Risking Truth

Reshaping the World through Prayers of Lament

Ellington

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781630878276
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Ours is a world characterized by change. Often the most fundamental changes in our lives result from experiences of profound suffering and loss as we are wrenched from our familiar world and driven into one that is alien. In the midst of such loss, we are compelled to choose between trying to cling to the remnants of a reality that is passing away and trying to make a home in a strange new world. Biblical prayers of lament wait for us at this crossroad of loss and newness.Prayers of lament are marked both by loss and by the inexplicable silence of God. Everything we believe about God's justice and goodness is placed in doubt by his hiddenness. The cry of lament is an act of tremendous risk. To lament is to abandon the sinking ship of religious certainty and strike out in a small dingy, amidst stormy seas, in search of a hidden God.Faced with God's silence, the biblical writers are willing to place at risk their most fundamental beliefs and to lament. The Psalm writers risk the loss of the Exodus story by crying out to a God who has failed to save, demanding that he once more part the chaotic waters and make a way in the desert. Job risks the loss of a moral God by confronting God with his injustice. Jeremiah risks the loss of the covenant by calling out for God to return yet again to a faithless partner and a failed marriage. Matthew and John the Revelator recognize that the coming of Messiah is impelled by the cries of innocent sufferers. Throughout the Bible, lament risks the possible loss of relationship with God and presses for a new, though uncertain, experience of God's presence.

1

Why Should We Cry Out?

On January 26, 2004, the day after Christmas, an earthquake deep beneath the floor of the Indian Ocean gave birth to a tsunami that devastated coastal areas in and around Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and India. The death toll approached 300,000 and, because of the remoteness and poverty of some of the affected areas, a final death count can only be estimated. Literally in a matter of moments the lives of many hundreds of thousands of people were struck by overwhelming tragedy and loss. Houses, churches and temples, hospitals, schools, and even entire villages were obliterated. Families were torn apart and people perished by the tens of thousands regardless of age, religion, race, wealth, or social position.

When Safety Vanishes

Stability and safety are things that we prize very highly in life. We will pay a heavy price to obtain them and an even heavier price to keep them once we have them. We will go to extremes, will even fight wars, in order to protect a safe and prosperous life for ourselves and for our families. We will turn a blind eye to our own faults and sins, while villainizing those who threaten our safety. We will turn away from the suffering of others and find ways to justify insulating ourselves from a chaotic world that threatens to rob us of our sense of security. In the developed nations today we have experienced great prosperity and an unusual degree of security, so much so that we have come to think of such things as normal and even as our God-given right. Small wonder that we resist so energetically anything that threatens to undo the lives that we have built for ourselves.

Ultimately, though, we cannot shield ourselves from loss. Uncer-tainty, change, injury, and death are constants in the world that no amount of wealth or technology can fully guard against. The spread of nuclear technology among diverse nations and powers, continued vulnerability to terrorist attacks, the shift of populations from poor to wealthy nations, the mounting strain on our environment as we exhaust its natural resources, and the threat of new diseases and super-viruses are just a few of the things that threaten our sense of well-being. Ultimately we are unable sufficiently to control our national borders, our economies, our livelihoods, our homes, or even our own bodies. Loss threatens each of us and can completely transform our lives in an instant.

In the Bible, safety and security are found not in military strength or wealth or technological advantage, but in a relationship with God. Yahweh, the God of Israel, is exalted as the creator of the world and is the sovereign ruler of the nations. The forces of nature are in the palm of his hand and he controls wind and fire, flood and earthquake. God is the mighty warrior who takes up arms, vanquishing enemy armies. He is the healer who cleanses lepers and raises the dead to new life. He is the loving parent who provides food for the destitute. He is the righteous judge who delivers the weak and powerless. Proverbs 21:31 puts it succinctly: “The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD.” For those who live in a relationship with Yahweh, he is both the provider and the guarantor of life. The loss of security, then, threatens their sense of an ordered world and touches directly on their relationship with God.

For the writers of the Bible the experience of loss elicits prayers of lament. Such prayers are born from devastation when safety is replaced by turmoil. We find them in those places where our defenses against chaos have been breached and our resources for coping overwhelmed. Feelings of pain, fear, confusion, and outrage drive lament prayers. They are the fruit not of quiet reflection, but of pressing need.

Lament does not arise from perplexity over theological uncertainties. It is anguish and not theological curiosity that energizes the cries of “How long oh Lord?” and “Why have you abandoned me?” Theological reflection, if present at all in lament, is so only in a derivative sense. The prayer of lament seldom asks “Why do tsunamis take the life of babies?” but rather “Why did this tsunami kill my baby?” Lament is the product of life experiences and not of detached contemplation. It is not concerned with objectivity, but rather with verbalizing pain. The crisis that confronts the one praying a lament is more than the potential loss of a theological understanding of God, it is the weakening or loss of trust in God. It is not just that tragedy has struck, but that in the midst of that tragedy the God who has been a loving source of protection and prosperity in the past seems suddenly to have fallen silent, so that he will not provide, not protect, and not heal. Loitering behind many of the biblical laments is the basic question “Can this God still be trusted?”

Praying the prayer of lament is a risky business. Lament is risky, first of all, because it abandons all pretense of excuse, denial, or cover-up. Like the little boy in Hans Christian Anderson’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes, lament proclaims loudly and, for some, embarrassingly that the world is not as it was thought to be and that the emperor is, in fact, naked. Such prayers simply will not constrain themselves to conventional, acceptable, safe language in their address to God. Laments rightly diagnose the fundamental problem as a crisis of relationship with God. Yes the enemy attacked, yes the floodwaters rose, yes the disease wasted, but the real problem is that God both permitted these things to happen and then stood silently by as his people cried out to him for help. Lament declares boldly that everything is not all right, that God has not delivered, and that he has hidden his face from his people. The prayer of lament does not indulge itself in rationalization and excuse, but offers an honest and impassioned expression of the experience of God’s hiddenness in the midst of chaos. In short, in order to lament one must first turn loose of illusory certainty.

