A Place for Lament

Mike Bell posted this on Internet Monk earlier this week. For it to make sense we had to use the picture as well, so, in light of the double crime (!) why not read this  at source: What about Job’s Kids? (Be sure to also read the comments.)

I had an interesting picture in my facebook feed the other day.  I don’t usually repost much, but this one really caught my attention as it represented how I was feeling that day.

On particularly rough days, when I’m sure that I can’t possibly endure, I like to remind myself that my track record for getting through bad days so far is 100% and that’s pretty good.

Nice thought, right?

It reminded me of what I had read just the previous day from James 5:11:

As you know, we count as blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job’s perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.

So what happened to Job?  The Sunday School version has God taking everything away, but blessing Job with even more than he had at the beginning.  This version tends to gloss over the 40 chapters of suffering that occurs between the taking away and the restoring.

Ever since I reposted the facebook meme I have had second thoughts.

Why is it so bad to say “life sucks”, full stop.   Job “loathes” his life and wishes he had never been born.  He continues this theme for most of 40 chapters.  In other scripture, David cries “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”  Why are we so afraid of lament?  Why do feel the need to put on masks when we go to church?

And what about Job’s kids?  The book of Job portrays them as partiers.  After every birthday party Job presents a sacrifice, just in case his children got carried away.  We get the sense that the book portrays them as less than ideal so that it can be shown that what he ended up with was better than what he started with.  Even so, his kids couldn’t say that their “track record for getting through bad days was 100%.”

That is the second problem that I have with the facebook post.  Some people don’t make it.  People die, commit suicide, are incapacitated by injury and disease, or are completely overwhelmed by circumstances.  Maybe I am overthinking this, but a post that says it’s “pretty good” that I made it through the day could come across as pretty insensitive to those who are going through significant struggle or loss.

I have a friend who lost his job, was then divorced by his wife, and his kids no longer want to talk to him.  Should I go and give him a friendly slap on the back and say, “Isn’t it good that you are making through the day?”  Or what about the cashier from the variety store behind my house who was shot in a robbery and left as a quadriplegic?  How would my post make him feel? Or those who a physically or sexuality abused on a daily basis?

Sometimes life is tougher than we can manage.  When I see others in that place I need to learn to sit and listen, and not be so quick with the clichés.  I also have to be willing to take off my own mask and admit to others when I am having a miserable day, or week, or month, or year.  For some “life is tough, and then you die.”  I find it really hard to call that “good.”

What do you think?  Am I overreacting here?  Or is there a need for us to be more considerate of those who are having difficult times?  Do we need to recognize and practice lament in our own lives?

Self-Deprecating Worship Music

So the other night we’re reading Psalm 106. You know that one. The one where the Israelites are reminded of all the times they screwed up as a nation. The times they forgot their God. Then it suddenly occurs to me. This is a PSALM. They SANG THIS. This was one of their WORSHIP SONGS. As in, “Take your hymnbook and turn to number 106.” How do you SING stuff that is so self deprecating? Definitely a minor key.

⁶ We have sinned, even as our fathers did;
we have done wrong and acted wickedly.

⁷ When our fathers were in Egypt,
they gave no thought to your miracles;
they did not remember your many kindnesses,
and they rebelled by the sea, the Red Sea.

¹³ But they soon forgot what he had done
and did not wait for his counsel.

¹⁴ In the desert they gave in to their craving;
in the wasteland they put God to the test.

¹⁵ So he gave them what they asked for,
but sent a wasting disease upon them.

¹⁶ In the camp they grew envious of Moses
and of Aaron, who was consecrated to the LORD.

¹⁷ The earth opened up and swallowed Dathan;
it buried the company of Abiram.

¹⁸ Fire blazed among their followers;
a flame consumed the wicked.

¹⁹ At Horeb they made a calf
and worshiped an idol cast from metal.

²⁰ They exchanged their Glory
for an image of a bull, which eats grass.

²¹ They forgot the God who saved them,
who had done great things in Egypt,

²² miracles in the land of Ham
and awesome deeds by the Red Sea.

²³ So he said he would destroy them—
had not Moses, his chosen one,
stood in the breach before him
to keep his wrath from destroying them.

²⁴ Then they despised the pleasant land;
they did not believe his promise.

²⁵ They grumbled in their tents
and did not obey the LORD.

²⁶ So he swore to them with uplifted hand
that he would make them fall in the desert,

²⁷ make their descendants fall among the nations
and scatter them throughout the lands.

²⁸ They yoked themselves to the Baal of Peor
and ate sacrifices offered to lifeless gods;

²⁹ they provoked the LORD to anger by their wicked deeds,
and a plague broke out among them.

³⁰ But Phinehas stood up and intervened,
and the plague was checked.

³¹ This was credited to him as righteousness
for endless generations to come.

³² By the waters of Meribah they angered the LORD,
and trouble came to Moses because of them;

< ³³ for they rebelled against the Spirit of God,
and rash words came from Moses’ lips. ^[c]

³⁴ They did not destroy the peoples
as the LORD had commanded them,

³⁵ but they mingled with the nations
and adopted their customs.

³⁶ They worshiped their idols,
which became a snare to them.

³⁷ They sacrificed their sons
and their daughters to demons.

³⁸ They shed innocent blood,
the blood of their sons and daughters,
whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan,
and the land was desecrated by their blood.

³⁹ They defiled themselves by what they did;
by their deeds they prostituted themselves.

⁴⁰ Therefore the LORD was angry with his people
and abhorred his inheritance.

⁴¹ He handed them over to the nations,
and their foes ruled over them.

