ilam baptist church

admin January 6th, 2012

I feel like I grew up in a very different world from the world that my children inhabit, one of the areas of life that has changed an awful lot is food. I think that I was in my twenties before I can recall eating Mexican food or Italian, or God forbid Indian. Curried sausages was about as spicy as it got in our house. It was meat and three veg in my childhood, and one of those veggies was invariably potatoes – rice was not on the menu, macaroni once in a very long while.
The approach to cooking has changed to, invariably things used to be boiled then even sausages. I remember meals being put in front of me, the greens having been boiled to within an inch of their lives to extract all the colour from them. Gray green silverbeet or sullen looking peas, cauliflower struggling to maintain its structural integrity which would dissolve in your mouth, bleached potatoes, swedes and a sad looking chop staring up at me.
‘I’m not eating this rubbish’ I said, somewhat less calmly than I am saying now. And my longsuffering mother glaring down at me saying quite rightly, ‘Roderick, count your blessings boy. The people in Ethiopia would appreciate good food like this. You should be thanking me.’ ‘Well mum, perhaps we could wrap it up and send it to them ’ or something similar would be my retort. Have you had those conversations? I have done both sides now, its the circle of life.
Its one of the things that we as parents desparately want our kids to learn, to show gratitude when others are kind to them. So when you pick your child up from a play date at someone else’s house, there is this little dance that goes on until the child thanks their host. We try to hint to our child to say the magic words, the eyes are going and we are sending a host of silent psychic hints of ever increasing ferocity. We probably look like we are having some sort of spasm, which the host, polite to a fault, pretends to ignore.
We had this sign language thing going on with our kids, and rubbing your chest was the signal for thank you. Less threatening and less obvious than say thank you! We recognised that saying thank you does not come naturally and needs to be learned, its part of a child learning to appreciate other people and what they do for them
Today’s text is 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, and it’s also about saying thank you, Paul says-
Rejoice always, 17 pray continually, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
It comes at the end of the letter which was designed to give new believers encouragement – there is a big section on the second coming, and some advice to them on how to live godly lives. It’s all carefully unpacked and laid out right up to chapter 5:11, then there is this intense little flood of good advice at the end which these verses are part of. It reminds me of that scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when the young man Laertes is about to leave the country, and his father Polonius comes to say good bye.
Reading from Hamlet – Laertes and Polonius
He’s dumping all of his good fatherly advice as quick as he can because the boat is about to sail, its everything that he meant to say but didn’t get around to. Similarly, its almost as if Paul was in a bit of a hurry and just had time to jot down a few final thoughts, maybe the parchment was almost full or the boat for Thessalonika was about to leave. Don’t know, but he just blurts all this stuff out.
I’m left wondering what the connections might be between thanking, praying and rejoicing – but Paul was in a bit of hurry so he didn’t spell it all out for us.
If you take this text at face value it’s pretty challenging. I don’t know about you but rejoicing is not a constant state for me rather an occasional sojourn, and I am not always thankful – I am frequently quite grumpy. But it’s God’s will for us in Christ Jesus to rejoice, pray and be thankful – so it’s serious. These are commands not optional extras or worthy suggestions, so we have to grapple with them.
The challenge for us in rejoicing and giving thanks all the time is that some pretty awful stuff happens in life, loss is a reasonably regular companion. I know numerous people that have suffered miscarriage, infertility, relationship breakdown, injustice at work, serious illness and the death of people close to them – it goes with being finite beings in a sin scarred world. To tell them to rejoice seems like rubbing salt in their wounds. And I have heard it preached that we should thank the Lord for the hard stuff as well as for the blessings, because it all comes from him.
A friend of mine was in Christchurch last September in time for the quake, and she went along to church with the people that she was staying with on the next day. They were praising God that he had spared us as no one had died, which at the time did seem to be pretty extraordinary. In February they said that the deaths were down to God, praise his name.
Thanking God for what happens opens up a real can of worms. If we attribute the good things that happen in life to God and thank him for his blessings, from the banality of finding a parking space to the gift of a child, then some would say that it makes sense to attribute the bad things as well. As that well known verse says, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. That church i just mentioned would presumably argue that it does not make a lot of sense to thank him for the good stuff but not credit him with the bad. He is either in control of all things or he’s not. Those that think that he is pulling all the strings say that we need to thank him for the hard stuff as well, but that takes you down a really tricky slope.
Is God responsible for all of the sin in the world and its consequences – no we are, so it makes no sense to thank him for that because a good God will not bring evil such as war or violence into existence. We cause our wars not God. We end up in a philosophical sinkhole of our own making if we follow this logic to its conclusion and thank God for sin and its consequences, its perverse.
There’s a movie that I love called Strictly Ballroom, which is set in the very small world of competitive ballroom dancing in Melbourne. In the clip that you are about to see we are going to see how Shirley, the star dancer’s mother deals with her son’s desire to dance new steps, which are different from the officially sanctioned way to dance.
The consequence of his unorthodox approach will be that he will not win the Pan Pacific Grand Prix Dancing Championship, Latin American Division – which is her fondest wish for him as she didn’t win it when she was a young dancer. She hopes that he will succeed where she failed.
Clip – Strictly Ballroom
