, everybody, let us pray. And when we do, let us not pray for God to solve the problems that we’re thinking of; let us pray for us to figure out how we can solve these problems ourselves.” ²²