What Jesus Commands: Lament

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us for our worship service. It’s good to see you here. I have a few announcements I’d like to mention as we begin.

The men’s group will meet tonight at 6:30. All men are invited.

We’re still taking donations for Stump Elementary’s Weekly Religious Education program. If you have anything you’d like to contribute, please leave them in Randal’s Sunday school classroom, or you can see Della.

I’ll remind you that we’ll be having a very brief business meeting after today’s service. I’ll go ahead and excuse everyone after the closing hymn, but if you’re a member please hang around for a bit as we vote on approving the new Nominating Report.

Della, do you have an announcement?

Jesyka, do you have anything this morning?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Heavenly Father, as we gather on this solemn morning we are reminded that today — and all of history— is about you. We pray you help us to worship you with an undistracted heart. You know how our minds wander to the upcoming week, to present worries, to the aggravations of others and our own insecurities. Help us put those thoughts away and focus on you and your glory. Let Your Spirit stir our hearts, our souls, our minds, and our strength to exalt your Holy Name. For it’s in Jesus’s name we ask it, Amen.

Sermon

I had just gotten off graveyard shift at what was back then DuPont. Tired, hungry, filthy. I’d taken a shower and decided to check the weather report, because I wanted to cut the grass that afternoon when I got up.

But there wasn’t a weather report that morning. Instead the TV showed a live feed from downtown New York City, and one of the World Trade Center towers on fire. The newscaster was stuttering, scrambling around because he was getting so many reports at once. He said apparently an airliner had just crashed.

People were running out of that building. Firefighters and police were on the scene. A terrible accident, maybe the worst airline disaster in history. Hundreds surely dead.

I sat on the edge of the bed, trying to figure out what had happened. The shot on the TV was a wide camera angle of that burning building. I was just about to turn it off and go to bed when another jet came into the frame, flying straight for the second tower. Then were was a ball of fire.

The newscaster stopped talking. I remember hearing someone in the television studio gasp. The news anchor said something about another jet — you could hear the confusion in is voice. That’s when I knew that whatever this was, it was no accident.

I never slept that day. Sat there at the edge of the bed watching the news until I had to go back to work at midnight. I watched as the lucky ones got out of those two buildings. Watched others jump from hundreds of feet up rather than perish in the fire. Watched the first tower fall, and then the second.

Every aircraft in the country was grounded. There began to be rumors of a terrorist attack. I called Joanne at school. She was pregnant with Molly. I remember wondering what sort of world my daughter would be born into.

No one knew what was happening yet, but I think we all knew this was a moment that would define us as a nation. For my grandparents, it was Pearl Harbor. For my parents, it was the assassination of President Kennedy. For my generation, it would be 9/11.

In a lot of ways, that was proven true. There was life before 9/11, and life after. But in a lot of other ways — and sadly, I think — September 11, 2001, has been largely set aside and forgotten because of all the other terrible things that seem to happen nearly every day now.

Halfway through this year, the United States had gone through more than 300 mass shootings and 15 mass killings.

Half the country is in a severe drought, the other half is under water.

Every national election we have is the most important one in the history of our country — and if the wrong person wins, it’s the end of the republic.

Covid has killed over a million Americans.

Our schools are such dangerous places that before students stepped foot in a classroom this year, every teacher in Augusta County had to learn how to tie a tourniquet, barricade a classroom, make a weapon out of everyday items, and triage wounded students.

The news is filled with tragedy. We can’t get away from it. And even though after every tragedy we all ask, “How long before something is done about this?” the truth is we always end up turning our heads and moving on.

We moved on from 9/11. We moved on from Iraq, from Afghanistan. We move on from every murder and every act of evil. In fact, studies have shown that floods and fires and even school shootings don’t really control the nation’s attention for more than a few days.

You can say that’s because we’ve become numb to these things. But the truth is that we’re not so much numb to tragedy as we are overwhelmed by it, because it seems to happen so often now.

These terrible things happen, and we don’t want to think such darkness is possible, because it reminds us of how powerless we truly are. And so we choose — as a nation, and as individuals — to just look away and move on.

That numbness we feel at all the terrible things that happen is a way of self-protection. We learned last week what we’re supposed to do with that self, didn’t we? We’re supposed to deny it.

All through the gospels, Jesus warns us about looking away from the pain of this world. He says don’t look away from the hurting. Don’t whistle past injustice. Don’t make suffering invisible.

