Prayers That Stick: CRAP (Prayers of Lament and Cursing)
Sycamore Creek Church
March 25, 2012
Tom Arthur
Psalm 13

CRAP friends.

Yeah, that’s right.  CRAP.  Everyone is lamenting today.  The Spartans are out.  The Wolverines are out.  The Blue Devils are out.  Everyone.   At least your team didn’t lose in the first round to a team you’ve never heard of before.  CRAP.

Well, today we’re continuing a series on prayers from the book of Psalms.  We’re looking at prayers of lament and cursing.  OK. My “lament” for the way that March Madness is turning out is really more like a complaint than a lament.  You know what I mean?  There is a significant difference between the two.

Complaint: Having to listen to your talkative friend.
Lament: Having your talkative friend talk behind your back.

Complaint: Waiting in a long line at the grocery store
Lament: Not having enough money to buy groceries

Complaint: Paying $4/gal for gas to drive to work
Lament: Not having work to drive to

Complaint: Not liking the songs sung at church
Lament: Not being able to gather legally to sing songs at church

CRAP!

We hear a lot of complaints from those around us, but have you ever really heard someone lament?  You’ve never heard a lament until you’ve heard a southern Pentecostal woman lament.  Sarah and I lived in a house with several other Christians and we offered hospitality to women and children in transition.  It was kind of like living in the homeless shelter with your small group.  One day while I was a seminary I was sitting in my chair reading when I heard a wail go up like nothing I’d ever heard before.  I jumped up and ran out of my room to see what was happening.  “Mary” had come back from church and felt that one of her trusted friends had stabbed her in the back.  Her trust was shattered not just by anyone but by someone who was supposed to be her spiritual sister.  Being a Pentecostal, Mary was prone to letting it all hang out.  She cried and cried out loud and louder than I had ever really heard someone cry before.

As the house gathered around her, we hugged her, laid hands on her, and began to pray for her.  I didn’t know exactly what to pray, but I felt God’s Spirit leading me to the words of scripture.  Whenever you don’t have words for your prayers, turn to scripture.  So I began reciting the psalms I had memorized looking for a suitable one:

Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked.
Psalm 1.  No, not right.

Make a joyful noise to the Lord all the earth.
Psalm 100.  Not even close.

The heavens are telling the glory of God.
Psalm 19.  No way.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love;
Psalm 51.  Sounding good…

According to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.
No.  This isn’t a moment of confession.

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
Psalm 139.  Getting close.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
Psalm 23.  Still close but not quite.

How long, O Lord, will you forget me? Forever?
Psalm 13.  Perfect!

The only problem was that I had not yet memorized Psalm 13.  CRAP!  In that moment I realized that I had only memorized “happy” psalms.  I hadn’t only jumped over all the pain and hurt in the Psalms.  All the suffering.  So after that night I made a commitment to memorize a psalm of lament, and I landed on Psalm 13.

Psalm 13 NRSV
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.

The psalms are found in the middle of your Bible and are prayers in the form of poetry.  It’s essential to remember that whenever you read them.  Because they are poetry they will have multiple meanings.  They will also use very few words to get across a lot of depth, and there are many forms of poems: praise, awe and wonder, lament, confession, wisdom, and more.  (By the way, do you know where a poem comes from?  A poe-tree.  Ugghhh…In a sermon on lament you’ve got to get a laugh in where you can.)

Because the psalms are prayers, they are very personal in nature.  Reading or praying a psalm is kind of like reading someone else’s journal.  Sometimes you learn more about them than you do about God.   You’re learning about their feelings about God more than about who God is.  And often in the psalms there is an honesty that we are not always comfortable with.  We would prefer to think that God’s people don’t really feel like that, don’t really have those emotions.  But we do, and the psalms teach us that being honest with God changes us.

It is interesting to note that in Hebrew the book of Psalms is titled “Tehillim” which  means “praises.”  But there are actually more laments in the book of psalms than there are praises.  The ancient Hebrew people apparently thought it was also a praise to God to lament to God.   Perhaps this can be seen most clearly in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.  I visited the Wailing Wall in 2007.  It is a very sacred place where people come to lament all kinds of things, but especially the tensions between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East and especially in Jerusalem.  People place written prayers (often laments) in the cracks of the Wailing Wall.  Here is a recognized place where it is appropriate to come and lament.  The church, on the other hand, does not know how to lament.  Let me give you one example.  Jeremy and I spent way too much time trying to find songs that would work with this sermon today.  All our songs are “praise songs.”  We don’t have any “lament songs.”  So we ended up choosing psalms that at least referenced struggle or pain in some way.

