Dr. Mark Powell: I'd like to begin by asking you... if you know why you're here.
Prot: Of course. You think I'm crazy.
Powell: I prefer the term "ill". Do you think you are... ill?
Prot: A little homesick, perhaps.
Powell: Really? Where is home?
Prot: K-PAX.
Powell: K-PAX?
Prot: ... K-PAX is a planet. But don't worry. I'm not going to leap out of your chest. — dialogue from the 2001 film K-PAX

When a man named Prot (Kevin Spacey) is hospitalized in New York City because he claims to be an alien from the planet K-PAX, it is up to Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges) to determine why he has this delusion. Prot is so convincing in his claims that it isn't long before Dr. Powell, and the audience, begin entertaining the possibility that Prot might just be who he says he is, a being who arrived here on a beam of light.

I once worked with a man who believed he was being hunted by the CIA. He showed me proof in the form of coded messages he had intercepted from newspaper classifieds and from letters sent to him by his parents, who were, he believed, cooperating with the authorities to have him captured. He was extremely competent, even gifted, at his job. Outwardly he gave every indication of being as "normal" as anyone. But as he learned to trust me and felt comfortable sharing his delusions, it became clear that he was not quite right in the head.

The National Institute of Mental Health says that 25% of American adults suffer from a diagnosable form of mental illness in any given year. Whether you know it or not, there are several among your neighbors, friends, and extended family who battle with depression, anxiety disorder, PTSD, OCD, bipolar disease, schizophrenia, and/or scores of other disorders of the mind. Untreated, any of these are debilitating. For the overwhelming majority, there are treatments but no cures. In many cases, mental illness is a lifelong, chronic condition that can be managed but never conquered.

In fact, there are certainly people sitting beside us in church on Sundays who are mentally ill, some of whom are barely holding things together. Rick and Kay Warren's son Matthew committed suicide recently after the pain of his lifelong struggle with depression became too great to bear. I've been there myself several times. I have struggled with depression since my teens, and at times it has filled me with such darkness and despair that I couldn't see a way out. As recently as six months ago, when my usual medication failed me, I wondered if I could escape from the darkness that gripped my mind.

Our theology of mental illness ought to be the same as our theology of physical illness: both are the result of Adam's rebellion and the sin that subsequently tainted creation. Mental illness is no different in its genesis than cancer or stroke or asthma or the common cold, because a mind is only the mysterious and wonderful creation of the brain and all its interactions with the external world over time. We are material beings created to live in a material world, with a soul that will last eternally. That material part of us is fragile and easily broken.

Paul says in Romans 8:24 that while we wait in hope for the transformation of our bodies and minds from material to eternal, the word hope necessarily means we wait for what we do not yet have. The miraculous healing of our minds and bodies is possible — God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine (Eph 3:20) — but it seems more common for God to say to us, as he said to Paul, My grace is all you need for now, because My power is displayed in your weakness. (2 Cor. 12:9)

Regrettably, society stigmatizes men and women who suffer from mental illness. Popular culture makes it the subject of jokes and ridicule, while the church sometimes mistakenly ascribes a spiritual cause to what is a physical condition, a mistake that heaps guilt and shame on people who are already suffering.

Long after the winter rains had disappeared and the ground had turned pale and dusty from baking in the desert sun, there was a spot not far from my house that remained dark and moist. Sinking the blade of my shovel into the earth, I discovered wet soil well below the surface. Not good news. I knew the water line to the house ran deep right along this very path, and I knew what I would find once I dug it up: a leak.

So I shut off the water and started excavating, not quite as carefully as an archaeologist unearthing ruins, but with all the same curiosity. It had been 33 years since I had laid this pipe in the ground, and I had only the vaguest of recollections about what I would find.

The problem was a stress crack along the inside of a 90 degree joint, a crack so small that it was hard to spot, but under 60 pounds of pressure sprayed like a geyser.

A stress crack — mix time, pressure, slight movements of the earth, perhaps some manufacturing defects, and eventually the PVC becomes stressed beyond what it can withstand. Under the relentless pressure of the water within the pipe a crack forms, water escapes, and a trickle becomes an artesian well.

I think of Adam Lanza, the mentally disturbed young man who killed children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary school, as suffering from a stress crack. At one time, he was probably a sweet kid, though challenged in ways we can't imagine by his autism. Autism doesn't make you murderous. Some other pressures built up in Adam's life — his parents' divorce, his mom's overprotectiveness, burying himself in the world of violent video games. The sum of these somehow shattered his human decency and pushed him into an inexplicable, callous rage towards innocent school children.

We would like to think that we can prevent such horrors by stricter gun laws or increased access to mental health services — and yes, it's likely that these sorts of legal and medical interventions would reduce the number of blowouts.

