John Mark Hicks

In light of the recent tragedy in Myanmar (aka Burma) which has taken the lives of over 32,000 people as well as the tragic earthquakes in China that have claimed over 16,000 lives, I offer the following piece which I wrote–at the request of the Editor–for the Feburary 2005 issue of the Christian Chronicle after the 2004 Tsunami. I find it terribly inadequate. Consequently, I continue to pray laments and seek to follow Jesus in his compassion and mercy toward hurting people. I don’t know what else to do or say.

Theological musings are rather useless in the midst of tragedy but perhaps they give some perspective for those of us who are trying to “make sense” of what is apparently senseless while at the same doing all we can to share the compassion of Jesus with people who hurt.

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The Asian Tsunami brought “Jobian” destruction and despair. With over 200,000 estimated dead and missing—one half from Indonesia and a quarter from Sri Lanka—thousands of “Jobs” sit in despair on their own ash heaps.

Jobian experiences generate Jobian questions. Interpreters—apparent “friends” who seek to comfort—weigh in to speak almost prophetically about the “whys” and “reasons” for such a disaster.

“God is punishing evil,” some say, echoing Job’s own friends. The biblical story does have examples of analogous divine acts (the Noahic Flood). “God is testing the region,” others say. Testing is a thread weaved into the fabric of many biblical stories (apocalyptic tribulation tests the whole world in Revelation 3:10). “God is warning us about the end of the world.” Jesus pointed to some earthquakes as warnings or signs (Matthew 24:7).

Others, unlike Job’s friends, explain that God is uninvolved, or that such disasters evidence that there is no God, at least not a good one. The former defends God at the risk of diminishing prayer and demystifying the biblical story while the latter substitutes human notions of “good” for theological ones.

All answers to the question “why” are overly simplistic. It is too simple to say “God was not involved” since Scripture involves God in many similar situations, and it is too facile to assert “God was judging humanity” because Job’s friends made that mistake. Since I don’t even know why I do some of the things I do—I am often a mystery to myself—how can I grasp the “whys” of God? The mysteries of God’s involvement have often remained hidden during the deepest struggles of God’s faithful servants, including Job, Joseph and Jeremiah.

God understands the question, and we trust he has an answer. But he doesn’t think like us (Isaiah 55:9). Even if God answered the question, it might be like trying to explain Quantum Mechanics to a five year old. We simply do not have the capacity to think after God or grasp the fullness of his purposes.

Though the ultimate answer is unfathomable and unavailable, the human question arises naturally in our fallen circumstances—sufferers know it is an unavoidable question. Job asked “why” (3:23; 7:20; 13:23) and never received an answer. Along with Job we yearn to make sense of tragedy. If only, we imagine, we had a rationale—natural law, chaos, judgment, testing—then we could bear its weight. But would it hurt any less? Nevertheless, we question and there is no answer.

While God has not provided an intellectual resolution, he has responded to our cries. He responded to Job, surprising both Job and his “friends,” with his presence. Job had once only “heard of” God, but now his “eyes” had seen him (Job 42:6a).

The Christian message, consistent with Hebrew history (see Exodus 2:23-25), is that God responds to suffering with redemptive presence. God draws near to comfort sufferers and heal their brokenness. In Jesus, God did not explain suffering—how I long for a “Sermon on the Mount” about suffering—but rather he experienced it as one of us and redeemed us from it.

Jesus responded to suffering by sharing its burden, even death. Moved by love and compassion (even for his enemies, including us), he redeemed cosmic fallenness through healing and atonement.

Jesus is God’s response to suffering. It is not his only response (there are other parts of the story), nor is it the totality of all that is involved (the difficult questions of providence are not so neatly settled). But through Jesus God reveals his compassion and redeeming purpose. Our “why” questions remain unanswered but God has shown us who he is.

Moreover, we know who we are. We are the body of Christ on earth. We are his hands and feet. We must respond to suffering with love, compassion and redemptive healing. We do not act out of mere humanitarian concern. Rather, we act out of the movement of the Spirit who loves the world through us. We act because we are disciples of Jesus, and we offer grace because we have been graced.

