You may already be aware of my interest in the biblical practice of lament – I’ve written about it elsewhere, bang on about it regularly, and have found it essential for being able to hold onto my faith in the many contexts where it seems that God hasn’t acted as he should have.  I recently caught up with a friend who is going through a tough patch, but who has been repeatedly told – directly or indirectly by their Christian community – that the kinds of questions and complaints they have about God are wrong and unacceptable.   I believe my friend is simply being courageous and honest in their appraisal of the intersection between faith and life: it is messy.  It can be awfully hard. If God is our rock, our strength, our protector, our provider, our vindicator, then questions and anger are reasonable responses to situations where it feels like God has abandoned us, not protected or provided as the preaching and worship songs promise us on the weekly.  And yet so many Christian responses that are shared with people in times of crises are woefully inadequate, overly simplistic and make people feel like they’re faith failures and no longer belong. Turns out that only the tidy, together ones may enter here.

I find this deeply frustrating because the kind of faith my friend is expressing is actually deep, even if it is tenuous and hanging on by a thread.  As someone once described it: it’s a faith that’s clinging to God against God; it’s being real about the ups and downs of a relationship with God. It refuses to settle for a truncated theology that only allows good things to be said about God. It demands honesty and accountability with God. It wants a real relationship with God, not one in which only rosy, nice things can be said. And it reckons (like the Psalmists and Jesus himself on the cross) that God is big enough to handle our complaints. So I tip my hat to folks like my friend, and aim to follow in their honest footsteps in my own, rather tenuous relationship with God.

All of this led me to reflect on the biblical portrayals of the people of God.  They almost always don’t have it all together, and when they seemingly do (I’m looking at you ganteng Solomon), the façade lasts a few chapters before it all comes crashing down anyway. As someone who regularly doesn’t have it all together, I take great comfort in how wonderfully messy and stumbly the people of God are. So I wrote this little piece to my (seemingly) tidier brothers and sisters of the Christian faith who – for whatever reason – struggle to match the courage, honesty and depth of my friend:

Do you remember Israel’s story?

[Pairs well with on the nature of daylight by Max Richter]

Do you remember Israel’s story?

Oh, it started in a Garden designed and landscaped

by God himself

But that’s one short chapter

– An important one, I’ll admit –

But it’s one short chapter

And in no less than three more

The pages are splattered with blood,

Flooded with hurt and smelling of death.

____

Do you remember Israel’s story?

Do you remember where Israel got its name?

It wasn’t in the temple with songs and arms uplifted

It was in the dark of night

When Jacob fought God

And limped forever more.

____

Do you remember Israel’s story?

Slaves to Pharaoh for four hundred years –

Four hundred years

Four hundred years

Four hundred years of crying out to God without an answer

____

Do you remember where God ‘rescued’ the Israelite slaves to?

It was to a desert, a wilderness

A place of merciless heat and long, sunburnt days

Of freezing cold and shivering nights

Of aimless, purposeless wandering for forty years

Forty years

Forty years

Forty years of shivering, sunburnt, aimless, purposeless wandering.

____

Do you remember Israel’s story?

After four hundred and forty years

They were turned back at the gates of the promised land

Deported, driven back, banished for another lifetime to that desolate place.

_____________________________

So go easy on the ones who are living through some kind of

Four hundred and forty plus years

Of blood splattered pages

Flooded with hurt and smelling of death

Folks who limp because they’ve gone twelve rounds with God

Or spent back-to-back lifetimes in desolate places

____

Your tidy togetherness has poorly prepared you

For the Jericho Road that runs narrow and winding

from Eden to the Promised Land

You’ll be needing their wounds to bind your own

When you discover the unavoidable reality

that Christ is inviting you to a cross on a hill called Golgotha,

That the good seed you are

Is no use to God or the world

Unless you first die and are buried

____

I suggest you keep these people close.

Make them your friends.

Ask to sit at their cracked and muddy feet.

And take off your polished shoes in their presence,

For the ground they stand upon is holy.

____

Do you remember Israel’s story?