Waiting for the Sunrise
Repentance. Confession. Sin. Transgressions. Iniquity. Death. Lenten Words. Good Friday words. If we are honest, most of us start to get a little uncomfortable when we hear these words mentioned in church. Wouldn’t we rather spend our time talking about joy, forgiveness, jubilation, and life? We like these words don’t we? These “Easter words” that bring to mind brightness, color, energy, and exuberance. The Lenten words don’t bring about quite the same feeling do they? Rather than sitting in the growing shadows of Good Friday, our tendency is often to fly through Holy Week, to race ahead to the glorious day of resurrection that makes us want to jump and shout and clap for joy. And we could do this. We could focus our energies on preparing for Easter by grocery shopping, buying flowers, picking out just the right Easter outfits. We could pretend Good Friday isn’t all that important. We could ignore it, and pretend we don’t need to do anything to prepare our hearts for Easter. But if we do, aren’t we only short-changing ourselves? We miss something. How do we know just how bright resurrection morning is if we have not paused here, in the darkness at the foot of the cross? If we don’t let ourselves stay here for a little while, then when we sing for joy because our sins have been forgiven with the rising of our Lord, do we really even know what it is that we are in need of forgiveness for?
We live in a world that tends to value scriptures such as “I’ve come that you might have life abundant!” over verses such as we have heard tonight. We don’t like to pause too long at the anguished cries of “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” because to do so is to give voice to our sin and our pain. It’s easier and less messy to put on our smiles and keep moving through life and our whirlwind pace, hoping the reality of our sin and our pain and the brokenness of the world around us won’t catch up to us. When we stop, when we pause, and contemplate the death of Jesus, we have to come to terms with the fact that it was our sin that held him to that cross. The sins we were going to one day commit 2000 years in the future were there that day, those sins were already a reality. This is a hard truth to wrap our minds around, but when scripture tells us that Jesus took on himself the sins of the world, that includes the sin of you and I.
We don’t need someone to point out to us that we are not in Eden anymore. We only need to look around us, turn on the evening news, look within our own minds to see that things aren’t the way God created them to be. Many of us are experiencing a great deal of pain in our own lives. We struggle finding work. We wrestle with physical illnesses. We watch loved ones suffer. Financial uncertainty wakes us in the middle of the night, causing fear and worry. We watch our marriages go through very difficult times, and we find ourselves asking “God, where are you?”
Sometimes we seem to think that these problems are unique to our generation today, but scripture shows us that for thousands of years people have sinned, have dealt with the consequences of their sin, have fretted and worried over how to provide for their families, how to care for loved ones, how to reach out to those affected by physical and mental illness. The words we heard tonight from Psalm 22, the same words that were uttered on the lips of Jesus from the cross, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are words that are part of what I am coming to believe is one of the greatest gifts scripture gives us: the gift of the Psalms of Lament. Rarely do we talk about the psalms of lament, or the psalms of protest as a professor of mine used to call them, in our churches or communities today, but with all that’s going on in the world today Christians are slowly beginning to recover the depth and importance of these prayers. The Psalms were the prayer book of the nation of Israel. They were songs, prayers, and liturgies that guided the worship of the Jewish people for centuries. In worship they didn’t offer up lists of prayer requests to Yahweh, they prayed these Psalms, over and over. They used these words to call upon God, to praise Him, and also to urge him to act. In every Psalm of lament, and there are a lot of them by the way, the Psalmist cries out to God from the depths of his or her soul and reminds God that things aren’t as they should be. They implore God to act, they beg for mercy and forgiveness, they tell God “I’m drowning here, I’m stuck in the mud and the mire. The enemies encircle me, they’re about to attack” God, DO SOMETHING! And in every Psalm of lament there is at some point, a declaration that the psalmist still recognizes God as God. Not every prayer is answered, not every psalm has a happy ending where every problem is solved. Yet every psalm of lament declares at some point something along the lines of “but you are God. You are holy. You are enthroned above. You are in control, we will still praise you.”
Good Friday is a day of lament. Of course we are grateful for the cross, but before we race on to Easter, today is a day of stopping. Good Friday is a day where we first acknowledge the sins we’ve committed, and then actually take time to grieve those sins and the consequences of them. Today is a day of taking time to chat with God about them. But friends, as we do take time to grieve our sins, to acknowledge the places of pain in our lives and to cry out to God about these things, today is also a day of finding joy. For as we cry out to God, we hear the echo of the psalmist’s proclamation, coming down to us throughout the centuries: You Lord, are holy. You Lord are to be trusted. You Lord, will deliver us. You Lord, are our God. You Lord, have forgiven us. You Lord, have separated our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. You Lord, have washed us in the blood of your only son, and because of that we stand before you whiter than pure snow. We find joy in these words. Our life circumstances may not be magically better. The cancer may not be gone. Our relationships may not be perfectly mended. The conflict with our teachers or parents may not be fully over, but we have confidence that in the midst of all of these circumstances God is still God.
Jerry Sittser is a professor at Whitworth University, and in one tragic car accident he lost his wife, his mother, and his four year old daughter--leaving him as the single father of three other children. His book, A Grace Disguised, has been extremely influential for me, as I’ve thought about the concept of grief and lament in my own life. One of the things he says here is “The quickest way for anyone to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west, chasing after the setting sun, but to head east, plunging into the darkness until one comes to the sunrise.” We’re here tonight because we’re willing to plunge ourselves into the darkness of Good Friday, as we wait and watch for the light of Easter dawn. Friends, we know it’s coming. We know the end of the story. But let us remain here in the shadows of the cross a little while longer, confident that we can find joy in this day of lament.
