I have always disliked preachers who deal with their own issues from the pulpit. Two sermons in particular stand out to me in this respect. One was a Transfiguration Sunday sermon in which the preacher talked about her high stress levels and her mountaintop experiences. By the end of it I was wondering if she thought that SHE was the one being transfigured instead of Jesus. The other sermon was a funeral sermon for a friend who died very suddenly of an unknown heart condition. The funeral preacher spent his entire sermon asking God "Why" and never once proclaimed to us the good news that Christ had defeated death in His own resurrection. Both times I walked away feeling as though I had been cheated by people too wrapped up in their own struggles to look for God's grace and mercy in the world around them.
But today we need to talk about issues. We need to talk about the harsher realities of life, because God has given us a psalm of lament today, and the practice and privilege of lament is something the church is losing very rapidly, and we will need this practice and privilege of lament before our lives are through. Let us pray.
O God, we humbly ask that You be with us today. We ask You to hear through our small talk and our falsehoods to the deeper pains beneath. We ask You to help us come to You in confidence and hope when this broken world fails us, when our broken brothers and sisters fail us, when our own broken lives fail. Hear our cries from the depths of our lament, gracious Lord. Amen.
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,
Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!
But in our lives, aren't there times when we feel as though the tentacles of death are already wrapping around us and pulling us into the pit of death? I remember feeling that way many times in my own life, and I know there will be more times of death and sorrow to come. The psalmist certainly feels that way. "I'm crying out to you from my grave, Lord - can you hear me?"
I know that some of you don't think this is the way we should go about dealing with our pain. I've heard several of you comment on how your ancestors solved their pain with work: if you were bothered by something, you just needed to get out and work until it went away. Besides, if you look around, you will see others in much worse circumstances - so why should you complain?
That may be well and good for a while. There are a lot of good things that can come from dedication and labor. When I was really struggling during my divorce I worked a lot because it allowed me some time to hide from the pain. But the pain never went away. It just waited until I let down my guard and then it stormed right back into my heart and into my soul. After a while I realized that the only way out was to face the pain and sorrow head on: hiding from it was only prolonging the pain.
One of the counselors in our DivorceCare DVDs has a great illustration for this. He says that trying to heal the pain of our souls by working harder or denying it's happening is like trying to heal a broken leg with Novocain and increased activity. You might think you're getting better, but all you're doing is hiding the wound under anesthetics. You can be going along thinking that life is getting better and all of a sudden you look down and see that broken leg is now worse than ever because you haven't let it heal properly.
The psalmist knows that pretending isn't going to solve the problems he's facing. Notice also that even though things are so bad that they feel like death, the psalmist trusts that there's a God out there who will hear prayers. There's no "God, if you're there, I could use some help!" Not even a deal to be made: "Save me, St. Anne, and I will become a monk!" Just a heartfelt cry for the listening ear of God: "I am DYING here, Lord - hear my prayer!"
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, who could stand?
But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered
BUT! Always look for the BUT when we talk about sin and death. BUT God forgives, the psalmist remembers, and the reason God forgives is so that we might trust God enough to cry out from the grave in the first place. If you had sinned so deeply that you felt like you were dying, and you thought that God would not forgive, would you have the confidence to come to God in prayer?
Whatever the circumstances might have been, the psalmist knows that even though life isn't what it should be, God forgives. Even when times are terrible, when people cut us down, when futures seem hopeless, when we're all alone, when we can't trust anyone at all for anything, God forgives, and that forgiveness is the great hope that allows lament to be answered with trust.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His word I hope.
My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.
On Easter Sunday morning in 1986, I woke up around 2:30 a.m. because I kept hearing voices downstairs in our living room. I remember my brother Brian and me coming downstairs to see my Grandma & Grandpa Johnson sitting in the living room with the light on - certainly not a normal occurrence for 2:30 on a Sunday morning. When we asked them what they were doing there, they said, "Your parents had to go to Winside because your Grandpa Janke died about an hour ago."
This was the first grandparent I'd ever lost. I remember how my heart just dropped right down to the bottom of my stomach. I remember losing the feeling in my fingers and toes for a minute or two. I remember somehow stumbling back upstairs and lying in bed for the rest of the night, waiting for light to come so that this horrible nightmare would be over.
