Psalm 88 "Dark Nights"

         I love a lot of modern and post-modern Christian music.  I love the idea of, at least sometimes, having more than one musical instrument in worship – even guitars and drums on occasion.  I think the positive and electric melodies and energetic rhythms are a marvelous addition to the moderate and often staid 21^st century church. 

         However, I do not like the endless praise choruses, week after week, choruses whose only theme is “Whoo!  Hoo!  Isn’t life good?”  You see, if your spiritual diet consists only of this bright and cheery side of the Christian faith, then you are most certainly undernourished.  What is more, you will be unprepared when you encounter the darker side of life, an experience that every one of us will have at some point. 

         If you have not faced it already, someday someone you love will have a health crisis, and you will know most poignantly how short life is.  Or you will lose your job and with it your sense of self-worth.  Or you will become estranged from a child or parent or sibling.  Or dementia will brutally claim a spouse.

         And when that happens, you are bound to feel so lost and alone.  If you have not faced it already, someday the rug will be pulled out from under you when you least expect it, and you will go crashing down – and you will feel like a broken pot, shards of you lying around helplessly.  Your life will be in shambles. 

         Because those dark and desperate times do happen to everyone, maybe that is the reason why the psalms of lament are included in our Bible.  These are the psalms of stress and spiritual sorrow. These are the psalms of desperation and grief.  These are the psalms of burnout and “I can’t go on”.  These are the psalms that give us permission to cry out into the darkness to ascertain if God is listening, if God is there at all.  Listen to this paraphrase of part of one of them.

Lord – where are you?!
I seek refuge in you.
I need you now more than ever.
Lord – can you hear me?!
I am slipping, Lord,
the ground beneath my feet has crumbled away.
My energy has been stolen,
my joy in my work has gone.
I feel trapped as a net closes around me.
I don’t know who to trust.
The people around me seem to only
want more and more of me.
I hear people whispering about me.
I’m sure that they have only scorn for me
behind my back.
I’m sure they are plotting to get rid of me.
Lord – save me!
I am exhausted!
My eyes struggle to see
my strength fails
my bones waste away.
I am losing myself in this misery.
I am sinking into a deathly emptiness.

              A pretty dark image, to be sure.  And yet, the Celtic tradition of blessing extends even to those times – those times of exhaustion and loss and that feeling of uncontrollable sinking that we often call the “dark night of the soul”.  How can that be? 

         How can we possibly find blessing in those most difficult of circumstances? How can we find peace in the midst of pain and despair?  How can we find God especially in times of struggle?    Surely those are some of the most fundamental – though often unspoken – spiritual questions, particularly unspoken by those of us who come to worship regularly and are supposed to be so certain of our Christian faith – even though the fact of suffering has always been one of the greatest challenges of the church because its distribution and degree seems so random and unfair.

         Face it, as blogger Bobby Valentine wrote, “The Bible is not glib about evil and suffering. Just the opposite is true. The Bible in fact is brutally honest about pain, misfortune, and the challenge it presents to faith.  (However), the answer the Bible gives is not always as clear-cut as we would like it to be. “

              Many years ago, I officiated at the memorial service of a dear friend who, after three optimistic years of affirming life died of liver cancer.  He left behind a wife and four children, his twin boys being close friends of our younger son, Tim - all three of them about to begin high school.

              A few weeks after his Dad’s death, one of the boys remarked to me, “I thought that after Dad died, I would know that God had deserted me.  But instead, I feel closer to God than ever.” 

              Pretty perceptive for a teenage boy!  Though he could not really say concretely why he felt as he did, I suspect it had something to do with knowing in his heart of hearts that even in the darkest of times, God had not been absent from his family but rather could be sensed now and again in the midst of their pain.

         There was once a farm that caught fire; the barns were completely burned down, and much livestock was lost.  After the fire, the farmer was walking around the property to estimate his losses and so was poking through the rubble. 

         When he came across the charred remains of a hen, he gave it a gentle kick to move it aside.  The dead mother hen fell over.  However, much to the farmer’s amazement, out came living chicks. The mother was sheltering them from the fire by covering them under her burnt wings. Those wings were the refuge for the chicks in time of danger.

         Most of the psalms of lament in our Bible begin as lament but end on a very direct note of hope and optimism – like the happy ending of the story of the baby chicks.  As Methodist pastor Geoff McElroy noted in his blog, “The place of lament is not the end of the story. Lament in the psalms usually makes a shift towards confidence and hope, looking towards the future that the psalmist anticipates that God will provide….

         ….Lament does two things simultaneously, two things that in many ways we have regulated as unable to coexist: anguish and hope. Too often we feel we can only exist in the dark places of life as one or the other; if we have hope, then we shouldn’t feel anguish. Or if we are in anguish, we don’t allow ourselves to see any hope. But the psalms of lament push us beyond this compartmentalization of grief and pain to a place where they can maybe coexist together….It’s not that you must go from complain to praise, but that maybe it is possible (though difficult!) to be in both places together.”

This direct connection between anguish and hope may be true generally of the psalms of lament. However, the connection is not so obvious in Psalm 88 that we read earlier.  This psalm stands alone in its darkness and is sometimes called “the granddaddy of all laments”.  Surely that label fits.  This psalm does not end by praising God – or even acknowledging God.  It ends like a door slammed shut.  It ends with a cold wind blowing across our souls.  It ends “with darkness as my closest friend.”

         Elie Wiesel, in his book, Night, comments on the evening he arrived at the concentration camp, Auschwitz, at the age of 15: “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. “  He asks over and over again:  Where was God in the face of such outrage?

         Later in his book, Wiesel describes the hanging of a young boy.  Two others were to be hanged as well.  They were screaming, but the little boy remained silent.

         “Where is God? Where is He?” Elie heard someone whisper as the prisoners were forced to walk by and look at the victims. Wiesel writes, “But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the boy was still alive . . .” For over half an hour they had to watch the little boy struggle for life.

         Then Elie heard the same voice ask, “Where is God now?” He goes on to say, “And I heard a voice within me answer him, ‘Where is He? Here he is — He is hanging on this gallows . . .’”

         Wiesel came to realize over time that even at Auschwitz, in the very darkest of nights, God was there.  As Bobby Valentine wrote, “In a way God did hang beside that little boy. God did not exempt himself from human suffering.  (After all, embodied in Jesus, God) too hung on the gallows. At Golgotha, in the Night, at the Place of the Skull …(Biblical scholar and theologian Walter) Brueggemann is right. Psalm 88 only makes sense in the light — or perhaps better — the Darkness of the Cross.

         Psalm 88 shows that God does not, in the comfortable surroundings of heaven, turn a deaf ear to the sounds of suffering on this fallen planet. Instead God has joined us, choosing to live among us — in circumstances of poverty and great affliction…..The Christian message – like our psalm 88 - encompasses the full range of anger and despair and darkness.  It offers complete identification with the suffering in the world. But it goes a step forward: it offers hope. That step, of course, is called Resurrection.”

       But, for us now – coming here today with our doubts and fears and all manner of struggles - perhaps it is enough to know simply this: God is not afraid of the dark. Perhaps that is where the blessing lies that the Celtic tradition holds dear. 

God is not afraid of the dark.  And perhaps it is in the dark that all the shards of our broken lives are gathered together – maybe never made whole in the way they were before the pain, before the loss, before the despair – but gathered together nonetheless – in the dark - and repaired by a love we can not ever fully imagine.