Joyful Defiance

Death Does Not Win the Day

Anna M. Madsen

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781506472614
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506472621
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Sitting in the pew at her husband's funeral, author Anna Madsen heard the last verse of the great Reformation hymn: "Were they to take our house, goods, honor, child, or spouse, though life be wrenched away, they cannot win the day. The kingdom's ours forever!" Reflecting on this experience, Madsen realized that death takes victories when its power appears to be greater than life. And she defiantly refused to cede death any more wins: "Not my spirit, not my strength, not my joy, and certainly not those of my children."

The challenge is to acknowledge death in its manifold forms and own one's indignation and grief, and yet transcend it so that even if we are angry, we do not become anger. This book names the tension between grief and hope, acknowledges the reality of both, and defines a path forward to a life of joyful defiance. That path runs through Holy Saturday, a day that has one foot in the fear, grief, and death of Good Friday while the other is in Easter, a day of hope, freedom, life, and joy.

Christians are not immune from experiencing anxiety, anger, exhaustion, and grief--emotions and effects arising from personal and communal trauma, including the trauma of death. Yet, the accompanying angst and pain, while real, are not the last word for people of faith. This book is written particularly for advocates, caregivers, and those who suffer in any number of ways, among them chronic illness, chronic injustice, and chronic exhaustion. Despite facing grief, anger, fear, and fatigue, readers will be encouraged not just to cope but to embrace hope and joy again, and then to plow them back into the ground of the wider world for the sake of their neighbors.

1

The Absence of Lamenting the Absence of God

In 1978, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) and two of the predecessor bodies to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA)—the American Lutheran Church (ALC) and the Lutheran Church in America (LCA)—published the Lutheran Book of Worship, forever fondly known as either the LBW or the “Green Book.” The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) participated in the creation of it but pulled out at the very last moment, publishing its own hymnal instead.

It was a standard book of worship for well over thirty years, and in some places, it still finds a home in Lutheran pews and certainly has a place in many Lutheran homes. But here’s an interesting bit of trivia about this beloved book: all the lament psalms were removed from its pages.

It’s like some huge despair magnet hovered over these sacred texts and pulled up all the psalms that dealt with grief.

This unfortunate idiosyncrasy did not pass the notice of the estimable Lester Meyer, late Old Testament scholar and longtime professor of religion at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. For a spell in the 1960s, my father, George Madsen, now a retired pastor and New Testament theologian, and Les were colleagues, not just teaching students in pristine classrooms but digging through dusty soils on archaeological sites in Caesarea Maritima. That this sort of professional relationship bloomed into a friendship is something indeed: they were like the mismatched friends in The Odd Couple, Dad being Oscar to Les’s Felix. While as far apart in personalities as Felix and Oscar, the two of them shared a fondness not just for each other but also for biblical scholarship.

Les’s deep love of details and of the Psalter led him to notice the lamentable, so to speak, omission from the LBW, and scholar that he was, he wrote about it.1 Even through his terribly genteel manner, honed by a Reformed heritage and academic protocol, one can still hear how profoundly miffed Les was about these editorial decisions. Straight out of the chute, Les draws attention to the section of the LBW entitled “The Psalms” but with the level of sarcasm that is acceptable in polite academic company.

Les pens, “The heading [‘The Psalms’] is somewhat misleading, since the section does not contain all of the biblical psalms. . . . It would seem . . . ungrateful to complain when Lutherans who use this worship book have more than eighty percent of the Psalter so conveniently available . . . nevertheless . . .”

And with that “nevertheless,” Les proceeds to (albeit politely) lambast and lament.2

After a deep dive into a biblical approach of study called “form criticism,” Les sifts out the specific types of psalms notably absent from the book. Thirteen (46 percent, he notes, of the missing psalms) are individual psalms of lament, seven (25 percent) are community psalms of lament, and the others are psalms of judgment and variations on the lament theme. In sum, he writes, “Of the twenty-eight psalms omitted from the Lutheran Book of Worship, then, twenty (or 71%) are laments, while another five (or 18%) have lament-like qualities.”3

Lutherans, or at least the Lutheran editors, it seemed, had an aversion to, were agnostic about, or were antipathetic to lament. And it led Les to wonder why. It also led him to wonder what implications would ricochet into the life of lay worshippers were they not to have access to communal lament, a question raised all the more by his incredulity that while the hymnal, the source of worship for all the people, did not have the lament psalms, the Ministers Desk Edition4 did.

Relatedly, it’s worth noting that neither “lament” nor “grief” is listed as a subject heading in the LBW hymnal index, though that oversight has been rectified in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW), the most current ELCA hymnal.

To lay out his case and lay claim to his indignation, Les leads the reader on a foray into ancient Israel’s sense of God. He highlights how ancient Israelites were acutely aware of both God’s presence and God’s hiddenness. The latter moments, those occasions when God seems absent or is even the author of individual and communal suffering, are the ones that gave birth to the lament psalms. Who among us hasn’t asked where God is in the midst of grief, tragedy, and profound suffering? Were broken hearts, lowered heads, and raised fists experiences known only to ancient Israelites? Of course not.

Like the ancient Israelites, we are more than familiar with grasping and gasping for sense, for yearning that order be regained, for praying that God be revealed and present again. Instead of shalom, we know all too well and all too often evil, suffering, inequity, death, and general but persisting nonsense. Meyer believed that for Israel—and, arguably, for us—if “all responsibility must finally rest with the one God who, as Creator, was guarantor of an orderly world . . . an orderly world testified to the divine presence.”5

The lack of this purported orderly world, though? These moments where nothing but an echo is heard precisely when the Divine ought to be speaking? The apparent chaos and void shake our understanding of ourselves, of what in life can be trusted, and of whether, in fact, even God can be trusted.