She is trying to fake it till she makes it, trying to will herself to rejoice as a way of fending off or denying her feelings of despair. No one is fooled. She is extreme but many christians are essentially doing the same thing, because you’ve always got to rejoice, you are sort of not allowed to grieve. It’s like being sad would show a lack of faith.
I recall meeting Brian in a resthome when I was a student chaplain. He was a widower with poor eyesight, failing memory and could manage about six steps on his walker before he had to sit down for a rest. It would take him about 40 minutes to get to the dining room for his meals – he was doing it tough. And I said to him you have sustained some real losses haven’t you. He replied not really, there are some poor beggars here that are much worse off than me, he was thankful that he wasn’t one of the people that was really suffering. I heard variations on that theme a lot in the resthome, it could be worse. I don’t think that is what Paul is calling us to when he says give thanks in all circumstances. Brian had a positive attitude to his circumstances, but was minimising the very real and major losses that he had suffered.
I don’t think that Brian was a christian but I have heard a christianised version of this approach. Sometime when I have expressed my concern for christian people going through hard times I have been met with – ‘well, I am still walking in victory, I’m not going to lose that.’ I don’t think that this is what Paul is calling us to.
So what does it mean to give thanks in all circumstances?
There are two answers that I want to suggest to you. The first is to thank God for the things that we can unconditionally and absolutely attribute to him. That is our salvation, that we are sealed with the Holy Spirit who will walk this life with us, he will embody Jesus to us – God will not leave us or forsake us. Also Jesus promises that our treasure in heaven is safe.
He will remember the love and the grace that we shared with others, the encouragement we gave to someone who needed it, the gifts that we quietly gave to his kingdom. He does not forget our good deeds and will ultimately reward us, because God is nobody’s debtor.
The second is that we are told to give thanks in all things, not for all things. So no matter what is happening in my world there will be things and people that I can be thankful about. In Brian’s case he still has his memories of the things that he experienced earlier in his life, he still watched cricket in his room, had people looking after him who he enjoyed, and a couple of good friends at the home. Despite the dramatic shrinking of his world there were still good things in it that he could be thankful for. It is a matter of counting your blessings and so maintaining an attitude of gratitude no matter what your life circumstances, I think that it’s a spiritual discipline. Paul was not calling him to thank God for his disabilities, but rather to maintain the practice of being thankful in his life.
Likewise, Paul does not require my young self to deny the horrendous cuisine that I was exposed to as a young man, but I can give thanks that it sustained me. And Shirley is not called onto to deny her very real grief about her son, but she could give thanks that she has a son who shares her passion for dancing.
Many modern secular psychologists would be saying a hearty amen to these conclusions. People who are thankful are more optimistic and more mentally healthy than those that don’t. But christian gratitude goes further.
Thanking God is a very tangible act of faith. In saying thank you, especially when things are difficult, we are showing that we trust in God’s goodness and God’s care for us. By a decision of our will we are choosing to trust God’s charactor and care for us. Thanking God is an essential building block of the joy of the Lord, rejoicing in God comes from a grateful heart.
The mega story of our faith is that God created everything that has ever been, he spoke it into existence, and when he created it he saw that it was good. All things were clean, pure and unsullied.
Sin entered our world through our rebellion, seeing ourselves as the ultimate authority rather than God. It fractured
• our relationship with God,
• our relationships with each other are scarred by the consequences of our selfishness,
• our world groans under the curse of sin, and
• inside ourselves we are broken by its poison.
Paul in Romans 1:21 sums up our sinful rebellion by saying that we neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him.
In Jesus God became one of us and entered into our experience to be reconciled to his creation. He sought us out to be his people, to identity with us, to save us from ourselves. Our salvation is far from complete, we are being saved to be a part of the community of love that is Father, Son and Spirit. God’s kingdom has broken into our reality but its fullness is still off in the future, when Jesus returns and all things are brought together under his lordship.
I have a friend who has a particularly tricky mother who he manages with great skill. In the run up to his wedding he was quite concerned about how she might react to his new in laws, she was in fact starting to cause a few problems. His solution was to publically thank her for being so welcoming to his bride’s family, and she glowed under his thanks. But he was thanking her for what he hoped she would do rather than what she had in fact done, and it worked brilliantly. He used thank you as the first word, but our thank you to God is always the second word. God is glorified in our giving thanks.
Saying thank you is our response to the saving act of Jesus, who saved us by creating us and by redeeming us from sin, it is our response to his saving love. It is always the second word, never the first because the first word was Jesus Christ.
The temptation for us is to try to narrate God into our lives. If you listen to most christian testimonies the person telling the story is usually the main character, but the truth is that it’s the other way around. We are in the process of becoming part of God’s big story of creation and redemption. Thanking Jesus is a way of realigning ourselves with his story, that he made us, that he is good and cares for us, and we have a place in his people and in the future plan that is unfolding.
There are a couple of parallel passages to this verse and I want to show you one, its Colossians 3:15-17
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
You see the similarities, giving thanks is connected with joyful worship and the experience of the peace of Christ. This passage is clearly targeted at the life of the church community, not so much at the individual believer. Interestingly the Thessalonians passage is also not talking to the individual believers, but to the whole community. Being thankful and rejoicing are things that we do together, a team sport as well as an individual pursuit.
So today we thought that it would be good to consider what you are thankful for. We are going to open barstool in a minute, …

