Sunday, May 3, 2015 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Lament in Easter

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 22
1 John 4:7–14

“Without the identification with our hurting world that lament provides, we can no longer preach the message of the cross, nor be in full communion with a God who is justice and righteousness.”

Stacey Gleddiesmith
“Identifying with Christ: Why We’re Called to Lament for Our Suffering World”
December 2010 www.reformedworship.org

I was surprised a few weeks ago when I looked ahead at the upcoming scriptures assigned to each Sunday and found Psalm 22 listed for this fifth Sunday of Easter. I wondered if it was a mistake. This psalm is the psalm always assigned to Good Friday. It belongs in the somber and reflective season of Lent, not in the joyful and vibrant season of Eastertide, the season in which we currently abide.

So I quickly looked it up and realized the lectionary committee had not gotten Lent and Easter mixed up after all. Rather, it suggested we only read the last part of this psalm for this fifth Sunday of Easter—the happy part, the words of restoration and healing. That made a bit more sense to me.

But over the last couple of weeks, as the death toll in Nepal has continued to climb and the tension in Baltimore has continued to increase and as our mission team from both Fourth Church and from Trinity UCC left yesterday to begin the music ministry racial reconciliation trip, a trip that will end with a concert and conversation near Ferguson, Missouri—as all of that flashed through my mind, I decided that maybe Psalm 22, a Psalm of Lament, fit in fine with our lives and our world, even during the season of Easter.

But in order to explain that conclusion, I need to tell you a true story about a very close friend of mine. And know I have permission to tell it. As we begin his story, there are a few things you need to know about what life was like for my friend. It would be fair to say my friend’s childhood was a time of total chaos. They lived in extreme poverty, and his father could not keep a job, so they moved constantly. It was not unusual for my friend to leave one house to go to school and then to be picked up after school and taken to another house because they had been evicted that day.

But the stress of extreme poverty was not the only thing that contributed to his sense that the ground was always shifting underneath his small feet. Abuse was the primary author of his chaos. He was molested by a family friend when he was eight, a moment that caused such fear and shame that he did not speak about it until he was in his fifties. And in addition to that wrenching experience, he was subjected to occasional physical but constant emotional abuse from his mother. And then there was the fighting between his parents. Their arguments never got physical, but words can do almost as much damage.

One early evening, when he was ten, things were heating up in the house again, and he felt he had to get out. So he ran out into the backyard and searched for a place of escape, a place of safety, a place of calm. Yet all he could find in his scraggly backyard was an old doghouse. So he ran over to it, got on top of it, and just sat there, holding his knees to his chest, waiting for that household storm to pass.

In retrospect, my friend wonders if he was searching for his own kind of Noah’s ark so he might be kept from drowning in the chaotic seas of his young life. But he did not know that at age ten. Noah’s ark was a story he barely knew. Church was not a part of their lives. My friend believed in God as much as he could, but he did not have a faith community, so his beliefs were rather amorphous.

On that night, though, sitting there on top of his ark, he decided to talk to God, to offer some kind of prayer. But try as he might, he could not do it. He was too scared. So he just sat there, knees up to his chest, waiting. Waiting for this God to be known to him. Waiting to feel a sense of divine presence. Waiting to find his voice that could ask all of the questions that had been building up inside of him—questions like why? And what had he done to deserve it? And if it was his fault, he was sorry, so couldn’t God make it all go away? All of those questions rattled around in his brain and in his heart but got stuck on his tongue. And they got stuck because he wondered if it was wrong to even think them, let alone speak them to God. His ten-year-old mind wondered if those kinds of questions would make God even angrier at him and if they meant he really was a bad little boy.

After I heard my friend’s story, I started wondering if things would have been different had he been involved in a church. Would that have changed anything? Would he have felt like there was a place to go other than the lonely doghouse in his backyard? Would he have felt there were people there he could trust and to whom he could tell his story—people who would do whatever they could to keep him safe and, almost as importantly, people who would encourage him to cry out to God in his sense of anger and abandonment and not shame or judge him for it? And finally, I wondered if, had he been a part of a church, would he have ever heard those words of lament and complaint in a service of worship besides Good Friday, so he would know that words like that were OK? Perhaps, but maybe not, because sometimes as church we don’t handle lament very well.

As I reflected a few minutes ago, we tend to push lament away or banish it to Lent and to Holy Week. My seminary professor Kathleen O’Connor has written that she believes there are few places in the church that one can truly take sorrow, loss, and hopelessness because many of us still struggle with the relationship between lament and faith. For whatever reason, some of us have this sense that once we come through the doors of the church, we have to push down any feelings of anger or doubt or of not having it all under control. We feel like we have to put on our good church face, the face that pretends that we are only full of joy and praise.

Throughout my ministry I have listened as church members apologized to me for crying in worship because somewhere along the way they were told, either explicitly or implicitly, that tears were a sign of unfaithfulness, of not having enough trust in God. So they assume grief, fear, anger, and doubt are not welcome in the pews of the church. I, myself, have struggled with the reality that I occasionally tear up while preaching. “Shannon,” my internal voice always scolds, “this is not the time. Get it under control.”

After all, many of us come to worship to be centered in praise and hope, to get enough strength so we can make it through another week of discipleship. So that becomes the emphasis on what we do in this sacred space together. And there is not one thing wrong with that focus. Praise is a huge part of our story. But if praise is the singular focus every single Sunday, then stories of lament like my friend’s story start to feel too scary, too raw, too broken to be spoken in worship. What if someone gets offended? What if it triggers a hard memory in another? What if it brings everybody down when enough of life serves that purpose just fine?

