Perspective: Five Prayers You Can't Say in Church

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Five Prayers You Can't Say in Church

Scripture:

Blessed are those who mourn - they will be comforted...

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness - the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

And blessed are you, blessed are all of you, when people persecute you or denigrate you or despise you or tell lies about you on My account. But when this happens, rejoice. Be glad. Remember that God's prophets have been persecuted in the past. And know that in heaven, you have a great reward.

Matthew 5:4,10-12 (The Voice)

I lose my way

And it's not too long before you point it out

I cannot cry

Because I know that's weakness in your eyes

I'm forced to fake

A smile, a laugh every day of my life

My heart can't possibly break

When it wasn't even whole to start with

From "Because of You" by Kelly Clarkson

I started teaching Sunday School at my church around three and a half years ago. Since then I sometimes feel as though I have become the proverbial "wolf in sheep's clothing" of my church. I decided that if anyone labeled me as such, I would reply that I am not wearing any "sheep's clothing" thus I am simply a "wolf." If your motto is "Give me that old time religion - it's good enough for me," then do not bother coming to my Sunday school class when I am teaching. What good is a teacher who only tells his or her students things they already know or believe?

The truth is that I want people to question their understanding of things and to wrestle with matters of faith. I want to unsettle and disturb people. I think that, by doubting and wrestling and questioning, people can deepen their faith and have a fuller and richer experience with God.

I feel as though I may have disturbed some of the people in my Sunday school class four weeks ago when we discussed the life of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. This prophet was called to speak out against the idolatry and corruption of the Southern Kingdom of Judah¹ and to warn the people of their impending doom if they did not change their ways. Jeremiah, throughout his ministry, was met with ridicule, violence, and imprisonment, and he had to contend with false prophets who offered a contradictory message. Ultimately, he was unable to bring about any reform in the kingdom, and all he could do was to watch Judah spiral downward into chaos and ruin.

Jeremiah lived a hard life. Known for his lamentations to God, he is often called the "Weeping Prophet." A number of these laments are recorded in the book of Scripture that bears his name as well as a collection aptly named Lamentations. During what proved to be a rather depressing Sunday school lesson, I saw it fit to share one of the laments he lifted up to God in the midst of persection. I share it here in its entirety, so that you, the reader, might understand the difficulty he faced and how utterly helpless he felt about his situation.

O LORD, You have enticed me,

and I was enticed;

You have overpowered me,

and You have prevailed.

I have become a laughing-stock all day long;

everyone mocks me.

For whenever I speak, I must cry out,

I must shout, "Violence and destruction!"

For the word of the LORD has become for me

a reproach and derision all day long.

If I say, "I will not mention Him,

or speak any more in His name,"

then within me there is something like a burning fire

shut up in my bones;

I am weary with holding it in,

and I cannot.

For I hear many whispering:

"Terror is all around!

Denounce him! Let us denounce him!"

All my close friends

are watching for me to stumble.

"Perhaps he can be enticed,

and we can prevail against him,

and take our revenge on him."

But the LORD is with me like a dread warrior;

therefore my persecutors will stumble,

and they will not prevail.

They will be greatly shamed,

for they will not succeed.

Their eternal dishonor

will never be forgotten.

O LORD of hosts, You test the righteous,

You see the heart and the mind;

let me see Your retribution upon them,

for to You I have committed my cause.

Sing to the LORD;

praise the LORD!

For He has delivered the life of the needy

from the hands of evildoers.

Cursed be the day

on which I was born!

The day when my mother bore me,

let it not be blessed!

Cursed be the man

who brought the news to my father, saying,

"A child is born to you, a son,"

making him very glad.

Let that man be like the cities

that the LORD overthrew without pity;

let him hear a cry in the morning

and an alarm at noon,

because he did not kill me in the womb;

so my mother would have been my grave,

and her womb forever great.

Why did I come forth from the womb

to see toil and sorrow,

and spend my days in shame?²

I think it is safe to say that Jeremiah was not a very happy man. To summarize his prayer, he felt as though God had made his life excessively difficult by giving him a hopeless task to perform, a task that had brought him a lot of hardship and ridicule, a task that he could not escape even when he tried. Though he praised God and appealed to God for help, at the same time he expressed anger toward God and wished that he had never been born. Jeremiah did not mince words but went into painfully explicit detail about how he felt.³ Though we might hear someone pray such a prayer and step back in fear of a sudden bolt of lightning, there is no record of God punishing Jeremiah for what he said.