But as quickly as we might stop people like Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Eric Harris, Dillon Klebold and Seung-Hui Cho, along come a couple of demented individuals ready to park pressure cookers filled with ball bearings and explosives in the middle of a crowd.

What moves people to such unthinkable disregard for life? What produces such blinding anger and rage that murdering strangers seems a reasonable solution to the fury building up within?

The fact that evil persists despite all our efforts to eradicate it tells me that better laws and more generous social services are only dealing with the surface issues, while missing the deep internal flaws that are at the heart of these murderous outbursts, not to mention all manner of lesser rages and daily insults that we shrug off. The problem is not inadequate laws, but a growing spiritual vacuum at the heart of our modern societies, a vacuum crying out for the God Who Loves Us, a vacuum that we fill instead with modern skepticism and childish platitudes.

"He saved others," they said, "but he can't save himself! He's the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, 'I am the Son of God.'" — Matthew 27:42-43, NIV

A large crowd followed along as Jesus was frog-marched through Jerusalem to Golgotha, the Hill of Skulls, for his execution. After being nailed to the cross and hoisted into the air, soldiers, officials and ordinary citizens gathered close, curious to see what would happen next. The soldiers mocked him and divided up his clothing. Mary and the disciples stood in quiet grief at a distance. The emboldened crowd hurled insults at him and challenged him to perform a miracle to save himself.

Today is Good Friday, the day on which Christians remember the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. He was beaten, flogged, abused in various ways, nailed to a rough wooden cross and raised up among criminals as an example of Roman justice. All four Gospel accounts record overlapping versions of these events, and all agree that he died sometime in mid-afternoon, in time to be taken down and buried before sundown.

The crowd couldn't know what would happen, but they seem to have believed it was possible, if only remotely so, that God would somehow rescue Jesus.

"He saved others" seems to be a straightforward and perhaps unintentional witness to the signs and miracles that Jesus had performed throughout his ministry. In the years of his ministry he restored sight to the blind, cured lepers, healed the sick, gave crippled men back the ability to walk, raised the dead... And always, he claimed to be able to forgive sins, to wash away the wrongs that had erected a barrier between ordinary men and women and the holy God of Israel.

The crowds were always a mix of skepticism and awe, doubt and belief when it came to Jesus' miracles, and that is no less true today. But it's interesting that when he was up on the cross, the crowd seems to have been ready to acknowledge his good works, even as they doubted that he would use that same power to rescue himself. "He saved others, but he can't save himself."

What they didn't know was that he had no intention of saving himself, no desire to save himself. Only the night before as he had been praying in Gethsemane, he is recorded to have asked God to save him from what he knew was coming the following day. He ends that prayer saying, "...not my will, but Your will be done." He was yielded to God's plan. Once the whole terrible last act was set in motion, Jesus willingly submitted himself to all that lay ahead.

"He trusts in God" is again a very strange bit of mockery that acknowledges Jesus' holiness. He was a man devoted to honoring God with his life, with his word, with his actions. Daniel and his friends trusted in God and were thrown into a furnace, only to be rescued from harm by God. Jesus' friend Lazarus died, but was rescued by God from death. Jesus lived a life of prayer, self-denial, and obedience — indeed, the Scriptures say that he led a sinless life. Surely God would be pleased with this man and would reach down and lift him off of the cross? This may have been what was on the mind of the crowd that day.

But it was God's plan, God's intention that he would bleed and die on that cross as the ultimate Paschal Lamb, the final Passover sacrifice, ushering in a new and permanent covenant between humanity and God.

It was God's plan that Christ's death would redeem humanity and make us finally and permanently right with God.

The crowd couldn't begin to imagine the possibility that God would atone for our sins by placing his own Son on the altar of the cross; but if they had connected the dots from Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac to that hill of death outside of Jerusalem, they would have understood, perhaps in horror, that because of his immense love for humanity, God would not intervene to save his own beloved Son.

"He said, 'I am the Son of God.'" In certain modern-day cultures, and in ancient Israel, this is a blasphemous claim. It implies equality with God. It suggests that God has somehow had sexual relations through which children were born. Jesus constantly drew on familiar earthly things as metaphors to explain the unseen and misunderstood things of God's realm.

It certainly shows the crowd had been paying attention. They may not have believed him, they clearly didn't understand him, but there's no doubt that they heard exactly what Jesus had been saying all along.

Jesus Christ was the eternal God living in the form of an ordinary human being, having come to earth to proclaim God's love and to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Reconciliation between God and humanity depended on Jesus' willingness to be nailed to that cross, and on his humble acceptance of the agony and death that would follow. He quietly placed himself into his executioners' hands out of love for us. He didn't save himself, but on the cross Jesus saved you and me, some 2,000 years ago today on Good Friday.