I fully understand why we might brush those raw parts of our lives aside, why we deny they exist, when we come to church. But Dr. O’Connor claims that when we choose denial, we lose part of the language of our biblical story—the language of complaint and lament; a language heard clearly in Psalm 22; a language embraced fully by our ancestors, the people of Israel; a language now being used in the rubble of Nepal and on the streets or Baltimore. But we not only lose that language. When we choose to deny our own brokenness or pain, when we stifle it rather than speak it, we also place ourselves in danger of losing a part of who we are.

Again, Dr. O’Connor: “When we pretend that everything is OK with us,” she said one day in class, “as individuals, or as a church, or as a people—and we deny that anything is wrong or that we ever feel broken or hurt or in pain—when we push that stuff down, all we are doing is closing off a part of ourselves. And when we close off those parts of ourselves in worship or in the life of the larger community of faith, then we are unintentionally closing off those parts of ourselves from God too. And the spiritual consequence of denying our need to lament is that the center of our being, that part that groans for healing and wholeness, that center is blocked from grace, and true full-throated praise is no longer possible.”

Another professor, Walter Brueggemann, puts it this way: Lament makes an assertion about God—the assertion that our God matters in every dimension of life, not just in the good parts. So when we lose the power of lament, our understanding of faith is inevitably altered. God becomes “only the silent guarantor of the status quo, [rather than a God who] can be addressed in risky ways as the transformer of what has not yet appeared.” As a matter of fact, Brueggemann writes, “When God must [only] be praised all the time, prayer becomes a lie and a cover-up” (quoted in Kathleen O’Connor, Lamentations and the Tears of the World, p. 131).

Both of my professors longed for us to see that honest lament, questions, complaints, even tirades against God can actually be helpful for the life of faith, for the life of a church, for the life of society. For by voicing our lament, we are leaving no barrier between us and God. Lament goads God to speak. It urges God to emerge and comfort us. Lament dares God to be our witness and to restore us to God’s own self. And then the biblical promise of lament is that this kind of honest, broken prayer eventually carries us through the terror and despair into life and wholeness (O’Connor, Lamentations and the Tears of the World, p. 136).

It is what we see happen in Psalm 22. The psalmist knew the power of pure, raw honesty with her God so she speaks with total candor. And it is a candor of faithfulness, for if she did not think God cared for her, if she did not think she mattered to God, then she would not even bother with speaking her pain in prayer. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is a cry later heard on Jesus’ own lips. And as you heard throughout the psalm, the psalmist holds on to that kind of honesty and speaks openly about her sense of abandonment and brokenness; about how she is mocked and scorned; about how it seems she is surrounded and no one is there to help. The picture the psalmist paints reminds me of my friend on top of the lonely doghouse: it is a picture of chaos, of abuse, of violence, of feeling helpless to stop it.

But whereas my friend did not know he was allowed to do so, the psalmist speaks it all in prayer to her God. And after laying it all out, after being as honest as the she knew to be, after not bothering to wipe her tears or to hide her face, there is a palpable shift. An empty space. A Saturday after Good Friday. Listen for it. Verse 21: “Save me from the mouth of the lion!” . . . “From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me.”

Did you hear that space, that shift? It is a shift that tells us something happened to the psalmist after she voiced her lament. Something had to have happened, because we hear hope beginning to bubble up in her prayer. After pouring herself out in lament for twenty-and-a-half verses, the psalmist ends her song with ten-and-a-half verses of praise and restoration and healing. What happened? We are not sure. But maybe it was that because she refused to let any barriers remain between herself and her God, God was able to work through her lament, bringing the psalmist through the terror and despair into a space of comfort, life, and wholeness. Maybe the psalmist’s honesty gave God that kind of healing space to work. Only God knows for sure. But the psalmist’s witness shows us that something holy happened.

It is what we see in almost every single lament psalm in the Bible. Somehow they always end up moving through their despair into this space of pregnant silence and then into praise. And the gift of these lament psalms is that they give us a pattern for prayer that we can use ourselves, at home and in worship, a pattern that is biblical and faithful, a way of honest praying that can release us from any fear or shame that keeps us silent before our God when we so desperately need to speak.

As I end my first year of ministry with you, I want to share one of my hopes for us: part of what I hope we can embody even more is to be a community in which vulnerability is seen as courageous; a church where we can speak the truth of what we feel without being judged for it or shamed for it. Can we be a church where this kind of honest, unbridled prayer is both sometimes spoken aloud in this sacred space, as well as taken out into the public square when needed?

Lament is part of the cries of Black Lives Matter. Lament is part of the protests that are breaking out in urban centers, including Chicago. Lament is part of the response to tornadoes that destroy small towns and earthquakes that send avalanches careering. Lament is all over the place out there, where we live our lives. So perhaps, even if we just start with today, not only can we pay attention to the lament out there, but we can reclaim the power of lament in here.

Let us say to grief, to fear, to anger, to confusion, and to tears: Come into this worship space, there is room for you today. You don’t need to hide or stay outside, because we, as a church, believe what the psalmist experienced will be our story too. We know there will be times when our story will begin in lament and brokenness and might even stay in that disorienting space for moments or days or even years, but because of God’s mercy and goodness, we trust our story will eventually end in praise and healing and restoration. For that is what God hopes and wills for all God’s people—for my ten-year-old, now sixty-seven-year-old friend, for the psalmist, for those carrying signs of protest, for those carrying bodies in recovery efforts, for me and for you.

So now, let us hear another voice in scripture, this one from the prophet Isaiah:

For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth. . . .
No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
     or the cry of distress. . . .
Before they call, I will answer,
     while they are yet speaking I will hear.
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together;
     the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
     but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
     on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.
     (Isaiah 65:17, 19, 24–25)

And our days of lament will be gone forever.