Les fully understood the disillusionment that suffering can cause and knew that the ancient Israelites did as well. For them, Les writes, when this evil, suffering, death, inequity, despair, and nonsense came to pass, these moments of despair “raised the problem of the integrity of [Israel’s] religious outlook.”6

Every time I read that sentence, I am struck by Les’s choice of the word integrity. It’s a powerful word and intentionally used. If someone has no integrity, they are capricious and dishonest and cannot be trusted. To question the integrity of their faith and thereby the integrity of God, then, is no small thing. However, it is precisely what lament gives us the freedom, language, and cadence to do. Is our God worthy of the worship and faith God invites and even commands of us, or is God instead base, fickle, deceitful, cruel, and not to be trusted?

The audacity of posing such questions—directly to God, no less—is quite foreign to Christianity, as is questioning God at all. I think we are afraid of this kind of raw expression of pain and anger because we—even we Lutherans who ostensibly are all about grace—even we, at the end of the day, are not entirely sure that God can or will absorb or even tolerate our lament and what underlies it. Part of us wonders, What if we doubt, what if we end up disbelieving, and what if we then in that moment die? Then what will God do to us? Or what if our dismay is perceived by God as audacious, and what if we cause God offense, even we who believe? What will God have of us when we are met by the Divine?

Or to circle back to the introduction, what if it’s true that God has an immutable plan, and all things, even horrible, painful suffering, are going according to it? What if our pain is supposed to happen, if we deserve the suffering, if we are to learn something from the trauma?

Lament can feel dangerously unfaithful, disobedient, or lacking in trust, and given that at least two and maybe three generations of Lutherans grew up without ready access to lament as a facet of faith (at least in the hymnal), it certainly feels foreign.

But it’s not foreign to the Jewish tradition. In fact, not only did ancient Hebrews write the book—quite literally—on lamentations, but the act of lamenting is, as Les Meyer knew, a foundational part of the book of Psalms because they experienced reasons for lament in their daily lives. For this reason, Les made sure to mention in his article the late Old Testament scholar Robert Davidson, who wrote—notably in a book called The Courage to Doubt: Exploring an Old Testament Theme—that the experience of God’s assumed absence reveals that the ancient people collectively knew of the excruciating sense that God had abandoned them and had given them up to their sins and their sufferings. With that shared lived experience, Davidson viewed the questions “Why?” and “How long?” “to be as authentic cries as ‘Hallelujah.’”7

Christians are familiar with alleluia, of course. We get alleluia. We are all over alleluia. It may not be coincidental that the rise of contemporary Christian praise music in Lutheran circles overlapped the use of the LBW’s codified rejection of lament.

But Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann is annoyed to no end that Christians easily run to the praises of God but away from the laments to God. Dipping into the anguish of Psalm 22:1, Jesus, the Jew, himself cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It passes the attention of neither Meyer nor Brueggemann that those who suffer and who claim Jesus as Savior are far less inclined than their Jewish siblings to join in that same cry to that same God.

Meyer uses Brueggemann to make his case about the absence of the lament psalms in the LBW. He draws upon Brueggemann’s chastisements of Christians for their unwillingness to engage lament. With almost the same level of proper academic constraint as coursed through Meyer, Brueggemann laments that

much Christian piety and spirituality is romantic and unreal in its positiveness. . . . It is no wonder that the church has intuitively avoided these psalms. They lead us into dangerous acknowledgment of how life really is. They lead us into the presence of God where everything is not polite and civil. They cause us to think unthinkable thoughts and utter unutterable words. Perhaps worst, they lead us away from the comfortable religious claims of “modernity” in which everything is managed and controlled. In our modern experience, but probably also in every successful and affluent culture, it is believed that enough power and knowledge can tame the terror and eliminate the darkness.8

It is possible, he prods us to think, that the lament psalms force us to recognize, and then articulate, our most repressed instincts, unacknowledged emotions, basest elements, and greatest fears of who we are and of the nature of the human condition. In so doing, of course, we are honest with ourselves and with God, stripped of pretensions and politeness, and raw with pain and fury.

But the Hebrew people, says Brueggemann, knew and were quite comfortable with the concept that they could honestly speak neither of life nor of God if the unpleasant parts of each weren’t also uttered: their deep suffering and grief, their anger at losses and betrayals of trust, and compounding it all, a palpable absence of God’s presence and redemption in its midst.

Precisely through Israel’s lamentations, Brueggemann believes that by their stark candor, their verbal recollection of a life without misery, and their willingness to hold God accountable to their expectations of God, Israel “bears witness” before God. Lamenting, then, is an act of faith rather than a betrayal of it. “In that act,” Brueggemann says, “God is summoned relentlessly into the now.”9

This nowness is key to lament and key to the difference between Jewish and Christian embracing of it. For a series of interwoven and complicated reasons, Christians have tended to focus faith in God’s redemptive action upon what happens after death. Our trust in redemption has become primarily futuristic in nature and in hope, the purpose of Christian baptism and belief becoming centered on a salvation that will occur afte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Absence of Lamenting the Absence of God
• 2 Joy Comes in the Mourning
• 3 Finding Hope When You’re Losing Your Grip
• 4 Justified for Joy
• 5 Holy Saturday Living
• Notes