From Lament to Hope

Today's Reading

Read Psalm 13:5-6: "But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me." Two verses. After four verses of "how long." That is the proportion.

Read Psalm 22:22-31 — the back half of the psalm Jesus prayed from the cross. The opening was, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The ending is, "All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you... Posterity shall serve him; it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation; they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it."

Read Lamentations 3:21-24 one more time. "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have 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.'"

Read Romans 8:24-25: "For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."

Reflection

A week ago you began this plan with Psalm 13 and four "how longs." Today you finish it with the turn — the move that biblical lament makes from grief into hope, and the careful, hard-won, costly nature of that turn.

You have seen the turn many times this week:

— Psalm 13 makes it in two verses, after four of complaint. — Psalm 22 makes it after twenty-one verses of dereliction, and then runs ten more verses out into a global vision of worship. — Lamentations 3 makes it after sixty-six verses of unrelieved grief, and then immediately returns to grief in chapters 4 and 5. — Even Psalm 88 — the one psalm that does not turn — is held inside a Psalter that turns over and over, so the believer praying that psalm prays it as one note inside a much larger song.

The turn is real. It is the back half of biblical lament. To stop at the complaint would be to misread the form. The Psalms that begin in the dark do not, with one exception, end in the dark. They end with God.

But — and this is the careful pastoral point — the turn cannot be forced.

Look at what Lamentations 3:21 actually says. It does not say, Then I felt better. It does not say, And then I saw the city being rebuilt. It says, "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope." The prophet is making himself remember. The mercies are not currently visible — Jerusalem is rubble — but the prophet calls to mind what he knows about God, and from that memory he builds a small fire of hope in the dark. It is a theological turn before it is an experiential one. The circumstances have not changed. God has not changed either. The prophet is choosing to remember the second of those facts and let it carry him through a season in which the first is also true.

This is what Paul means in Romans 8 when he says, "hope that is seen is not hope." Paul is being precise. Hope — Christian hope — is by definition the confidence in something not yet visible. If the situation has already turned, there is nothing to hope for; you are simply observing. Hope, in the New Testament sense, is the patient waiting for what God has promised but has not yet performed. "If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." The lament psalms model this exactly. They turn toward hope while still in the dark. The lights have not come back on. The mercy is being remembered, not seen.

This is why the turn cannot be premature. A church that rushes to the bright side has not understood what hope is. A church that demands the grieving smile has confused circumstantial relief with biblical hope. Real hope — the kind Paul is talking about, the kind the prophet is doing in Lamentations 3, the kind David is doing in Psalm 13 — is something the heart performs while the situation is still unfixed. It is an act of memory and trust, not an announcement that everything is now okay.

Which means — and this is the most important thing in this whole plan — that you do not skip the laments to get to the hope.

The two are joined. The hope is hope precisely because it has come up out of the dark. A "hope" that has never sat in Psalm 88 is not biblical hope; it is denial dressed in worship clothes. A "hope" that has prayed Psalms 13 and 22 and Lamentations 3 all the way through has earned its name. It has felt the weight of the previous verses. It is real.

This is the difference between Christian hope and worldly optimism. Worldly optimism says, Things will probably get better; cheer up. Christian hope says, I have looked at the rubble; I have prayed the lament; I have called the mercy of God to mind; and so I will wait, in the dark, for the day to come. These are not the same thing. The first is a mood. The second is faith.

Calvin understood this when he called the Psalter "an anatomy of all the parts of the soul." The Psalms do not give us a theology of feeling-better. They give us a theology of the whole human life, with all its parts on the table, brought before God. We need both the laments and the doxologies because we live both. To pray only the doxologies is to pray as we wish we were. To pray only the laments is to pray without faith. To pray both, in the proportion the Spirit gave them to us, is to pray as Christians.

Tim Keller wrote that lament is "the way to take in fully what's happening — both the bad in the world and the good in God." Both. At the same time. Lament holds them in one hand. The bad is real; the good is real; both are addressed to God; the believer prays both, and through both, and arrives — sometimes after sixty-six verses, sometimes after years — at the place where the good in God outweighs the bad in the world. Not because the bad has been minimized. Because God is bigger than it.

Bonhoeffer, who would be hanged in a Nazi camp before the war ended, wrote in his prison cell that "the Psalter is the prayer book of Jesus Christ." Bonhoeffer prayed the laments in his cell. He did not get the experiential turn — he was executed before the camp was liberated. He got the theological turn. He prayed the mercy of God to mind, in the dark, and walked to his hanging praying. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning. Sometimes, this side of glory, that is the only turn we get. It is enough.

This is the charge as the plan ends.

You have a prayer book that the church has been quietly editing down. It has Psalm 13 and Psalm 22 and Psalm 88 and Lamentations and Habakkuk and the cross of Christ in it. The Holy Spirit gave us all of it — the laments included — for a reason. Pray them. Pray them through to their turn when the turn comes; pray them and wait when it does not. Teach them to your children. Sing them in your church. Do not let our generation be the one that lost a third of the Psalter because it was insufficiently cheerful for the Sunday morning industry.

The prayer book the Holy Spirit gave us is bigger than the songs we have learned to sing. It has room for everything. It has room for you. Pray the whole thing.

Going Deeper

Take one habit from this week into the rest of your year. It might be reading one lament psalm a week. It might be learning one minor-key hymn. It might be a monthly time of corporate prayer with two or three friends. It might be writing your own laments into a notebook, with the six-part structure from Day 2. Whatever it is, do it long enough that it shapes you. The Spirit who inspired these prayers is not done teaching us to pray them. He has nineteen more centuries of saints behind us showing how. We are not lost. We are simply being asked to remember.