We’re all familiar with Murphy’s Law, aren’t we?  It basically states, “If anything can go wrong, it will.”  I did a little bit of research to find out who this Murphy actually was.  There is more than one candidate.  Many people suggest Capt. Edward Murphy, an engineer in the US Air Force.  After a technician had made a mistake in wiring, Murphy claimed, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.”[1]

Others, like me, suspect an origin further back in history.  Understanding that Murphy is an Irish name, some say that the English pinned it on the Irish.  Of course, as a rule, the English have always held the Irish in the very highest regard, so it’s hard to believe they would do such a thing!

Whatever the case: if there’s anybody in the Bible who might possibly believe in Murphy’s Law, it would be the prophet Jeremiah.

Jeremiah lives at a time when the Babylonian Empire is knocking at the door.  People are nervous.  They fear destruction and exile.  And at the same time, injustice is rampant throughout the country.  As the prophet of the Lord, Jeremiah is given the task of opposing idolatry and corruption—speaking truth to power.  As true prophets do, his job is to afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted.

Jeremiah does not have a happy life.  His social life is all but nonexistent.  Saying “yes” to God has meant for him dealing with name-calling and far worse: slander, beating, imprisonment.  After the Babylonians do invade, he’s labeled a traitor when he warns against fighting back.  Saying “yes” to God means that Jeremiah becomes public enemy number one.

One of the things I really love about this book is Jeremiah’s ruthless honesty about his calling and ministry.  In chapter 1, when he is called to be a prophet, we get a little taste of things to come when the Lord says, “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you” (v. 8).  Jeremiah knows that trouble is in store for him.  It’s not for nothing that he has been called “the weeping prophet.”

There are several poems in the book that are often called the Confessions of Jeremiah.  We have a reading from the first and the last ones.  In these poems, he sounds a lot like Job.  More than with any other prophet, we see in Jeremiah a picture of his inner being.  At times, he verges on the depths of despair.

As our friend Murphy might say, “If anything can go wrong, it will.”

Jeremiah feels like God has betrayed him, and he isn’t shy about letting God know it!  More than once, he decides that he’s had enough; he is not going to do this anymore.  Let somebody else do this job!  But he finds it impossible to stop.  Chapter 20, verse 9, has the perfect example of this.  “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.”

“The Prophet Jeremiah” by Michelangelo

The Contemporary English Version puts it this way: “Sometimes I tell myself not to think about you, Lord, or even mention your name.  But your message burns in my heart and bones, and I cannot keep silent.”

That’s a confession that only someone who is in love can make!  Jeremiah loves the Lord, but he’s also mad and disappointed.

In chapter 11, we see something that would have anyone wondering what’s going on.  The people of his hometown issue him a warning: shut up or change your tune—or you won’t like what’s coming!  It’s been said that they’re “shamed to the depths that one of themselves should undermine the very foundations of the nation by what he said, and should make himself the most hated man in the country.  So they threaten to murder him.”[2]

Jeremiah laments that he is “like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter” (v. 19).  That’s one of the comparisons people make between him and Jesus.

And at the end of chapter 20, we see him cursing the day of his birth.  There’s a comparison with Job.  He even curses the man who brought glad tidings of his birth to his father!  That wasn’t good news!  Why didn’t he just kill me?  “Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?” (v. 18).

Of course, Jeremiah is far from alone in wanting to just call it quits.

A story is told about John Robertson, a 19th century minister in the Church of Scotland.  Having preached for forty years, he “decided one morning to resign.  He prayed: ‘O God, Thou didst commission me forty years ago, but I have blundered and failed and I want to resign this morning.’  But as he prayed and sobbed, he heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘John Robertson…‘tis true you have blundered and failed; but…I am not here for you to resign your commission but to re-sign your commission.’  He went on to new and greater things in his ministry.  And so did Jeremiah.”[3]

After everything falls apart—after everything crashes and burns—after the Babylonians destroy the temple—Jeremiah has a message of hope.  The exiles, one day, will return.  Rebuilding will happen.  Of course, if he had just quit (speaking of the prophet and John Robertson), he wouldn’t have been able to give that message of consolation.

