Advent 3, Joy: and darkest night

Hebrews 12:2-3 … keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross

Hebrews 5:7 While Jesus was here on earth, he offered prayers ad pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the one who could rescue him from death. And God heard his prayers because of his deep reverence for God.

Psalm 116:10 I believed in you, SO I said, “I am deeply troubled, Lord.”

My daughter Rachel invited me to a “Darkest Night” gathering at her home tomorrow evening. Here’s part of her invitation:

“As we approach the longest night of the year on 12/21, we remember that in the midst of Christmas joy we also hold distress, loss and longing – sometimes especially at holiday times when there’s a face missing from around the table or we recognize distance from those we love or we realize that there is darkness just outside the candlelight of our world.”

How does joy fit together with grief and trauma?

The first Christmas week after Karis died, I lay on the couch where she had so often rested, trying to get myself together enough to do my part toward making Christmas happy for the rest of my family.

While I still had not managed to overcome my grief enough to pull out the Christmas boxes, a friend came to visit me. She looked around at the absence of decorations in my home, and said, “Debbie, I am so disappointed in you. I always thought you were a woman of faith.”

On that note, she left me. Oppressed by an added layer of guilt and shame, and the sense that I had another loss to grieve—the loss of trust in my friend—I returned to the couch.

In stark contrast, another friend appeared at my home. She quickly discerned my condition, and said, “Debbie, talk to me. Tell me what you’re feeling.” She wasn’t shocked or offended by my outpouring of grief and tears. She didn’t say, “If you only had faith, you would get your act together.”

She said, “What is the most important thing you want to do for Christmas? I have time. I’ll help you do it.”

This friend understood and shared my grief. She didn’t take it on herself, but she walked with me through it.

After she helped me put up my family’s stockings, each with their name, including Karis’s, my friend left me. The comfort of her presence and compassion lifted my spirits enough that I continued decorating my house. Later, my two daughters completed what I didn’t manage to do. I hold their kindness in my heart as the most precious gift of that Christmas.

The invitation to lament, to acknowledge and express grief, can open space in our souls for joy.

Lament

My apologies for posting this out of order! I wrote it before traveling, so it would be easy to post on the run, and then forgot I never did it.

But God wants us to know him

Isaiah 5:7, 12-13, 20-21, 24 The Lord of Heaven’s Armies expected a crop of justice, but instead he found oppression. He expected to find righteousness, but instead he heard cries of violence… “My people never think about the Lord or notice what he is doing. So they will go into exile far away because they do not know me. …

“What sorrow for those who say that evil is good and good is evil, that dark is light and light is dark, that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter. What sorrow for those who are wise in their own eyes and think themselves so clever. … They have rejected the law of the Lord; they have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.”

Lament.

Not ours, this time. God’s.

I imagine Isaiah writing this chapter with tears running down his cheeks, just as Nehemiah, after the exile Isaiah predicts took place, wept over news about the condition of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 1:4). And as Jesus, too, wept over Jerusalem (Matthew 23:37, Luke 13:34-35).

Commentators say no other portion of Scripture gives us such insight into God’s heart as the writings of Isaiah. In this chapter, he uses the phrase “What sorrow” six times as he details the indifference of his people to his love for them, and their foolishness in rejecting his wisdom.

God wants us to know him: what he values, what he cares about, what he is doing, what he longs for, what stirs him to holy anger, what delights him. Through Isaiah, God shows us his broken heart. He shows us that even he can feel disappointed and betrayed. Like a loving parent passionate about his children, investing everything in them—and then experiencing their rejection and having to watch them suffer the consequences of their misguided choices.

I’m reminded of Hillsong United’s song Hosanna: “Break my heart for what breaks yours.” Until we can feel God’s pain, we don’t really know him.

God is not distant from us, untouched by our daily lives. He longs for intimate relationship, open communication, transparency in the security of his love for us. He wants us to pay attention when he speaks to us, and to make choices worthy of him, in line with his holiness.

The sovereign Lord and Creator of the universe loves you and me enough to weep over us.

The power of lament

But God heard Jesus cry

Hebrews 5:7-9 While Jesus was here on earth, he offered prayers and pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the one who could rescue him from death. And God heard his prayers because of his deep reverence for God. Even though Jesus was God’s Son, he learned obedience from the things he suffered. In this way, God qualified him as a perfect High Priest, and he became the source of eternal salvation for all those who obey him.

Matthew 26:38-39 Jesus told Peter, James, and John, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” He went on a little farther and bowed with his face to the ground, praying “My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.”

Psalm 116:10-11 I believed in you, so I said, “I am deeply troubled, Lord.” In my anxiety I cried out to you.

Have you ever felt your soul crushed with grief?

