Sermon for Sunday, October 26, 2025 || Proper 25C || Luke 18:9-14

Our last couple of sermons have been about big topics, about how the life of faith compels us to confront injustice, violence, and falsehood. Today, I’m going to change gears and tell you a personal story. The story is about me embracing humility – not as a matter of course, but as a last resort. I’m sharing this story today for three reasons. First, the end of the Gospel reading about exalting and humbling one’s self got me thinking about true humility. Second, today is the two-year anniversary of the climactic moment of the story, so it seems like a good day to share it. And third, talking about mental health openly is the way to destigmatize it, especially for people like me, who think we can just muscle our way through mental health issues.

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Let’s start the story like this: my genetics make me prone to anxiety and depression. The chemicals in my brain do not mix quite right to keep me in the best frame of mind. For the first half of my life, this was not an issue. Other members of my family were dealing with much more severe levels of depression, so any down times I might be feeling seemed inconsequential. And in the grand scheme of things, they were. I was doing just fine with a few blue days thrown in and no anxiety to speak of. Nothing to worry about.

It wasn’t until I was ordained that I experienced my first anxiety attack. It was a Sunday morning at my first church in West Virginia. I don’t remember the details too well, but I do remember locking myself in my tiny office, sitting on the floor with my back to the door with the lights off, and ugly crying to the point of not being able to catch my breath. There was no apparent reason, no specific cause. I did not understand what was happening to me. After about ten minutes, I was tired enough to calm down. I rubbed the tears from my eyes and got on with the day as best I could. I told no one. I think today might actually be the first time I’ve ever spoken about that first attack.

After that, I did not have a panic attack again for several years. At that point, the first attack was an isolated incident, easily dismissed as a one-off. I moved to Massachusetts, Leah and I got married, and then we moved here to Mystic. I still had the occasional blue day, but it was still nothing to worry about. Then in the space of six months, I became the rector here at St. Mark’s, and we had the twins. For the first time in my life, I had real responsibility and real stress.¹

I began having fairly regular panic attacks, one every few months, usually in the days leading up to a funeral. The thing about panic attacks as I experience them is that they seem like something I should be able to stop. I can usually feel them coming on for hours – even days – ahead of time. There’s a creeping feeling of helplessness or dread that nibbles at the corners of my consciousness. Everything feels off. And then, suddenly, I can’t catch my breath. Telling myself I should be able to stop it only makes it worse. The attack itself usually last a few minutes only, but the anticipation and the aftermath lead to a bone-deep exhaustion.

Even with the attacks happening more regularly, I never sought help. Like I said, I thought I could muscle through. I would “man” up, “soldier” on. I didn’t need any of that namby-pampy therapy crap. The closest I came to seeking help was talking to a few sleep specialists about my inability to sleep through the night. They looked for physical symptoms, but did not treat anything mental because I did not give them a reason to.

Then came the season after the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Deferred care meant that many of sick and elderly parishioners died in quick succession. For a while there in 2022 and early 2023, I always had a funeral on my calendar. We lost nearly 35 people in that time frame, and it was in the midst of it that I finally turned to a therapist for grief counseling. By this point, I was hanging on for dear life. But rather than seeing therapy as a helpful way to cope with loss, I secretly saw it as admitting defeat. I wasn’t strong enough to “man”-handle my way through. Because of this defeatist outlook, I did not put my all into the therapy.

Fast forward to the Sunday morning two years ago today. It was the day of our Stewardship Celebration. I had been feeling off since the night before – dizzy, my vision blurring a bit. I made it through the first half of the 8am service when I started feeling intensely hot. My chest was tight. I was disoriented. If I didn’t sit down, I thought I’d pass out. Thankfully, multiple nurses come to the early service, and they took care of me. They made me go to Pequot to rule out a heart attack. The next morning, I went to see my doctor. She prescribed me medication and appointments with a new therapist.

The very public nature of that anxiety attack two years ago set me on a new path. I could no longer hide the thing I should not have been hiding in the first place. I said at the beginning that this is a story about humility. In my dealing (or not dealing) with depression and anxiety, I was acting like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable. I exalted myself. I pretended that I could muscle through my issues alone with nothing but willpower and denial. But Jesus doesn’t call us to be like the Pharisee. Jesus calls us to be like the tax collector, to humble ourselves. In my situation, embracing humility meant seeking help. Embracing humility meant giving up the idea that therapy equals failure. Embracing humility meant recognizing that I wasn’t the only one who had ever felt like this and that there happened to be professionals who could treat me.

Humility is the state we find ourselves in when we discover we aren’t and never have been alone. I can exalt myself as a “self-made man,” but this is and always has been an illusion. Finding humility means getting closer to the truth about life, getting closer to the ground – the “humus” that forms the root of the word. The truth is that all life is interconnected, that even someone who thinks he’s going it alone isn’t. God calls us all into myriad intertwining relationships specifically so we can learn this fundamental truth. It took me nearly fainting right over there finally to learn this truth down in the depths of my being. I share this story with you today to help you embrace humility in your life, especially if you resonate with my fruitless desire to “man” up. This isn’t the way to life. The way to life follows God’s good road, which we walk down, humbly, hand in hand, with one another and with Jesus.

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Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash.

1. Because of my identifying markers – white, male, cis-gendered, straight, able-bodied, economically secure – I have always had my rights protected and thus feel very little stress simply because of existing in my body in our society. I know most people do not have this experience and instead deal with daily stress that I cannot comprehend. ↩︎