God Laments

Please note that due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate.

Media: Jason Gray interview

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s Jason Gray, a singer/songwriter, talking about a period when he lost his faith in God. Jason was living the dream: a successful touring and recording artist. But when his marriage collapsed in 2015, what followed was an intense period of spiritual re-evaluation. Feeling anger and pain toward God wasn’t something Jason had been led to believe was ok – and it led him away from Christianity … … until he read an interview in Rolling Stone Magazine with my favourite singer/songwriter, Paul Hewson – AKA Bono – of U2 fame. In that interview, Bono said:

“I read the Psalms of David all the time. They are amazing. He is the first bluesman, shouting at God, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ But there’s honesty in that too. . . ”

Allowing himself to be truly honest with God was the missing piece of the puzzle for Jason. For Jason, realising that being a Christian didn’t have to be “happy clappy” was a huge turning point. The Bible is full of praise, but the Bible is also full of sorrow, anguish, and lament. In fact, there’s a whole book of the Bible just called Lamentations.  That’s like naming a book ‘Grief’ or ‘Disappointment’ – there’s nothing appealing about it! But, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, disappointment and sadness in life are inevitable. The “problem of pain” (to quote C.S. Lewis) is one of the biggest obstacles to faith that people encounter, whether they’re believers or sceptics.  We’ve actually done a whole episode on this – that’s episode 67, ‘On Suffering’ – and, spoiler alert, the Bible doesn’t tie it up in a nice bow. What it does give us are the tools to suffer well – and perhaps most surprisingly of all, God is right there with us  … in the lament.

 I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson:
Hey, Drew, what led you to write a book on disappointment? Because I’m not sure this is going to go well at parties. ‘Hey, what’s your latest book about, Drew?’ ‘Disappointment’.

Drew Hyun:
Yeah. No, I, you know, I, I wrote the book because I think, especially from a Christian worldview, um, disappointments are part of what we believe life is about and what we believe about how this, how the world has been fractured in many ways. And so, in many ways, when people begin to doubt faith or – in their own faith, wrestle with God about why do bad things happen, um, I wanted to present a case for why we can almost expect disappointment. Um, but hopefully in the midst of disappointment that we can have an underlying kind of hope that’s able to supersede that kind of disappointment.

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s my first guest, Drew Hyun. Drew is a pastor in New York City and has just released an excellent new book, Beautiful, Disappointing, Hopeful: How Gratitude, Grief, and Grace Reflect the Christian Story, out now through our season sponsor Zondervan Academic. As the title suggests, the book isn’t all about disappointment, because life isn’t all disappointment. There is beauty … and hope, too—often right alongside the sadness. It’s a matter of emphasis. Drew says:

“We can ignore the world’s ills and focus on the positives, or we can adopt a constant melancholy mindset, drowning in discouragement or cynicism. Either option seems untenable because each would dismiss a genuine segment of our lived experience.”

Moving to New York City in September 2001 showed Drew just how disappointing life can be.

John Dickson:
Am I right that, you know, when you moved to New York in, uh, 2001, you know, you were confronted by those terrible events that we all remember, and that this was in some ways shaping for you?

Drew Hyun:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think, uh, before that time, I had graduated from university, uh, really strengthened my resolve of faith, and especially the intellectual side of faith, um, in my college years, and then moved to New York City to help serve and work at a church that was serving marginalized communities. But six days after I arrived in New York was 9/11. And it really shook me and, uh, in many ways, my approaches to, uh, evil and suffering and difficulty – so many of my responses to that when it came to faith were very intellectual kind of arguments for theodicy and the problem of evil. And for the first time, it was actually a very real and visceral experience in my own life, as well as in the lives of people around me. And, uh, it caused me to just hopefully kind of confront, um, the more grounded elements of my faith, which was how do we live in a world of beauty and disappointment, uh, especially as Christians.

Studio – John Dickson:

The 9/11 terrorist attacks caused a huge shift in the American psyche. Speaking to NBC News five years after the events, Kristi Roe – a former NYC resident who witnessed it all unfold – spoke for thousands of others when she said life had never felt the same since. Here’s our voice actor, Dakotah Love, reading a little of that interview: 

Reading

“How do you ever go back to what was in the face of such pain? After 9/11, I had the opportunity to work with children and families who lost loved ones that day, it’s all just too much to comprehend. The effects of that day are far-reaching, from subtle nuances to huge life shifts. My four friends survived but were also forever changed. I’ve seen the shift in my friends, the shift in the children I worked with, and the shift within myself. And although the shift or change presents itself differently in everyone…it is there. 

