Sunday, June 29, 2014 | 4:00 p.m.

When We Lament

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 13

Let me ask you a question and hope that you’ll answer me—out loud—each in your own way, but together. So, for example, if I were to ask you something like “Have you watched any of the World Cup?” you would answer either yes or no, but all at the same time, shouting out your answer.

So, let’s practice this.

Have you watched any of the World Cup?

OK, you have the mechanics. So now here is my question. This time it’s not a yes or no answer. Ready? Remember to shout out your answer, whatever it is. Here is the question:

How are you?

How many of you answered “Fine” or “Good”?

Most of you. And that’s what is expected of us. It’s an automatic response. Someone you haven’t seen for a long time runs into you on the street and asks, “How are you?” and you know they don’t exactly want to hear about your worries or the fact that your dog is sick or the troubles you are having at work. It’s not the time to tell them about the spat you had with your mother or the fact that there is someone in your family who struggles with addiction. You doubt that you can quickly share with them how it has felt to be grieving the death of your grandmother who died just last month or that you are worried about some tests your friend is having. They probably are in too much of a hurry to listen to the fact that you wake up each morning wondering about the state of our world or worrying about violence in Chicago or thinking about the future your children will have.

People we meet on the street or run into at a party or talk with at church generally don’t have time to spend listening to our sorrows, hearing our laments. When we are asked how we are, I don’t think most of you launch into a song of wailing or grief or sorrow. But I know that all of us carry within us places of sadness. We do that as individuals. You know what your sadnesses are.

And we carry sadness as a community. How can we not? We see others in our midst who we know have struggled with particular challenges and we wonder how they do it. But here they are, in our midst. Right next door, in Anderson Hall, our Sunday Night Supper volunteers are feeding people who either have no home or inadequate resources for food. We would like not to focus on that, but there is sadness we carry, and discomfort we feel about homelessness and poverty and hunger. We are a people who proclaim the hope of the resurrection and that God is always doing a new thing, but we also carry our sadness and yearning—our hope for a better world and some anger perhaps about the news of the world that appears to be getting worse rather than better. We yearn as a people of God for those swords to be turned into plowshares. And we feel grief or sadness or fear, if we were to be honest, that it hasn’t happened yet.

Psalm 13 is a lament. It’s not the only lament in the psalms, but it is a classic one. I’ve decided to focus on only the psalm today because I think we need to be reminded that at least here, in this place, we can make room for our sadnesses and our grief, individually and collectively. The psalms of lament help us do that. The dictionary definition of lament is “the passionate expression of grief or sorrow.” One of the definitions adds that this passionate expression of grief or sorrow is often in music or poetry or song form. So the psalms, which were songs used in worship in the earliest worshiping communities of the Hebrew people and also in the earliest worshiping Christian communities, included time for lament. Jazz and blues know this genre well. But our American culture doesn’t make much space for wailing and grieving and lamenting, especially when there’s always a pressure to look as though you have it all together.

David Brooks wrote an article in April for the New York Times about suffering. “Over the past few weeks,” he said, “I’ve found myself in a bunch of conversations in which the unspoken assumption was that the main goal of life is to maximize happiness. We live in a culture awash in talk about happiness.” And yet, according to Brooks, life’s struggles and sadnesses so often are the things that form us.

Clint Dempsey, one of the players on our World Cup Team, lost his sister when he was twelve. She died from a brain aneurysm. It was then, he said, that his life turned—on a dime. And he found that questioning God and searching for answers helped him to grow and gave him direction. Now, he says, he knows that in both good times and bad, God is faithful. Clint Dempsey did what I think we all have to do and that is he made room for the sadness in his life. He made space for it. That’s what our psalms of lament do. They make room for us to acknowledge our sadness and yearning. In Dempsey’s case, his grief and questioning led to his transformation. His grief and questioning allow him now to sing a doxology of praise and thanksgiving.

