Laments, Love Songs, and Hardy Novels

Laments, Love Songs, and Hardy Novels--November 29, 2018

"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?

 Consider and answer me, O LORD my God!

     Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,

 and my enemy will say, 'I have prevailed';

     my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

 But I trusted in your steadfast love;

     my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

 I will sing to the LORD,

     because he has dealt bountifully with me." [Psalm 13:1-6]

There's a lyric that's been stuck in my head for years, somewhere rumbling around in the dusty corners of my mind.  Jon Foreman, of the band Switchfoot sings this recurring line, "Every lament is a love song."

I think Jesus is teaching me the truth of that line--to lament something requires that you have loved it enough to grieve over its loss.  To lament over someone implies that you know and love them enough to feel pain at their own suffering.  Jon Foreman is right: every lament is a love song.

But the more I think of it, I would push that even further.  Every lament is not only a love song for the thing or the person who is lost, but it is also a cry of faith longing for things to be put right.  A lament is a recognition that something beautiful in this world has gone wrong, or been broken, or been lost, and naming that loss in lament assumes that the God to whom we cry out cares about our sorrows, and is capable (and willing) to mend what is broken in this world.  

Every lament is not only a love song, but also a cry of hope for God's ultimate victory to set right all that is wrong in this wonderful, terrible world.  Lament directed at God carries the seed of expectation that justice should be done, that the wounded should be healed, and loss should be restored to fullness.  In a sense, lament is the prayer for the victory of God over chaos and death.  Even when it is phrased in angry accusation or brash confrontation with God: "How long, O Lord?  Will you forget me forever?" the passion of the one praying implies a certain expectation that God is both powerful enough and compassionate enough to do something when we feel forgotten or are bearing pain in our deepest self.  The angry cry, "Why did you let this happen?  How long do I have to wait in this tension?" comes, deep down, from a place of trust in One to whom we think we are speaking--otherwise we wouldn't bother to complain and accuse and shake our angry fists at the sky.

For me, that lesson began in earnest, not in a Bible study, but a high school English class. Years ago--decades, actually--I remember reading Thomas Hardy's 19th century novel, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and after a bit of struggling through the Victorian subtlety of Hardy's style of writing, was forced to come face to face with the way our experience of tragedy compels us to cry out for justice and restoration. (Note to the reader: the next sentence is both a plot point and description of a violent act perpetrated against a character in the book--forgive the unsettling nature of what has to be said in what follows.) In Hardy's novel, the title character is raped in the woods by someone she knew and trusted in a cruel turn of events that changes the course of her whole life and leads to heartache, loss, and murder by the end of the story.  And as the narrator of the story describes this crime, Hardy raises the question of God: where was God when this happened?  How could Tess's God let such a thing happen?  Was God absent, or unaware? Unable to stop it, or unwilling to do anything to prevent this monstrosity?  These are the questions of lament--they are much the same as the questions of the psalmist here in Psalm 13.  

The 19th century British novelist Thomas Hardy could offer no hopeful answers--in fact, he couldn't bring himself to believe that a good God would allow any such things, and so wrestled with saying there must be no god, or that there was only a cruel and indifferent thing called "Fate" that made terrible things happen.  

But for people who are convinced of the reality of God, the questions and accusations of lament--the "where were you God?" and "How long, O Lord?" questions--are questions that carry with them trust that God is real and that we expect God to put things right at the end.  Christians are not permitted to ignore the difficult questions of tragedy and injustice--whether we find them on the lips of the psalmist or a 19th century novelist--but we ask them with the expectation that the God to whom we cry out will, at the last, set things right, and restore justice for those who have been made victims and will lift up those who are bowed down.  Our calling out urgently, "Where are you, God?" carries with it the hope that the sorrows of life in this world can become joys, and that unjust suffering is not the end-goal of creation.  We do not get to run away from the difficult questions, but we ask them differently, perhaps, than the Thomas Hardys of history.  We will ask, "How long, O Lord?" as though we really do believe God's victory will come, and that somehow even the worst experiences and most cruel tragedies of life can be transformed, redeemed, and put right.

As we get close to the very end of this year we have called "It's All About Jesus," with this last month's focus on the Victory of Jesus, this is one of those pieces we'll need to remember.  We don't get to tie things up with a neat bow as though everything is working out just fine right now.  The followers of Jesus still suffer great loss, still endure tragedy, and still struggle with our own sin, too.  We are victims sometimes, and we are perpetrators, too.  We are wounded by the cruelties of life, and we also participate in them, sometimes actively and sometimes with passive complicity.  And when we find ourselves entangled in the painful things that happen in this life, we lift up our laments--not as surrender to despair, but precisely as cries of faith to a God whose victory we long for.  We cry out, "How long, O Lord?"  "Will this pain in my heart last forever?" because we believe, deep down, that the God to whom we cry is both able and willing to put things right, albeit in God's own time.  We cry out because we do believe that God cares about our suffering, shares it with us, and holds the hand of every victim as only somoene who has taken nails in his own hand can, and also that this God has promised victory for all creation at the last, when the world is put right.

Our lament is not only a love song for the things and people who suffer.  It is also a seed of hope in God's victory--and so today, we water such seeds, acting and living in ways that contribute to the healing, the restoration, and the compassion that we believe will at the last win out in God's timing. 

Lord Jesus, you know what it is to suffer and even to cry out in godforsakeness, and you know the victory toward which you are gathering all creation.  Help us to live in the tension between your promised future and the pain of this life, and to be a part of the healing you are doing even now.