The Prayer of Grief

We all suffer. We all mourn. At least in this life this seems to be common to all people. Yet, something almost always feels wrong in our suffering. We experience something wrong in our relationships, in ourselves, and in our connection with God. What we should realize is that all of our suffering is that it points us to a need for something bigger than it all. We need to pray and depend on God to relieve our suffering.

Look at the wrong in our suffering: The distance of death seems far too great. Injustice of any decision or event destroys equilibrium and often a kind of goodness. Loss can remove a known joy and hope. Betrayal, abandonment and animosity destroys the relationships that we were meant for. We could go on. The truth of all of this suffering is that it is not what we are meant for. This is shown to us throughout Scripture but especially at the beginning and end. The consequence of the first sin in the Garden of Eden was that our suffering would be greatly increased. And the end consequence of God making his home on earth and heaven and earth becoming one is that suffering and death will be no more. This is a clear message that God has a big plan for us that overcomes and even erases suffering.

Yet, we don’t live there yet. We live in a broken world with fleeting lives, relationships and material goods. In this world, and sadly in our own hearts and minds, our work and productivity often brings with them struggle and pain. Sometimes there just isn’t enough of something. So, what do we do in the meantime? Well, if this suffering is all too natural to this broken world, we actually can’t turn to the world or even our own hearts and minds to relieve it or deal with it. Any solution the world offers would be just as fleeting. The only real solution is to reach out to the one who is beyond it and even has promised us to relieve us and bring us rest. As an example of God’s promise of rest and relief, remember that the 7th day of creation God rested. This means that rest was built into creation and was just as pivotal as the animals, the water and land, the stars and planets.

So, this leads us to the main message of today: we should always bring our suffering to God in prayer. Not only is he the only one that can truly do anything about it, but he also wants us to bring it to him. Our first reading today was from a book called Lamentations - that’s right there is a whole book in the bible dedicated to grieving the suffering that someone has to endure. In addition to that about ⅓ or 65 of the psalms are psalms of lament. If that isn’t an invitation to grieve with God, to tell our sorrow to God in prayer I don’t know what is. In fact, if God is so purposefully telling us to turn to him in our sorrow and pain, it must mean that there is great purpose in it and that it is good for us and His Kingdom. God isn’t just a shoulder to cry on, or a cathartic ear, he is the one who does make the difference in our sorrow and so we need to be praying to him.

In our passage from Lamentations, the writer, historically Jeremiah, spends a long time just reflecting on the feelings, experiences, and sights of suffering. The writer of Lamentations is actually personifying Jerusalem and mourning on the city’s behalf, but by doing this he is able to draw in so much experience and heart-ache that all of us experience. As Jeremiah looks at the hurt, he is reflecting on what is actually happening. He sees how friends and those closest to him have abandoned him, he sees how his sins weigh heavily upon his neck, and he sees that God has turned his back on him. Obviously, there are more specifics here, but these are three important elements to acknowledge as we reflect on our suffering. We should recognize the wrong done to us by the world and those surrounding us. We should recognize our own faults and evil that has led us here. And we should recognize the distance and/or animosity with God that has ultimately increased the suffering. If we miss any one of these we are mourning only part of the wrong and so we can be led to untruths. Just a side note: these three broken realities that lead to suffering are also expressed in God’s curse as Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden.

We read today through Lamentations 3, which is in the centre of the book's 5 chapters. In chapter 3 we get a short respite from mourning as the writer reminds himself of hope. This is an important reminder, as much as we might be living in our sufferings, as much as they can feel like they surround us, we must hold onto hope - in fact, hope should be at the centre of our suffering. We still mourn, but as Paul says, we do not mourn as those that have no hope.

And what is Jeremiah’s hope, Jerusalem’s hope? “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’” That is a huge statement, especially considering what Jerusalem has endured. In my limited understanding, the kind of siege, brutality, slavery, and exile that Jerusalem would have experienced under the hands of Babylon are far worse than anything we even hear about in today’s world. Yet, Jeremiah can hold onto hope.