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admin January 6th, 2012

Today we’re continuing last week’s story about lament and hope. Last week we majored on lament but this week we’re looking at the movement towards hope in the midst of lament. A movement that we’ve already seen is part of most of the lament psalms. In fact all but a couple move from lament to hope. Not necessarily by resolving the circumstances that have caused the Psalmist distress. But movement more in terms of expressions of despair giving way to expressions of hope and praise.
Let’s listen to that same Psalm Helen read to us form last week. Psalm 42

There’s a song by Leonard Cohen that seems to me very close to the message of the Psalms. Most of you know that I think Bob Dylan is king really. But if you haven’t yet seen the DVD of Leonard Cohen live in London you’ve missed a treat. And one of the highlights of that concert is his song called anthem. And when he sang this song live in the Stadium at Addington a couple of years ago the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. And the words of the chorus of this song go like this:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

This seems to me very close to the message of the Psalms of lament.
That just as light can’t be really appreciated, or the difference it makes be discerned, apart from the experience of darkness. So our hope as Christians is really only something we are forced to reach out to grasp in the context of separation and pain and suffering. And so we find this interplay between anguish and hope in the psalms. And a movement from despair to hope. But not according to any particular pattern or formula.

Sometimes these psalms move quickly from anguish to resolution to praise. Sometimes they mix things up. Like for example Psalm 12 where there is a movement from anguish to faith and hope but still in a context where the strife continues.