I want to change gears and look at the value of Jeremiah’s Confessions.  Actually, I should probably ask, “Do we think they have value?”  As expressions of lament, do they have value?  What is the value of lament?  What is the value of giving voice to our grief?

The Confessions are about stuff that happens to more than just one person.  They are about the community, the people of Israel.  And they’re also about us—all of us, in every time and place.  We haven’t gone through what the people in Jeremiah’s time do, but we also know what trauma and disaster are all about.

Clearly, the last two years have taught us a few things about that.

Some people say that we shouldn’t talk about the bad things that happen, certainly not in church.  I wonder, have they ever looked at a cross?

I’m sure none of you have ever experienced this, but sometimes when tragedy strikes, we can offer some unwanted explanations.  Stuff like, “God never gives us more than we can handle.”  Let’s ignore the fact that isn’t in the Bible—it’s an altering of something in 1 Corinthians about God giving us a way out of testing and temptation (10:13).  But aside from that, does that really help anyone?

This is among my favorite unhelpful explanations: when someone loses a loved one, especially if that person was young, I’ve sometimes heard that “God needed another angel in heaven.”  We should understand humans and angels are two completely different types of beings!  Aside from that, something far worse, in my opinion, is the funeral poem claiming, “God broke our hearts to prove to us He only takes the best.”  That seems to say nothing less than God is a monster.

Still, I think we can see that those types of remarks say more about the person uttering them than anything else.  When we’re at a loss for words, we too often offer things that are unhelpful and painful and stupid.  Maybe a better approach is simply to be present.

That leads us to the value of lament in the scriptures, with the example of Jeremiah’s Confessions.  Old Testament scholar Kathleen O’Connor says, “They give voice to profound fidelity because they keep communication with God alive in the midst of destruction and despair.”[4]

When it comes to reflecting on our fears and insecurities versus relying on God, I think it’s safe to choose the latter.  As a result, I think I like her advice better:

“Here is what to do in the pit of hopelessness.  Cling to God, even when God has slipped away from you.  Yell at the top of your collective lungs.  Hold tightly, mercilessly, and, with every ounce of strength, shout and scream at the deity…  Hold nothing back. Complain, protest, resist.  Reach into yourself to claim your experience and your capacity to see and name reality.  Rise up, ‘give God an account,’ and approach God ‘like a prince’ [or a princess] (Job 31:37).”[5]

The good news for Jeremiah is that he doesn’t remain in the pit of hopelessness.  His love of God is what sees him through.  It is precisely because he loves God that he’s able to say the things he does.  His honesty, joined with his love, is what honors that relationship.  It keeps the relationship alive.

It might feel wrong to be angry with God, but that’s okay.  God already knows how we feel, and when something terrible happens, God is saddened even more than we are.  At the time, it might not seem that way, and that’s also okay.  We can be honest with God, and we also can make our confessions of ruthless love.

So it’s important to ask, for those of us here, how can we welcome expressions of lament?  How can we, as the apostle Paul advises, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep”? (Ro 12:15).  It is more than appropriate for the church to do that.  It’s a sure sign that we are on our way to becoming the beloved community.

The Confessions of Jeremiah, as opposed to Murphy’s Law, is a good and faithful road to follow.

[1] www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-true.html

[2] Klaus Koch, The Prophets: The Babylonian and Persian Periods (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 39.

[3] www.directionjournal.org/article/?168

[4] Kathleen O’Connor, “Lamenting Back to Life,” Interpretation 62:1 (Jan 2008), 42.

[5] O’Connor, 45.

We are now well into the season of Lent.  The usual question is, “What are you giving up for Lent?”  I like the answer Banu gave.  “We need to dispossess ourselves of the possessions that possess us, so we can be possessed by God.”  As one who is not fond of clutter, I can think of plenty of possessions which, were they to disappear, would please me greatly.

