Learning to Lament COVID (Psalm 22)

I had told you last week that this week might be a little different. It’s not going to be quite as different as I had thought it would be…and we actually won’t have a time where we “go dark” online. I will tell you a little about my vision here.

We are hurting. We are hurting as a world, as a nation, as a community, as a local church, as individuals. And this hurt is changing us. That hurt HAS to go somewhere.

I saw this episode of mythbusters where they took all of the safety valves off of a water heater and then let it build up pressure. (This is the result). It blew up a house.

That’s what happens when we don’t have a good biblical way of dealing with this pain. It builds. I’d say that within our world we have quite a few water heaters exploding and causing destruction.

And here is what happens. If that happened in your house what would you blame for the destruction? You’d blame your water heater. The water heater failed. But really the problem is the pressure. The problem is the pain.

That’s what is happening to us. We’re blowing up…maybe not even at water heater levels but all that pain is trying to find a release…and then when it does we end up blaming the wrong thing. It’s THIS politician, this religious leader, this theology, this person, this random stranger in traffic....and that ends up filling up somebody else’s water heater. But really it’s that we haven’t properly dealt with our collective trauma.

The Hebrew word for the book of Psalms means praises. It is the Hebrew song book. 150 psalms and at least 60 of them are psalms of lament. That means 40% of the songs are about bad situations and praying that God will deliver you from them. To put that another way 40% of the songs in the song book God has given us are biblical complaints. Psalm 22 is one of those.

What does this mean? It means there is a believing way of complaining and there is a faithless way of complaining. I believe what Christopher Wright has said is true. Speaking of the frequency of these laments in the Bible he says:

The point we should notice (possibly to our surprise) is that it is all hurled at God, not by his enemies but by those who loved and trusted him the most. It seems, indeed, that it is precisely those who have the closest relationship with God who feel most at liberty to pour out their pain and protest to God without fear of reproach. Lament is not only allowed in the Bible; it is modeled for us in abundance. God seems to want to give us as many words with which to fill in our complaint forms as to write our thank-you notes.

And so I want us to engage in that this morning. We will use Psalm 22 as our guide. And my hope here is to help you write your own psalm of lament. If you want something out of this sermon then you need to be active in it.

But let me read Psalm 22 then we will get to work.

READ TEXT

First we need to start with the surface thing. What’s going on? For Jesus as he makes Psalm 22 his, he is in agony upon the Cross. There is physical suffering and then there is also everything theological that is happening…where God made him who knew no sin to become sin on our behalf.

But that’s where we start. What is the situation. Where you at? Lost a job, broken relationship, someone hates you is slandering you, a dear person to you has died, or just a handful of really bad things happen to you today.

That’s the pressure building up. So what do we do with that. These psalms of lament have four main components to them. They can appear in about any order. There is the complaint the cry to God, the acknowledgement of trust or the Godward turn, the prayer for deliverance, and most all of them end in praise.

Let’s look first at the complain/lament. Express your pain. Tell God what is going on. Tell him your fear, your ache, your difficulty. Look through Psalm 22...

Forsaken, abandoned, God seems silent, unable to rest or sleep…jump down to verse 6…despised by the people, mocked…verse 12…surrounded by enemies, physical pain, abused by others.

What are you feeling today? What hurts? How does it hurt? Why does it hurt? What impact is it having upon you?

Bring all those frustrations to the Lord. I feel so lonely. I feel abandoned. I feel like nobody understands me. I feel discouraged. I feel worthless. I am physically hurt. I am lonely. I am broke. I am being slandered. Oh there are some really hard things we can fill in the blanks here. Death, abandonment, miscarriage, imprisonment, abuse....those really dark moments.

Bring those out. Bring those questions. Why did this happen Lord? Hear the Psalmist. My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? Why aren’t you listening to me? Why am I crying out and it feels like silence? Why did this thing happen?

Why, Lord, were we going so well prior to COVID, people were joining, we had excitement, feeling at home, getting ready to go on a mission trip to Mexico, not that attendance matters, really…but those are people…we had for about 6 weeks had around 200 or even over 200 in attendance…then it came to a screeching halt. Things feel different. Now we’re languishing. Our mission feels forced. We don’t seem as excited. It just feels like a big dark cloud. I feel the weight of this Lord. Is it me, Lord? This hurts.

Friends, we need to be grieving and asking these questions in humility though. I think Mark Vroegop is correct, “Proud, demanding questions from a heart that believes it is owed something from God, will never lean into true lament....come with your pain, not your pride.”

But come with those questions. Come with those complaints. But don’t stay there....there is so much more to lament.

The second component to a lament is the confession/trust/ or the Godward turn . That’s kind of what you are seeing in Psalm 22 at the beginning…most of the psalms of lament start here. What you do here is connect your complaint to the character of God.

See verse 3....

You are holy…our fathers trusted…they cried and were rescued…they weren’t put to shame.

But notice what he does here in verse 6. “I’m being mocked for my trust.” Rather than being delivered my pain is increasing. What gives, Lord? This doesn’t seem consistent with your character. You delivered them…why aren’t you delivering me?

This is so key. It’s acknowledging that only God can help. It’s casting all of our cares upon him. It’s handing things over into His hands. One of my favorite quotes from John Newton is, “The Lord keeps the key of comfort in his own hand.”