I have come to the conclusion that the prophets of God were not particularly happy people. The Old Testament prophet Elijah was called into a similar situation as Jeremiah over two centuries earlier. Elijah was called by God to combat the idolatry and corruption of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. This task put him into conflict with the infamous King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.

At one point, Queen Jezebel swore by her gods to kill Elijah, prompting the prophet to flee into the wilderness. After a day of running for his life, Elijah prayed,

It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.⁴

Later on, Elijah prayed, "I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away."⁵ Elijah felt hopeless and alone in his struggle; he was overwhelmed, exhausted, and ready to throw in the towel - for good. I have been told to be careful regarding what I prayed, because God just might give me what I asked. God did not grant Elijah his wish for death but instead continued to strengthen and encourage him on his journey.⁶

Another unhappy prophet was Jonah. Jonah was called to travel to Nineveh, the capital city of an enemy empire, to speak out against the evil of the people. After some initial reluctance and a minor incident involving a whale, he went to Nineveh and issued forth a half-hearted oracle: "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" Ironically Jonah, despite his lack of enthusiasm or sincerity, was more effective than Elijah or Jeremiah could ever have dreamed. The whole city repented and fasted, and even the animals wore sackcloth.⁷

When God saw the repentence of the people of Nineveh and decided to spare the city, Jonah surprisingly became angry with God. He prayed:

O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that You are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.⁸

The truth is that Jonah hated the people to whom he had been called to minister. Like Elijah, he prayed for death, not out of exhaustion and hopelessness, but out of anger. Again, God would not give the prophet what he wanted, but continued to teach him about loving his enemies.⁹

Typically we think of the Psalms as ancient songs of praise to God. Probably the most beloved of the Psalms is the twenty-third, known for its beautiful imagery of green pastures, still waters, and God as a loving shepherd. It is truly ironic that the psalm placed immediately before it begins with the following words:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;

and by night, but find no rest.¹⁰

A beloved psalm about imtimacy with God is immediately proceeded by a psalm about abandonment by God. Even more interesting is the fact that both were penned by the same poet, David. Such is a life of faith: sometimes a person may feel very close to God, while at other times he or she may wonder if God even exists.

The following psalm contains explicit lyrics.

One psalm most people wish wasn't in the Bible is the one hundred thirty-seventh, which was written by the Jewish exiles who had been taken from their homeland after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem. The psalm ends as follows:

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

Happy shall they be who pay you back

what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones

and dash them against the rock!¹¹

Yes, you read that correctly. This psalmist wishes for revenge against his enemies and even fantasizes about the brutal slaughter of his enemies' innocent children.

Typically church music is not sung from the perspective of one forsaken by God and does not contain lyrics commending horrible acts of violence against children. If these particular psalms were recorded in our day and time, I wonder if a parental advisory label would appear on the CD.

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In our society, some emotions are strongly encouraged while other emotions are discouraged to the point that they are almost viewed as diseases. When someone says to us, "Hi! How are you?" we are pretty much expected to say, "I'm good! How are you?" or else something is seriously wrong with us. I know that there are times that I replied to someone in this fashion when actually I felt that my life couldn't be worse. One morning, I was already having a bad day and decided to be honest when someone asked me how I was doing. I replied, "I suck. How are you?"

Christians can be the worst in this regard. Often we act as though life should be nothing but smiles and sunshine as long as we have accepted Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior, and sometimes we treat negative emotions as symptoms of sin. Often we throw around cliches not unlike the short, pithy sayings often found on church signs. Though they may be nice thoughts, they are generally unhelpful and fail to give proper respect to a person's feelings. I think that if someone said to Jeremiah, "God will never give you more than you can you can handle," the prophet probably would have felt all the more discouraged.

