Photo by Alex Woods on Unsplash

​This week we continue our journey through the Psalms as a way to let our prayers be formed by the longings, praises, songs and laments of our ancestors. And as I talked about last Sunday, I think one of the most remarkable things about the Psalms is that they are so raw and human. These are not sanitized and strange words that are irrelevant to our human experience and keep God at arms length. Rather, these are our gut responses to God that draw us into the depths of relationship in the midst of our gritty, wonderful and often painful human experience.

For the Psalms are a mix of poetry and prayer. Far from decorative or surface ideas, the language of poetry calls us into the depths. Eugene Peterson in his book Answering God: The Psalms as Tools For Prayer says, “Poetry grabs for the jugular. Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal. It is root language. Poetry doesn’t so much tell us something we never knew as bring into recognition what is latent, forgotten, overlooked, or suppressed.”

The Psalms text is almost entirely in this kind of language. As we read the Psalms, we aren’t looking primarily for ideas about God, or for direction or moral conduct.

We are looking to find the experience of being human before God exposed and sharpened. To be laid bare intimately and honestly before the God of the universe who knows our name.

And this can be daunting for us. We are all too accustomed to talking about God rather than talking to God. The Psalms invite us to move beyond these cerebral discussions to deal with the very viscerally felt prayers of our humanity.

The psalms are disturbing if you read them—all of them. It’s easy to take the familiar comforting ones at face value. We love Psalm 23 speaking about our Good Shepherd and Psalm 145 speaking of our God of compassion. But what about the cries of despair, outrage and vengeance? "How long O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" (Psalm 113:1) "Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD?" (Psalm 139:21), even venomous words, "Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!" (Psalm 137:9)

At first, these words are offensive and off putting. How is it possible that they ended up in our sacred text? And yet we must let go of such romantic notions to catch God's nearness to us in the thick of our human flailing. Walter Brueggemann offers a framework for understanding the whole book of Psalms. And while not every psalm can be fit into a neat category, the majority of the psalms can be viewed in one of three ways: Psalms of Orientation, Disorientation and Reorientation.

It is easy to understand the Psalms of Orientation. These are the Psalms we have come to know and to love. These are the Psalms when life goes as we expect it to and when life is ordered by God's ways. Psalms of blessing and gratitude and worship to our God of creation.

But it is much more disconcerting to read the Psalms of Disorientation. These Psalms are the reaction of the faithful to God when the world they once knew is broken. When life doesn't go as planned and God's goodness seems elusive. When the city of God Jerusalem falls to conquering Babylon, you don't sing Psalms of God's goodness. Rather, you weep, you cry out in outrage and you lament. Here, we are not so concerned whether the content is ethical or not, but we allow ourselves to be moved by these words that reflect the pain of a people engaging with their God in world-shattering circumstances.

Finally, there are the Psalms of Reorientation. The Psalms of Reorientation are the words of people who have experienced a miracle, against all odds. They are gasps of thankfulness when the impossible breaks through. They are whispers of delight when the unimaginable has happened. God has broken into time and space and done something that they could not have anticipated and certainly could not have created.

“Even in a world demystified and reduced, grace intrudes and God makes all things new,” Spirituality of The Psalms, Walter Brueggemann

These are the Psalms of people who have been to hell and come out the other side. Psalms of amazement, wonder and gratitude.

As I consider the Psalms, I am increasingly convinced that they are necessary for our formation. For we are all too prone to keep God at a distance and to find our prayers stale and irrelevant compared to the evocative range of our human emotion. But the Psalms teach us that God is found at the very core of our human experience. There is no need for editing, stuffing or distancing. God is near and hears our cries of lament as well as our songs of adoration. So whether you find yourself in a time of orientation, disorientation or reorientation, may you be inspired and buoyed by the honest and raw faith in these prayers of our ancestors.

by Jessica Ketola

​Sitting midst the heartbreak and injustice for those who continue to suffer the unthinkable in migrant detention centers, I am sickened. The reports of horror and degradation continue with pictures of children in cages, separated from their parents, hungry and inconsolable; adults and children held for weeks or months in over-crowded cells, sometimes with no access to soap, toothpaste, or places to wash their hands or shower, sleeping on concrete floors or forced to stand due to lack of space. Reports of filth, unsanitary and inhumane conditions, sexual abuse, hunger, extreme cold, illness and even death. What are we to do but to cry out.