If the disciples of Christ are the ones who deny themselves and take up their crosses and follow him, his disciples are also ones who never turn away from even the scariest realities. Because Jesus never did. He looked at suffering head-on. And because he did, he was able to comfort those who suffered.

As the church of Christ, we are his hands and feet. As Christians, we are called to be the conscience of this nation, and time and again the Bible warns us that our conscience can be numbed. It can become calloused. And the easiest way for that to happen is to keep looking away from the problems of this world instead of looking at them head on and addressing them in the spirit of Christ.

That’s our job as his disciples because we have the truth in us. And because we have the truth, we cannot be silent. We cannot look away. We have a holy responsibility to be on the front lines of tragedy, to help and to lift up, precisely because we walk in the light rather than in darkness. As Jesus warned in John chapter 9, the danger isn’t for those who are blind, but for those who say they can see.

So how are we to begin doing that? What’s the first step in looking right at the tragedies of this life instead of looking away and ignoring? In a word, we have to learn how to lament.

To lament is to give a loud cry of grief. But in the Bible, it’s more than just sorrow or talking about sadness. It’s a prayer begun in pain that ends in trust. It’s the path that takes you from heartbreak to hope.

I said last week that Jesus will never tell us to do something that he hasn’t done. Jesus lamented often. He weeps three times in scripture — at the death of Lazarus, when he weeps over Jerusalem in Luke chapter 19, and in Gethsemene. All those times, he lamented.

The Bible is filled with lamentations. There’s even a book of the Old Testament named by that word. But there’s no more beautiful language of lamenting than in the Psalms, and that’s where we turn today.

Fifty-eight of the 150 Psalms in the Bible are laments, and today we’re going to look at one in particular, Psalm 13. Turn with me there and follow along:

How long, O LORD?

Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Consider and answer me, O LORD my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,” lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, because he has dealt bountifully with me.

And this is God’s word.

Right here in this Psalm is all the instruction you need to know the proper way a disciple of Christ is to lament. There are four steps. First, turn to God. Next, bring your complaint. Then ask boldly for help. And finally, choose to trust. Let’s take those one at a time.

First, turn to God. This is a psalm of David, and most scholars agree that David wrote this prayer while he was being pursued by King Saul. Saul was after him. Saul was going to kill David, and Saul had the resources of an entire nation at his disposal.

David feels utterly hopeless right now. Completely overwhelmed. All the light has gone out of his life. And so what does he think? What does David think this experience has taught him? The same thing that we think when we suffer tragedy, whether personally or as a nation. David thinks God has turned away from him.

Verse 1: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”

How long will you withdraw your favor from me, God? How long will I have such worry and fear, not knowing what to do to end my troubles?

David may have begun this trial with patience. At the beginning he may have held his complaints to God. But now so much time has passed and his problems are so overwhelming that David doesn’t know if they’ll ever end.

He’s despairing. He sees no hope that God will help him. That makes what he’s feeling worse, because it’s a terrible thing when tragedy strikes, but it’s even more terrible when tragedy strikes and you don’t know where God has gone.

That’s David right here. He feels like he’s been forgotten so long by God that it seems like God will never return, that David will never again have God’s mercy. David thinks not only that God has forgotten about him, he thinks God will never remember him again.

He asks, “How long will you hide your face from me?” In the imagery of the Bible, turning your face toward someone is a sign of friendship and intimacy. But when you hide your face from someone, it’s a sign of displeasure and disappointment, even hatred.

That is what David thinks God feels toward him right now. Things are bad, and so David must have messed up. He must have angered God for this to happen.

But now listen — even though David feels that God has forgotten him, he still turns to God in prayer. That’s the first point. You cannot go by your feelings, because they’ll betray you. No matter what you feel about God’s absence, turn toward God. Turning away from your feelings can be the hardest thing, but remember you are more than your feelings. You have a will. In your pain, you have to choose to talk to God about what’s happening.

Whatever you might be feeling about God’s absence doesn’t matter. What matters is what you know as a Christian. And what do you know? You know that even if it might feel like God is hiding his face from you, a hidden face is never proof of a forgetful heart. And you know that even if you feel like God has forgotten you, God can never forget, and he especially can’t forget you.

You have to turn to God in the first step if you’re ever going to accomplish the second step, which is to bring your complaint.