The friends who came to Job’s ash heap became interpreters and accusers rather than comforters. Asian victims need the body of Christ to sit with them—without interpretation, without accusation, but with compassion and aide.

But if there is a divine message in the Tsunami, perhaps—just perhaps—it is not directed at impoverished Indonesia or India. Maybe the message is for the world’s wealthy economies. It forces us to think beyond this particular tragedy.

The tsunami has rightly generated worldwide compassion. But what if the daily headline were “26,000 Children Died Today of Preventable Diseases”? (See Michael Learner’s article.) There is a need for the daily compassion of the nations as well as Christian people and churches (see Larry James’ January 4 suggestion, “One Way Communities of Faith Can Make a Big Difference”.)

Yes, contribute to tsunami relief—demonstrate the love of God by offering grace to the hurting. But don’t permit compassion to be circumscribed by major headline disasters. We receive daily gifts to help the daily tragedies of life. There are other tragic circumstances, even in our inner cities, which need our help. $350 million for emergency aide to south Asia? Yes, absolutely! But what if we gave $1 billion to dying children in 2005?

If we have sent a donation for disaster relief, God be thanked! But now perhaps God reminds us to send an equal or greater donation to dying children or other needs that don’t get the headlines but are equally tragic. Perhaps that is the message of the tsunami—a reminder that suffering is pervasive, life is fragile, and the wealthy are blessed for the sake of the poor and not for their own consumption.

Madeleine L’Engle:

          “Dear God.

          I hate you.

          Love, Madeleine.”

I have been contemplating this brief prayer for several days after I read it in Gary Thomas’ Sacred Marriage (p. 157; an excellent read, btw!). Initially, I was horrified by how much I identified with the prayer and I was quite troubled by the prayer’s resonance in my soul. My first reaction was “I get the point.”

Them’s fighting words, it seems to me. It expresses our fight (or, as in the case of Jacob, wrestling) with God. The word “hate” stands for all the frustration, agitation, disgust, exasperation, and bewilderment we experience in the presence of God as we live in a suffering, painful and hurting world. “Hate” is a fightin’ word–a representation of the inexplicable pain in our lives. Sometimes, perhaps, we are too polite with God.

I hear Job in this word. God has denied Job fairness and justice, and Job is bitter (Job 23:1; 27:2). God is silent. God “throws” Job “into the mud” and treates him as an enemy (Job 30:19-20). God has attacked him and death is his only prospect (Job 30:21, 23).  Job is thoroughly frustrated, bitter in his soul, and hopeless about his future. God was a friend who turned on him–“hate” might be an accurate description of Job’s feelings as he sits on the dung heap.

And yet, just as Madeleine’s brief prayer, Job ends with “Love, Job.” He speaks to God; Job is not silent. He does not turn from his commitment to God; he does not curse God or deny him. He seeks God even if only to speak to him and wait for an answer. He laments, complains, wails and angrily (even sarcastically) addresses his creator.

The contrast between “I hate you” and “Love, Madeleine” is powerful. It bears witness to the tension within lament and our experience of the brokeness of the world. Though deeply frustrated with the reality that surrounds us (whether it is divorce, the death of a son, the death of a wife, the plight of the poor, AIDS in Africa, etc.) and with the God who does whatever he pleases (Psalm 115:3; 135:6), we continue to sign our prayers (laments) with love. We have no one else to whom we can turn and there is no else worthy of our love, or even laments.

The signature–“Love, Madeleine” or “Love, John Mark”–evidences a relationship which is the foundation of the prayer itself. It is out of this love we pray; it is out of this love we lament. It is with love we say “I hate you.”

The poignant irony of that last sentence is, it seems to me, the essence of honest lament.

P.S. L’Engle’s A Stone for a Pillow is a wonderful exploration of fairness, suffering and our journey through the world with God though often in tension with God.

On November 14, 2007, my good friend and colleague at Lipscomb University Mike Matheny died after his three year struggle with a brain tumor. Mike–the same age as me, 50–is a dear friend to me. We talked often about our great loves–the Psalms and baseball.  He is a Yankee fan, I am a Cubs fan. But we are both fans of the lament Psalms, both prayed those laments, and we both taught Psalms at Lipscomb.  I miss him terribly and I imagine he stands with the saints around the throne of God in both praise (“worthy”) and lament (“how long”).