"Arise, Lord! Lift up your hand, O God. Do not forget the helpless." [Psalm 10:12]

Migrant Detention Centers Conditions - Times Article

As we continue through the Psalms, this week I am struck by the psalms of lament, crying out for justice. As much as we would like to read peacefully through the psalms, there is hardly a page that isn't left smoking by a pungent curse. These outbreaks of hate that smite the enemy can be off-putting. We are used to peaceful prayers, sanitized prayers, detached prayers. There is a rawness and honesty in the psalms that is disruptive and yet necessary.

But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted; 
you consider their grief and take it in hand. 
The victims commit themselves to you; 
you are the helper of the fatherless. 
Break the arm of the wicked man; 
call the evildoer to account for his wickedness 
that would not otherwise be found out.
The Lord is King for ever and ever; 
the nations will perish from his land. 
You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; 
you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, 
defending the fatherless and the oppressed, 
so that mere earthly mortals 
will never again strike terror. (Psalm 10:14-18)

Eugene Peterson says this in his book Answering God: The Psalms As Tools For Prayer. "But immersed by prayer in this holiness, we see clearly what we never saw before, the utter and terrible sacrilege of enemies who violate a good creation, who brutalize women and men who are made, every one of them in the image of God. There is an enormous amount of suffering epidemic in the world because of evil people. The rape and pillage are so well concealed in polite language and courteous conventions that some people can go years without seeing it. And we ourselves did not see it. But now we see it. And we hate it. We are ejected from our cushioned private religion into solidarity with 'The Silent Servants of the Used, Abused and Utterly Screwed Up'."

So what happens when we no longer distance ourselves and begin to lament? What shifts in our prayers as we begin to cry out on behalf of those seeking refuge from violence at our borders who are only subjected to more violence?

​In the article, Responding to Injustice With Lament, Andy Kim talks about how critical it is for the people of God to learn to lament. Here is an excerpt:

The Lost Discipline of Lament 
The Bible is filled with lament. There is even an entire book devoted to lament (Lamentations, anyone?). Check out Psalms 10, 13, 22, 39, 44, 51, 56, 60, 74, 79, 80, 85, 90, 92, 1 Samuel 30:4, Jeremiah 31:15, Matthew 27:46. We see time and time again that when the God's people are faced with evil, injustice, oppression and turmoil, the Biblical response is often lament.

In Reconciling All Things, Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice help us to understand what lament is, and what it isn't:

"Lament is not despair. It is not whining. It is not a cry into a void. Lament is a cry directed to God. It is the cry of those who see the truth of the world's deep wounds and the cost of seeking peace. It is the prayer of those who are deeply disturbed by the way things are... The journey of reconciliation is grounded in the practice of lament." (pp. 78)

In our pursuit of multiethnic ministry and reconciliation, are we engaging in Biblical lament?

Author, pastor and theologian Soong-Chan Rah suggests that as the church in America, the answer is often a resounding no.

The Absence of Lament 
In a 2013 article, Rah notes that while laments constitute 40 percent of the Psalms, they are conspicuously absent from contemporary American worship.

Rah observed that out of the top 100 worship songs from August 2012 according to Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), only five songs fell into the category of lament, while the vast majority were celebratory praise songs..." (Looking at the current CCLI Top 100, not much seems to have changed.)
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He explains here and in more depth in his book, Prophetic Lament:

"How we worship reveals what we prioritize. The American church avoids lament. Consequently the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost in lieu of a triumphalistic, victorious narrative. We forget the necessity of lament over suffering and pain. Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. Absence makes the heart forget."

