Sermon Notes Job 23, Ps. 22

Ps. 22 was the prayer on the lips of Jesus when he was on the cross. The plurality of psalms are in the lament vein.Life is full of trouble, so it makes sense to teach us formal prayers of lament. Laments help us to put pain into words. laments remind us that our deepest thoughts and feelings can be enclosed in an envelope of prayer.I want to be clear. Laments are formal types of prayer; they are more than complaining or whining to God.Let me re-phrase that. Even whining and complaining get changed when they are placed into the form of prayer. (See among others Brueggemann piece Costly Loss of lament and Billman and Migliore on Lament).If one would speak of seasons of prayer as in the seasons of the year, laments fit the fall and winter of hte spiritual life. “Give sorrow words,” said Shakespeare. Calvin called the psalms the “anatomy of every part of the soul.” Job has come to the end of his rope, but one thing is keeping him going. In different prophet’s oracles, they speak of God holding a trial, a rib, a formal dispute. Job wants to put God on the witness stand to account for what has happened to him. One of the things I so admire in Scripture is the sheer boldness of address to God. You see, Job feels painfully the absence of God in his suffering. It is as if he is calling God out, daring God to face him. Job is utterly convinced that no moral reason can exist for him to face so much sheer misery. Job reminds me of Jacob, only this time the wrestling match is verbal, an inner wrestling match, in a titanic struggle over the great religious questions about good v. evil. I once heard someone say: “when I get to heaven, I have a lot of questions that I want god to answer.” In his powerful book Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolstersdorff wonders aloud to God, “will I find you in the dark?” I would answer that liturgy gives us space to have God find us in the dark, the darkness of our condition.Richard Fenn spoke of trial in one of his erudite books, Liturgies and Trials.. Every time we go to church we are in a ritual trial of ourselves but of God as well.The verdict comes quickly for us:. Guilty. Then the sentencing is astounding: full pardon, release, It continues. Sometimes the word of God hurtles down on us like a bill of indictment. Sometimes it looks like a complaint in a civil case. It is not a crime but a harm due to negligence perhaps.Sometimes it looks like those awful results of blood work where you just know a thousand problems are going to show up,but then you get the happy news that the feared numbers are non-existent or have even improved. All of us remember, and some of us have given, those terrible trials known as tests. Brueggemann also uses the image of trial from the Old Testament to help frame his magnum opus on the Old Testament. There he sees the Bible as much more than an object of adulation but a compendium of material that lives out the name of israel, to wrestle with God. It is the story of a series of disputes between God and people, people and God. It goes both ways. In worship our questions get thrown at God:how can things be this way? what sort of god do we worhsi? Look at this fount; look at this table; look at this cross.