Holy Words – Psalm 44

Jonny Morrison begins a new series for the season of Lent, walking through the Psalms of Lament, entitled "Holy Words." This is going to be an interesting work for us because the American Church is not all that good at Lament. We don’t have tools to lead us into unknown and hard places. Instead of practicing Lament we tend towards: • Easy answers – trite, cliché, or superficial explanations for our experiences. • Quick Fixes – what we often call coping mechanism. Ways to deal and manage but not heal. • Ignore – which is how we tend to approach pain in other people’s lives. We don’t want to make it worse, so we ignore it all together. We do all three of these things with good intention, but untended pain doesn’t heal. That is why we need the practice of Lament instead of shortcutting around the difficult space, Lament helps us enter in. On Sunday we named 5 ways Lament is a better way of first dealing with the hard parts of life: • Lament names pain that our quick fixes tends to hide. • Lament gives voice to people who suffer the most • Lament joins the body together in solidarity. • Lament reveals to the world a different way of engaging. • Lament leads us into the deep places of our faith where we are challenged to trust. Lament is a practice of trust: will we trust God in the unknown? Will we trust God even when we feel abandoned by him? This is the same question being asked of Jesus during the season of Lent. Will Jesus trust all the way to and through the cross, where he, like Israel in Psalm 44, will ask, “Why have you abandoned me?” The good news of Lent is that Jesus choose to trust, and because He does, our Lament always gets to be different.