When we lack the discipline of lament, we run the risk of letting our triumphalism, our anger, our hurt, our fear or our apathy fester inside of us and paralyze us. Biblical lament calls us to sit in the pain, to truly see the brokenness in ourselves and in our world, and to cry out to God.

Are we willing?

Practice Lament 
And so I encourage you to practice lament this week. Engage your heart and soul with the prayers of the psalmists. And along with your prayers, engage your bodies for I am reminded of the African proverb, "When you pray move your feet." And I've included below many ways in which you can participate and engage here locally.

PILGRIMAGE 
"Pilgrimage is a posture very different from mission. The goal of a pilgrim is not to solve, but to search, not so much to help as to be present. Pilgrims do not rush to a goal, but slow down to hear the crying."

How do we put ourselves in the way of listening to those who are suffering? I encourage you to do participate in Lights for Liberty on Friday night or other local events.
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RELOCATION 
"The practice of relocation [means] taking our very bodies to the hard places and tarrying long enough to be disturbed."

It is easy to be undisturbed at a distance but what happens when we put our physical bodies in hard places? This is one of the reasons I will be going to the border and why it is important to show up at our own detention center in Tacoma (there is an event this Saturday).

CONFESSION 
"[It's] a way of unlearning innocence. As we learn to go out of our way to draw near and tarry with the pain of the world... the challenge is to keep naming the truth, keep being disturbed, keep remember the awful depth of brokenness. The prayers of lament in the Psalms were public prayers, intended to be read and inserted into the corporate life of worship... It is critical that we learn to pray like this, bringing these prayers into public worship in a way that helps us tell the truth and confess in explicit relationships to the brokenness of our own contexts."

This is why we it is important that we pray the Psalms throughout the week and the Prayers of the People together at our gatherings. And we encourage you to write your own psalms and laments so that we can pray them together.

This past Sunday I spoke broadly about singing as an act of worship, a topic partially inspired by our sending the Larsons, who have led us beautifully in song, and partially inspired by the Book of Psalms, which we’ll be turning our attention to this summer.

Many of us have experienced powerful moments of intimacy, connection, and worship through singing. It’s no small wonder – a 2013 study on choral singers showed that the singers’ heartbeats actually synched up when they sang together. Our hearts literally and spiritually beat as one when we sing; one wonders if they indeed are beating along in time to God’s heart:

“Our God will take great delight in you;
The God of love will no longer rebuke you,
But will rejoice over you with singing.” [Zechariah 3:17]

Though we don’t often actually sing them, the Psalms are indeed songs. The early Christian monastics referred to the Psalms as “the Bible in miniature” because they were understood to engage every Biblical theme, every emotion, every expression of grief or guilt, praise or rage. The desert abbas and ammas treated the Psalms as the bedrock of all public and private prayer, speaking, singing, and wrestling with the words daily. In this dailiness, they expected the ageless, ancient Spirit that breathed the Psalms to breathe in them anew, over time opening up the relationship between the singer and the song.

I wonder if one way we could think of our engagement with the Psalms would be to think of them as something like the songlines of Australia. The Aboriginal Peoples of Australia are keepers of ancient paths through the land called songlines. These paths trace the journeys of ancestral spirits from long ago and the primary tools for navigation are songs that have been passed down for generations. Songlines tell stories and give information on plants, animals, the nature of the land, cultural values, and wisdom. When a new generation journeys along the songline it is as if the older generations journey with them – memory, family, land, and time are bound together in song.

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Like songlines, the Psalms are songs that have been sung by our ancestors in faith for generations as a way of navigating this life. Through Spirit, they are now passed on to us, the generation of the Church created for such a time as this, to sing anew if we so choose. I wonder if we took up these songs today – particularly those of us who struggle to engage with Scripture – as prayers to read and be read by, if we wouldn’t find our own heartbeats synching up with our ancestors who tried the same thing. I wonder what we’d be surprised by or invited into. And I wonder if, above and under and around it all, we might hear through these ancient words the heart of the God who has been singing all along.