But still other psalms show no movement. Just people who are stuck like Job full of complaints but nothing has changed. Like Psalm 88 in which the Psalmist talks about being stuck in the depths of the Pit deserted by his friends and cast off by God. And that’s the way it starts and ends. Although, in fact, there are only a couple of Psalms like that.

Of course our inclination is to want to rush through the anguish to a quick resolution. From prison to praise as quick as we can.
But in the Psalms there just isn’t a formula for rapid resolution. Things take as long as they take and are often very messy. And some things can’t ever be neatly resolved in this life. All we can say is that the backdrop of the rest of the bible story in which we find these laments says that God is with us in our suffering and he does see and hear and care and he has come down to rescue us as we said last week based on God’s message to Moses in Exodus chapter 3.

But given that this is such a clear movement in most of the Psalms where do the Psalmists draw their hope from? And how do we rediscover hope in the midst of really distressing circumstances?
Well, I want to talk some more about this in just a few minutes but first Pete will speak to us, then I will talk again briefly and then Peter will lead us through to some concluding acts of worship in which we can make our responses to God and particularly as we share in the Lord’s supper.

Because certainly the punchline for us must be this. That in Jesus we meet one who uses the very words of the lamenting Psalmist himself and applies them to his own agony. Agony which we believe he endured for our sakes and to let us know that not only is God able to understand our anguish but he has tasted it himself firsthand in Jesus and knows what it is to lament from the inside of life both as the tormented son and the grief stricken father. And so this is the one to whom we turn when we look for hope in the midst of despair.

But how do we really nourish that hope and what might it involve?
Well we’ll come back to my thoughts on that in a few minutes but first some thoughts from Pete….. ….

As I said before I want to just briefly explore how we can nourish hope and three dimensions of what it seems to me this involves. And so I want to talk about sources of hope in terms of past, present and future dimensions.

The past picks up on the theme of remembering that we often find in the Psalms. Remembering that recalls and retells the stories of the acts of God in the past. Psalm 42 that we read from before says

“These things I remember as I pour out my soul. How I used to go to the house of God under the protection of the Mighty One”.
And “My soul is downcast, therefore I will remember you”

I love the writings of Frederick Beuchner and there is a great sermon by him entitled “A room called remember”. Its about a place that any of us can book into any time that is full of memories that can help to make us feel at home and at peace. Not the dark and sinister memories of things we would rather forget. But the encouraging memories of things we need to hold on to and must not forget, although often we do.

And Beuchner says we need to make time for remembering on purpose. A deeper and slower kind of remembering. Remembering as searching and finding. To grasp the trajectory of the journey that we are on and the foundations that have already been laid and to remember those on whose shoulders we stand. This is remembering as a kind of prayer.
The Psalmist David says Give praise to the Lord. Make known his deeds among the peoples. Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles and the judgements he has pronounced.

So Beuchner says “when we enter that room called remember at last we see what hope is and where it comes from, hope as the driving power and the outermost edge of faith. Hope stands up to its knees in the past and keeps its eyes on the future. There has never been a time past when God wasn’t with us as the strength beyond our strength and the wisdom beyond our wisdom, as whatever it is in our hearts that keeps us human enough at least to get by, despite everything in our lives that tends to wither the heart and make us less than human. To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift. So “hope stands up to its knees in the past and remembers”.
And so when Jesus took the bread and cup at the last supper he said do this and remember me. And so the Lords Supper is one invitation to enter the room called remember.
But not only in the sense of remembering things past. This bread is my body this cup is God’s new covenant sealed with my blood. Not just the memory of events past But also the promise of the presence of this one with us now. Like the experience of those men on the road to Emmaus who didn’t realise who the stranger was who walked with them along the road until they broke bread together at the end of that journey and they suddenly woke up to the fact that the risen Jesus had been with them all the time and they were actually sitting at the table with him without even realising it. Because his promise is Lo I will be with you always.
Not promising that we will always clearly discern his presence.
But promising that he is there whether we do or not. Because the key thing is not how tightly we are holding on to God but how firmly he is holding onto us. And he is.

