Psalm 13

1 How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever? How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long shall I have perplexity in my mind, and grief in my heart, day after day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me?
3 Look upon me and answer me, O Lord my God; give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death;
4 Lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him," and my foes rejoice that I have fallen.
5 But I put my trust in your mercy; my heart is joyful because of your saving help.
6 I will sing to the Lord, for he has dealt with me richly; I will praise the Name of the Lord Most High.

This year, Monday Matters is focused on wisdom conveyed in the treasures of the book of Psalms. We'll look at the psalms read in church before Monday Matters comes to your screen.

Suffering and Hope

The images coming out of Venezuela after two earthquakes break our hearts. Before you read any further, stop for a moment of silence, with a prayer for all who suffer there.

Selah

When something like this happens, we respond with our prayers and with expressions of support (Episcopal Relief and Development is a good place to donate for disaster relief). We may also reasonably respond with age-old questions of why things like this happen. Where is God in the midst of such suffering?

I recently listened to a podcast in which Ezra Klein interviewed Bart Ehrman, New Testament scholar and teacher at UNC-Chapel Hill. Mr. Ehrman’s roots were in evangelical Christianity. He left that faith, embracing atheism. When asked why he made that shift, he said it was because he could not understand how a good God could allow such suffering in the world. That’s an excellent question. It’s not a new question.

One of my teachers named J. Christiaan Beker was imprisoned in a forced labor camp, captured by Nazis. His first hand witness of the cruelty of that regime informed his thinking as later in life he wrote a book called Suffering and Hope: The Biblical Vision and the Human Predicament. He said that there are various ways to consider the suffering around us. Suffering sometimes comes because of what people do to each other, what oppressors do to other humans. Suffering sometimes comes because we do things to ourselves that are not life giving, indeed, things that harm us. And suffering sometimes happens with no simple explanation. A mystery.

That third point seems to be on the mind of the author of Psalm 13, which you might have heard yesterday in church. The psalmist asks “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I have perplexity in my mind, and grief in my heart, day after day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me?”

I’m wondering if those are ever questions that you have raised. Do you ever feel that God has hidden from you?

This is not the only place in scripture where these kinds of questions are asked. The book of Job is all about this mystery of why bad things happen to good people. The psalms are filled with questions about why the evil prosper and the innocent suffer. In the gospels, when Lazarus succumbs to fatal illness, his sisters say to Jesus: If you’d been here, my brother would not have died. Translation: Where were you? Jesus himself enters into this mystery as he hangs on the cross and prays: My God, why have you forsaken me? St. Paul simply says: We see through a glass darkly. No kidding.

I’m taken with Psalm 13 and how it admits that as we look at the suffering of the world and the suffering in our own lives (what one preacher called our personal tsunamis), we are faced with a mix of perplexity and grief. The great challenge of our faith is to move forward carrying that perplexity and grief, moving forward through it without necessarily getting neat answers, moving forward in trust.

We need community to do that. We need a life of prayer to do that, even and especially if our prayer is one of outrage. If the challenges are so great that we can’t even figure out how to pray, we let the community pray for us. We let the community carry us. We need the stories of our faith, how folks in the Bible and folks in the history of the church have weathered these storms. Those stories exist to encourage us.

And while we wait to figure out why God is hidden, we might as well spend our time doing something, even if it’s a small thing, to help alleviate suffering. We can counter what seem like random acts of suffering with random acts of kindness. I recently ran across a quote from Philo of Alexandria, who wrote around the time of Christ. He said: Be kind. For everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. As one priest put it: Suffering is the promise life always keeps.

We can indeed move forward in the midst of great battles. It requires the kind of trust we read about in Psalm 13. Ask for that trust this week. And as you wait in trust, be swift to love and make haste to be kind.

-Jay Sidebotham