Image credit: Eugene Delacroix, 1845, Christ on the cross, oil on wood.

A new survey by Pew Research shows that more American adults now favor than oppose same-sex marriage, by a margin of 49% to 43%. In 2003 the same survey showed the opposite: 58% opposed vs. 33% in favor. Pew attributes the shift primarily to the coming of age of the Millennial generation — those born after 1980 — 70% of whom support same-sex marriage. But Americans across the board have been changing their opinions on this issue. Pew has found that more than one-quarter of those who now favor same-sex marriage admitted that they had previously held the opposite view.

Republican Senator Rob Portman made headlines when he recently announced his support for same-sex marriage, a change that came about, he says, as a result of learning that he has a homosexual son. When Pew asked those who had reversed themselves why they had changed their minds about same-sex marriage, one-third explained that it was because they know someone who is gay.

These shifting public opinions have been coaxed along by Hollywood and the popular media, both of which have done their utmost to depict homosexuality as a healthy, natural, legitimate lifestyle choice. The messaging has been effective, and as the flood of stories depicting homosexuality positively have worked their way into the cultural psyche, as closeted homosexual shame has been replaced by gay pride, and as lifestyle advocates have re-framed their same-sex marriage arguments using terms like "civil rights" and "equality," ordinary Americans have yielded to the PR onslaught.

Americans are a generous, compassionate and fair-minded people. We love to see the underdog triumph. We hate injustice and unfair play; our founding document declares that "all men are created equal," and though we have often failed to live up to that vision, it remains our conviction that we must create such a society.

To many Americans, and especially to homosexuals, it seems a violation of that declaration to deny them a privilege that is freely enjoyed by heterosexuals, namely marriage. Increasingly, many Americans, the young especially, are responding to the constant demand for marriage equality by saying, why not?

Even Pastor Rob Bell, former head of the mega-congregation know as Mars Hill Bible Church, was quoted a few days ago in favor of same-sex marriage:

I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it's a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man. I think the ship has sailed and I think that the church needs to adjust... this is the world that we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are. — Rob Bell in a comment as part of a forum at Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco

Where Bell and many others have gone off the rails is by focusing on modern notions about love and fairness and equality, without first looking hard at what marriage is really all about and what purpose it is meant to serve in society.

The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display His craftsmanship.
Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make Him known.
They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard.
Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world.
— Psalm 19:1-4, NLT, a Psalm of King David

On Tuesday night, my friend Parks set his camera up on a hillside and captured an image of the comet Pan-STARRS, below. On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I attempted the same thing, but failed to even see the comet much less get a photo. Millions of people around the globe saw the comet, but not me. Thousands of people on every continent photographed this visitor as it passed by, but I completely missed it.

The problem, of course (aside from my bad eyes) is that while the heavens are busy proclaiming the glory of God, they do it silently and subtly. What I needed were icons, arrows, and flashing pop-up messages in the sky. If I had been wearing one of those Google Spectacle™ gizmos, I could have turned my head in the general direction of the comet Pan-STARRS and an animated Google Doodle™ would have directed me right to it. Oh brave new world.

Because the heavens "speak" of God's glory "without a sound or word," their message is admittedly ambiguous. As David looked up at the night sky, especially on those long night watches in the fields as a shepherd, he had the time to really study what he was seeing, time to ponder what it all meant. He saw beauty. He would have observed the way the stars moved across the sky night after night, always returning to their places for the next night's performance. He saw the faster-moving planets, the cyclical phases of the moon, streaking meteors, perhaps even a comet or two. When you take the time to look deep and long into the night sky, the universe seems almost alive, immense, ordered but sprinkled with random acts of unpredictability and surprise.

In all that wondrous beauty and ordered chaos, David saw God at work. But what about today?

Well, for one thing, half of us live in the midst of so much artificial light pollution that we never see the stars at all. And even when we might have a chance to look up, there are so many wondrous things dragging our gaze downward that we seldom do.

I ate lunch yesterday at a Thai restaurant with some friends, and during the meal I noticed a table of four young men, all with their heads bowed. I smiled, assuming they were praying together. On closer inspection I could see that each of them was hunched over his smart phone, oblivious to the others sitting nearby, lost in the artificial wonders to be found in a tiny glowing screen.

That may be an apt metaphor for our times: the heavens still declare the glory of God, but we're all engrossed in our cell phones, too busy surfing and chatting and tweeting to look up.

God is speaking. Are you listening? God's glory is displayed in the heavens. When was the last time you paused to look up?

Photo credit: Parks Squyres, SaddleBrooke, AZ, March 12, 2013.