Psalm 13
1 How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I bear pain[a] in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
3 Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
4 and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;
my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.
5 But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
6 I will sing to the Lord
because he has dealt bountifully with me.
In July of 2013 I was visiting my paternal grandparents in Point Breeze, NY, along with the rest of my family, for a birthday barbecue and some time with the extended Smith clan—skipping stones into the lake, taking a walk among the cottages, and playing some friendly rounds of beanbags. My brothers Calvin, Oliver, and I all have birthdays within a few days of each other around the end of July. I was there with two-year old James, and it was an especially memorable day because we had stopped by my parents’ house earlier to give them some special news: we were expecting a second child, due the following March.
We knew that they’d be excited, but we hadn’t expected the sudden burst of laughter that accompanied our announcement. “We’re just delighted,” they assured us. “We couldn’t be happier for you.”
Knowing grins had followed us up to the family barbecue, and once the initial stages of socializing had been taken care of my mother offered to play beanbags with James so that Julie and I could take a walk with my brothers. I wondered aloud if we all might take James up to the lake to throw some rocks in. “I really think you should just go for a walk,” she said.
She stood watching at the end of the driveway as Julie and I started down the road with Oliver and Calvin and their wives. I exchanged a look with Julie, and we were in agreement: We shared our good news. “We have something to announce…we’re going to have another baby next March!”
Oliver laughed aloud and congratulated us. “That’s ironic,” he said “because we are ALSO going to be having a baby” (their first) “next March.”
At which point, of course, Calvin told us all that he and Beka were also expecting their first child next March. My Mom saw it all unfold from the end of the driveway and she later said that watching our joy of mutual discovery had been what she’d been hoping for all day, ever since each one of us had “dropped in” to share their good news with her and my Dad.
Deliriously happy, we left toddler James with my parents for a few hours that night so that the six of us expectant parents could drive to a restaurant and talk properly about all that we hoped for—the excitement of three cousins to be born within a few weeks of each other, two to first-time parents. We cajoled a waitress to take a picture of us, and it’s a wonderful shot.
We all look young—glowing with summer color and hope and expectation. We each have our arms around our wives, delighted beyond measure to have revealed our secret news and to have found such joy in the telling.
The following March my niece Abby and my nephew Silas were born. But for Julie and I, the story ended differently. That pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.
A miscarriage is a multi-layered grief. We grieved for the life that wasn’t. We grieved for the pain that we saw in each other. And no one prepares you for this, but we grieved for the community that was lost when there were two cousins born in March of 2014 instead of three. Grief is isolating. There was a place around that restaurant table for a third happy couple, expecting a baby. But finding a place—finding a community—is harder when you’re hurting. You feel like a pariah. You feel like you are imposing your unhappiness on others. You feel like you’ve lost your place at the table.
That sense of “not belonging” was felt again even more keenly when we were down to visit Julie’s family for Christmas that year. She was pregnant again, and she miscarried a second time. We went to church that Sunday morning, stony-faced, hurting, and emotionally raw. Her childhood church was a community that did Sunday morning worship with a praise band, and her family always sat towards the front. Even before the music started that morning, we felt conspicuously unhappy amid the other worshippers. And then, when the music director at the front saw our grimacing, hurting faces, he asked from the podium, “Come on, aren’t you all happy to be praising the Lord this morning?”
We weren’t. And there needs to be a place in a church for those who are not happy to be standing there joyfully praising the Lord. This absolutely does not mean that we shouldn’t joyfully sing songs of praise on a regular basis—we SHOULD. And we must also make space for lament.
I’d like to spend some time this morning thinking about lament, and before anything else, we need to acknowledge that lament is not only a permissible, but a necessary part of the human condition and of the Christian life.
What is lament? Lament is an expression, often passionate, of grief or sorrow. In music, lament is almost always in a minor key. In poetry, lament tends to find simple forms—less sophisticated meters and verse schemes. Lament includes noises of pain and suffering—Ah! Woe! Alas. Lament likes structure and repetition. In the book of Lamentations and in many of the Psalms, laments are presented in the simplest of schemes—as an acrostic, a poem with each line starting with a different letter of the alphabet in sequence. I spend a lot of time in the Psalms for my job here—it is the source material for much of our musical tradition. We have a psalm as one of our lectionary readings every Sunday, and do you know how many of the psalms are psalms of lament? Nearly a third of them!
You would never think this from some of the faith traditions that lie adjacent to ours—certainly not from contemporary practices in Christian radio music, which brand themselves as “positive and encouraging.” To be positive and encouraging is fine—to be only positive and encouraging is, both musically and theologically, a mindset that doesn’t understand why not everyone might be up for joyfully praising God all the time. It’s a mindset that doesn’t acknowledge that people are human beings. There are, of course, also many joyful and encouraging psalms: psalms of adoration, psalms of triumph, psalms of praise. Our worship would be unfaithful to the psalter if we didn’t regularly sing in awe-filled wonder and praise to God. But our worship is equally unfaithful to the psalter if we never lament—if we never sing the songs in minor keys, the psalms of grief, heartbreak, and sorrow. It would be like eating a diet without any protein. It would be missing something deeply essential to the human experience.
