This morning, I visited a pregnant mother in the hospital who was in a bad car accident. While I was there I ran into a nurse who is struggling with the recent and sudden death of her husband. As I arrive here at the church office I stop to consider how many of you are feeling insecure about your job or your finances, how many of you are struggling with illness and pain, how many of you look as if you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders when I see you on Sunday mornings.
As I sit here thinking about all of this and thinking about all of you, I am thankful that I have chosen Job as my companion over the course of this month. I decided to preach a sermon series on the book of Job because I believe that somewhere within this complicated and confusing book of the Bible there is a word of hope for all who are suffering. Job is real. Job is relevant. Job gives us permission to voice our pain and to name our suffering.
Job is a lament. Most Christians are unfamiliar with the Old Testament literature that falls within this genre of the “lament.” Many of our psalms qualify as laments, as well as Job. But rarely do we spend much time with them in worship, or Sunday School, or in our daily devotions. Why? Well, perhaps because upon initial reading a lament can sound quite irreverent and even rude in the way its author addresses God. Laments are angry. They accuse God of being absent. They accuse God of not caring. They accuse God of aiding the enemy and destroying the righteous. Reading through a lament may lead you to ask, “Is this really in the Bible?” because there you find all the questions and all the angry words that you have perhaps ever wanted to throw at God in the midst of your own suffering, but never dared.
Or perhaps we avoid the laments because it’s much more comfortable to cover up our pain with a false piety and with spiritual pats-on-the-back such as when we tell ourselves that “God will make everything all right” or “God won’t give me more than I can handle” or “Everything happens for a reason.” Perhaps this is more comfortable than confronting God about suffering that we cannot understand nor justify.
Whatever our reason for avoiding the laments, though, I would encourage otherwise. I would encourage you not to avoid them, but to embrace them as particularly profound statements of faith. Because within those angry and accusatory words hurled at God in the midst of suffering lies the assumption and the belief that God is present to hear them, that God cares enough to listen, and that God is open to receiving whatever we hurl our Creator’s way. Why? We may ask again. Well, perhaps because God knows suffering too. And God knows our need for hope in the midst of it.
Peace in Christ,
Rev. Dr. Teri McDowell Ott
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