Because he does see and he does hear and he does care and he has come down to rescue us. And he is Emmanuel God with us and God with us right now and wherever we are.

And so here are the past and present aspects of hope.
But then there is also the future. The hope we look forward to.
The promise that the way things are is not the way they will always be. The promise that the loose ends of history will be sewn up. That justice will be done and evil dealt with. And there will be an end to suffering and sadness and disillusionment and despair. And this broken city we now live in will be transformed into a different kind of redeemed city with a garden at its centre and a river running through it as a home for people from all nations to live in and to live at one.

In Hebrews chapter 11 we read it was by faith that Abraham lived in a tent while he looked forward to that city with foundations whose architect and builder is God. For faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we don’t yet see. And living in the light of that vision now. Living as both signs and agents of that future kingdom.

And so as we come to the Lord’s Supper in a few minutes time we not only come to remember the past and celebrate the present but we also do this in remembrance until he comes. And looking forward to that ultimate table that we will all sit down to feast at in the full presence of God. The past and the future. Memory and expectation. Remember and hope. Remember and wait.

For him who we have until now only caught the most faint of glimpses of yet who we will see face to face and immediately recognise and not as a threat but as the fulfilment of our deepest longings. The one who did himself lament My God my God why have you forsaken me. But who now comes, having tasted our suffering first-hand, to deal with every fear in our hearts and to wipe away every tear from our eyes.

Because ultimately our hope is not in a formula or a prophecy or a promise or a doctrine, but a person. One who has come and is always coming and yet who is also still to come. Jesus is our hope. To remember him who always remembers us.

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admin January 6th, 2012

Kia ora!
This morning’s message is brought to you by the holy trinity of Helen Sturgeon, Pete Majendie and myself and hopefully also with the participation of the real Holy Trinity.
And today we’re thinking about Lamenting. And if some of you who were here last time I preached think but that’s what he talked about last time just after the first earthquake last September – has he only got one message?
Well let me just quickly explain that this is what Rod asked me to come and speak about – lament this week and hope next week. Because you have a document that says “We want to grow as a worshipping community that is characterised by qualities that include healthy lament over our personal and collective losses while being held in the hope of the Gospel.”
And there have been lots of losses both personally and collectively in this year. And last Sunday was the anniversary of the first quake in Christchurch last year. And today is the 10th anniversary of fall of the twin towers in New York on September 11th. And then there was the tsunami in Japan, Not to mention the famine in East Africa right now. Huge catastrophes. But also all the personal losses that can loom just as large for us as individuals through a death or disability or infertility or conflict or just huge disappointment and disillusionment. So how do we deal with the anguish that accompanies these sorts of losses?
In the Bible half of the Psalms are poems or songs of lament or complaint. Even the psalmists themselves call them complaints. Cries of anguish and desperation. Some are based on much more personal and private experiences while some are clearly more communal crises. But whatever the case this is the prayerbook of the people of God and we are being invited to let their responses teach us how to respond. But do we really? According to the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, “ in her songs, testimonies and prayers the church only knows of praise.” Someone else concluded in their study of church worship “Psalms of lament are poorly represented in the worship of most denominations…..it would appear that prayer and worship in most Christian congregations fail to make room for the experiences of lament, and protest and remonstration with God”. And yet another writer says about the worship of churches shaped by the charismatic renewal “Charismatics are good at the highs….but not so good at the lows”. Because charismatic spirituality identifies with the ‘Romantic’ adventure which overcomes a succession of trials, often with supernatural help, but also wants to rush towards the happy ending in a way that often doesn’t deal very well with ongoing pain and suffering and grief. And a Philipino church leader commenting on the sort of worship life that westerners have exported around the world says “that there seems to be no way for dealing with unanswered prayers in the church”.
But we want to suggest this morning that the Bible says something different. That even if the laments have been largely purged from the worship of most churches this church has said that you think this is something important to rediscover. And we think so too. And so Helen is going start by leading us in some reflections on this theme and then I will say some more and then Pete will lead us to our conclusion today but also conscious that what we do today is also connected to our celebration of hope next week, but not because we need to rush there. In fact its important that we don’t. But its because there is the promise of hope beyond the pain and confusion that we can be brave to enter into this experience. Because telling the truth about suffering and honestly expressing our complaints where people and even whole communities are groaning under stress is not only appropriate, but also very necessary.
If even Jesus himself enters into the experience of the Psalmist when he uses those words from the first verse of Psalm 22 to cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” How much more should we expect this to be part of our experience as his followers? And so the Bible encourages us to take our complaints and confusion and grief and anguish to God so that we can experience his help in sorting things out. Or at least find a source of hope in the midst of our pain and confusion. And so it might seem strange but there is a point in those words of the prophet Jeremiah in Jeremiah chapter 9 verse 20 when he says “Teach your daughters how to wail; teach one another a lament” “Teach your daughters how to wail; teach one another a lament”And so this morning we will. So over to you Helen.
(Helen)

