Humans have a wide range of emotions like happiness, sadness, awkwardness and loneliness. Sometimes, you want to sing, talk about your dreams, discuss music, be angry at politics, be angry at yourself or laugh at a Youtube video.
But other times, these are the last things on your mind. Sometimes, you want to be alone, away from the noise and the bustle, the judging looks and the unmet expectations, and you want to cry over your failures, fears and possibly your life in general.
As an emotional person, there’s one thing I hate above all else: being told to “just be happy.”
When someone asks me how I’m doing, and I answer them honestly, the last thing I want to hear is advice. When someone expects me to be fantastically brilliant day-in and day-out, it's frustrating and unrealistic.
Reproving me for not meeting those unrealistic standards is damaging, as my emotions are the way that I process the world. If I could “just be happy” when I don’t feel happy, believe me, I would, but I can’t.
Things get even worse when I say this to religious people. If your mainline Protestant layman finds out you’re feeling down, the first thing out of their mouths is usually, “I think you need to go see a counselor”, or “have you looked at medication?” It’s as if anytime you feel upset, it means you’re experiencing a chemical imbalance that can be quickly fixed, so you can go back to feeling happy like all of the “normal” people.
Then, there’s your mainline evangelical, who will point you to that secret sin that’s stopping God from blessing you. I don’t think I need to say anything more about that pseudo-theology.
All of the things mentioned above mitigate anyone who experiences strong emotions. They say these emotions don’t matter, that they’re my fault, that they’re abnormal and need to be corrected.
Do you feel like this, too? If so, then you need Lutheranism.
The genius of Lutheran theology is that it recognizes that being human is, at least in part, an emotional experience. Its theology doesn’t condescend or scoff at those emotions people like me feel so strongly. Instead, our teachings say emotions are actually OK, that they’re healthy. They’re human because they acknowledge that Jesus had emotions.
He got angry when He saw the temple was being abused. He wept at the sight of the death of His friend, Lazarus. His tears flowed for Jerusalem upon His final entrance there. He bemoaned being abandoned by His Father as He hung on the cross. Jesus felt things.
And, in the recording of His feelings, the writers of the Scriptures reveal to us that it’s OK for us to feel things, too.
It’s OK to feel indignation at legalized infanticide, to feel dejected when you are hated by society, to feel sorrow over the sins you have committed, to shed tears when your father passes away, to wish you had been there, to wonder if things will ever be the same again.
Because being a Theologian of the Cross means calling good, good and bad, bad.
Though the epitome of our theology is something that looks very bad (our Messiah dead and nailed to a tree), that moment of bad was used for the greatest good that has ever happened: redemption.
When things were the bleakest, it was then that our salvation was won and all of hell’s demons crushed underfoot. However, that’s not how it looked. All there was to see was a dead man, nailed to a tree. But, in faith, we cling to God’s promise that there was something more going on.
In Lutheranism, we are free to be emotional people, but this is only because our salvation is outside of ourselves. We can be emotional because our emotions do not impact our salvation.
Instead, we rely on Christ and His sacraments.
And, that is enough for emotional people like us.