Mike’s suffering and death was a traumatic trigger for me. The last time I visited Mike it was as if I was with my son Joshua in his last days. Mike and Joshua were both in hospice, incapacitated, and nonverbal. My time with Mike was a psychological reversion to the trauma of Joshua’s death which was then a reversion to Sheila’s death.  It was as if I was at Joshua’s bedside as well as Mike’s..as if I was again being carried out of Sheila’s funeral.

In the wake of that reversion, I shut down emotionally. Even my funeral sermon at Mike’s service was relatively devoid of emotion. I did not want to feel that pain. It was a pain with which I was all too familiar and my way of dealing with it was to withdraw and numb my feelings. Not feeling the pain was, it seemed to me, better than feeling the pain.  Of course, I did not realize what I was doing or what I was doing to myself. Only in the past couple of months have I seen the effects of unresolved grief in my life and relationships.

I thought I had resolved it and even believed I was relatively healthy, but I was actually deceiving myself.  I was playing the “hero” which is a role I have been given (and willingly assumed) most of my life. The hero, of course, cannot let himself be embarrased by tears or uncontrolled grief. He must hide it with laughter and avoid intense conversations about it.  “Laughter can conceal a heavy heart, but when the laughter ends, the grief remains” (Proverbs 14:13). The hero must be strong and model how to handle life’s tragedies.  But I am no hero. To the contrary, instead of living through my grief, I avoided it.  I tried to jump over my grief and leap–like superman–over tall buildings in a single bound.

I am now grateful that my leap has actually become a crash, and the crash has become a moment of divine grace.  Hitting the wall of unresolved trauma has given me the opportunity to truly experience my grief; to revisit, relive and reconstruct the meaning of my grief.  To re-enter the world of lament and truly feel what I feel has become a journey of authentic healing. And for this I am grateful and grateful for the people God has put into my life that support me, show me grace and model redemptive love.

“Though he brings grief, he also shows compassion because of the greatness of his unfailing love.”  Lamentations 3:32.

I am ready to lay aside my talk of grief for a time…I’m in danger of “oversharing” if not already past that point…but I will return to the subject again in the future…it is part of my journey, a part of me.

In the recent past I read an amazingly insightful book by Tian Dayton entitled Heartwounds: The Impact of Unresolved Trauma and Grief on Relationships. Dayton is a leader in experiential therapy or psychodrama. While her work is not explicitly Christian, it is spiritually-based. It has been extremely helpful to me as it has opened my eyes to much of my own life, especially in the aftermath of my own participation in some psychodramatic experiences based on my own life. [If you are interested in the therapeutic technique of psychodrama read Dayton’s The Drama Within: Psychodrama and Experiential Therapy.]

The power of psychodrama is that it brings body and soul into relation with unresolved trauma or grief. It is not merely cognitive, but somatic and communal. When there is unresolved trauma in our unconscious, we revert back to that trauma when we are triggered by an analogous experience. We then react to the present trigger as if we are again experiencing the original trauma. Consequently, we tend to intensify feelings which may not be appropriate to the situation, or transfer feelings from the past event to the present which is totally confusing because the present does not objectively warrant those feelings. This confuses people in relationship with us, and somestimes we withdraw emotionally in order to protect ourselves from those horrendous past feelings.

Psychodrama provides a way to re-experience the past trauma in a safe environment in order to reconfigure its meaning. Psychodrama confronts the past in a concrete somatic and spiritual experience so that we symbolically but nevertheless authentically relive the past trauma. This confrontation undermines attempts to flee (escape) from the trauma, fight the trauma with intensified feelings or freeze our feelings (a kind of numbing).  While those strategies are helpful in the initial moments of grief as they protect us, if we are stuck in any one of them then the unresolved trauma will negatively affect our sense of peace and relationships with others.

Psychodrama offers an occasion for resolving the trauma. It resolves it by reorganizing a memory.  By entering the past drama through role play, one is able to gain perspective and assign new meaning to the experience.  The drama creates a new narrative–it is a redoing of the past through undoing the past. The new narrative provides a new frame of reference for drawing meaning from the event as we reconstruct the past with new awareness, perspective and insight.