Nancy Duff, Professor of Ethics at Princeton, says this about lament:

Psalms of lament allow us to speak from the darkest regions of the heart, where our despair threatens to overwhelm us.  In so speaking we do not exhibit a lack of faith, but stand in a biblical tradition that recognizes that no part of life, including the most hideous and painful parts, is to be withheld from God, who loves us, who in Jesus Christ speaks the psalms of lament alongside us, and who proclaims hope, when there can—at least for the time being—be no hope in us.  The church would do well to recover this biblical practice of lamentation. (Nancy J. Duff, Recovering Lamentation as a Practice in the Church, an essay in the compilation Lament: Reclaiming Practices in Pulpit, Pew, and Public Square edited by Brown and Miller.)

Cursing

Sometimes our pain and lament is so strong that it leads us to cursing those who caused us this pain.  The psalms are quite familiar with this kind of pain and often turn it into prayers.  Sometimes the cursing in the psalms is pretty graphic like that in Psalm 137 which says:

Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! (Psalm 137: 9 NLT)

CRAP!  Was that in the Bible?  Happy is what?  This psalm is written during the Jewish exile in Babylon.  The Babylonians came and sacked Israel and carted off many Israelites to Babylon.  Imagine a foreign invader coming and destroying the United States then forcefully relocating you to a foreign land.  That’s how bad it was.  You can imagine the pain that is underneath this psalm of cursing.

But are we to take this seriously?  I’m not so sure.  Remember sometimes we learn more about the emotion of the psalmist than we do about God.  Consider this for a moment.  The phrase “Happy are” is a stock wisdom phrase in the psalms.  It shows up many times.  Here are some instances:

Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked.  Psalm 1:1
Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven.  Psalm 32:1
Happy are those who make the LORD their trust.  Psalm 40:4
Happy are those whose strength is in you.  Psalm 84:5
Happy are those who fear the LORD. Psalm 112:1
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! Psalm 137:9

There’s quite a difference between all the other psalms that use this phrase and Psalm 137.  I think the psalmist is intending to be outrageous, even absurd; maybe even a little sarcastic.  A modern example might be the movie title “Thank You for Smoking.”  You’re supposed to understand that there’s a wink and nod in there.  But in the end, you will not be happy or blessed by dashing babies against rocks, even the babies of your enemies.

Usually the cursing psalms come from the perspective of having completely open hands.  Consider Psalm 109, the nuclear bomb of cursing psalms:

Psalm 109:7-15 NLT
When his case is called for judgment,
let him be pronounced guilty.
Count his prayers as sins.
Let his years be few;
let his position be given to someone else.
May his children become fatherless,
and may his wife become a widow.
May his children wander as beggars;
may they be evicted from their ruined homes.
May creditors seize his entire estate,
and strangers take all he has earned.
Let no one be kind to him;
let no one pity his fatherless children.
May all his offspring die.
May his family name be blotted out in a single generation.
May the LORD never forget the sins of his ancestors;
may his mother’s sins never be erased from the record.
May these sins always remain before the LORD,
but may his name be cut off from human memory.

CRAP!  When was the last time you prayed like that?  Notice that the psalmist is asking God to do all this.  The psalmist’s hands are empty.  He is giving it up to God.  All his anger, frustration, pain, and suffering.  God, you take vengeance on this creep! Not me, but you.

So let’s go back to Psalm 13 and see if we can learn anything more about how to lament.  There is a basic pattern in Psalm 13: Despair – Demands – Deliverance.

Despair

Did you notice how many times the psalmist asks “How long?”  How long…How long…How long…How long?  Four times.  It’s OK to ask God, “How long?”  Sometimes God feels absent and sorrow overwhelms us.  Maybe some of this at times has to do with our own ego getting the worst of it.  Did you catch the psalmist lamenting that his enemy might gloat over him: Don’t let my enemies gloat, saying, “We have defeated him!” (Psalm 13:4 NLT).

Demands

From despair the psalmist moves to making demands.  Notice all the strong command words: Look! (Pay attention!) Answer!  (I’m waiting!)  Give!  (Now!)  But these demands aren’t the demands of someone who doesn’t know God.  Notice that the psalmist calls God “my God.”  There’s a kind of intimacy here.  The intimacy is what makes the demands possible.  These demands also come with reasons.  If you don’t act, God, this is what will happen: I’ll die and the enemy will gloat and rejoice.