Let's look closer: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. Wow, again a huge statement, especially recognizing that he is saying this at the worst time of his life, possibly any nation's life. But it is important, because it is true. We might not always be able to see God’s love or experience it, but in faith and previous experience we should be able to recognize that it is there none-the-less. This is also important, because it tells us that something is wrong in us and the realities that surround us that stop us from knowing this steadfast love. So, a big question arises, how would this situation change if I actually knew and experienced God’s love in the moment? Even if I can’t fully answer the question I can tell you that the answer is “a lot”. Our suffering is transformed when we know the love of God. Again, this shows us why acknowledging the steadfast love of God is so important. If we can’t acknowledge it, how can we ever hope to experience it? Prayer is essential to this as the way we reach out and connect with God.

“God’s mercies never end. They are new every morning”. Mercy as the undeserved forgiveness and redemption of a wrong. God’s mercy never ends. This means that no matter how much suffering we are enduring there is always relief and redemption that God is working into it. It might not be that the dead rise when we want, that the sick are healed or that everything is restored right away, but God’s mercy is doing what is needed. It is redeeming, forgiving, restoring, rebuilding what is needed when it is needed. Since these mercies never end, it means, that in the midst of our suffering we need to be turning to God so that we might see where he is working. In addition, since his mercies are new every morning, this prayerful watching needs to continue as God will redeem, restore, rebuild continuously. The question remains, do we have the eyes to see it, the hearts to find joy in it, and the willingness to join in the work?

‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’ This is maybe the most important and yet most difficult part. Most of us like nice things. Most of us have hopes and dreams deeply tied to this world and its realities. Most of us want our portion of this world. Yet the truth of this broken and fleeting world is that many people won’t get these things and that us that do become just as fleeting and broken depending on them. No, it is God that is our portion. He is our dream. He is our hope. He is the Kingdom and the source of everything good. As long as anything stands in front of him, we will find ourselves shaken when something in this fleeting world is lost. Yet, if we rest in him as our portion, what we will find is that there is always enough, in fact, there is more than we could ever need.

So, how does all of this relate practically to our suffering?

First and foremost, we need to bring everything to God in prayer. We need to bring our grief and anger in all of its ugliness to God. Our psalm today wishes something abhorrent on the Babylonian army. Yet, this is part of Scripture, because this is where our grief and anger can go. What we recognize in prayer is that only when we trust our grief and anger to God and his justice will we actually see justice done.

Second, we have to be reflective and honest about that suffering - we need to grieve not just what is being done to us, but also what we have done to ourselves and what we have done to our relationship with God. Sometimes we beat ourselves up, or sometimes we deny any part in our hurt, but ultimately we usually fail in seeing how we have deserved the hurt, because of how we have treated or ran away from God.

Third, we need to recognize God, the only place we can turn for true restoration and the only one who is faithful in bringing it about. He is the God that saves and he is also the God that gives and gives. This doesn’t mean that everything will be exactly as we want it, but it does mean that in God, we will have more than we need.

To close I want to remind you of the second Beatitude: “Blessed are those that mourn for they will be comforted”. We are called to a Christ centred kind of mourning, even blessed in it, because through it we recognize the truth of this broken world and instead trust in the only last comfort there is. In God, we find rest.

Notes:

Everything good comes from the Lord - so the bad is the absence of his hand - he is still the actor

Shut out to my prayers?

My ways crooked

Good to wait for the Lord - he is our portion

Mercies are new every morning

Let us really mourn for what is truly wrong - tariffs, threat of wars, refugees, a volatile, cancelling and oppositional society - no these are just the symptoms of something we should have been mourning long ago.

How can we sing in a foreign land?

Even though they die will live

Even Jesus weeps

Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man from dying? Could not the God who created everything, who loved us enough to come down and become human, who was powerful enough to overcome suffering and death - could not he enter our sorrow and bring it to comfort and joy?