Every lament includes some kind of complaint to God. This isn’t just rehashing your anger. This isn’t yelling at the Lord and accusing Him of hurting you on purpose. Instead it’s humbly and honestly sharing with God the pain, the questions, and the frustrations that are raging in your heart.

In verse 2, David’s lament is broken down into three parts. The first is, “How long must I take counsel in my soul?” Whatever David’s going through here, he’s been coming up with plan after plan to make things better, but no matter what David tries, everything’s failed.

He feels like he can’t turn to God, so he has to get out of this mess himself, but whatever he tries only makes things worse, because he’s relying on his own power. And what do we learn time and again in life? The more we rely on ourselves instead of God, the worse things get in our lives.

And it’s exactly because David’s relying on himself that he brings his second complain in verse 2 — he has sorrow in his heart all the day.

All day, every day, constantly. There’s no break, no easing up. It’s even costing David sleep — he can’t find rest at night, because he’s trying to come up with another plan based on his own limited knowledge of what to do.

His sorrow isn’t just because of whatever Saul is doing — it’s not just what’s happening in David’s circumstances — it’s actually being made worse because David can’t seem to find a way out of his troubles.

And now the third complaint — David’s enemy is being exalted over him.

David can’t find a way out of this, he can’t do anything right, but everything Saul’s doing is succeeding. Right now, David is completely in Saul’s power. And remember, God said that David would be king. Saul’s not the rightful king in God’s eyes. But right now Saul is winning and David has no hope.

No wonder David feels like God has turned away. No wonder we feel like God has turned away when our lives begin to fall apart. Because it’s not supposed to happen this way, is it? Aren’t we children of God? Isn’t He our father? Then why does He allow this? Why does He seem to turn away from our hurt?

All three of these complaints are bundled up in the same question in verse 2 — How long? How long will you continue to let this happen, God? That’s David’s real complaint here. It’s bad enough that he’s suffering, bad enough that things look so bad. But when things are bad and you can’t find God at all, that makes the weight on you even worse.

Which is exactly why you need to take that third step. After you’ve turned to God and brought him your complaint, you have to boldly ask Him for help.

That’s what David does in verses 3 and 4. “Consider and hear me,” he says in verse 3. David feels as if God’s turned his face not only from David’s troubles, but from David himself. Now David asks that God look upon him again.

And God must, because David has come to a point where he realizes that God is the answer to all of his troubles. That God is the only answer. God is the only true help.

“Light up my eyes,” David writes, “lest I sleep the sleep of death.”

That’s an extraordinary sentence. This is David at his most honest and most vulnerable, pouring out his heart to a God that he still clings to even when David can no longer feel Him, can no longer see or know Him, in a moment that is so dark, so hopeless, that David has come to the point of suicide.

Everything in David’s life has grown dim. But instead of giving up, instead of turning away from God the same way that David feels God has turned away from him, he prays, “light up my eyes.” Give me a reason to continue, God. Show me yourself again.

David’s not praying for a revival in his soul here. He’s not asking for an increase of faith. He’s just wanting to see morning. “Revive me, O Lord,” he says. “Put a brightness in my eyes. Give me a reason to hope again. Save me.”

Why? Because of verse 4:

lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him,” lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

This seems like a straightforward verse, doesn’t it? “Help me, Lord, or Saul’s going to win.” But there’s more to it than that, because you have to remember this very important point: everything physical is either influenced or caused by something spiritual. Everything. Every setback you have, every ailment, every issue, has a spiritual root to it.

As Christians, you have plenty of enemies in this world. That includes that self of yours that you’re supposed to deny every day. But you can never lose sight of the fact that there’s an unseen world of enemies out there too, there’s Satan and his demons, and they want nothing more than to watch you fall.

David’s not just fighting Saul. He’s fighting the devil too. He’s appealing to God in this lament for help because he says in verse 4 that when he’s shaken — when his faith begins to crumble, when his hope fades, when God seems to turn away — Satan rejoices. When we allow ourselves to stumble or fall, the enemy wins.

David’s appeal to God isn’t just, “Don’t let Saul triumph over me, Lord.” More broadly it’s also not to let evil triumph over good. David’s appealing to God not just for his own personal interest, but in the interest of truth and right.