Of course, possessions need not be material.  The most insidious possessions are the ones within.  They grab hold of our minds, emotions, and spirits.  They grab us and we grab them.  We are indeed possessed by our possessions.  We need to be exorcised!

Psalm 142 presents the utterance, the cry, of one who has been dispossessed, though not by choice.  The psalmist laments the loss of security, the loss of freedom, the loss of joy.

According to the title of the psalm, we’re hearing from David when he was in the cave, hiding from King Saul.  Saul had become insanely jealous of David.  The people loved him; his son Jonathan loved him; the Lord blessed David’s actions.  Therefore, David must die!

In the Hebrew Bible, those titles are considered part of the psalm.  That’s why David is traditionally thought of as the author.  Still, whether or not we see David as the poet, the singer of the song, the psalmist gives voice to a grief resounding down through the ages.

A large percentage of the psalms are psalms of lament.  This is one of them.  “With my voice I cry to the Lord; with my voice I make supplication to the Lord / I pour out my complaint before him; I tell my trouble before him” (vv. 1-2).

This is a psalm suitable for the season of Lent, even though it appears nowhere in the lectionary.  That’s the case with many of these psalms.  They tend to be omitted from the worship of the church.  (I’ll come back to that later.)

Psalm 142 is suitable, not because Lent is all about lamentation, moaning and groaning.  Rather, the Lenten journey focuses on repentance, reflection, and renewal.  And it is indeed a journey.  As we go through the psalm, we find ourselves in process, in transit.  The psalmist is also on a journey.  The psalmist is on the road, and it is a rocky road.  The psalm speaks to these things.

[photo by John Salzarulo on Unsplash]

Our poet is walking the path, and with confidence says to the Lord, “When my spirit is faint, you know my way” (v. 3).  That’s a good thing, because here comes trouble.  “In the path where I walk they have hidden a trap for me.”  The New Jerusalem Bible says, “On the road I have to travel they have hidden a trap for me.”

Who are these would-be captors?  What are these would-be captors?  What traps, what snares, are lying in wait?

Those are good questions for us this season.  I suppose this could be said every year, but it seems like this is a Lent like none other.  We are emerging from a global pandemic, and traps a-plenty have been set.  Destruction and hardship have been left in its wake.

Wrestling with the effects of lockdowns, debates about masks, the wisdom of vaccine mandates, all that and more—it has taken a toll on our well-being.  It’s taken a toll on our sanity!  Families have been divided; they have turned on each other.  It’s sad but true that in too many cases, people who thought of each other as friends have been divided.  Discord has occurred.

I haven’t lost any friends, but I can say there are people I agree with who I didn’t think I would before Covid.  On the flip side, I have found myself disagreeing with those who I couldn’t imagine myself doing so before Covid.

Our psalm continues with David (or the David-like person) crying out, “Look on my right and see—there is no one who recognizes me.  All refuge is denied me, no one cares whether I live or die” (v. 4, NJB).  No one recognizes me.  No one cares whether I live or die.  This is the picture of dejection, the portrait of despair.  Maybe there’s a tiny touch of paranoia?

Have you heard the saying, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you”?

The psalmist is encircled by enemies, surrounded by the sinister.  Our friend is nameless, and no one is offering a hand of greeting.

I wonder, could this also be a picture of abandonment by friends?  A question I know we’ve all heard is, “With friends like that, who needs enemies?”  Abandonment by friends was poignantly and heartbreakingly demonstrated on the night we call Maundy Thursday.  The words from the liturgy: “On the night Jesus was betrayed and arrested” are played out.  When the disciples see the gang coming to take Jesus into custody, they make themselves scarce.

Have we ever stood back when a friend needed us?  Have we ever seen an injustice and not lift a finger?  It’s a terrible feeling if we dare allow ourselves to feel it.

Here’s another uncomfortable question.  We easily see those others as persecutors, but how about us?

I don’t if this exactly qualifies as persecution, but in my freshman year of college, I might be described as the “roommate from hell.”  Maybe that’s too strong a term; I never did anything bad to him.  Maybe I was just the roommate from heck!