Studio – John Dickson:

But 9/11 wasn’t the only thing that shaped Drew’s approach to disappointment. Growing up in a Korean family, he encountered the concept of Han – a unique Korean idea that describes a deep, deep sense of sadness.

John Dickson:
Am I right that there’s a special Korean Concept called Han, um, and, and I already knew this before your book, because there’s a awesome West Wing episode where a Korean comes and he, and, and toward the end of the episode, he, he asks the president, do you know about the concept of Han? It’s very poignant. Tell me about this concept!

Studio – John Dickson:

The West Wing episode I was talking about, by the way, is actually called ‘Han’ – it’s from Season 5 (the first season after Aaron Sorkin quit, and in my opinion, the worst season of the series.) In the episode, a brilliant pianist from North Korea visits the United States on an official visit and secretly asks to defect. For various reasons, he is discouraged from doing so, and the pianist tells the President about the Korean word ‘Han’, which doesn’t have a direct English translation. He conveys the feeling of the word by playing Chopin’s Prelude in E minor… your listening to a brief re-imagining of the piece … 

 

Drew Hyun:
Yeah, Han it’s, you know, I remember asking my mom, what is Han? And she literally, she kind of paused and then she goes *sighs* She just, she made this very guttural, visceral sound, and it was a cry, a yelp, and she went on to explain that ‘It’s, it’s hard to explain, it’s just this sorrow and sadness that’s, uh, indescribable and difficult to capture and put into words’. It’s the feeling of powerlessness, helplessness, and, uh, a grief that pervades the Korean people. And, I often like to tell people, if they’ve watched Korean dramas and, uh, many of the dramas end in incredible sadness and difficulty. And in many ways, those dramas are capturing a part of the Korean psyche. The history of the Korean peninsula has been one that’s been exploited, invaded, occupied, and so on. And so this word, Han, actually depicts the way of, of grief and suffering and loss that Koreans have experienced that’s deep within kind of the psyche of, uh, the Korean people.

John Dickson:
Is there a particular. traditional Korean way of coping with Han? Or is the point that it is just a cry out into the nothingness?

Drew Hyun:
Yeah, you know, I think there have been different ways. Um, what’s really interesting is like for me, for instance, at the Korean church that I grew up in, uh, like we’d be having these prayer meetings. It was very routine to have prayer meetings in the morning. And at these prayer meetings, um, It’d be like, Hey, we’re going to pray. We’re going to celebrate that God gave us this building, you know? And so one would expect like, I’m like, okay, we’re going to start praying. I remember as a young child and then everyone would turn off the lights. Uh, and then when the prayer meeting would start, people would cry out, they’d cry out, ‘Oh Lord, Oh Lord, Oh Lord’. And then a symphony of just wailing would just kind of pervade the entire auditorium. And it was almost like this signal, like looking back and thinking about this concept of Han. Uh, there’s something about the Korean experience, where even our prayers are laced with lament and sadness. That even the way it sounds, and I still remember the sounds of those prayer meetings that were supposed to be celebratory. And the sounds were basically, ‘Ah, ah, ah’. It sounded like this wailing was kind of echoing throughout. And, even in the Korean, there’s a Korean traditional folk instrument called the Kayagum, and the way that it’s calibrated, it, the way that when one plays it, the way that it sounds, it has these sounds that sound like dun, dun, dun, and, and even in all of these different kind of expressions, whether it’s prayer or music, there’s this underlying tone of just the deep sorrow and sadness of Han.

John Dickson:
I, I think I can, I can hear what you’re talking about. I, I’ve heard that before and it, it does sound like a cry.

Studio – John Dickson:

Life, whether we like it or not, will be disappointing. The major faiths of the world have all tried to make sense of this. Buddhism teaches that disappointment comes from your attachment to things; the antidote to disappointment then is to detach. Islam, on the other hand, teaches there is a decree from God for every single disappointing event in the universe. For Muslims, there’s a comfort in knowing God wrote this down from eternity.  (Christianity has a similar view of God’s total sovereignty—except, contrary to some people’s claims—it also says there are secondary causes of pain in the world. The creation itself has experienced some decay. It groans. And so we groan at its effects). That’s not something taught in traditional Islam. Partly as a result, there is no Islamic tradition of lament/complaint directed at God himself. Hinduism has a straightforward account of disappointment; suffering is a result of past actions – either in your life now or in your soul’s past life.  That’s the theory of karma. But the Bible takes a different path. Stay with us …

