(avg. read time: 4–8 mins.)
The second sermon I ever preached was on Ps 88. It seemed like a good challenge, and I thought that if I did not preach on Ps 88, I would never hear a sermon on it. Thus far, I have been correct. I imagine people out there have done it, but if after all these years of listening to sermons I would need to do some scouring at churches I have not attended to find one, that kind of demonstrates the point. One reason why this text tends to be ignored is that it seems morose. For this reason, you are also less likely, at least in America, to hear sermons on Lamentations, but even in that book there are notes of hope. There are no explicit ones here. In virtually any other lament psalm, there is still some clear sense of hope and trust for the remedy of the present situation. Not so in Ps 88. What then do we do with this text? What is significant about the fact that a text like this is in the Bible?
Since this text is part of the Psalter, that means it was considered to be useful for corporate worship. This is something I want to return to in more detail another time when I articulate the outline of a theology of worship, but worship is a holistic action because we are holistic beings. We are not souls that inhabit husks of bodies that will one day be discarded while our “true selves” go off elsewhere to an eternal abode. After all, we believe in a God who raises the dead. What is more, when God created us in his image, he created us as embodied creatures. The fact that we are described as image-bearers of God means, in some way or another, we were designed for worship, as images in the ancient world were used for the purposes of worship. And as image-bearers, we are also essentially embodied creatures, and this is further reflected in the biblical language of worship.
Words used for worship in both the OT and NT often did not have an exclusive connection to what we describe as “religious.” They referred simply to acts of allegiance, submission, or devotion, particularly in terms of bodily postures or expressions (such as kneeling). But what is more, Israel’s particular history with its sense of covenantal history with YHWH meant that worship involved more than mere ritual, as in surrounding cultures where worship had no connection with ethics beyond the proper performance of ritual. Rituals certainly are involved with the worship of God, particularly in the setting of corporate worship, but corporate worship is only one part of worship. All of life was/is to signify the worship of one God with no others beside him. Indeed, worship is any action that demonstrates submission to and absolute dependence upon God. By extension, a worshipful life is a life that submits everything in allegiance to God. Corporate worship is especially fitting as what M. Patrick Graham describes as, “a time for reorientation of the human heart—to remember what God has done in the past and to infuse the present with hope for a future life of well-being and communion with God.”1
This reorientation comes from acknowledging who God is to oneself and to one’s community of faith. This in turn comes from proclamation and remembrance. We internalize and express the proclamation and remembrance through prayer and praise. Both prayer and praise are necessary for a worshipful life, for they both express our fundamental orientation towards and allegiance to God. And because worship expresses something so fundamental about us, worship in turn shapes us so that we become like what we worship. You reflect it to what you worship and to others, which again fits with what it means to be an image-bearer of God; all these aspects of worship are part of our very nature.
More specifically, it is important to understand Ps 88 as a prayer. J. Clinton McCann, Jr. describes prayer as, “the offering of the whole self to God, including pain, grief, fear, loneliness, and sinfulness as well as expressions of innocence and desire for vengeance.”2 The Psalter as a whole consists of prayers and praises in song form that present ways of understanding everything in light of God’s reign and of seeking to submit everything in life to that reign.
It is understandable why in formalized prayer we like to filter things more, to present the best articulation we can, and the most pious versions of our statements that we can muster. But prayer should not be restricted to that. Walter Brueggemann points to Ps 88 as a psalm that illustrates four important points about the expectation that God characteristically, but not automatically, answers prayers like this, points which are worth quoting in full:
1. These prayers are real prayers and not merely psychological acts of catharsis whereby the speaker ‘feels better’ by expressing need out loud. These prayers are seriously addressed to God, who is expected to answer.
