A sermon preached at Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, CA on June 9, 2024

Introduction to Worship

Good morning and welcome to worship at Calvary Presbyterian Church. We are glad you have joined us. 

As we continue our sermon series on the Book of Psalms, today we’ll look at a song of lament. Lament is not a word we use often enough. It means to feel or express sorrow or regret, to mourn. 

The act of lament is an ancient Christian practice that we inherited from Judaism. But I think the 20th century American church forgot about Lament, in favor of the power of positive thinking. 

Today we’re going to remember it. 

Lament is not worry or anxiety. It is a public claiming that things are not as you wish they were and a cry out to God that you’ve noticed and you’re not happy about it. 

Jurgen Moltmann died this past week at the age of 98. He was a German theologian whose work was very important to many of us who have studied theology in the past 60 years. 

Before that, he was drafted into the German Army in World War 2 and was later captured and put in a POW camp. There he and other soldiers learned about the concentration camps. He recognized his complicity in the atrocities of the holocaust. When he faced that level of grief and shame, the stories of his secular upbringing brought him no comfort. 

He later wrote: “The depression over the wartime destruction and a captivity without any apparent end was exacerbated by a feeling of profound shame at having to share in this disgrace.”

At that point, many of the prisoners gave in to despair and lost any desire to look to the future. Yet Moltmann was confronted by an unexpected source of hope when a chaplain gave him a Bible. He was confused by a great deal of what he read, but he found himself transfixed as he came across the psalms of lament and the passion narrative of Jesus.

As he read about the suffering of Jesus on the cross, Moltmann writes that he was encountering a God who could identify with his own suffering. “I began to understand the assailed Christ because I felt that he understood me,” he recounts. “This was the divine brother in distress, who takes the prisoners with him on his way to resurrection. I began to summon up the courage to live again, seized by a great hope.” This hope not only enabled Moltmann to press forward, but it also shaped the way in which he would spend the rest of his life. He became one of the greatest theologians of his day, pointing people toward hope in God’s promises to save us from the worst pits of despair. 

This is the power of lament. To meet us where we are, in whatever depth of grief, shame, or loss, and give us words to sing as we cry to God for answers. 

Let us worship this day in hope. 

Scripture

Psalm 13

Sermon

I acknowledge, this psalm seems, at first, to be a bit of a bummer. How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

It is quite a contrast, in most ways, to the one we heard last week, that was full of turning toward God in praise and joy. Here, we turn toward God in lament, despair, and fear.

As I said last week, the psalms are a collection of poems and liturgical songs. Which means that while individually, they may focus primarily on one emotion—as a collection, they speak to our experience in the world, encompassing the joy and the sadness, the hope and the despair.

And there is a lot of despair in this one. Worry that enemies will prevail. Anger about God’s silence, which feels like it will go on forever.

We see a lot of despair in the world too.

I want to offer a few ways that the psalmist handles despair differently than we often see in the world around us though. First, this is addressed to “the lead player”, a David psalm, which reminds us that it is intended to be sung in the act of corporate worship, where every voice joins in to sing what appears to be a singular experience of despair.

I understand our tendency to take our despair and go off alone, surrounded by our pain, sure that nobody else could understand, worried that nobody would care. We might feel the powerful truth of “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” and assume that we are alone in that feeling of isolation. 

We might assume that everyone else is in the garden with Jesus singing “he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own” while we are the only ones facing the silence of God.

Imagine the power of hearing other voices sing your lament? The voices of your church family giving voice to your pain, making it their own, if only for the length of the song, so that you don’t have to carry it alone?

Despair and Lament need to be voiced by us all. On any given day, it may not be our despair, but we know that one day it will be. Grief is as much a part of our human experience as are joy and celebration.

As you think about the different voices coming through the Book of Psalms, you can think about the congregation around you, or your co-workers, or the people on your bus or in line with you at the grocery store. We are a Book of Psalms. Some of us are full of praise. Others have grief. Some have doubts. Some are a mix of emotions. And you can’t always tell by looking at someone what the song is that they are singing in their heart. So be gentle with yourself and gentle with each other. 

Another consequence of singing your lament publicly is that you are then able to be cared for by others. If you sing your lament only by yourself, off in a cave somewhere, nobody else will know.

When people hear your lament, you open yourself up to a response. People will offer to help you, which sounds great in the abstract, but can feel uncomfortable when people get all up in your business.

It can be hard to receive help. In my experience, I am much more comfortable offering to help someone else. Letting them help me—that’s an act of faith on my part, to overcome my independence and control issues. When I’ve let people in, of course, it’s been life giving and important. That barely makes it easier to do.

It’s been humbling too, requiring me to acknowledge my inability to pull myself up by my own cowboy bootstraps all the time.