Break

Media – Bono interview

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s Bono of U2, speaking about the Psalms with Eugene Peterson, the creator of the controversial Bible translation The Message. It’s beautiful, and I love Peterson but it’s not really a ‘translation’; it’s more an interpretation. My students aren’t allowed to use it in thier essays. Anyway, yes, I’m a fan of Bono—ever since their second album October, which has quite a bit of lament in it. Many of their albums do, actually. The Psalms are a fascinating part of scripture. They’re a collection of 150 songs and poems right in the middle of the Old Testament, composed by all manner of artists. The most famous Psalmist is King David, who (traditionally) wrote at least 73 of the 150 Psalms in the Bible. There are lots of genres within these 150 works, and some people – like my next guest – have devoted their academic careers to understanding these different styles.

Jill Firth:
So the psalms are, I’m not even sure that they’re all songs. Some of them are quite, you know, more like a prose, so that they’re mostly songs, perhaps. They used to say it was the songbook of the Second Temple. I’m not sure that I think that either. Um, there, there are, there are a whole collection of praise, lament, uh, wisdom, thoughts, uh, remembrances of God’s greatness in the ancient times, you know, from the Exodus.

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s the Reverend Dr Jill Firth, lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament at Ridley College, Melbourne. She did her entire PhD on the theme of lament in the Psalms – specifically in Psalms 140-143. That’s like 100,000 words on just 42 verses of the Bible!

John Dickson:
We have a lot of American listeners and, and I find that Americans don’t know that the very first book ever published in America in 1640 was an edition of the Psalms. It sold for $15 million.

Jill Firth:
Oh gosh. Yeah. Cause that, you know, some people used to just sing the Psalms like Presbyterians every week. They knew all the Psalms and of course Catholics would be doing it and Anglicans do it. But in a, you know, in the plain chant kind of way. Yeah.

John Dickson:
Yeah. I mean, Augustine reckoned he knew all the Psalms by heart. He prayed them. He prayed them so often.

Jill Firth:
If you’re a monk, you know, they just did it and everybody, Jewish people as well, Jewish people knew them and, you know, Christians who prayed regularly would all know the Psalms by heart. 

Studio – John Dickson:

I asked Jill to give me an Undeceptions rapid-fire round of the different types of Psalms – but if you want to hear the difference between, say, didactic and imprecatory Psalms, you’ll have to become a PLUS subscriber. Al’s dropped a link in the show notes where you can sign up for the benefits – one of which is extended episodes. For the Plussers – here’s the rapid-fire round. For the rest of you – let’s go straight to the Psalms of lament. 

John Dickson:
Okay, so now let’s focus on lament psalms. Uh, tell me, you know, what are they? How do you like to define a lament?

Jill Firth:
Yeah, so I, I have my own little, um, definition that a lament is talking to God about trouble and sorrows. So talking doesn’t mean necessarily talking, but you might be like, you know, groaning like Romans 12, um, or you might be just silent or just weeping, uh, to God. You don’t, Talk about God because I know God is really horrible. You say, look, you are not doing a good job and About trouble and sorrow anything that they always have some Problematic point if it’s a lament, there’s always something going wrong for you or for the people around you.

John Dickson:
And how prominent are they in the book of Psalms?

Jill Firth:
There’s a lot I think it might be a third or something like that. So there’s book one, book two, book three, uh, book four, book five. And the first three books have a lot of lament Psalms. Then book four actually is mostly praise, but has some other things. Then book five is pretty equally, just equally arranged, you know, balanced. So people have said in the past, lament to praise, individual to corporate, or is actually that, that’s not quite accurate. Um, you know,

John Dickson:
the, the landing of the book of Psalms is just all praise, isn’t it? You have

Jill Firth: Well, the last five?

Jill Firth:
The last five Psalms are these Hallelujah Psalms, but the eight before that are Davidic Psalms, the most are individual and four of them are laments, and two others of them are kind of in a lot of trouble, like t here are enemies, very present enemies, in all those Davidic Psalms and then in the Hallelujah Psalms, it’s kind of, it’s a bit, um, not apocalyptic, eschatological, where everything’s fixed up. There are no enemies, nobody’s killing the children, nobody’s starving, you know, the poor ladies with no children have got plenty and so on.

Studio – John Dickson:

The Davidic Psalms of Lament, toward the end of the book, follow a similar structure. They begin with an anguished crying out to God, but they end with a declaration of God’s goodness. But this is by no means a rule. Take Psalm 88 for example. It is relentless in its sadness–and listen to the end!!