Through one psychodrama last week I was able to re-experience the grief of Sheila’s funeral on May 2, 1980. I had not grieved like that since May 2, 1980. It opened again for me the floodgates of tears which I had unconsciously held in reserve through numbing and withdrawal. Psychodrama, as a therapeutic technique, was a blessing to me. Re-entering the narrative, I was able give it new meaning and see what I had not seen previously due to the overwhelming grief.

As I reflected on the meaning and process of that experience (and it was not my only dramatic reliving), I began to more deeply appreciate the psycho-dramatic nature of the sacraments themselves. Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and Assembly are dramatic re-creations of divine redemptive events; they are dramatic narratives that provide a frame of reference for meaningful lives within the story of God. They are interpretative events that somatically and spiritually root us in the redemptive story.

This is not only so at an individual level as we individually participate in the sacraments–we each have our own personal experience of God through these dramatic events, but it is also a corporate or communal experience. As we gather around or beside the waters of baptism, we re-experience our own baptism and we participate with the one who is being baptized. Thus, I do not particularly like private or familial baptisms–it robs the community of the psychodramatic experience. As we gather around the table, we experience the reality of community through eating and drinking together. As we assemble before the throne of God, we participate in the reality of “heaven on earth” as we worship with the saints in a way that transcends time and space.

The sacraments are divine invitations into redemptive pyschodramas. They are no mere symbols but actual means of divine encounter whereby we somatically, pyschologically, concretely and spiritually relive the story of God’s redemption. Sacramental experiences are both cathartic (a cleansing) and rehabilitative (reconstruction); they reconstitute the present for us so that we have a renewed narrative for living with meaning in the story of God.

I assemble with the saints to experience again the sacramental drama that provides meaning for my life in the place of futility, hope in the place of despair, and communal support in the place of isolation.

Twenty-eight years ago this morning–at about 3:00am–I was awoken to the news that my wife of two years, eleven months and eight days had died during the night.

Sheila and I agreed that she would undergo corrective back surgery so that she could carry a child full term.  We had already experienced one miscarriage and would like to avoid another. We decided to have the surgery with her life-long doctor in Atlanta, Georgia. While she recuperated at her parent’s home in North Georgia I would complete my reponsibilities at Potter Orphan School and complete my M.A. at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, KY.

Ten days after her surgery, while she was recuperating at her parent’s home, a blood clot entered her heart and stopped it…on April 30, 1980.

I was devastated. Our dreams, hopes and plans for the future were gone in a single moment. It was a sudden tear in my universe that left me–seemingly–nothing. The future would be totally unlike the past; the future would be totally different than what we had planned and what I had anticipated.

In recent months I have focused my personal and spiritual energy on living through my past grief traumas; to relive them in order to better integrate them into my psyche.  A vivid memory that has recently come back to me through this process is how embarrassed I was to be practically carried out of Sheila’s funeral to the waiting cars for the drive to the burial place. Everyone saw my grief; everyone saw my “weakness.”  I felt exposed. This has had a profound affect on my subsequent grief–more than I would really care to admit.

I don’t know how many have shared that sense of embarrassment with me or if I was the only one but it was real for me.  Perhaps the embarrassment of grieving so deeply, so openly, and so despondently was perhaps rooted in my lack of experience in grieving, perhaps in the church’s lack of modeling grief, perhaps in my own personality, perhaps in my inexperience with biblical laments, perhaps in the cultural image of “big boys don’t cry,” perhaps in a faulty theology of hope (“she is in a better place, so don’t cry”), perhaps a false sense of what male strength is, perhaps….  Well, there are  many reasons and perhaps all of them with an element of truth.

I know, however, that sense of embarrassment has shaped me in unconscious ways. It has prevented, to some degree, deep grieving in other losses–at least public grief.  It has moved me toward avoiding my grief rather than fully embracing it and experiencing it. Despite my intellectual knowledge of grief, lament and tears, I had not let myself fully grieve.  I wanted to avoid the embarrassment as well as the pain. I did not want to live through that grief again; I did not want to feel it since I knew how awful it felt.