I never really made an effort to get to know him.  I rarely asked him about himself or his family or anything personal.  He occasionally would offer an olive branch.  One night after he’d been out with his friends, he brought home a tamale for me.  (By the way, he was Mexican American.)  He was a really nice guy.  I’m sure we could have been good friends.

One morning really stands out for me.  It was a Saturday morning, and I was still in bed.  I awoke to the voices of his father, mother, and sister.  They were speaking Spanish, so I didn’t know what they were saying.  I figured if I pretended I was asleep, they would cut their visit short.  That did not happen.  They had to know I was awake.  I imagine they asked him, “What’s the deal with your roommate?”

They were there for about twenty minutes.  After some time had gone by, I was too embarrassed to act like I had just woken up.  All I had to do when I first heard them was to greet them and ask if I could have a minute or two to get dressed.  I must confess there was a bit of racism involved.

The story does have a happy ending.  Decades later, I connected with him on Facebook.  I profusely apologized for being such a complete jerk when we were roommates.  I even let him know that a few years later, I came to faith and the Lord had turned me around.  It turned out he hadn’t thought about very much about it.  He just thought I was quiet.

I said earlier that Lent is not all about lamentation, but it certainly has a large role.  It is okay—even necessary—to lament.

There is a minister in the Evangelical Covenant Church located in Oakland, California named Dominique Gilliard.  He has written on the subject of lament.

“Somewhere along the way,” he says, “we modern Christians got lament wrong: we began thinking of it as optional instead of a required practice of the faith.”[1]  This goes with my earlier comment about lament being overlooked by the church.

He continues, speaking of its benefits, “When we lament, we confess our humanity and concede that we are too weak to combat the world’s powers, principalities and spiritual wickedness on our own.  When we lament, we declare that only God has the power to truly mend the world’s pain and brokenness.”

This is always true, but how much more we see that pain and brokenness today with war in Europe.  At the same time, we too easily disregard wars in Asia and Africa.

Gilliard comments on the power of lament.  “Lamentation prevents us from becoming numb and apathetic to the pain of our world and of those whom we shepherd.  Lamentation begets revelation.  It opens our eyes to death, injustice, and oppression we had not even noticed.  It opens our ears to the sounds of torture, anguish and weeping that are the white noise of our world. To live without lament is to live an unexamined life.”

I like how he credits lament as begetting—as producing—revelation.  It opens our eyes and ears to the pain that is “the white noise of our world.”  It’s difficult for me to sleep without running a fan or something else generating white noise.  I need the white noise to drown other sounds out.

Something that gets drowned out by white noise are school shootings.  To be honest, I lose track of them.  It seems like there’s one every week somewhere in the country.

“To live without lament is to live an unexamined life.”  Before I read that in his article, I hadn’t thought of it that way.  (Maybe I need help in examining my life!)  Lament helps to make us fully human.  It puts us in touch with realities that deserve our attention.  It puts us in touch with people who deserve our attention.  The apostle Paul says, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Ro 12:15).

The psalmist begs for attention when calling upon God.  “Give heed to my cry, for I am brought very low.  Save me from my persecutors, for they are too strong for me” (v. 6).  Here’s the final request: “Bring me out of prison, so that I may give thanks to your name” (v. 7).

So, as we’ve been on the road we have to travel, what is our prison?  What holds us?  What prevents us from giving and living in gratitude to God?  Dare to look deep within; I promise you will find something.  Going back to the beginning, that is the often-maddening question of Lent.  What will we give up?

I’ll repeat my original quote from Banu: “We need to dispossess ourselves of the possessions that possess us, so we can be possessed by God.”

The psalm ends on a powerful note of praise.  “The righteous will surround me, for you will deal bountifully with me.”  As we progress through Lent on the road we have to travel, if we yearn for freedom, the Lord will burst the bars of our self-constructed prisons.

[1] www.faithandleadership.com/dominique-d-gilliard-reclaiming-power-lament