Lament challenges every theology of guaranteed safety and every doctrine of assured outcomes. Goaded by pain, such prayers do not shrink from exposing the cracks in our most sacred ideas about God. No question is illegitimate and no expression of doubt is off-limits. Nor does this questioning of the sacred take place in a corner, confined to the heart of the sufferer, but spills out in groans, pleas, and shouts before God and the assembled congregation. Lament will neither deny pain nor give place to theology, but risks truthful communication that could potentially lead to a loss of trust and the dismantling of our theologies of God. But more than just our confidence in God and our theology are risked by the act of lament. By challenging God to answer and to act, the prayer of lament places at risk the very foundations of an ongoing relationship with God. By putting God “on the spot,” lament runs the risk that he will neither answer nor move, that his silence will endure. Open lament risks exposing a new reality, that the God who brought his people out of Egypt and into the land of the promise no longer is a God who saves.

Lament is also, though, an act of hope. It will not accept as final the mere testimony of eyes and ears. It refuses to answer the silence of God in kind. Like a small child, lament keeps endlessly repeating “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” in that irritating tone of children that simply cannot be ignored. While lament may explore dark places and journey to extreme frontiers in a relationship with God, by its very nature it refuses to step back from that relationship into silence. The prayer of the lament stakes all on the conviction that God hears and will answer. Ultimately, while the prayer of lament involves a degree of risk, to remain silent in the face of God’s silence is to accept and embrace the certainty of hopelessness.

In this book we will focus on the biblical writer’s exploration of their faith in God and relationship with God in light of experiences that cast doubt on much of what they believed to be true about him. In lament the contradiction between what we believe to be true about God and the ways that we experience him in daily life reaches its zenith. Prayers of lament provide the primary tools with which the people of Israel can explore and redefine their relationship with God in the midst of chaos. They do this by placing at risk both belief and experience. It is in and through the prayers of lament that the tension between belief and experience is most effectively adjudicated. Lament allows us to resume the journey of faith in the midst of profound loss and divine silence. Were we to either forsake our beliefs or deny our experience, it would be impossible to continue the journey. The cry of lament is not an embarrassing lapse of faith on Israel’s part, but is a courageous act of risk-taking. Indeed to remain silent or, worse yet, to mouth praises into the silence, is a betrayal of faith, finding sufficiency as it does in a God who is distant and past. Lament is a profound and potent expression of faith.

The Place of Lament in the Life of the Church

Growing up in the church as a child, I was introduced to stories from the Old Testament that stirred my imagination and shaped my earliest notions of God. Upon leaving my children’s Sunday School class, though, a marked change took place. The Old Testament stories, which revealed God so vividly and which had such a central role in the nurturing of my faith as a child, took on more of a peripheral character in the teaching I received as an adult Christian. It was almost as if I were expected to “outgrow” the God of the Old Testament. Occasional sorties into the Old Testament were made, plundering proof-texts for the purpose of supporting some point more adequately and fully expressed in the New Testament, but rarely was the Old Testament explored in any depth for its own unique contributions to Christian faith and understanding. Only in seminary did I “rediscover” the Old Testament and come to know it as the Bible of the New Testament writers. The notion that the Old Testament had somehow been made redundant by the New was gradually replaced with an appreciation for the extent to which the New Testament is founded on, depends upon, and flows out of the Old.

Almost entirely absent from the pages of the New Testament are the faith community’s wrestlings with the problems of innocent suffering, the prosperity of the wicked, and the silence of God in times of need.1 Prayers of lament, so common in the Old Testament, are much more rare in the New and this has led some to assume that the suffering of Christ on our behalf has replaced our need for such prayers. A theology that sees the Old Testament as essentially supplementary in nature and largely eclipsed by the revelation of Christ will disdain the biblical resources given to the church for responding to God in the extremities of life. It is my desire to explore the uses that Israel made of lament and to consider its place in the shaping of our ideas and beliefs about God today.

Lament is found throughout the Old Testament, from the foundational stories of the Pentateuch, to the worship of the Psalm writers, to the reflections of the sages, to the oracles of the prophets. Experiences of suffering and of God’s silence in the face of that suffering elicited from Israel a cry. In our highly individualistic societies today, it bears pointing out that that cry was not a private matter for the prayer closet, but was offered in the context of public worship, teaching, and preaching. The silence of God in the face of human suffering was of concern to the community as a whole.

But how are we of the new covenant to appropriate such prayers? While we do not find adopting prayers of praise and thanksgiving problematic, the same cannot be said about prayers of lament. How do prayers of lament fit into the life of the modern (and increasingly postmodern) church? Should they have the same form as the laments of Israel? Should the victory of Christ over sin, sickness, and death alter their content? When confronted with suffering and divine silence, how should we speak to God?

Our Loss of Lament

Ours is an age and a culture, at least in North America, in which many have forgotten how to lament in the ways that mirror biblical prayer. By that I do not mean that we have forgotten how to cry,...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Why Should We Cry Out?
• Chapter 2: Risking an Imperfect God
• Chapter 3: Is the Story Still True?
• Chapter 4: Risking the World in Job
• Chapter 5: Jeremiah and the Vocation of Shared Suffering
• Chapter 6: Can Messiah Come Without a Cry?
• Chapter 7: The Shapes of Lament
• Bibliography