I am grateful that in the last fifteen years or so the church has increasingly acknowledged the function, role and need of lament within the community of faith.  As lament is taught, modeled and experienced, the kind of embarrassment that I felt on May 2, 1980 is less likely and the opportunities to fully experience grief are enlarged. When the community laments, we grievers do not feel so alone. I think I am over that embarrassement now–partly because I am grieving, partly because I have immersed myself in the biblical laments in the past ten years, partly because I have sat with others in their grief–but it is an image that lingers in my mind in subtle ways. I think embarrassment is part of my past now rather than my present but it is also part of my history. That, too, I must integrate into my psyche by the power of God’s Spirit.

Psalm 6, though primarily about physical healing, is a text I read through the lens of psychological healing.  I hear myself in that prayer; I hear the yearnings of my own heart. The New Living Translation provides a vivid translation.

 2  Have compassion on me, Lord, for I am weak.
       Heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony.
 3  I am sick at heart.
       How long, O Lord, until you restore me?

 4  Return, O Lord, and rescue me.
        Save me because of your unfailing love.

 6  I am worn out from sobbing.
        All night I flood my bed with weeping,
        drenching it with my tears.
 7a My vision is blurred by grief;

 8  Go away, all you who do evil,
       for the Lord has heard my weeping.

Tears are wonderful healers; they are divine healers.  Tears release emotional stress; biochemically, tears of grief release chemicals that have built up during emotional stress.  These tears have a different chemical composition than other kinds of tears. Grief tears release physiological, pyschological and spiritual toxicity.  They are God’s gift to humanity to process the hurt of a painful world.

Psalm 6 is my lament–a reminder that tears are healthy.  They are not an embarrassement though I have often held back the tears because I feared embarrasment.  Instead, tears are part of healing.  Those who live through the tears will reap the joy of healing (a paraphrase of Psalm 126:6).

I’ve had a good cry today.  I feel better.  I feel some of the healing that God intends for tears to bring us.  Thanks for listening.

Give sorrow words; grief that does not speak

Whispers to the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

Shakespeare, Macbeth

Some of the Psalm lines I quoted in my previous post were from Psalm 84.  I had read this Psalm many times in the past, but this past week it has made an indelible impression on my heart.  I don’t know why it did this time–perhaps this past week’s focus on grief, perhaps the recent book on assembly Bobby Valentine, Johnny Melton and I authored, perhaps it was my past experiences in assembly, or perhaps it was just the right time for God’s Spirit to speak to my heart through this text. I don’t know–but the experience of this text this past week was powerful for me.

The Psalm speaks of the yearning for home–“a place in his courts to rest” (from the song, not the Psalm but it is the idea). The sparrow has a home and so does the swallow–a place of safety where she may hatch her young. It is a nest of peace, tranquility, companionship and joy.

There is such a place for believers near the altar of God–near the mercy, compassion and grace of God. To dwell in the house of God is to fill the emptiness of our souls; to experience the joy of presence rather than the grief of loss. It is the dwelling place of God himself, and our hearts and flesh cry out for that presence.

Our present reality, however, is that our pilgrimage takes us through the “Valley of Baca” or the Valley of Weeping. Our journey does not take us around pain and grief but through them. I think I have often sought to transcend the pain rather than experience it. I have sometimes excelled at the art of jumping to a different place like in the movie “Jumper”–to transport myself to another moment, to escape to a different reality–instead of sitting in my feelings, experiencing the pain and moving through the grief.

The divine promise in this Psalm is that those who set their heart to experience the presence of God will find blessing and strength. As they move through the dry (ironic, huh?) Valley of Weeping in the summer, God will provide autumn rains that create pools of water to refresh them. The pilgrims will move from strength to strength despite their pain, grief and times of weakness.

I connect with this Psalm at many levels. At one level, while the Valley of Weeping has been and still is a dark and painful place for me, there are also times of refreshment–springs of water–which comfort me through encountering God in those dark places. God seeks us even in the darkness and perhaps particularly in the pain. His presence is felt in those moments which turn lament into praise.

At another level, while I have discovered those moments in private meditation, more often than not I have found them in the courts of praise among God’s people. To dwell in the court of the Lord for the Psalmist is more about the public assembly of God’s people in the temple courts where God met his people–it was home for the Psalmist or at least the home he wanted.