2. The prayers, some of them savage in their urgency, are acts of hope uttered in confidence that God will hear and act in response. This point is of great significance, for conventional Christian piety tends to regard such abrasive speech toward God as affrontive and beneath the dignity of polite faith. These prayers reflect the awareness of Israel that in serious conditions of need, faith demands not politeness toward God but full candor about need expressed toward the God ‘from whom no secret can be hid.’
3. The fact that these prayers characteristically end in joyous resolution indicates that in Israel’s horizon of speech, they are effective prayers that do indeed habitually evoke a transformative response from God who intervenes to change circumstance. That is, a passionate realism exists about them that challenges ‘modern’ faith. That realism—real prayer prayed in real hope to a real God who makes real answer—suggests that Israel understood its prayer as real communication and not pious role-play.
4. In the pervasive practice of the church—in liturgical prayer and in personal devotion—these prayers have nearly disappeared from the horizon of faith, which is an immensely important development. Likely they remain unused because (a) they are too raw, candid, and abrasive for ‘nice Christians,’ and (b) they are too robust in hope for modern people who do not expect a God who hears and acts. The toning down of a prayer to less demanding form constitutes a loss of realism, candor, and robustness in much prayer.3
In such ways, Ps 88 and other lament psalms that contain more hopeful notes, contribute to holistic worship. And holistic worship can require brutal authenticity about how one feels at present, what one’s present circumstances are. Beyond that, we also must remember that the Psalms were for corporate worship, so it also requires the community to be brutally authentic about what they are going through and what they want to say to God. There is no sense in hiding it, as if God would not know about it. The fact that the prayer of Ps 88 has such desperation, frustration, and even anger, and addresses all of this to God shows this text to be an expression of a mature faith. The devotion to YHWH exemplified in Ps 88 is such that God’s apparent silence does not drive the people away from prayer; it drives them to pray more intensely.
For all that Ps 88 represents the darkest of lamentations, it is in its direction that we see the hope in this text. This direction is signified by the opening verse referring to “YHWH, God of my salvation.” That fundamental conviction about who God is provides the sole foundation of hope in a situation that is otherwise hopeless, a situation that the speaker states that God himself brought. The situation itself, the hope for deliverance from it, and the speaker’s very self, as well as the community of faith the speaker belongs to, are inextricably linked to YHWH. As Brueggemann states,
Israel has no option but to deal with Yahweh. That belongs to Israel’s identity and character in the world. Israel must deal with Yahweh in his life-giving speech and answer. But Israel must also deal with Yahweh in silence, in God’s blank absence as in the saving presence. Israel has no choice but to speak to this one, or to cease to be Israel. In this painful, unresolved speech, Israel is simply engaged in being Israel. To be Israel means to address God, even in God’s unresponsive absence.4
This prayer thus speaks to a particular part of life for the faithful and the need for faith within that part of life, even when everything about the present makes it appear that it will come to no good end. Although it is not the Psalm Jesus references in his outcry on the cross, this text serves well to portray an aspect of the cruciform life. It involves not letting go of faithful obedience and appeal to God, no matter what suffering may come, no matter how one feels, and addressing it all to God. Because he is the God who brought Israel out of Egypt when it seemed there was no hope. Because he is the God who raises the dead, reversing the state otherwise associated with ultimate finality. He is the God who makes a way where there is no way. These things and others show he is worthy of trust even when we cannot see a way out. He is the God who reveals himself in both crucifixion and resurrection.
M. Patrick Graham, “Setting the Heart to Seek God: Worship in 2 Chronicles 30.1-31.1,” in Worship and the Hebrew Bible: Essays in Honour of John T. Willis, ed. M. Patrick Graham, Rick R. Marrs, and Steven L. McKenzie, JSOTSup 284 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999), 141.
J. Clinton McCann, Jr., “The Book of Psalms: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” in 1 & 2 Maccabees-Psalms, ed. Leander E. Keck, NIB 4 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 669.
Walter Brueggemann, Reverberations of Faith: A Theological Handbook of Old Testament Themes (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 119–20.
Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), 80–81.