Newton is speaking to a woman who is crying out to him about having lost the joy of her salvation. He shares with her gracious words but at the end acknowledges I know that the Lord keeps the keys of comfort in his own hands. He is the one who has to answer your lament…he is the one who has to answer your cry....and so that’s what we are doing when we are talking to God about his own character. We’re turning our lament and making it Godward.

Lord, you are the comforter of the lonely—so why do I feel so lonely. You say you will never leave us as orphans…yet here I am alone again.

I know you want your church to grow. I know you are more passionate about missions than I am. I know that you are good. I know that you are kind and generous. I know that the gates of Hades will not prevail against your church. I know that you win. Yet here we are languishing. Is it us? Why have you forsaken us? Why does it seem like you’ve removed your hand of blessing? Why aren’t we thriving?

Now notice what happens in Psalm 22…there is a yet in verse 3 and there is another one in verse 9. He’s just said, “rather than being rescued it seems like I’m being mocked”....Now notice verse 9

Yet...

He is tying his hope and his identity to who God is. He’s attaching it to God’s character. He’s not just complaining, he’s not just talking about His grief, he’s giving it to the Lord and now he’s saying....

Do something about this Lord. I’m at your mercy. This then is the third part of a lament. The prayer for deliverance…boldly asking.

What is he asking in Psalm 22. see v19 “be near, come quickly, deliver my soul, save me.”

What are you asking God for specifically. There can be some healing in that actually. And I love how in the gospels Jesus asks the disciples, “What do you want.” There is a way in which that exposes so much about our hearts. What do you really want here?

When he asked that of the disciples they basically said, “we want to be awesome…we want to rule with you...” when he asked it of blind Bart… “I want to see...” We want our lament to be like that last one.

Mark Vroegpop has done us a favor by outlining 9 requests in the Psalms of lament:

1. Arise, O Lord. If God acts everything will change.

2. Grant us help. Help me carry this load, Lord. Lift me up. I need your resources…mine have run empty.

3. Remember your covenant. Be true to your promises, God. I’m trying to connect our past to my present.

4. Let justice be done. Defeat the wicked. Expose their slander. Bring justice to us.

5. Don’t remember our sins. This is when our lament is connected to what we’ve done wrong. Like Psalm 51. Forgive us.

6. Restore us! Make things right. This isn’t just put things back to the way they were before this tragedy…Because you know that this can’t happen at times. You can never be the same. it’s looking for the new heavens and the new earth. Make us whole. Make things whole and complete.

7. Don’t be silent—listen to me. One of the things that is so important for our healing…and our healing of trauma is being able to be heard. We have to tell our story. But we also have to tell our story to someone who is listening. I think that’s why you see that so much in the Psalms. It’s a cry that says, “do you care God....I know you care…listen, Lord…hear my heart…hear my pain…because I know if I can get an audience with you…I know if you hear…you are oh so good and you’ll be moved to compassion.”

8. Teach me. Some of the psalms of lament ask God to teach through the pain. What do I need to learn here. I think we get this one…but it’s not the most common one in the psalms of lament.

9. Vindicate me. Come to my defense. Show that I’m in the right here. So healing when you’ve been slandered and falsely accused.

Which of these requests do you need to make? Do you need God to arise and tend to your situation? Do you need to know that He is listening to your pain? Do you need him to teach you? Do you need vindicated? Do you need justice?

I think about framing my lament out of COVID. I need so many of these requests…arise, O Lord. Stir up your church. Help us. Inspire us anew. Hear us. Heal our broken hearts. Heal all of the loss that we have from not only this pandemic but all of the division that our exploding water heaters has caused. Forgive us Lord. Remember Jesus how you called us to be your witnesses…how you said we would receive power…we are asking for that even now. We’re asking for you to heal your church, Lord.

The last thing you see In Psalm 22 is how it ends in praise. Almost every psalm of lament turns here. Psalm 88 is the only one which doesn’t. All the others go back to praise. See verse 22…I will praise you…I will praise you amongst others.

This is also part of what needs to happen for us to have healing here. It’s not only that we tell our stories, and we tell our stories to one another…but together we have to learn to reframe our stories. That is what is happening here in Psalm 22. And this is what is happening with Jesus as he prays this on the Cross.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me is not the end of the story. It ends with praise. It ends with the glory of God going to the nations. It ends with redemption. Why? Because of what Christ was accomplishing on the Cross. Because the resurrection was coming. Because of the resurrection we have hope and healing. It’s not the end of the story. Our pain isn’t all there is.

And that’s what lament does. It takes serious our hurt. It owns it. It stares it in the face. It deals with it. It acknowledges it. It doesn’t sweep it under the rug. It doesn’t try to shoot down the monster of pain and trauma with a tiny little water gun. But it takes all of that pain and grabs ahold of it and says, “here we are going to go to the Lord with this thing.”

Psalm 88....

I want to invite you to spend some time crafting your own psalm of lament. Maybe you don’t need it…maybe you aren’t at a place where you want to open up that can of worms because you know that if you go there…you’re going to “go there” and it’s going to be a flood of tears. You don’t have to here…but I’d invite you to do that. Remember the water heater. We need this.