I can remember many different times when I felt transformed–moved from lament to praise–through worshipping God with the assembled saints. I remember a moment in the late summer of 2001 after Joshua’s death and my divorce that during the assembly I felt a divine comfort and whereas my heart was previously burdened I was able to release that lament to praise. It is not a permanent release–I still carry much of that burden, as I have discovered–but it was nevertheless an authentic, meaningful experience which still soothes my heart.

At bottom, grief needs both public (assembly) and private (meditation) encounters with God. It needs a safe place, both in the assembly and in communion with God, to bare its soul and to feel its pain. It needs both community and the inner world of the heart–both authentically living in the presence of the living God.

The heart that cries for the living God and journeys toward him will know the joy of living in the courts of God–a place of rest, peace and safety. This is the blessedness of relationship with God.

I am still on my journey–I have not yet arrived, and I know I have many fellow-travelers who are walking the same road with me.

“Blessed are those whose strength is in [God], who have set their hearts on pilgrimage [to the courts of God].”  Psalm 84:5

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have spent the last week in a setting that helped me to relive, move through and more deeply heal some of the trauma of my life. The deaths of Sheila, Joshua and my marriage have left me with some deep scars.

Only within the past eighteen months have I realized how deeply they still pain me and affect my self-image, my relationship with God and my relationship with others. Recognizing the need for some focused healing, I sought out a means of living through my grief again through some experiential and spiritual therapy. It was painfully but wonderfully meaningful.

I added to that experience my own discipline throughout the week of reading twenty five Psalms a day with the explicit purpose of experiencing the text anew and letting it speak for me. As I read through the Psalms I wrote down in a journal any line that expressed something in my heart. I used the Psalms to surface my feelings, my pain, my anger, and my sin. It was a cathartic exercise.

I decided to read the Psalms in the order they appear in the canon, that is, 1 through 150. I partly moved in this direction since I knew the first three books of the Psalms were largely lament while the last two books of the Psalms were largely praise. I wanted to experience the Psalms as a move through lament to praise, if indeed my heart could feel its way through them in that way.

I know this this is not a historical-critical approach to the Psalms nor the exegetical method that I would recommend or teach. However, it is a form of spiritual reading as I sought to let the Psalms identify with my own experience and allow them to speak for me out of my own pain and hurt. Below are some lines that were particularly meaningful. In future posts, I will focus on some themes or particulars that shaped my healing experience through reading the Psalms. I used the New Living Translation for my reading and quote it below. I have probably provided too many for blog readers…but I have many more written down. 🙂

“I am sick at heart.
How long, O Lord, until you restore me?”
Psalm 6:3

“My problems go from bad to worse.
Oh, save me from them all!
Feel my pain and see my trouble.”
Psalm 25:17-18a

“I am dying from grief;
My years are shortened by sadness.
Misery has drained my strength;
I am wsting away from within.”
Psalm 31:10

“My days are filled with grief…
My groans come from an anguished heart…
Do not stand at a distance, my God.”
Psalm 38:6b, 8b, 21b

“Hear my prayer, O Lord!
Listen to my cries for help!
Don’t ignore my tears…
Spare me so I can smile again.”
Psalm 39:12-13a

“You keep track of all my sorrows,
You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book.
Psalm 56:8

“My eyes are swollen with weeping,
waiting for my God to help me…
I am suffering and in pain.
Rescue me, O God, by your saving power.”
Psalm 69:3b,29

“My life is an example to many…
Don’t abandon me when my strength is failing…
O God, you have taught me from my earliest childhood,
and I have constantly told others about the wonderful things you do.
You have allowed me to suffer much hardshp,
but you will restore me to life again.”
Psalm 71:7a, 9b, 17, 20ab

“My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak,
but God remains my strength of heart;
he is mine forever.”
Psalm 73:26

“I cry out to the Lord without holding back.
Oh, that God would listen to me!…
There can be no joy for me until he acts.”
Psalm 77:1, 2b.