I can’t compare my experience with Jesus’s. But in the months following Karis’s death, these counter-cultural verses from Hebrews were lifesaving for me. They gave me permission to express my anguish, rather than just confining it inside and going into the death of long depression. They add so much color and sound to the Gospel accounts of Gethsemane that I wonder whether the anonymous author of Hebrews might have been in the olive grove that night.

*Oklahoma City National Memorial, Shutterstock: angie oxley*

When we give expression to our heartbreak, voicing lament at the same time helps us define and contain it. It seems the entire world has lost its moorings, but no: I realize I am torn up inside about this and this and this.

Lament is like releasing pressure from a pressure cooker, so the contents can be dealt with safely. We can lament privately, but it’s effective in a different way when someone we trust hears and feels with us and to some extent at least understands our anguish, feelings too overwhelming to deal with alone. I’m grateful for Luke 22:43, which tells us an angel came to Jesus in Gethsemane to care for him when the disciples failed to do so. In my experience, feeling alone in grief compounds its impact many times over. Compassionate people can help anchor us and give us the safety of boundaries when it feels like everything has fallen apart.

What happens when we don’t lament? The pressure inside us can come out in anger and mistreatment of others. It can generalize into paralyzing fear leading to irrational beliefs and actions. It can freeze into chronic depression. It can manifest in illnesses.

I called the verses in Hebrews counter-cultural because somehow in some Christian traditions the idea took hold that expression of emotions is not godly or decorous; it reveals a lack of faith and maturity. We admire people who are “strong,” meaning they bear their sorrows stoically. At all times they wear the demeanor of a “victorious Christian.” They keep their masks firmly in place.

Until, if they are like me, they simply can’t anymore. And then they may hear words like, “I’m disappointed in you. I always thought you were a woman of faith.” This anti-biblical culture, I believe is changing. I’m glad.

Jesus, the perfect, sinless, Son of God, lamented with loud cries. And though his Father could not remove the cup of suffering from him, Jesus walked into the betrayal of Judas and all that came next as he was mocked, scourged, slandered, and nailed to a cross knowing his Father had heard him and walked with him. Though his own disciples fled, Jesus knew he was not alone. David, the man after God’s own heart, expressed lament through the psalms. Jeremiah wept over his people. The great apostle Paul told the Corinthians some of what he had been through for the sake of the Gospel.

Lament is a gift we all need. I’m grateful for the biblical characters who model it for us. Beginning with Jesus, our Lord.

My friend Timmy introduced me to the sung Psalms of The Corner Room. Here’s an example. They are helping me give expression to the feelings stirred up by the launch of Karis, só vejo a graça in Brazil. Maybe they will help you, too, in your own need to lament in faith.

And this website might help as well.

Do you practice lament?

But Jesus grieves

Matthew 23:23; 37-39 “What sorrow awaits you hypocrites! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law—justice, mercy, and faith. … O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones God’s messengers! How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings, but you wouldn’t let me. And now look, your house is abandoned and desolate. For I tell you this, you will never see me again until you say, ‘Blessings on the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

A new month. Are we any wiser? Or just older, continuing in our same patterns of behavior as we conclude Lent and prepare for Holy Week … We still have time, time to sit before the Lord and ask him to reveal to us our own hearts and his. Time to soften our resistance to his still, small voice of love, inviting us to be freed from our selfishness and blindness. Inviting us into his care.

Matthew 23 is a chapter we tend to skip over, except for verse 37. Jesus pours out a blistering rebuke of the leaders of his day, repeating the phrase “What sorrow awaits you” seven times. It’s an anguished cry of lament. “They don’t practice what they teach … They crush people and never lift a finger to ease the burden … Everything they do is for show …”

The last line I quoted refers back to Jesus’ “triumphal entry”–after which the Jewish leaders, indignant, began to plot how to kill him.

I find most shocking Jesus’ declaration to these leaders that they will be held responsible for the murder of “all godly people of all time,” beginning with Cain’s murder of Abel. “This judgment will fall on this very generation,” Jesus says, before launching into his lament over Jerusalem. We know he would shortly bear on the cross the penalty for all the sin committed for all time.

Can you feel his anguish over innocent people who are killed by others with evil motives? It’s the lament of the Old Testament prophets, a revelation of God’s tender heart. “I hate all your show and pretense—the hypocrisy of your religious festivals and solemn assemblies” the Lord said through the prophet Amos after decrying those who oppress the poor and crush the needy. “Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice, an endless river of righteous living” (Amos 5:21, 24).

And then comes the phrase Jesus appropriated: “What sorrow awaits you …” (Amos 6:1). “How foolish you are when you turn justice into poison and the sweet fruit of righteousness into bitterness” (Amos 6:12).

Lord, you see our nation. You see all that’s going on in our broken, weary, bleeding world. And you see my heart. Take the blinders from my eyes so I can see it too. Let me find refuge beneath your wings.