We turn to God in our lament, and then we share our pain and our questions with him, but we can’t just leave it at that. We can’t just share our hurts with God and then walk away. God wants us to ask for His help. And not just ask — ask boldly. And we can do that, we can ask God for anything, because of one reason:

Hebrews 4:15-16:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

It’s because of Christ that you can boldly approach the throne of grace, because he died for you and rose again and paid for your sins, and is there a greater gift than that? To know that you have God’s ear?

To feel sorrow isn’t a sin. To have doubts isn’t a sin. To feel like God is missing from your life is not a sin. Those are signs that you’re human.

Sharing that sorrow and then asking God for help is the key to overcoming your sadness. It’s all about confronting how you feel.

That’s what prayer does. It keeps you from giving in to despair and saying, “There’s no hope,” or giving into denial and saying, “Everything’s fine.” But learning how to lament allows you to hope in God’s promises as you ask Him for His help.

And that brings us to the last step — choose to trust, which is verses 5 and 6.

There’s that word again, by the way: choose. Meaning it’s an act not of your emotions or your mind but your will. It’s choosing based not on what you’re feeling or what you’re thinking but what you know is true regardless of what you might feel or think.

We’ve seen what David is feeling. He’s feeling so much hopelessness and grief that he’s on the verge of suicide. We’ve seen what David is thinking — that God has turned away from him, and that it might be that way for the rest of his life.

But now we see David’s will rise up. He’s not going by what he’s feeling anymore. He’s laying aside what he thinks. He chooses what he knows. He wills, and he says in verse 5, “But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.”

“But I,” he says. “But as for me, I choose to trust in you, Lord. No matter what happens to me, no matter how crushed I feel, no matter what is taken away, no matter how loudly my heart and my mind scream that it’s all for nothing, that You’re gone from me or that You were never really there, no matter how much my bones ache for me to give up, I … will … choose … You, Father.

“I will trust in Your love for me that never fades, never changes, never lessens. I will choose to lean on Your promises rather than my own feelings. And even when I feel as though I will die, I will take Your word as the undying truth.”

And because David is now trusting, because David is now rejoicing, what do we see in verse 6? He’s singing. David is singing, because God has dealt bountifully with him.

Has God dealt bountifully with David right here? No, or at least it doesn’t seem like it to David. He’s still right in the middle of his troubles. Absolutely nothing outwardly has changed.

But he’s now so completely sure that God is going to help him and that God is going to turn his face toward him that David speaks of it as if it’s already happened. The future is so sure to him now that he treats it like the past.

It’s incredible, isn’t it, how much David’s view of things has changed in such a short amount of time. In just six verses, David has gone from crying in despair to singing in joy.

We see that a lot in the Psalms. That’s the true blessing of learning to lament. Doubt is replaced by faith, loss is replaced by hope, pain is replaced by comfort, and a trust in our own selves is replaced by a trust in an eternally loving and present God.

How does that happen? In every case, it’s through prayer. Remember, the Psalms are songs, they’re poetry, but they’re prayers first.

David goes from hurting to complaining, then from complaining to praying, and then finally from praying to believing. He goes from trusting what he sees and thinks and feels to trusting in what he knows — and that’s the mercy and grace and goodness of God.

That is exactly why you need to pray every day, and it’s exactly why you need to pray even more when you feel like God isn’t there, and when your words feel like they’re falling dead from your mouth.

Go to God, always. Lay your complaints at His feet. Ask him boldly for help. And then choose to trust Him. That is how you lament. That is how you become a disciple of Christ. To cry is human, but to lament is Christian.

This world will be scarred by sin until Christ returns. Our lives will be stained with tears until he calls us home. If there’s any truth that even nonbelievers can understand, it’s that life can change in an instant.

Those few thousand people who went to work at the World Trade Center 21 years ago never expected that day to be unlike any other. No doubt none of the dead believed that would be the day they died. They got up like they always did, left their homes like they always did, and never came back.

The same can be said for any of us. One day the one we love is right beside us. The next day, he or she is gone. One day we’re well, the next day comes news that we’re very sick.

The tragedies we experience, whether as a nation or individually, teach us not to cling to the things of this world, but to the God who never changes.

The Bible’s very clear on the matter — you’re going to experience trials. Hardships. You will experience persecutions. Evil hunts you every moment, every day. That’s true for you personally, for your family, for your town, for your nation, for your world.

But there is hope, because we have a Heavenly Father who holds all of it in His gentle loving hands. That’s the last point I want to make this morning.

