Where is God When It Hurts?
Psalm 88
LORD, you are the God who saves me;
day and night I cry out to you.
May my prayer come before you;
turn your ear to my cry.
I am overwhelmed with troubles
and my life draws near to death.
I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
I am like one without strength.
I am set apart with the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
who are cut off from your care.
You have put me in the lowest pit,
in the darkest depths.
Your wrath lies heavily on me;
you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.
You have taken from me my closest friends
and have made me repulsive to them.
I am confined and cannot escape;
my eyes are dim with grief.
I call to you, LORD, every day;
I spread out my hands to you.
Do you show your wonders to the dead?
Do their spirits rise up and praise you? Is your love declared in the grave,
your faithfulness in Destruction?
Are your wonders known in the place of darkness,
or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?
But I cry to you for help, LORD;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
Why, LORD, do you reject me
and hide your face from me?
From my youth I have suffered and been close to death;
I have borne your terrors and am in despair.
Your wrath has swept over me;
your terrors have destroyed me.
All day long they surround me like a flood;
they have completely engulfed me.
You have taken from me friend and neighbor—
darkness is my closest friend.
What a depressing passage! In a Book of Hymns dedicated to praising God, we find this scripture. It makes Job look like a lollipop factory.
We are continuing our series that you asked for last fall – our Sermons from the Pews Series. You asked address the question, Where is God when it Hurts? Our scripture this morning tells us that we are not the first to ask the question and I dare say, we won’t be the last.
This Psalm is one of those classified as a lament. Sixty-one of the Psalms are fall into this category and there are another five or six that are particularly laments. So what we read here isn’t all that unusual except . . . it’s different. All the other lament Psalms turn at some point and praise God for his work. All the other laments find a way from darkness to light - but not the 88th. Not once does the writer proclaim his trust in God or praise him for what he will do. Just on and on about being deserted by God. Depressing!
I have had a love affair with the Psalm forever. It was from this passage that I preached my first sermon in a church. (I have to tell you it was a real stinker.) My wife has claimed that this Psalm has been my mistress for the last 15 years and while I will certainly not admit to that I will tell you that I have spent hours and hours poring over this particular passage. In a very strange way, God has spoken to me through this passage time and time again.
I think it can speak to all of us from time to time. At one time or another in your life, you’ve asked God, in your time of greatest need, why he has deserted you. At some point in your life you’ve worn holes in your trousers from praying and . . . nothing. You have done all the things you were suppose to do in life, you’ve been a good Christian and yet the God you worship is absent when you need him most.
“Why, LORD, do you reject me
and hide your face from me?”
The Psalmist wasn’t the first and to be honest, he wasn’t even the best at complaining about God absence. Philip Yancey tells the story from a migrant farmhand’s mother.
Last year, she begin, we went to a little church in New Jersey . . . We had all our children there, the baby included. The Reverend Jackson was there, I can’t forget his name, and he told us to be quiet, and he told us how glad we should be that we’re in this country, because it’s Christian, and not ‘godless.”
Then my husband went and lost his temper; something happened to his nerves, I do believe. He got up and started shouting, yes sir. He went up to the Reverend Mr. Jackson and told him to shut up and never speak again – not to us, the migrant people. He told him to go back to his church, wherever it is, and leave us alone and don’t be standing up there looking like he was nice to be doing us a favor.
Then he did the worst thing he could do: He took the baby, Annie, and he held her right before his face, the minister’s, and he screamed and shouted and hollered at him, that minister, like I’ve never seen anyone do. I don’t remember what he said, the exact words, but he told him that here was our little Annie, and she’s never been to a doctor, and the child is sick . . . and we’ve got no money, not for Annie or the other ones or ourselves.
Then he lifted Annie up, so she was higher than the reverend, and he said why doesn’t he go and pray for Annie and pray that the growers will be punished for what they’re doing to us, all the migrant people . . . and then my husband began shouting about God and His neglecting us while He took such good care of the other people all over.
Then the reverend did answer - and that was his mistake, yes it was. He said we should be careful and not star tblaming God and criticizing Him and complaining to Him and like that, because God wasn’t supposed to be taking care of the way the growers behave and how we live, her on this earth. “God worries about your future”; that’s what he said, and I tell you, my husband near exploded. He shouted about ten times to the reverend, “Future, future, future.” Then he took Annie and near pushed her in the reverend’s face and Annie, she started crying, poor child, and he asked the reverend about Annie’s “future” and asked him what he’d do if he had to live like us, and if he had a “future” like ours.
This story tells about the feeling of abandonment better than most and unlike the “Reverend Jackson” I know that God does care about our present. And unlike this migrant farmer, unlike you and me when we demand that God come and take care of us, I know this – God did come down and see for himself what it was like to walk in our shoes. He came in human flesh, and saw and felt for himself what this world is like.
Old Testament characters like Job and Jeremiah and the writer of today’s Psalm wondered aloud where God was and if he had plugged up his ears. Jesus put an end to such speculation. God not only didn’t have his ears plugged he took on our ears – human ears. He heard firsthand the groans of the world, he heard the cries of the sick and the needed, and he heard our pain.
Jesus was the only person who ever planned his birth, his birth place, and his parents. He chose the most humble for all three. In his life he knew lonely, tired, and hungry. Not only was reject by others but he was assaulted by Satan’s temptation. He understood what it was like to be rejected by his family and to be betrayed by those closest to him. And he too, asked the same question that we ask. “My God, My God. Why have your forsaken me?”
In his pain, Jesus was just like us. He felt alone.
In his pain, Jesus asked our question.
During my seminary days, the great question without great answer was, “Where was God in the Holocaust?” None of us were present and each student could probably gave an adequate theological answer but how would those in the concentration camp have answered?
Elie Wiesel was a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and wrote the book, Night. In his book he tells of the trip to Auschwitz, how he was separate from his Mother and Sister and how he watched his father murdered before his eyes. He describes how he was beaten by other inmates for food and how he suffered with dysentery and starvation.
Maybe, for me, Wiesel had an answer I can cling to. He tell the story of a morning when the prisoners were gathered to witness hanging of a person caught stealing food. In this case, the perpetrator was a child.
During the hanging of a child, which the camp is forced to watch, he hears someone ask: Where is God? Where is he? Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the boy dies slowly and in agony. Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes clear, and weeps.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now?
And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.
For the writer of the 88th Psalm, for Job and Jeremiah, for me, and even for Jesus in that one moment, the answer is the same. He is with us. He never left us and he feels our pain. He knows our pain and he hears our prayers.
Jesus promised to be with us always, even to the end of time and his last words claim then and now the fulfillment of God’s promise through the prophets. “thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day . . .”
I Am Not Alone
I close my eyes and think of life
I think of everything that goes wrong
I laugh out loud but cry inside
I seem to always feel alone
There's nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide
Nobody to give my soul
My life's tough, not an easy ride
I'm lost, and always cold
I need someone to talk to
I need someone to need
Loneliness is hard to deal with
But if feels like that's the only place I succeed
Somehow inside, I know I'm wrong
I know I'm not alone
I know that God is in my heart
Living deep inside of my soul
All I have to do now
Is say the facts that's shown
I am not alone, I know
I am not alone.
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1 Yancey, Philip, Where is God when it Hurts? Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1977
2 Mark 15:34b
3 Luke 24:35a
4 Troxel, Kristi, I Am Not Alone. The Inspiration Place, 2003
