This post, by Elaine Poproski, is a reflection on the “Hope In Our Suffering” sermon.
As a pastor, I am privileged to hear a lot of people’s stories. Some of those stories make me smile; some of them make me cry; some are funny and others are disturbing. No matter the story, what they all have in common is the fact of suffering as a reality in life.
As a pastor, particularly when I hear the hard stories, I’m always looking for glimpses of God in the midst of the suffering. Sometimes God’s presence in it is already part of the story. Sometimes the storyteller has no awareness of God at all. So I listen closely – to the storyteller and to the Holy Spirit – waiting to catch a hint of where God is or was in the story. I wish I could tell you that I’m always successful, but that is not true. Sometimes I come away from a story and my prayer is nothing more profound than, “Why, God?!” or “Do something, God!” I know suffering isn’t God’s intention for us, but I also know God doesn’t always rescue us from our suffering. And sometimes I get mad at Him for that.
I think this is why I was so struck by Heather’s definition on Sunday of suffering as our experience of the brokenness of the world. (You can listen to her sermon here.) In that definition she set aside all the questions about why God allows suffering or about categorizing different types of suffering and how those types may or may not be God’s will, and instead simply acknowledged it as a fact of our broken world. It twigged in my brain some of things I’ve been reflecting on since listening to Dr. Soong-Chan Rah speak at our denomination’s annual gathering last week on the topic of Lament. He defined it simply as truth-telling to God. It’s a biblically sound worship practice. It’s something we rarely allow space for.
And yet, the Bible is full of lament. Somewhere in the region of 1/3 of the Psalms are lament psalms. There’s an entire book of the Bible named Lamentations. But along the way the Christian church, at least in our part of the world, seems to have forgotten (or denied) the importance and power of lament as an essential part of worship. Lament is a right response to injustice. It’s a right response to oppression. It’s a right response to suffering. Consider these words from Psalm 6:
I am worn out from my groaning.
All night long I flood my bed with weeping
and drench my couch with tears.
My eyes grow weak with sorrow;
they fail because of all my foes.
Our lament is our cry to God for relief, for justice, for help. It’s our wordless wail when all we know is hurt. It’s God’s children running into his arms because that’s where it will all be made right, even if we’re mad at Him or disappointed in Him.
I wonder what it would look like to allow space and time for lament in our worship services, not once in a while, but also not as a weekly occurrence for a few minutes in the service. I think we need to figure this out. I think the church is intended to be a prophetic body and I think we can only be that if we are a body that laments.