Steven Colbert was interviewed by Playboy magazine in April. The interview covered a wide variety of topics, but one of them was grief. Colbert explained that when he was just ten years old, his father and two older, teenaged brothers were killed in a plane accident. Steven Colbert spoke of grief all these many years later. He said, “Grief comes to you.” He continued, “I’ve always liked the phrase ‘He was visited by grief,’ because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door.”

The psalmists were wise enough to know that human beings need to express their grief, even and especially in the midst of the worshiping community. They were wise enough to remember that at least here, the God we know in Jesus Christ, the One who suffered mightily himself, can hear our laments. What the psalms of lament allow us to do is to look sadness squarely in the eye. Barbara Brown Taylor, in her recent book titled Learning to Walk in the Dark, says, “What if I could learn to trust my feelings instead of asking to be delivered from them?”

The psalms of lament tell us that we can trust our feelings and we can face darkness and that God can stand it when we cry out “How long, O God?”

So please open to Psalm 13. Let’s look at it. Notice how it begins. Not with a nice address such as “Dear ever-loving and gracious Lord” or “Gracious and loving God.” The psalmist is ticked and has no time for niceties. “How long, O Lord?”

How many times does the psalmist ask, “How long, O Lord?” Tell me. Four times. How long? Will you forget me forever? To the psalmist, God just seems to have flown the coop and gone away. The psalmist expresses feelings of having been abandoned by God. How long will you hide your face? “Hiding face” was a phrase that indicated that God must have turned to someone else, changed allegiance, no longer valued the psalmist. How long must I bear pain in my soul? How long must I be sad? There is no softness in these words. There is straight out honesty and despair. There is no way the psalmist is ignoring his anger or sadness, but he’s ticked off and has had it and he pleads with God. Where are you? How long will I be forgotten? How long must I suffer?

And then he continues with direct statements about what he wants from God—still with a lot of honesty. Look in verse 3. These are the requests: Consider. Answer. Give light to my eyes. The psalmist tells God to pay attention and consider him. Or, please, God, look my way again. Notice me. Consider me. And then he says, Answer me. Say something. Give me a sign. Let me know you are in this somehow. Answer me, will you? And then, Give light to my eyes. Help me to understand. Shed light on this. Help me see what on earth this suffering is for. Consider. Answer. Give light and understanding.

Now look at verse 4. Because if you don’t do this, God, I’m going to sleep the sleep of death or just plain give up, and if you don’t, my enemy (whoever that is) will say, “Ha ha, what good is your supposed God?” My enemy will say, “I have prevailed and won.” How long, O Lord? Consider. Answer. Give light, or else—or else I’m going to give up and my enemies, whether they be people or the enemies of grief and sadness and despair, depression, poverty, unemployment, whatever those enemies are, will win.

This morning Shannon’s sermon on part of the sixth chapter of Romans and Paul’s preaching reminded me of the concept of dying with Christ. Dying with Christ but also being raised and resurrected with Christ. We carry within us Christ’s death—all the pain and grief we bear—but also we carry within us Christ’s resurrection. Could it be that acknowledging our sadness and grief , making room for it, arguing with God about it, will lead us to an even deeper knowledge that we share in Christ’s resurrection? The message of the cross is that we as a people hold the agony of life together with the ecstasy of life. It is our identity. We hold together complaint and praise and the knowledge that God is involved in all of life—even life at its worst. When we can see that, we can see God’s involvement even in the most God-forsaken event, the crucifixion.

What happens at the end of Psalm 13? The psalm seems to abruptly change, after all of the wrestling that has taken place, the angry questions, the feeling of having been abandoned by God. Verses 5 and 6, which I ask you to look at too, become a doxology. Those two verse become a song of praise. The psalmist has come to the knowledge and hope once again that Gods’ steadfast love is real and true, that holding complaint together with praise is our identity as a people, because we have died with Christ and are also raised with Christ. So let’s make those last two verses our doxology now. Please read them aloud and with me: But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me.

May you be encouraged to speak boldly and honestly to God about all of the pain and grief you bear, and may your wrestling, may your questions, may your pleading bring you to the ability to sing again a doxology of praise, thanking God for dealing bountifully with you in the past and even now. Alleluia. Amen.