Lament in a time of disorientation
AM Psalm 31 • PM Psalm 35
Ecclus. 11:2-20 • Rev. 9:13-21 • Luke 10:38-42
“What are you, my God? I thought angrily. How do you compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to you their faith, their anger, their defiance? What does your grandeur mean, Master of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay, and this misery? Why do you go on troubling these poor people’s wounded minds, their ailing bodies?”
Let that soak in for just a minute…. Psalms of lament, ancient and modern, are full of bitter complaints, frantic pleading, even desperate bargaining. Psalm 35, our psalm appointed for this evening, has all of these.
Psalms of lament, including this one imagined by a teen-aged Elie Wiesel in Auschwitz, focus on the issue of justice, in a questioning way. These psalms do not mince words. They are sometimes shocking in in their condemnation of God for allowing bad things to happen to good people.
Many of the hymns we sing have lyrics based on psalms, but I don’t recall a single one that is based on a psalm of lament. Our congregational and choral singing, as much as we enjoy it, looks the other way from the world as we know it in a time of calamity, uncertainty, and disorientation. If not in our singing, then in some other way, we need to take seriously the psalms of lament as part of our effort as Christians to make sense of the disoriented world we live in. What do we see in our world that would stir us to talk to God in the way the psalmists do, and what actions might such a conversation lead us to?
Written by Bob McMath
As I was writing this reflection the holocaust came to mind, along with the deeply powerful and intimate depiction of it by Elie Wiesel. How many of the six million, I wondered, went to their deaths with a psalm of lament on their lips?