There is surely a wrong way to go about lament as certainly as there is a whole and healthy way. We all know someone who “laments” continuously about a particular evil or grievance and whose company we do avoid or resent because their lament (or bastardized version of lament) has taken away their capacity to experience anything else. They have cherished their lament to the point where they cannot release it. To lament as modeled in our psalm for this morning is to truly grieve something and to let it go. If you grieve something and continue to clutch the grievance, you are no longer lamenting…you are doing something perfectly understandable and defensible. You are protecting yourself, protecting yourself by controlling the story of what hurt you. But your story can never be bigger, then, than the bounds of your own self. You are no longer lamenting.
This is a striking characteristic of lament throughout the Bible. The Psalmist laments, “How long, O Lord”, and the lament is bigger than his own grief. The lament, in fact, is bigger than all of Israel’s national grief. The identity of the Psalmist and the identity of God’s people are still more important than the admittedly calamitous evil (humiliation, enslavement, and exile) that has overtaken them. They are, before anything else, good or bad, the people of Yahweh. And this corporate identity in and as the people of God is why it is so important for us to lament in church together.
Our psalm for today models a template for lament is in its corporate nature.
We need to lament together to remember that we are God’s creatures. That doesn’t explain why evils happen to us, it doesn’t make the evils feel better, but it does frame our story in a different way than it would if we had started only from our own pain and in private. The Psalmist doesn’t shy away from pain. He calls it a day-by-day pain, and he uses the most expressive internal language to evoke the anguish of his experience.
But however awful the pain is, he must mention Yahweh’s people and Yahweh’s Hesed—his mercy, or covenant faithfulness. In many ways the pain is harder because we know of Yahweh’s mercy—this too is part of the lament. But the Psalmist stares it down anyway, resolutely—and he stares it down as part of a covenanted community, a community which calls its god its “parent.”
I mentioned earlier how isolated and alone Julie and I felt in our deep lament over our miscarriages. When we lament for and from our community we lament from a posture of humility. To share our lament is to open up our hearts to those that care about us and to name in public that we are weak, we are mortal, we are sick, and that we need help. I will confess that I am terrible at this. When I am hurting, my instinct is to bury my hurt like a stoic and to carry on as if I were strong enough on my own to be fine without anyone else’s help. Not so lament in the Bible. Shared experience is humbler than and infinitely stronger than private grief.
When we lament together we let people into our story. We surrender the safety of controlling our own story alone and we let our private pain become part of the story of the people of God. In an act of faith, we let our pain be the story of God’s faithfulness without knowing how that story is going to end.
I should mention that the story I shared with you at the beginning of this service has, despite the pain involved, a beautiful ending. That chapter of our lives ends with a boy named Owen being born in October of 2014. But I’ll be the first to tell you that not everyone gets a happy ending. And we need to tell those stories as well.
If your story this morning is incomplete…if you are hearing talk of lament and your heart is stirring with some long-held pain, or if you are waiting for an ending to your story—here is what we can glean from this short, brutally beautiful psalm. You may not ever get the ending that you want. But the final words of this psalm give us two things to hold on to—one, that we can say, as a people, that we have kept trust with God’s Hesed. If Hesed is a covenant word, we can be covenant-faithful no matter where we are in our story.
Here is the final comfort from the Psalms. We do not lament alone. God, in ways that we do not understand but to our infinite consolation, laments with us. Psalm 56 says “You have kept count of my laments. You have put my tears in a vessel; have you not written these down in your book?” Our God is not a God who watches us from a remote and unknowable height. Our God calls us to corporate lament because he himself is a part of that lament.
He says “My heart shall cry out for Moab.” He says “I will bewail with the weeping of Jazer the vine of Sibmah.” He says “I will water thee with my tears, O Heshbon, and Elealeh.” He cries out “How shall I give thee up, O Ephraim?”
And, most poignantly of all, the tears of Jesus looking upon Jerusalem. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how I longed to gather you under my wings as a mother hen gathers her chicks.” Lament must be a part of our worship because you cannot tell the story of our God without telling the story of how he laments for his people and his creation. You cannot tell the story of our people without telling the story of our griefs—the hurts we’ve suffered and the hurts we’ve caused. It is as theologically appropriate a response to life in our world as singing “To God be the Glory.” We will sing next, and we will sing a song of lament, but I’d encourage you to take several moments in the quiet before we do so to consider what it is that you need to lament this morning. And wherever you are, find someone to draw near to as we sing, “How long, O Lord?” There is great consolation, as the people of God, in lamenting together. Not one of us is a pariah. Not one of us is imposing our unhappiness on the unwilling. There is a space for each one of us at this table. It is our duty, our privilege, and our vocation to carry one another’s hurts. Let us sing, but first let us pray and let us keep silence:
“You who spoke peace to chaos, and created everything that is, was and shall be, please return to us beauty and gladness, as we bring you our mourning and ashes. Amen.”