“Happy are those who are strong in the Lord…
When they walk through the Valley of Weeping,
it will become a place of refreshing springs,
where pools of blessing collect after the rains.”
Psalm 84:5a, 6

“But even the best of these years are filled with pain and trouble.
Satisfy [me] in the morning with your unfailing love,
so [I] may sing for joy to the end of [my life].”
Psalm 90:10c, 14

“Unless the Lord helped me,
I would soon have died…
When doubts filled my mind,
your comfort gave me renewed hope and cheer.”
Psalm 94:17a, 18

“Don’t turn away from me in my time of distress.
My heart is sick, withered like grass.
My tears run down into my drink.”
Psalm 102:2ab, 4a, 9b

“My heart is full of pain.
Help me, O Lord my God!
Save me because of your unfailing love.”
Psalm 109:22b, 26

“Now I can rest again,
for the Lord has been so good to me.
He has saved me from death,
my eyes from tears.”
Psalm 116:7-8ab.

“I weep with grief,
encourage me by your word.
Your promise revives me;
it comforts me in all my troubles.
The suffering you sent was good for me,
for it taught me to pay attention to your principles.
Now let yoru unfailing love comfort me,
just as you promised me, your servant.
I have suffered much, O Lord;
restore my life again, just as you promised.
Do not let my hope be crushed. ”
Psalm 119:28, 50, 71, 76, 107, 116b

“I took my troubles to the Lord;
I cried out to him, and he answered my prayer.”
Psalm 120:1

“Those who plant in tears
will harvest with shouts of joy.
They weep as they go to plan their seed,
but they sing as they return with the harvest.”
Psalm 126:5-6

“The Lord will work out his plans for my life–
for your faithful love, O Lord, endures forever.
Don’t abandon me, for you made me.”
Psalm 138:8

“I pour out my complaints before him
and I tell him all my troubles.
For I am overwhelmed,
and you alone know the way I should turn.”
Psalm 142:2-3a

“For the glory of your name, O Lord, save me.
In your righteousness, bring me out of this distress.”
Psalm 143:11

“The Lord lifts the burdens of those bent beneath their loads.”
Psalm 146:8b

“He heals the brokenhearted,
binding up their wounds.”
Psalm 147:3

“Sing to the Lord a new song,
sing his praises in the assembly of the faithful.
For the Lord delights in his people.”
Psalm 149:1, 4a

“Let everything that lives sing praises to the Lord!
Praise the Lord!”
Psalm 150:6

I have uploaded to my General Materials page two items related to the biblical book entitled “Job.” I gave a series of lectures at Lipscomb University entitled Faithful Lament: Job’s Response to Suffering and the handouts for those lectures are now available. I have also provided the powerpoint presentation that accompanied the lectures.

The first lecture is structural in nature. I suggest that the Prologue and Epilogue are hermeneutical perspectives for the readers–they offer perspectives for reading the dialogues and monologues (Job 3-42:6). For example, they establish that Job is righteous (innocent suffering), what Job says is “right” as opposed to the friends, and that the suffering of Job functions as a cosmic test of whether any human can actually serve (love) God for nothing other than relationship with God. The prologue reminds us that we should read Job’s words sympathetically and the epilogue offers a kind of eschatological understanding of God’s grace to the suffering and his ultimate reversal of suffering itself.

Lecture two outlines the laments contained in the book of Job. There are many and they form the main point of the dialogue as well as Job’s monologue. The substance of the book is Job’s struggle with faith in the midst of a chaotic and unjust world. The question “why” looms large in Job, but more important is the question whether Job will continue to trust the God whom he thinks unfair.

Lecture three suggests that the Yahweh speeches are more about reminding Job of what Job already knows–God is transcendent, worthy of praise, and he runs his world with wisdom and care. He does what humans cannot do–he sovereignly reigns over the evil in the world. But the critical point, I think, is that Job receives this encounter with Yahweh in humility and finds comfort in the encounter. Unlike most Christian translations, I understand Job 42:6 as “comforted” (or his change from lament to comfort) rather than “repented.”

It seems to me that if “repent” is the correct translation then the friends were right. “Job,” the friends said, “if you repent, God will give it all back to you.” The friends stress that God’s grace to his people is a quid pro quo: I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine. Instead, I would suggest that the lament of the dialogues finds resolution in the encounter with Yahweh. Job is comforted before God restores his wealth and happiness.