⁴² Their enemies oppressed them
and subjected them to their power.

⁴³ Many times he delivered them,
but they were bent on rebellion
and they wasted away in their sin.

Okay, I left out a few of the good verses. But even so…

We always want our songs to be happy.  The modern church doesn’t do lament well. What if Western Christians had a song that was the modern equivalent to this?   Twelve months ago in her review at Thinking Out Loud of The Ben Ripple my wife wrote:

All in all, it is important for us to know stories like Ben’s.  The places where God meets us face to face, and the places where he stands quietly behind us.  What the family next door might be going through and what they may deal with from one day to the next.  It’s been said that we live in a world that has forgotten how to lament — to cry out to God our pain and fear and loss.  This book is just such a thing, but like so many of the laments in Scripture, it ends on a note of “nevertheless…”  The possibility of healing, the value of trusting, the necessity of faith in one who loves us.

In a review of a new NLT edition that contains a section of laments, I quoted the authors:

“These are the questions we’re all afraid to ask God, and the complaints we might hesitate to voice to him. The truth is, God desires our honest doubts, questions and complaints. After all, the writers of the Bible regularly lament, crying out to God and questioning him about injustices, pains and problems.

A year ago at Internet Monk, Chaplain Mike looked at our propensity to edit the Psalms of Lament to suit our purposes in a piece about Sanitizing the Wilderness:

Contemporary “worship” music is especially weak when it comes to giving voice to the full spectrum of human experiences and emotions. Even when today’s songwriters make use of the Psalms they tend to transform the raw, earthy language that describes our complex, often messy relationships with God and others into easily digestible spiritual sentiments…

…It takes one image from a rich, profound, complex and realistic description of life and latches on to it because the image evokes a simple devotional sentiment that prompts an immediate emotion. We set it to music, and voila! — people get the idea we are singing “Scripture.”

Australia’s Mark Sayers wrote the following in The Art of Irrelvance:

One of the struggles of the artist is to hold together the awe inspiring and the transcendent elements of life, those moments which remind us of God’s glory, with the painful and broken elements of life. Christians tend to do okay at the first part, Christian bookstores are filled with prints of glorious mountain ranges, we love the transcendent apex of the worship song. But we tend to struggle with the broken elements of life, with integrating suffering, lament and loss into our creativity. On the Cross, God intervenes in history with such staggering alacrity and originality we can only marvel at his creativity.

In one moment, God’s glory is revealed, Jesus takes sin upon his shoulders and defeats death and evil, yet at the same time, we are confronted with the image of a dying God, a man whose painful screams speak of his isolation from God. The crucifixion is one of those rare moments, where the transcendent and the immanent, the glorious and the earthly, the human and the divine are held together. It is the ultimate template for Christian creatives. Hold those extremes together and you will produce work that no longer is mimicry but which is truly creative.

Reading the Psalms of Lament When You’re Having a Good Day

Today’s reading is from Jake Hunt at the blog Wiser Time, where it appeared several months ago under the title, How to read the Psalms when you don’t feel like the psalmist.

About a third of the psalms in the Bible are laments– psalms in which the author lays a complaint before God and asks for his help. If you read Psalms regularly, which is a good idea, you’ll come across lots of heavy content. More than we’re accustomed to expressing in worship, but that’s another post.

A lot of this language can seem foreign to us. I don’t usually feel like all my bones are out of joint. I don’t often flood my bed with tears, and I don’t currently feel like I have more enemies than I can count. But we shouldn’t just read or think on happy things– if we did we’d ignore a lot of the Bible.

Here are a few tips for reading and learning from the psalms when our own situation doesn’t line up with the author’s.

Learn not to put on a happy face.

The psalms are an absolute smackdown of the idea that we have to be happy to worship God, or pretend to be. Every day with Jesus isn’t sweeter than the day before; some days with Jesus are really lousy. Psalm 88 (“darkness is my only companion”) was not written to get the people pepped up, but it was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and it was written for public worship.

God is big enough to handle our lament. He wants us to bring our sorrows to him; he wants us to worship him through tears when that’s all we can do. Reading the psalms will remind us of that.

Think of others.

Even if you’re not feeling so sad you forget to eat your food, chances are someone around you is. Let the language of the psalms help you understand how your grieving friends feel. Let it open your eyes and remind you that there are hurting people in your life who need your words, prayers, and tears to bear them up.

Remember Jesus went through this for you.

Jesus “fulfilled” the psalms, and the rest of Scripture, by taking on himself everything it means to be human, and to be one of God’s people. He knows what it means to feel forsaken by God, because he actually was– so that he could guarantee we never would be.

Every lament we read in the psalms is something that happened to our Savior. He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. Reading Psalms with that in mind should drive us to a greater appreciation of what he’s done for us.

Wait.

I started reading a psalm a day in my first year of seminary, and it’s generally been part of my routine since then. At the time I was 24, and had enjoyed by God’s grace a generally happy life. It was hard to identify with the psalms of lament, or with the idea of longing for heaven: life on earth was pretty great.

Life on earth is still pretty great. But deaths of friends and family, infertility, bouts of depression, the vulnerability (and tiredness!) that comes with kids, watching friends hurt, and seeing more of life in general have meant that at 30 it’s a lot easier to see what David was talking about than it was at 24. And I’m still young, with more joy and more suffering to come.

An older friend told me once, “When I was young it was hard to want heaven. The older I get– yeah, it’s not so hard anymore.”

If you’re in a happy season, thank God for it, and stay in the Word– the happy parts and the heavy parts. The day will come when you’ll need the language of lament, and it’s good to have it in your heart ahead of time.

~Jake Hunt