How Long, Lord?

A Lament with Hope

Last night the Newark Church of Christ hosted a lament gathering for our Good Friday Service. This was a time to give expression to the various cries of suffering that many people live with while recognizing that God suffers with us in the Crucified Christ. As part of the gathering, I offered a lament homily which I am posting here for your reflection.

---

Along with many others, both young and old, I have cried out to God for help many times. I’ve cried out for God to hear me, even wondering at times if God hears me. I have cried out to God on behalf of others too.

What else can we do when grief and pain overwhelm us? So we cry out. Yet, there have been many times when God’s silence has left me with nothing to pray except, “How long, Lord?”

Watching a mother collapse on the ground as she realizes her teenage son isn’t coming home… How long, Lord?

Hearing parents wail at the casket of their middle school child who ended his life… How long, Lord?

Listening to a young girl not even old enough to drive tell me how an older man abused her… How long, Lord?

Every time a child suffers because of neglect, abuse, of simply because the child is regarded as an inconvenience… How long, Lord?

Walking through the pediatric oncology ward of Sloan Kettering Hospital, knowing that some of these children won’t survive… How long, Lord?

Knowing now many parents who, with excitement, have begun anticipating the birth of their child only to learn of miscarriage and silent births… How long, Lord?

Whenever someone is born with disabilities that will keep them from enjoying things in life that most of us take for granted… How long, Lord?

Every time the news breaks with yet another mass shooting… How long, Lord?

Whenever a person is persecuted in some place like Iran or North Korea just because they believe in Jesus Christ… How long, Lord?

I’m sure you can recall your own moments when all you could pray was, “How long, Lord?” I’m thankful that we have this voice of lament in scripture as a way of expressing the grief and pain that we, as well as others, must endure.

There was a time when the word lament wasn’t even on my horizon. But, as those who know my wife and me, that changed after the death of our son Kenny. Part of that grief and pain has been never knowing why. Another part of the grief and pain has been knowing that when our son needed us the most, we couldn’t help him… feeling like we failed. And when we cried out to God, the answer was silence. For whatever reason, just silence.

Some of you know that silence. You’ve prayed for your health but continue to live in pain. You prayed for healing from the abuse you endured as a child, but the silence means that your trauma remains. You’ve longed to have a child only to hear the silence remind you that your body won’t cooperate. Some of you have asked others to pray for you because that’s what we’re taught to do, but even then, there are times when the only answer seems to be silence.

The silence just exasperates the grief and pain, leaving an abyss of nothing to say.¹ On more than a few occasions, I’ve identified with the Psalmist who says, “I was too troubled to speak” (Ps. 77:4).² So I’m thankful we have the voice of lament in scripture to give us a voice for our complaints, a voice of lament expressed in faith.

We can cry out to God and be angry, be disappointed, and feel like we’ve been let down or even forsaken. We can ask God, “Are you listening? Do you hear us? Can you not see the distress we are in and the pain that we bear? It is as if you, God, have placed us in the lowest pit, in the realms of the darkest depths (cf. Ps 88:6).

We are overwhelmed with troubles, sometimes so severe that the longing for an end to the suffering always seems beyond our reach. We can understand why Kate Bowler, who herself suffers from the incurable disease of colon cancer, says that grief “is about eyes squinting through tears into an unbearable future.”³

But like lament so often does, voicing our complaints to God can open space for us to find hope again. Like the time during chapel when I was a seminary student. There I heard the lament subtly expressed in the hymn Be Still, My Soul for the first time. I began to cry because, for the first time ever in a worship setting, I felt like the grief and pain I was enduring were spoken in this hymn.

But I also had this sense that’s hard to explain in words, but I knew at that moment that God was listening. I heard the voice of the Lord speak through that hymn that the Lord is on my side, that there will come a day “when disappointment, grief, and fear are gone, sorrow forgot, [and] love’s purest joys restored.”

Those days haven’t come yet, but like the Psalmist, I have learned to “remember the deeds of the Lord” and “remember [the Lord’s] miracles of long ago” (Ps 77:11). And so I remember that God has not forsaken us but instead has joined us in our suffering, ultimately suffering death himself in the person of Jesus Christ crucified.

The image of Christ-crucified matters for many reasons but one of those reasons is that God identifies with us in our suffering. In fact, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is a statement of who God is.⁴ That matters because here lately, I’ve started reading more about the relationship between trauma and theology, trauma being the wounds we live with, and theology is the understanding of the Christian faith we hold to. So the other week, as I was reading about trauma, it dawned on me that, in some way, I was reading about the life my wife and I have lived for the past twenty-plus years.

At the moment, sitting in Brew Ha-Ha Coffee Shop, I felt sad and wanted to give myself a hug, but I thought that would look a little weird. So I just sat back, and as I did, God spoke… not with audible words but in a way that immediately I had this vision of Jesus Christ hanging on the cross saying, “I’m sorry, but we’re going to get through this together.”

And so on this Good Friday, where we remember the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, for every one of you, whatever your suffering and trauma may be, it’s okay to tell God that you’re angry, disappointed, or even feeling forsaken. But my prayer is also that we’ll see a vision of Jesus Christ crucified as God’s promise, saying, “I’m sorry, but we’ll get through this together.”

And that’s a promise we can hope in because Jesus has also promised us that his death will not be the final word. But for the word to come, we’ll have to wait until Easter Sunday.

1. Kathleen D. Billman and Daniel L. Migliore, Rachel’s Cry: Prayer of Lamen and Rebirth of Hope, Cleveland: United Church Press, 1999, 105, “When unexpected suffering strikes, and especially when it persists, the sufferer literally does not know how to express what is happening except to groan or cry or scream. Acute suffering creates an abyss of speechlessness for the person in pain.”

2. Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

3. Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, New York: Penguin Random House, 2018, 70.

4. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R.A. Wilson and John Bowden, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993, 295, “When the crucified Jesus is called ‘the image of the invisible God,’ the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this. God is not greater than he is in this humiliation. God is not more glorious that he is in this self-surrender. God is not more powerful than he is in this helplessness. God is not more divine than he is in this humanity.