“No matter what, God is on the throne.”
I heard this a lot in the run-up to election day. And I continue to hear it a lot from well-meaning people addressing their friends, family, and church members who are grieving the possible fallout of the election results. According to this train of thought, not feeling distress is an essential part of Christian witness.
One of the passages that people point to in order to support this claim comes from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Paul is writing under house arrest, suffering abuses at the hands of the Roman state in spite of his Roman citizenship, which was supposed to protect him from such abuses:
I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength (Philippians 4:11b–13).
“I can be okay no matter what,” Paul seems to be saying, so our witness should come from our placidity in the face of circumstances that destabilize the people around us.
Placid is not Jesus’ goal for us
But Paul’s statement didn’t actually start or end with contentment. It starts and ends with people who are concerned about his suffering.
“I was glad to hear that you’re worried about me and the troubles I’m facing,” he says in Philippians 4:10, immediately before assuring his listeners that he can endure what’s happening to him. Then, after giving them that assurance, he tells them in verse 14 that, “It’s good that you’re worrying about me.”
“It’s good to be concerned” wouldn’t have been a new teaching to most early Christians, who usually observed or participated in Jewish religious life. The Hebrew Scriptures—what we call the Old Testament—are rife with poetry of a range of genres. But one of the most common genres, making up almost half of the book of psalms, is lamentation.
Lamentation as a spiritual practice is often unfamiliar to people like me, who came to faith through American evangelicalism. We tend to think that Jesus came so that we can always be happy, and we attract people to the faith by showing them how happy we are. But this approach is largely anomalous. Across the full sweep of biblical history, and throughout the life of the church over the last two thousand years, lamentation has been a powerful tool for spiritual formation and public evangelism.
Lamentation is not despair
Many evangelical Christians confuse lamentation for despair. This confusion can cut us off from one of the most powerful tools in our spiritual arsenal.
Despair is the belief that nothing will ever get meaningfully better, but will probably get much worse. Our best-case scenario is being condemned to the way things are, and the most likely scenario is being damned to how bad they will get. The future is a descent into a cavern, with nothing waiting at the bottom.
Lament, on the other hand, is grief at the gulf between what is and what should be. It’s mourning the present because it doesn’t live up to the future. If despair is descent into a cavern, lament is fumbling through a dark and winding tunnel—with the knowledge that light is waiting at the other end.
Too often, we think it’s worldly to experience grief or distress or rage in the face of immediate suffering. If we bring it into prayer, we’re wasting God’s time on things that don’t matter. If we let it out in front of others, we’re distracting them from the good news.
But our lamentations aren’t distractions from the good news—they’re the reason for the good news, and they teach us why the news is good.
Lament is the reason for the good news
Nearly half the psalms are psalms of lament, but that’s far from the only place you’ll find poems and songs of lament in the Bible. Almost every book of prophecy includes some form of lament. The only book of poetry in the Old Testament that sticks to a single theme and genre sticks entirely to lament. (It’s the book of Lamentations, by the way.)
One of the jobs of the Old Testament prophets was to communicate and explain God’s promises—what God was going to do and why God was going to do it. And the reason God promised to usher in a better kingdom isn’t ego. It’s not just so that God’s name could be revered. And it’s not because of some sort of compulsive impulse to make things orderly again after humans disordered them. It’s because God’s heart is moved by human suffering. The things that move us to lament are the things that moved God to send us Jesus.
When God’s kingdom comes in full, the things that move us to lament will be comforted, healed, and undone. “Every tear will be dried,” according to Revelation. This isn’t a side-effect of the kingdom coming—it’s the intended purpose. When we lament—when our anticipation of the glory that is to come moves us to deeper grief at the suffering of this present age—we are training our hearts to long for God’s kingdom. And we are explaining to the people around us that we serve a God who understands their suffering so deeply and takes it so seriously that the divine broke into time and space to offer hope and comfort and a better future.
Practice your lament
In his book Prophetic Lament, Dr. Soong-Chan Rah says:
Lament in the Bible is a liturgical response to the reality of suffering and engages God in the context of pain and trouble. The hope of lament is that God would respond to human suffering that is wholeheartedly communicated…
So, how do we take our first, shaky steps in “wholeheartedly communicating” our lamentation?
There are a number of models for this, but the one I will use here comes from the book Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy by Mark Vroegop. He breaks biblical lamentations down into four basic movements:
- An address to God.
- A complaint.
- A request.
- An expression of trust and/or praise.
If hope—conviction that the world was meant for something better than the present and assurance of a greater future—is the difference between despair and lament, then this model can help us move from the cavern to the tunnel.
Each step of lament is a part of a pathway toward hope. In the address, the heart is turned to God in prayer. Complaint clearly and bluntly lays out the reasons behind the sorrow. From there, the lamenter usually makes a request for God to act—to do something. Finally, nearly every lament ends with renewed trust and praise.
Whether you are one of the roughly half of Americans distressed about the results of a bitterly polarized election, or one of the three and a half billion humans observing and encountering the bitter realities of a fallen world, use this model this weekend to practice bringing a lamentation before God. May we all emerge from those prayers ready to make that better future felt.
Rick Barry serves as the Executive Director of the Center for Christian Civics, where he equips the church to think, speak, and act differently in the public square. He has worked on campaigns for local, state, and federal office, is a former writer and editor for Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and oversaw communications for the Grace DC church network. He and his wife live in Washington, DC.