Lament, I believe, ultimately finds its answer in divine encounter. God comforts his people through his presence and through the presence of his people with his people. God gives hope through the power of his Spirit (Romans 15:14). There is no formula; there are no magic words. There is ultimately only the presence of God through encounter and in community with his people.

In the late 1990s, before my book Anchors for the Soul: Trusting God in the Storms of Life, I conducted a seminar in Phoenix entitled “Helping Suffering Families.”  This seminar ultimately became the small group study book.  I am making the powerpoints for that seminar available on my Bible Class page.  Also on that page are teaching outlines and handouts for the series entitled Anchors for the Soul: Teaching Outlines. You can listen to a more recent version (April 2006) of the seminar through the audio download here.

Ultimately we may help families by presence, silence, listening, loving, embracing, but also by speaking words that remind us of the story in which we live.  We can speak words about God’s love, his listening, his empathetic presence, his sovereignty and his victory.  We can encourage the suffering to lament (even protest) while at the same time trusting the God who has revealed himself in the story of Israel and Jesus.

Shalom

John Mark

Divorce may be the most broken experience in the fallen world.  It certainly ranks high if not the highest.  I say this because it is such a reversal of God’s creative intent.

God created oneness, shalom and mutuality between male and female in marriage–it is not good for humans to be alone.  Humans are created for community–even when marriage is not chosen, community is still necessary for human beings since we were created as social beings.  Community is necessary to fully image the relational community of God’s own life. We cannot be the image of God if we are not also beings-in-relation just as God is being-in-relation.

Divorce is the total deconstruction of this divine intent; it is the opposite of imaging God and living missionally in the world as the iconic representation of God’s life through imaging what is really real (that is, God’s own life).  The brokenness of divorce is contrary to the divine intent at so many levels.

But God does not intend for his creation to remain broken or for his people to continue to live in broken conditions that bar them from experiencing his creative intent.  God’s redemptive intent entails mending the brokenness–not just in some future reality, but even in the present. A theology that leaves divorced people to a permanent brokenness or even forces them to live in that brokenness by community pressure/threats fails to embrace the redemptive purpose of God in the world.

At one level, God intends to heal the wounds of divorce–not merely in the future, but in the present. Healing does not have to await the new heaven and new earth but can be experienced in the alreadiness of communion with God through his Spirit. The wounds of resentment, guilt, hurt, and shame–among others–can find resolution through the grace of God and his community. The divorced can once again experience shalom.

At another level, God intends to redeem the brokenness by renewing community among the divorced. I understand that this community can be renewed through living in community with the people of God, but I also believe this redemption may come through remarriage.  God may renew his original intent among divorced people–it is not good for them to be alone.  The joy, initmacy, fellowship, mutuality and relationship of a man and woman is still something God yearns for his creation though he offers relationship in other ways as well for those who so choose or by circumstance find themselves without choice.  His creative intent is still operative and it is redemptive for those who have experienced the brokenness of divorce.

I do not intend to engage in any kind of exegetical debate in this post or focus on particular texts.  I have previously recommended Rubel Shelly’s book Divorce & Remarriage: A Redemptive Theology for detailed discussions. My concern here is at the macro-level–the flow, tenor and goal of God’s actions in the world.

At bottom, do we embrace a redemptive orientation toward the divorced or do we deny them by our particular constructions of texts, theories, inferences, etc. the redemptive purposes of God for their lives? God does not, I think, intend to leave the divorced with the name “Abandoned” or “Shamed,” but he intends to rename them “Chosen” and “Beloved”–chosen and beloved by the ecclesial community as well as a potential future spouse should they so choose. The redeemed people of God should act redemptively toward broken people, including the divorced.

For those interested, my three sermon series on this topic is available at the Sycamore View Church of Christ website. Look under the September date. The teaching statement by the Sycamore View elders is a good example of a redemptive approach to those who have been hurt by divorce. It is available here.

Thus concludes my short–and all too brief–series on divorce. It is painful to remember and reflect on the topic, but it is so pervasive in our culture and churches that we must address it redemptively as we seek to embody the life of our Redeemer.