Anguish Before God

Ordinary Time XXVII (World Communion); October 7, 2007

Lamentations 1:1-6

If we really believed in God, more of our poetry and prayer would sound like these lines from Lamentations.

What does our religion give us? Sometimes it gives us things to think about; maybe the preacher comes up with a good idea or an insight or simply teaches a lesson from the Bible that we have not heard before, and so we think about it for a little while. Sometimes it gives us encouragement to live better, and that’s a very good thing; people of every great religion get encouragement to live better. Jesus certainly spent a lot of his time telling his followers to pay attention to the needs of the poor, the hungry and those who didn’t quite measure up socially. Sometimes our religion makes us feel better, acting as a sort of spiritual anti-depressant; we sing hymns of praise and hear words about the love of God and go home feeling as if we can make it through another week.

Those are all good things. But are they enough?

When life really does suck, is it enough simply to hear a sermon urging you to be a better person, a prayer asking God to take care of the sick, and a hymn of praise for creation? But no, we come to church to look good, to sound good, and to get our religious duty done quickly enough to get home in time to see the kick-off. Where is the room and when is the time for pain? Does God care about our pain?

“Of course he does,” we say. So why don’t we ever talk about it in church? Why is it so important to look good, to sound good, and to feel good? Imagine this: say we made time in the service for people to stand up and offer their testimonies and their prayer requests. And say Sister Alice stood up and said, “Brothers and sisters, my husband and I need your prayers. We’re struggling with our marriage and we’re going to a counselor but it’s a struggle and we need your help.” Or say Brother Tony stood up and said, “I’m having trouble believing in God anymore; it’s not that anything really bad has happened to me, it’s just that I no longer really feel anything spiritual anymore, and I really miss it, so please pray for me.” Or imagine that Brother Craig, one Sunday, said, “I am so depressed about the war; I don’t know what to think about it, but it worries me that so many of our young people are being killed and I’m sad about the suffering of the people of Iraq.”

What if? How would you and I react? “Craig should not get political in church.” “This will be interesting stuff to tell my friends about at coffee tomorrow.” “The service is going to run more than an hour again; if Bob doesn’t control things better, I’m going to another church.” Or will we gather around Alice and Tony and Craig and pray for them? Will we cry out to God in anguish for them and with them?

Or is it more important to keep up appearances, to pretend that if we believe in God at all, then God is all about fluffy clouds and little girls with puppies and happy songs about God being so nice to us? None of this “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!” We don’t want any “[Jerusalem’s] foes have become the masters, her enemies prosper, because the Lord has made her suffer for the multitude of her transgressions; her children have gone away, captives before the foe.” And if we say that we don’t want poems and prayers of anguish, it is because we don’t really believe in God nearly as much as we believe in our own good taste.

Obviously I am referring not only to Sunday worship, but to our private prayer lives and our Bible studies and our dinner parties and prayer meetings – any time the people of God are being the people of God. It is not important to keep up appearances; it is important to believe in God, to believe that God loves us and wants to hear what’s on our mind, even if we’re of a mind to do a little swearing at God.

First thought in support of that idea: the ones who love you are the ones who make you suffer. Your enemies can cause you pain, just staying alive more than fifty years will cause you pain – if your heart doesn’t act up or you don’t get cancer, then something else will start to go wrong. These things cause pain. But to truly suffer you have to love and be loved. When the one you thought you could not live without leaves you, that will bring you not only pain, but suffering. The pain of others whom you love and who love you will bring you suffering. And if you are going to believe in God and love God and let God love you, then you will suffer. The Bible does not promise that everything will always be cozy and nice; that could only be true if God merely tolerated us, rather than loving us. “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!”

Second thought: we are sharing a Holy Supper this morning, along with people throughout this broken, anguished world. And there is little about this supper that is nice. Oh, we have sanitized it a bit, limiting the amount of real human contact we have and substituting that dangerous wine that Jesus loved so much with insipid juice. But this Supper is still about the Son of God going to a horrible death and continuing to feed our spirits with his Spirit. The Lord’s Supper, our fundamental religious ritual, is about a dying body and spilled blood and a new life that in resurrection still has nail-holes in the hands and feet.

Sure, most of the time our life before God will feel pretty good; after all, we are Easter people. Most of the Bible is about goodness and peace and victory and hope. But the anguish is there, too, because life is messy and doesn’t always work out the way we want and God loves us in all that mess. Sometimes all we can do is hug one another and pray. When the poet looked at the ruins of Jerusalem and wept, “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!” I’ll bet he went looking for his best friend and said, “I need a hug” and then they prayed. Often, believing in God is no more complicated than that: to hold on to one another and pray.

What more can we say, Lord God? Hear our prayers for ourselves and for the world and for those we love and who love us. Amen.

Robert A. Keefer

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Clarinda, Iowa