A Psalm for a bad day

“To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.””

Karl Barth

I’ve not had a very good day. I’m full of hay fever and I’m overwhelmed with stuff going on. I came across this Karl Barth quote earlier today and it’s really helped. So let’s do a prayer of lament and in prayer let’s do a bit of uprising against our own disorder. 

Psalms of lament in the bible are really honest prayers. They say, “hey God, it isn’t alright today, I’m going to give you my situation because I trust in you. I’m then going to focus on your track record believing you can sort my rubbish out like you have countless others in the past.”

I think tonight I’m struggling because tonight’s government briefing was almost triumphant in tone that deaths are falling and look at what we’ve done!

 I think we need a national time of lament when we reach 40,000 lives lost, which won’t be long. Then there’s what’s happening in America, with racial unrest and violence after a very very wrong thing happening, and a President sending incendiary tweets from his bunker... 

Then there’s the uncertainty in my life. I am now allowed to go out for a walk (which I’ve always done) but not meet people or go in a building or shop or anything much really. 

I am still worried it isn’t safe to let the clinically vulnerable out, and anyway they still can’t see their family, that the R level is perilously near 1, that the government’s own alert level remains where it has been for ages but we are “transitioning” towards the level below, that track and trace isn’t fully operational and we don’t have any figures how many have been contacted, and it was meant to be “world beating” by now. It’s rather fun that when I put “lament” in Google images search this picture came up! 

Next week our stuff is put into storage yet again as we pack up the rental home which was meant to give us peace, but turned into a broken dream and where I now can’t be without being back on the steroids as it is very poorly. We haven’t lived in it since the end of January.

 Our rescue cats will have been in the cattery seven months when we can hopefully get them out. We thank God for the holiday let we now find ourselves trapped but safe in. By August, after having to get out of the Hastings manse, with a mixture of hotels and holiday homes, a manse in Hailsham for seven months and a rented home in Gorefield for seven months and where we are now for five months, we will have been on the move for two years. 

Then there’s the “will we move in the summer” question. Will there be a second spike due to crowded beaches and too large a party gathering and horsey racing coming back too early? 

So I give all this stuff to God. Poor God! But he can take it. Psalm 13 is a good example: 

1  How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?
2  How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me?
3  Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
4  and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
5  But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.
6  I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me.

In the lament Psalms, help and intervention is asked of God to deliver us from suffering, sorrow, great loss, failures, and rescue from enemies. Expressions of trust in God to act in our favour lead to hope and joy. Sometimes the Psalms are personal and sometimes said as a community. 
 

They all seem to have a basic structure: 
(1)Address God
(2)Description of Complaint
(3)Request for God's help
(4)Expression of trust in God

There’s nothing wrong in prayer in telling God how we feel. There’s nothing wrong in prayer in asking for God’s help. One word “help!” is a prayer. Remember this though: my Old Testament tutor in college taught me the most important word in a Psalm is the word “but”...

Yes today life is crap, uncertain, frightening, mad, out of control, with no answers at all, but just by railing at you, God, I’m saying I believe in you. Nowhere does the Psalmist say there is no God, indeed the Psalm one on from the one I chose for this reflection says that only a fool will say there is no God. We might not know what God’s timing is but even if he feels absent he is waiting for the right time to answer our most heartfelt and honest prayer. Our human desire for instant answers wants to pray “Lord, give me patience, but please hurry up about it!”

So tonight I suggest to you:

Name your worries and your fears. I find writing them down helps but if you aren’t a writer name them out loud. Often naming the complaint is a first step to healing. It is a sign of a strong in God that you can name what’s wrong to him. 

Then find some way of letting God remind you of the “but”! Have some space, use a prayer book, breathe, let go and let God. Let God speak into the brokenness of your heart. 

Walter Bruggemann writes a lot about lament. He sees lament prayers as an expression of grief, but that they are also an expression of hope. They are “an insistence that things cannot remain this way and they must be changed.” We give what’s wrong to God and then mysteriously, in time, we are given energy again to join him in taking transformative action to affirm “we cannot stay like this.” 

So for the United States tonight we pray for an end to prejudice that there may be respect for all people as precious children of God, and that violence and inflammatory words might be replaced with justice and understanding.

For the ongoIng Covid 19 crisis in our country we continue to pray:

Keep us, good Lord,
under the shadow of your mercy
in this time of uncertainty and distress.
Sustain and support the anxious and fearful,
and lift up all who are brought low;
that we may rejoice in your comfort
knowing that nothing can separate us from your love
in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And for ourselves we pray look on us, it’s tough today, I can’t cope with the world or sorting a house out I don’t want to be in or worries about this virus or whether plans can happen, I’m tired and I’m full of snot —— but  I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord’s praise, for he has been good to me.