The God who Grieves--November 8, 2019

The God Who Grieves--November 8, 2019

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? 

 Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.

 Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.

 In you our ancestors trusted;

 they trusted you, and you delivered them." [Psalm 22:1-4]

Even a prayer of abandonment and accusation presumes God is there listening.

Consider that for a moment; let it just sink in.  God is there--here, right wherever you are--even at the points we accuse God of abandoning us.  God is here even when we blame God for our feeling godforsaken.  And God bears not only the accusations we bring, but also bears the grief that leads us to accuse God of abandoning us in the first place.  

I was reminded recently of an insight of Henri Nouwen, who wrote in his Return of the Prodigal Son, "I am beginning to see that much of praying is grieving."  I think he is on to something there.  I don't think Nouwen means to criticize our prayer life, but to say that a great deal of life is about dealing with loss, and therefore a great deal of honest prayer is about lifting that loss up to God, and calling on God to hurt with us.  Sometimes we ask (and sometimes we outright demand) that God "do something" about our hurts and losses, and sometimes honestly all we can do is ask for God to be present with us... and maybe even then, we realize that God has been there all along, but that we were not able to see or sense or perceive God's presence in that suffering.

We are, all of us, constantly grieving over the loss of different things.  We grieve when someone we love dies. And we grieve when someone we love doesn't die at all, but goes on living without us somewhere far away.  We grieve when someone gets a diagnosis that looks grim, and we grieve when the thing we had hoped for for so long doesn't turn out the way we want.  When children are stricken with some life-altering condition, we grieve the loss of what we expected to be the "normal" course of life, and when children grow up, move out, get married, and become adults, we grieve the end of childhood and the loss of the familiar, even though that is exactly what we call the "normal" course of life. You grieve when a voice you had truly respected falls silent, and you grieve when a voice you had respected disappoints you and won't be quiet.  We grieve the loss of "how things used to be," and more often we grieve the loss of our nostalgia-tinged memory of "how things used to be," when they were never really as great as we recalled. Some of those hurts we feel more acutely, and some are more of a constant dull ache in the background.  Some may be true losses, and some may be only the loss of an illusion that was never really there.  But we are all constantly grieving... and so it only makes sense that we would bring those griefs to God.

The amazing thing to me is that the Scriptures--like these well-known verses from Psalm 22--give us permission to bring even the grief that feels like being abandoned by God, and to put them right in God's face.  The Psalms, of course, are prayers--and yet because these prayers have been held onto as part of what we profess to be God's Word to us, that also suggests that God invites completely honest, raw and emotional, even accusatory prayer when that is what we are actually feeling.  God can bear it when we grieve--even when the grief comes out as, "God, why did you let this happen?"

All of this drives home for me that there is simply no place or time where God isn't already, completely and fully, here among us.  God is present in our times of feeling godforsaken, just as God is there when we are chasing after a million other lesser things and trying to get them to fill the God-shaped vacuum in our lives (that, of course, being the lesson of the book of Ecclesiastes, in which the author describes how ultimately empty it was to seek after money, reputation, romance, sex, power, and book-learning, and in the end, after grieving over all the wasted years chasing those things, that God gave him purpose when none of those things  did).  Even when we blame God for the hurt we are feeling, God doesn't run away.  And even when things don't go the way we wanted, or when we don't see what "good" comes out of how things go, the Scriptures dare us to bring all of that grief right to God, presuming that God is there to hear it... and to bear it.

And then, in the broad sweep of its story, the Scriptures dare us to consider something yet more amazing: that the God who bears all of our accusations of abandoning us actually takes those same words onto the lips of Jesus, in whom, we confess, both God and humanity take flesh.  Not only can God bear our accusations of abandonment, but God bears it when Christ himself calls out from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  And in some sense, that means that God knows what it is to be abandoned and utterly alone, too.

Even in our times of deepest loneliness, God shares the loneliness with us.  Even in our times of most severe heartbreak, God's heart is broken, too.  Even when our lives feel like an unending litany of our many kinds of grieving, God grieves with us.  Yes, even when the shape of our grief is the lament that accuses God of being missing-in-action.

I don't know what particular things you are grieving on this day, but I think Henri Nouwen is right--that much of praying is grieving.  For whatever hurts and losses you are carrying today, know the promise of this ancient praying poet: we can bring it all to the God who grieves with us

My God, my God, come sit a spell with the world you so love, and grieve with us.