Deliverance

There’s a key word that begins verse five: But.  From despair and demands the psalmist turns a corner in the last two verses.  Two-thirds of the psalm is lament.  One-third is devoted to praise.  Here we see the psalmist reiterating his trust in God.  There is an anticipation of being rescued and saved.  His heart is, after much lament, rejoicing and singing.  I think it is helpful to recognize that while the psalmist has turned the corner here, we’re not told whether the situation got any better or not.  It is a praise for deliverance built on the faith that God wins.

While Psalm 13 makes this turn to praise at the end of the prayer, there are at least two psalms of the 150 in the Bible that don’t make that turn to praise.  Psalms 39 & 88 don’t turn toward praise.  I think this suggests that there are times where our hearts are so overwhelmed that we cannot turn to praise after lament.  Psalms 39 & 88 give us permission to stay in lament for some time longer.  How much longer?  I don’t know.  But my sense is that there is no rush.

Lament

So how should we pray?  What can we learn from the psalms of lament and the psalms of cursing?   If I were to boil it down to one thing it would be this: be honest in your prayers.  If you’re hurting, tell God.  If you don’t like what’s happening to you, tell God.   If you’re fed up with how slow God is at answering your prayers, tell God.  If you feel  like your prayers are falling on deaf ears, tell God.  If you’d really like you ex to have all kinds of bad things happen to them, tell God.  If your kids are driving you crazy, tell God.  If you can’t find a job and you feel like you’re sinking and God doesn’t care, tell God.

Then make demands to our God.  Tell God exactly what you want and why.  God, I’m tired of being depressed.  Heal me.  God, I’m sick and tired of looking for a job. Give me one.  God, I can’t stand my ex boyfriend.  Make his new girlfriend cheat on him like he cheated on me.  While you’re at it, my boss doesn’t respect or honor me in any way.  Next time he’s up for promotion, don’t let him get it.  Then let God deal with it.  It’s out of your hands.

Lastly, don’t forget to thank God in the midst of all this despair and all these demands.  Thank God before you even figure out how God is going to answer your prayer (or if God will answer it at all).  Thank God for the ways God has been good to you in the past.

Sometimes this kind of true lament is truly hard to do on Sunday morning in a community gathering.  Maybe that’s why it’s so hard for us.  Who wants to bear their soul to a ton of people they barely know?  Not many of us.  Maybe this is why small groups are so important.  Here at SCC we believe that small groups are essential to spiritual growth.  Part of that is because lament, which is a key element of growing spiritually, often happens more frequently in small groups than it does in large groups.  My own small group often meets and shares with one another the crap in our lives.  It’s kind of like small group is the toilet where you’re able to flush the crap out.  Do you have a small group where you can flush the crap out of your life?  Do you have a group of people you meet with regularly (at least every other week) where you can be honest about the crap in your life?  If not, find one.  We’ve got several here in our church, but they’re not the only ones out there.

While Sarah and I were living in Durham in the house I told you about (our small group for flushing the crap out of our lives), I was working on translating Psalm 22.  It’s the prayer that Jesus quoted as he hung on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”  Notice that Jesus asks “Why?” too.  I decided to take some poetic license with Psalm 22 and put it into the context of where we were living which was the ghetto of Durham.  All kinds of crazy stuff happened all the time in our neighborhood.  I cataloged it and lamented to God.  Here is the first half.

Psalm 22 According to East Durham:

Eli, eli, lamah, ‘azavtani
My God!  My God!  Why have you abandoned me?

All these things surround me.  They circle around me.  They are on all sides.  I can’t get away from them:

Hanging plants stolen from old ladies’ porches,
Packs of stray dogs roaming the streets,
Boarded up houses surrounding me.
Vandalized houses all about.
Paint splattered on remodeled houses.
Broken windows.
Businesses sabotaged time and time again.
Stolen copper pipes.
The boom of cars driving by,
The blast of train horns in the night,
Sirens screaming on Sunday morning,
Disjointed lovers spilling into the streets
cursing one another,
Single mothers missing fathers for their babies.
People going hungry, begging for food and help.
Women reduced to subsist by selling their bodies,
Innocent women receiving propositions,
even on the way to church!
Gunshots into the night,
Gunshots on Christmas Eve!
Welcome to Durham?  Welcome to gangs!
Crack houses on my block.
Police raids with smoke and sirens and shotguns,
while children play in the back yard.
Homicides and shootings mere blocks from my home.
Choppers and search lights.
An ambivalent 911.
Fear.

Are you soon to deal me death?
You did not save your son from death.  Am I to meet the same end?

Eli, eli, lamah, ‘azavtani
My God!  My God!  Why have you abandoned me?