Christians can be really glib at times, and glib Christianity is something I have rejected. I share with you these disturbing prayers found in Scripture to show that even a life of faith is a broken road marked with times of suffering and distress. I am not saying that we should blame God because our lives are difficult or that we should pray for death or that we should go around claiming that God has forsaken us or that we should fantasize about the brutal murders of our enemies' children. What I am saying is that the inclusion of these prayers in Scripture gives us license to be brutally, painfully, and explicitly honest about our feelings.

A lot of us, Christians especially, believe that there are some thoughts we are not supposed to think and that there are some feelings we are not supposed to feel. Like the prophets, we might feel as though God as given us an unnecessarily difficult lot in life, or maybe we feel that we cannot keep going another day. Like the psalmists we might feel abandoned by God, or we might find ourselves boiling inside over wrongs done to us. Our first inclination might be to keep such thoughts or feelings to ourselves or to even push them out of our minds entirely.

Maybe this is the wrong way to think. After all, it's not as if God doesn't know how we feel just because we keep our feelings to ourselves. The Old Testament book of Job tells the story of a man who had lost his children, his property, and his health all in a short period of time as he tries to work through his suffering. It was Job who said, "The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD."¹²

Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote a letter to Job, saying:
Complain - the Lord is not afraid, He can certainly defend Himself. But how is He to defend Himself when no one dares to complain as befits a man. Speak up, raise your voice, speak loudly. To be sure, God can speak louder - after all, He has the thunder - but that, too, is a response, an explanation, trustworthy, faithful, original, a reply from God Himself, which, even if it crushes a man, is more glorious than gossip and rumors about the righteousness of Governance that are invented by human wisdom and spread by old women and fractional men.¹³

Maybe the first step to healing is being honest with ourselves and getting these feelings out of our system by putting them to words. I am a Christian, and I like Christian music - Christian rock, modern praise and worship music, and even some old hymns. For a long time now, two of the presets on my car radio have been Christian stations. Even as a Christian, though, I will admit that there are times in my life when songs by Disturbed describe my feelings better than songs by MercyMe.

One's feelings can be compared to the stuff in one's house. There are some things that one might want to put on display - nice furniture, happy photographs, and books and movies that make one look intelligent - while there are other things that one would not want to put on display, things that clutter up the house. So often we simply stuff our clutter under the bed or behind the couch, saying, "Out of sight, out of mind." When we do this, we are not really dealing with the problem, for the clutter will never go away.

Likewise there are emotions like happiness that we want to put on display in our lives, and there are emotions like anger and sadness that we would rather hide. Repressing our emotions is like cramming our clutter under the bed: it will only ensure that we have them forever. In fact, repressing our emotions is even worse than hiding our clutter, because our emotions will inevitably find other ways to make themselves evident in our lives. For example, when do not admit that I am upset about somthing, I find myself losing my temper over insignificant things.

Truly dealing with our emotions is the same as dealing with our household clutter: we have to drag them out into the open and sort through them. It's a difficult, unpleasant, messy job, but it is the only way to find healing. Whatever you are facing right now - or rather trying your hardest not to face - may you find the courage to be honest with God, with others, and with yourself about your feelings. May you have the strength to do the hard work of bringing your feelings out into the open and working through them.


Notes:
1 - By that time, Israel had split into two kingdoms: the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah.
2 - Jeremiah 20:7-18 (NRSV)
3 - I think that preparing and delivering that particular lesson must have taken a toll on me. Ironcially, the opening hymn of the following church service was "Great Is Thy Faithfulness," and, as the congregation sang it, I wanted to cry. This song is also based on the words of Jeremiah. "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. 'The LORD is my portion,' says my soul, 'therefore I will hope in Him.'" (Lamentations 3:21-24 NRSV) Jeremiah felt as though God had given him a hopelessly difficult lot in life, but he knew that God never left him to twist in the wind.
4 - 1 Kings 19:4 (NRSV)
5 - 1 Kings 19:10 (NRSV)
6 - See 1 Kings 19:1-18
7 - See Jonah 3
8 - Jonah 4:2-3 (NRSV)
9 - See Jonah 4
10 - Psalm 22:1-2 (NRSV)
11 - Psalm 137:8-9 (NRSV)
12 - Job:1:21 (NRSV)
13 - Søren Kierkegaard. Repetition.


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