Reading Psalm 13.
Actually I have been doing some homework about laments since I last preached here because I wrote a paper comparing biblical laments with Maori laments. I got interested because I not only found that half of the Psalms are laments but also half of traditional Maori waiata. I found this from a collection of more than 300 waiata collected by Sir Apirana Ngata which have just been republished. And I was interested because I have learned a lot about dealing with death and grief publicly from Maori approaches to tangi. And Maori laments are often sung or chanted at tangi.
In fact I discovered along the way that most cultures have developed mourning rituals to express their grief and recent Western culture is a bit of an exception is this. As if we have tried to keep the reality of death at a distance and in the process have lost language to cope with it. Anyway in most cultures laments are very common. But for all sorts of reasons. Not just for the dead. There are laments about the fall of great cities, about emigration from the points of view of both those who leave and those who are left behind, and laments related to marriage rituals as a bride leaves to join her husband’s household, as well as laments for those who have died. Because the grief that accompanies loss is a universal experience. But most often Maori laments are written in response to someone’s death.
And even the form of Maori laments has a lot in common with biblical laments. Both of them have a poetic form that is designed to be sung or chanted. They both involve public expressions of deep personal pain and grief and disappointment in disarmingly honest and graphic ways. They both often talk about the distress of feeling separated and left behind by one who has previously been a huge source of encouragement and consolation. They tell the story of the events that have led to this and then often offer strong and very raw expressions of complaint and blame and anger, especially if some accident or foul play has been involved. And these are often accompanied by aggressive calls for vengeance and the desire for revenge. And so in both the lament psalms and the Maori laments we find similar expressions of disorientation and deep longings and loss and complaints and cries of anguish and calls for revenge. There are many similarities. And I think when it comes to honesty in dealing with our confusion and grief Maori have a lot to teach us about lamenting in Aotearoa.
But at the same time there is also something else that you don’t find in Maori laments that you do find in biblical laments. And that is strong complaints directed straight at God. In traditional Maori contexts even priests are careful about how they relate to God. Generally there is a hesitancy about addressing the gods directly and when you do you better get it right or bad things might happen. Direct appeals to God especially in the form of these sorts of complaints and especially by ordinary people are very rare in Maoridom. Not only in laments but even in pre Christian karakia – that is Maori invocations and prayers – making a direct appeal to a god, is a rare occurrence.
But by contrast the Psalmist usually begins by addressing God very intimately “My God” or “God of my fathers”. “How long O Lord” or “Help O Lord”. This is not a complaint offered to a stranger, but a cry of pain asking for help from a God who is believed to be listening.
And the complaint is no nicely crafted polite request. Just a holler. Complaining how troubled life is and how their world is caving in, everyone is against them and God is absent, silent, indifferent and uncaring.
They demand that God take notice and demonstrate that he cares by turning and acting to change things and do something to rescue them.
And the Psalmist typically goes on to heap up reasons why God must act – some honourable reasons, but also some much more dubious reasons.
The Psalmist often talks about wanting vengeance and asks for God’s help to make sure that something hurtful and punishing and destructive happens to the people who have caused their pain.
And then when the anger and pain of the Psalmist has been vented enough to allow for a turning, other more positive themes may be sounded. Sometimes with a resolution that is expressed in rejoicing and praise, but at other times more muted than this, however usually with more hope than the Psalmist began with.
But it is such an honest interaction the way the Psalmist unloads to God. And encouragement for us to be just as honest with God. For a Christian prayer that pretends is not prayer at all. Just a religious act that is trying to earn God’s favour or manipulate God in a way that expresses faith in a Gospel of works rather than grace.
