Worship enables us to find God in our sorrows, doubts and griefs - our tragedies and losses. A sermon preached by Rev Jenny Wilkens.

You can listen to Jenny's sermon from 9 Aug. by clicking here or reading the script below.

I came across an interesting article[1] this week called “Look what we’ve done to our songs” (they’d dropped the Ma off the end!). It was talking about how few of the hymns and songs we sing in our worship enable us to express the emotions that we are feeling in this year of Covid-19 pandemic with its effects on individuals, families, economies and whole countries, indeed our whole world. And then in the very same week we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have the terrible explosive accident in Beirut, causing huge damage on a country already struggling with Covid, a crippled economy and a large population of refugees from neighbouring Syria.

I’ll come back to our worship later, but I want to reflect on our Bible readings that both convey huge highs and lows of emotion. I am glad these stories are both there in the Scriptures for they show that how we feel matters to God, and that before God is a safe place to express the emotions that grip us.

Our reading from 1 Kings finds us right in the midst of the saga of the great prophet Elijah who has just achieved on Mt Carmel. a great victory for God over the prophets of the rival local god Baal. I still recall bringing back from Mt Carmel for my young nephew Elijah a little statuette of Elijah with his sword raised in warrior stance. It only cost $1 and was rather gruesome but at age 9 Elijah thought it was wonderful!

So the prophet Elijah had triumphed and you’d think he’d be on top of the world. But then he hears that the wicked Queen Jezebel is after his scalp, and he runs for his life. Twice angels minister to him as he becomes more and more physically and mentally exhausted. He is now in deep depression and wants nothing more than to die: it is enough now O Lord, take away my life.

He finally stops and hides out in a cave. Finally he hears God speak and say What are you doing here, Elijah? Elijah is quick to defend himself, I’ve been very zealous for you, God, but your people have turned against you. I’m the only one left, and they’re after me.

God then decides to reveal God’s presence to Elijah – but interestingly not in the mighty wind, not in earthquake, not in fire, all symbols that God has used before to manifest divine power and glory. No, rather God comes to Elijah in a way he can cope with in all his exhaustion: a sound of sheer silence.

Just what does that mean? Some have said that in that silence God honours Elijah, God doesn’t overwhelm Elijah with a show of power or majesty. Rather a bit like Job’s friends, who first sat on the ground with Job in silence for 7 days when he was in mourning (Job 2:13), God keeps company with Elijah.

Perhaps we can learn from that: it is a great gift;

“to allow the world to remain broken, to sit speechless with another in [their] loss and misery, to offer no solutions, to express only sorrow, using words only when necessary. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t speak or act—we can and must—but [first] we should accept our own finitude and failure, recognize the limits of our language”[2]

God’s silence also allows Elijah to get beyond all the noise and clamour of the world he’s been part of, even the noise and clamour of the victory and triumph he’s won, to actually take stock, zero down, search his heart and allow his secret thoughts and feelings to come to the surface in God’s presence.

In the words of a lovely quote Mark found this week from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks;

From time to time, we need to step back from the noise and hubbub of the social world and create in our hearts the stillness of the desert where, within the silence, we can hear the ‘kol demamah dakah’, the still, small voice of God, telling us we are loved, we are heard, we are embraced by God’s everlasting arms, and we are not alone.

God then acts in a very practical way to convince Elijah he is not alone, by telling him to go and appoint Elisha as prophet alongside him. Elijah will no longer be the warrior prophet, but the one called to mentor and raise up his successor – and so he will find he has colleagues and friends alongside him.

Elijah’s journey from bravado to deep depression finds a New Testament parallel in the account of Peter trying to emulate Jesus in walking on water.

Here it is Jesus who has seemingly won the triumph, with the stunning miracle of feeding the 5000, Jesus and the disciples are on a high. Yet Jesus goes off by himself to pray, to find his equilibrium in the presence of his Father, while the disciples are out on the sea of Galilee, having a hard time of it against the wind, and what’s more it’s dark and getting into the wee small hours of the night, the time when everything looks at its worst and you start imagining all sorts of disasters and things that go bump in the night! So it is as Jesus walks towards them on the water, all they can think is it’s a ghost, these brave fishermen are terrified. But Jesus’ words to them are strong: Take heart, it is I (literally I am, the name of Yahweh for those with ears to hear), do not be afraid.

It is now Peter who displays that typical bravado and impetuousness – prove it, Lord, if it is you, call me to come to you on the water. Come, says Jesus.

And Peter does – until his focus turns to the strong wind, and he takes fright and begins to sink – Lord, save me. And Jesus does, immediately, reaches out his hand and rescues him. I love the way Jesus does not take the mickey out of Peter, does not belittle him, yes he chides him gently I think, o you of little faith, why did you doubt? Just the same words as Jesus had said to all the disciples when Jesus calmed the storm on the lake that other time.

Doubt here is not just talking about Peter’s mental state, what he was thinking in his head, rather it is Peter’s broader sense of confusion and uncertainty, he’s paralysed and not able to commit himself to take action – he wasn’t quite ready yet to wholesale commit his life into Jesus’ hands, and yet Jesus rescues him as he is, doubts and all. Yet this is another step of faith for the disciples – we read ‘they worshipped him, saying Truly you are the Son of God’.

I want to come back now to some closing thoughts about our worship, the article I mentioned that asks why we have so many songs of triumph and praise but so few which allow us to express what we feel about the suffering of the world in 2020, about COVId-19 and its effects, about Hiroshima, about Beirut, about our own personal griefs and sorrows.

And yet about one third of the Psalms in the Bible’s hymnbook are Psalms of lament, telling God how it is with brutal honesty and expression of emotion, anger, doubt, grief. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has said that;

‘the dearth of lament in our communal worship [is] a symptom of just how in thrall the church [is] to Western culture’s triumphalist narratives of health and wealth. We’re quicker to declare final victory and imminent triumph, than to mourn present reality’[3].

Brueggemann talks about the Psalms of lament: “The prayer life of the [Psalmist] is filled with anger and rawness. There is no attempt to be polite or docile. Psalmic prayer practises no cover-up. Real prayer is being open about the negatives and yielding them to God... they are never yielded unless they be fully expressed.”[4]

I guess the challenge for us is that often such language is uncomfortable, it’s honest but blunt, we’re used to our language of worship being more nuanced, more indirect. But sometimes we need to know that God is with us in our sorrows, in our doubts and griefs, our tragedies and losses. Sometimes we express that in our worship or our singing, and sometimes the most powerful way to express it is in our silence, perhaps when we light a candle, for that is where we may hear amidst the silence, the still small voice of God.

[1] Mark Greene, Look what we’ve done to our songs, in ‘Connecting with Culture’ London Institute of Contemporary Christianity, 7 August 2020

[2] Matthew Potts, quoted in Wendy McDowell, The Way of the Still Small Voice, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, 2017.

[3] Walter Brueggemann, The Spirituality of the Psalms, 2002, quoted in Mark Greene, ibid.

[4] Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, (Fortress Press, 1985) page 66.