Sometimes it is also frustrating. Often well-meaning people enter in to our lament with attempts to fix things, when really we only needed someone to listen. Sometimes people enter into our lament with well intentioned platitudes when silent presence might be more helpful.

This is a reminder to us all, as people who hear lament, that some answers are fine, and some should, quite frankly, remain unspoken. It is not for us to make claims that “God must have had a plan” that involve the grief and sadness in someone else’s life. If someone wants to make that claim for themselves, that’s one thing. It is not ours to do. We are called to hold space for people to feel what they are feeling.

It reminds us that the act of being community together is complicated and messy. Mostly we get it right, and offer care and presence. Occasionally, we mess it up. And so we keep coming back to each other with open hearts, with understanding, with prayers of confession, with hope for those moments where we might get it right.

The psalmist begins with 4 versions of the question “how long”.

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

How long is the question of someone who has the faith that there will be an answer, even as they don’t necessarily like the answer.

Often the despair in our world feels more like screaming into a void, from which no answer will arrive. The psalmist doesn’t say “God is going to hide from me forever and I will bear this sorrow forever.” The psalmist has faith there will be an answer.

A clergy friend once pointed out that this psalm reveals a posture of trust from a person in frustration. Trust and Frustration are not mutually exclusive experiences and feelings. They support each other. Our ability to be frustrated and despairing is what gives us the room to trust, and to hold space for the “how long” question to be answered.

If trust only accompanied joy and praise, what would we be trusting in? What need do we have to trust if it’s only possible companion is praise? When all is going well, trust subsides, slips to the back burner.

Robert Alter translates the end of this psalm this way.
“But I in Your kindness do trust,
my heart exults in your rescue”.

I like the present tense emphasis in trust in this translation. It isn’t only a statement of what has been done in the past. It is a claim that I have trusted, I am trusting right now, I will continue on in trusting in the future.

The psalmist is making a claim—even though he can’t hear God’s voice now, he trusts in God’s kindness and rescue.

I’ve been speaking about singular despair, the kind we feel individually about particular situations in our lives. This psalm is also a powerful song to sing about collective despair—about the things going wrong in our community, our nation.

As we watch the atrocities happening in Gaza, and as we remember the Israeli hostages whose capture started this current iteration of a long running war, we cry out in lament. 

How long, o Lord? Will you forget me, forever?

43,000 people died by gun violence in the US in 2023. And our congress continues to refuse to act to address the violence in any way. We cry out in lament. 

How long, o Lord? Will you forget me, forever?

The government of Vladimir Putin continues its war against the people of Ukraine. We cry out in lament. 

How long, o Lord? Will you forget me, forever?

It is right for us to lift up those cries of lament and grief to the news of the world.

We don’t have to agree about the particulars of a situation to sing together in sadness about the violence and loss in our world.

In a few weeks, we will march in San Francisco’s PRIDE parade. Hope you can join us on June 30, you can sign up today after worship. PRIDE started as a response to a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich, NY in June 1969. Starting the next year, PRIDE parades began, primarily in larger cities, like NY, San Francisco, and LA. 

I suspect those first parades were psalms of lament, cries of sadness at injustice. At the same time, they were claims of hope, which over the years have added new expression, making it a celebration as much as a protest.

Our presence at PRIDE is that of allies, of people willing to sing along someone else’s psalm of lament, giving visible sign of the power of community. And our presence as a Christian church at PRIDE is even more important because religion continues to drive much of the hatred and judgment of the LGBTQIA+ community. I hope you can join us.  It is sacred privilege to sing someone else’s psalm with them.

Our response to the pain and hurt of the world, is to hold both the sadness of the world and the hope of God’s goodness at the same time. It’s a way of acknowledging the pain and difficulties in the world, without letting go of hope. It is also the scaffolding from which we resist the evil of this age. Because we lament and because we hope, we work for justice, peace, and mercy.

“Resistance is the protest of those who hope, and hope is the feast of the people who resist.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The power of the powerless

In the Introduction to Worship, I spoke about Jurgen Moltmann, the German theologian who died this past week at the age of 98. Here’s what he says about Christian hope: “Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are waited for as the prodigal son in the parable is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them. God is our last hope because we are God’s first love.”
― Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life

God is our last hope because we are God’s first love. 

If you need to cry your lament alone for a time, that’s fine. But lament is more powerful when all of the voices join together. This is why we gather. To voice the pain and injustice in the world with people who can support and care for us, and with people with whom we can resist evil and work to address the pain and injustice in the world. To cry out for God to answer, to cry out together and claim a blessing.

I am so grateful we do not have to sing our laments and sadness alone. Thank you for being a community that will sing them together.