The God of Israel and of Jesus is a God to be wrestled with in the face of danger and disillusionment. Please take this cup from me. Yet not what I want but what you want. “My God my God why have you turned your back on me?” Or think of the cry of Job in Job chapter 10 from the 1 on “I loathe my life, I will give free utterance to my complaint. I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. I will say to God do not condemn me: let me know what you contend against me. Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favour the schemes of the wicked?” And we can remember that recurring cry of the Psalmist why do the wicked have it so good yet the righteous have it so bad?
For Israel loss, grief, and disappointment and oppression and famine and infertility and death are all present realities and real dangers, but its God we must turn to for help. Not in the belief that God will always promise a simple solution. But God is not apathetic and untouched by the cries of his people. God is moved by such prayers and We think of his message to Moses in Exodus chapter 3. When God says “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt. I have heard their cry. I do indeed know their suffering and I have come down to deliver them. I do see. I do hear. I do care and I have come down.
Of course there are also other things we should lament about like our own sin and the sin we see screwing up the world around us. The Psalmist knows about that too. Although sometimes I wonder if we don’t believe in sin any more. Because in the churches I most often go to these days there is often no prayer of confession or reaching out for forgiveness. Do we believe in sin? And I wonder if there are other things we ought to be lamenting about if we could really see the world from God’s perspective?
Anyway it is this sense that the king of the universe invites us to come to him and lodge our complaints with him that is the dimension we don’t find in other lament traditions. The Maori laments do underline for us the importance of naming and expressing our grief but its very easy for us from our culture to just interpret this in a personally therapeutic way. Expressing our angst so that we can feel more at peace.
But there’s more to it than that in the Bible. It is the recognition that in a moral universe there’s a lot that happens that at best is very perplexing and at worst is totally unfair. And we have to have that out with God. To question God about it. To wrestle with God about it. To argue with God about it. Our God is not too far removed from us to do that. And nor is God too small or too threatened to invite us to do that.
And so the biblical laments not only invite us to honestly express our grief and disappointment and alienation, and pain. But to also deliberately take these expressions and the hard questions they give rise to into the presence of the only one who can really offer a decisive word to those who suffer. And probably not to provide an instant rational answer to the question that is asked that can explain why. But at least enough of an answer to introduce us to the one who does understand and who can walk the road with us.
Anyway that’s what I think is really distinct about the way the Bible invites us to lament.
Ann Weems is a Christian writer and her son was killed less than one hour after his 21st birthday. Naturally she was absolutely devastated and thought she would never recover. When Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann asked her if Rachel would ever be comforted because he was working on a commentary on Jeremiah she said no Rachel will not be comforted. Not here. Not now. Not in the sense of being ultimately comforted. Of course those people who are surrounding me with compassion are doing the work of angels and I bid them come. But Rachel will be comforted only when God wipes the tears from her eyes. And it was then that Walter Brueggemann suggested that she might like to write some lament Psalms of her own. And in time she did. And this is one of them.
(Read Anne Weems p23)
Its not just about lamenting. Its about knowing that there is a God who does see and does hear and does care and has come down to rescue us. And who is growing a community of people who are also learning to lament with us when that’s needed so we can also celebrate together when that’s needed. But I think Pete’s going to talk some more about that.

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