Of course, morning didn't bring the end of the nightmare. Grandpa was gone, and we knew it. But the light of morning still brought hope to me. It was Easter, after all, and Easter morning was about resurrection, right? Easter morning, more than any other morning, brings hope. I remember the pastor at Grandpa's funeral preaching a beautiful sermon about how Grandpa had met his Savior in reality while the rest of us were still waiting with hope. Twenty years later, I still remember that Easter means meeting the Lord in person, that one day we will meet the one who will banish the long, hard night of sorrow forever.
Even from sorrow that feels like the grave, the psalmist knows that the Lord is worth waiting for. The psalmist has been convinced that God's mercy and love bring healing to even the worst wounds, and now that the psalmist has acknowledged his pain and sorrow, in all its depths and all its darkness, the psalmist knows that the God who hears that honest cry is the same God who promises healing beyond the rising sun. This is a trust that comes to forgiven sinners like you and me: a trust that hopes in God's gracious love far more than our own ability to heal ourselves.
It is He who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.
This is the spot where a lot of praise music just leaves folks with nothing under which they can find shelter. The spiritual & theological content is flimsy at best - in the light of real world difficulties it blows away like straw off the Minnesota prairie. A lot of praise music makes everything dependent on how much I love God; and you know, there are days when how much I love God isn't going to do me a damned bit of good.
What we lose in this music is the great love of God for us right here and right now. What we lose is the impression that we can honestly tell God when and where it hurts. What we lose is the legacy of lament.
Last year I spent a lot of my prayer time in the Psalms, which is what really led to this series of sermons on the Psalms in the first place. What I've discovered in this time is the depth of emotion and weakness that possessed these great poets of God. Our psalmists rage against their enemies, their own brokenness and their own sin, and God Himself when God seems distant, and they don't write sappy love songs, fooling themselves by flattering God and pimping their own great love before the throne of the Almighty. When it hurts, they tell God; when they fall, they ask God for help; when they are weak, they ask God for strength; when they are beyond their own power to escape the pit, they plead for salvation; when God is good, they praise God for God's faithfulness. The psalms and the old hymns written from them and from other places in scripture just seem to be more realistic and seem to have more integrity than a lot of the flashy church music I'm hearing from the praise song crowd the past few years.
At a class at Luther Seminary in October, we talked about preaching the Old Testament and other texts besides the Gospels, and when asked why, Dr. Mark Throntveit replied: "to rediscover lament." We are losing the ability to speak honestly about our brokenness - the churches that pimp successful living (dare I say "purpose") leave their people high and dry when something goes wrong, as it always does. Jesus is not always the fuzzy, cuddly Savior - sometimes He bears a whip and has fire in His eyes. God the Father doesn't just want our praise songs - the Father wants us to follow His commandments and care for our freakin' neighbors already. The Spirit, I imagine, gets pretty offended when we sing about being filled but only mean 'filled with success and happiness.' We need to teach our children that God is also there for us when our enemies mistreat us - that it is their evil that injures us. We need to teach our children that God is there for us when life is unfair - that God hears our laments as well as our praises, and God wants it all. We need to teach our children to be honest with themselves, honest with each other, and honest with God - because without that honesty, we are selling them spiritual sugar that will eventually leave them unable to remember the God whose love is sometimes a "reckless, raging fury."
This past weekend, I discovered a different side to praise music, thanks to an artist who came at it from a completely different direction. This artist honestly dealt with the difficulties of life in the world. He talked about his struggles, his fears, his hopes and dreams and his failures and nightmares. Best of all, he encouraged us to do the same.
Lament isn't just about ripping your heart out and showing it to the world Lament is being honest with God that things aren't how they should be - but also trusting that God can make things the way they should be. In Holy Week, there is perhaps no better model for lament than God's own Son, Jesus, who has the trust and confidence in God to actually ask for what He wants: "Father, take this cup from me. Yet not my will, but Your will be done." This is lament: a prayer from a moment of deep darkness to a heavenly Father that we trust is listening, and an even deeper trust that the grave in which we find ourselves is not the resting place God has prepared for us.
So: let your lament be heard in God's ears. Trust enough to be honest about the world in which you live. Come before God with all your hopes and all your fears. The God who created you out of the dust of the earth is the same God who will rescue you from the dust of the grave. "Out of the depths we cry to you, O Lord: Lord, hear our prayer." Amen.
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