It’s something that’s preached in Church and taught in Sunday school and something you will absolutely say is true when things are going fine, but something you will absolutely start to doubt when things go wrong: God holds it all in gentle loving hands.

Colossians 1:16-17:

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

It’s called the sovereignty of God, and it’s a fancy way of saying that God’s in control. You have to know that God’s in control. You have to believe it. And you have to know it and believe it before those troubles come to you, because knowing that God works all things — good and evil — for your good, and that all things are in His power and control, is the only thing that makes lamenting work.

Because you’re not going to turn to a God you think is powerless. You’re not going to bring your complaint to a God you think doesn’t care. You’re not going to ask boldly for help from a God you think can’t help you. And you’re not going to trust a God that doesn’t have dominion and sovereignty and power over every thing and every event in your life.

So you have to get that settled in your core, in your will, right now, before the bad things happen. You have to, because for most people God’s sovereignty is too much to accept, much less believe, in the middle of pain and loss and suffering.

When you wrestle with the hard truths of God in the middle of sorrow and fear, sometimes you don’t win. And this is one of those hard truths. This is maybe the hardest.

Because where was God on 9/11? He was right there in those towers. He was with every person who jumped from those buildings and died when they landed. He was with every firefighter and policeman who charged up those stairs when everyone else was racing down. He was on those jets when they erupted in fire.

He was in another over a field in Pennsylvania when those brave passengers stormed the cabin, knowing they would die.

When you cry out to God as David did and say, “How long, O Lord, will you forget me?” you have to already have it settled in your will that God will never forget you, that He cannot, that He will not, forever.

You love a Lord who is above every circumstance. He is not shocked or surprised. He can never be caught off guard. He is a God who can take your wounded heart and breathe into it new and precious life.

And if you think for a moment that He can bring nothing good from your tragedy and no blessing from your pain, remember that the most evil event in history was according to His plan and foreknowledge.

It was the death of his sinless son at the hands of a sinful human race. But it was through this darkest evil that came your brightest blessing.

Whenever and wherever there is tragedy, the watching world will look to the Church, to the Christians, to see how we respond.

Your friends, your neighbors, your family, they’ll do the same. Will you act as an unbeliever in those moments and give yourself over to what your feelings and thoughts say is happening? Or will you be a disciple and see God’s loving presence surrounding you?

Ask Him today to give you a heart that laments over the brokenness of this world. Then turn to Him and offer your complaint. Ask Him boldly for help. And then trust, always trust, knowing that His help is so certain that it’s as if it has already happened.

Let’s pray:

Father we are surrounded by troubles. Every day, we feel their weight and heaviness pressing down on our hearts, tempting us to give into them rather than to surrender to you. That’s why we are so thankful for your instruction on how to lament, how to turn to you even when we feel as if you’re not there, how to lay our hurt and our pain at your feet and ask for your help knowing that you will always answer, that you’re eager to help, and then to trust you completely. We know, father, that you can be trusted. Heaven and earth may fade away, but you are unchanging. Your mercy and grace are unchanging. Your love for us is unchanging, and we pray that love be made manifest to us and in us and through us each day. For it’s in Jesus’s name we ask it, Amen.

Business Meeting

Thank you, everyone, for staying behind a few moments for this necessary business meeting. I will call this meeting of Sunday, September 11, 2022 to order with prayer:

Heavenly Father,

We come to you today asking for your guidance, wisdom, and support as we begin this meeting. Help us engage in meaningful discussion; allow us to grow closer as a group and nurture the bonds of community. Fill us with your grace, Lord God, as we make decisions that affect the church we love, and continue to remind us that all that we do here today, all that we accomplish, is for your glory.

We ask these things in your name, Amen.

Does everyone have a copy of the newest Nominating Report?

I’ll give you a bit to go over the teams and names before we proceed.

Is there a motion to vote on approving this nominating report as-is in its entirety?

Is there a second?

Is there any discussion around this report?

Will all those in favor of approving this report for the 2022-23 church year please raise your hands.

All those opposed, please raise your hands?

The motion carries / is denied.

Thank you all. If there is nothing else to discuss, I’ll close this business meeting with prayer:

Gracious Father, we have come to the end of this meeting, and we want to thank you for being with us. Help us to listen to your voice and follow you wherever you are leading us to this week. May we walk according to Your word, and give us both your wisdom and protection as we leave this place. Jesus’ name, we pray, Amen.