Reading

Lord, you are the God who saves me;
    day and night I cry out to you.

May my prayer come before you;
    turn your ear to my cry.

I am overwhelmed with troubles
    and my life draws near to death.

I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
    I am like one without strength.

I am set apart with the dead,
    like the slain who lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more,
    who are cut off from your care.

You have put me in the lowest pit,
    in the darkest depths.

Your wrath lies heavily on me;
    you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.

You have taken from me my closest friends
    and have made me repulsive to them.
I am confined and cannot escape;

    my eyes are dim with grief.

I call to you, Lord, every day;
    I spread out my hands to you.

Do you show your wonders to the dead?
    Do their spirits rise up and praise you?

Is your love declared in the grave,
    your faithfulness in Destruction?
Are your wonders known in the place of darkness,
    or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?

But I cry to you for help, Lord;
    in the morning my prayer comes before you.

Why, Lord, do you reject me
    and hide your face from me?

From my youth I have suffered and been close to death;
    I have borne your terrors and am in despair.

Your wrath has swept over me;
    your terrors have destroyed me.

All day long they surround me like a flood;
    they have completely engulfed me.

You have taken from me friend and neighbor—
    darkness is my closest friend.

Psalm 88

Studio – John Dickson:

How about that ending!! This poet has the spiritual confidence to tell the Creator: you’ve taken everything and now it’s all darkness! It’s brutally honest! I was recently asked by a Christian leader friend here in the US to speak to a group of pastors and leaders about losing my best mate Ben Shaw a few years ago—some of you listeners know the details—and he wanted to know how that affected my work. I’ll spare you the details—suffice to say, I hated giving the talk—but this was one of my key thoughts: “You have taken from me friend and neighbor—darkness is my closest friend.”

John Dickson:
It’s interesting that these lament Psalms don’t all resolve, do they? I mean, a lot of them do resolve, like it’s deep sadness. But, but then there’s also a note of joy toward the end, but some of them don’t resolve at all. I’m thinking of Psalm 88, which the last line of which is something like “Darkness is my best friend”. Full stop. Wow. What’s going on there?

Jill Firth:
So the Psalm 88, and some people say this is the only one that ends up, you know, awkwardly. Um, but actually there are quite a lot, like Psalm 137 ends with, um, this, the awful bit about the curse on Babylon and the babies and the rocks, you know, so that, that one also goes to quite a dark place, but it, it has more trust in the middle.

Studio – John Dickson:

Psalm 137 – written after the Babylonian conquest of  Judea and the deportation of Jerusalem’s population to Babylon – ends the most unsettling line … probably in the whole Bible.

Reading

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,

    happy is the one who repays you

    according to what you have done to us.

Happy is the one who seizes your infants

    and dashes them against the rocks.

Studio – John Dickson:

I hardly know what to say about that one—it’s an imprecatory psalm, and it’s not the only one!! I don’t have the full explanation of it. But I do agree with the insight of the Yale philosopher-theologian Miroslav Volf. He says that we are never permitted to act with such perverse vengeance, if you’ve been terrorized and brutalized like the poet of Psalm 137, you ought to take those vengeful feelings to the Almighty. There’s no point bottling it up, or going into denial. Take everything – even hatred – into the safe presence of the Judge of the world. Here’s how Volf put it: 

Reading

In the imprecatory Psalms, torrents of rage have been allowed to flow freely, channeled only by the robust structure of a ritual prayer. Strangely enough, they may point to a way out of slavery to revenge and into the freedom of forgiveness. This suggestion will not work, of course, if we see the imprecatory Psalms as publicly pronounced indirect threats to powerful enemies … They are prayers. And everybody except moderns for whom God does not matter knows that the primary addressee of prayers is God. Whatever else these Psalms might have done to those who listened, they brought the puzzlement and rage of the oppressed over injustice into the presence of the God of justice who is the God of the oppressed. For the followers of the crucified Messiah, the main message of the imprecatory Psalms is this: rage belongs before God—not in the reflectively managed and manicured form of a confession, but as a pre-reflective outburst from the depths of the soul. This is no mere cathartic discharge of pent-up aggression before the Almighty who ought to care. Much more significantly, by placing unattended rage before God we place both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self face-to-face with a God who loves and does justice.

Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace

Studio – John Dickson:

That deserves a pause … back to Jill.

Jill Firth:
But people say about 88 that even though he’s pouring out, just, it’s not like I trust in you or anything like that in words, but why would he be even talking to God if he didn’t think that God cared and was listening? So, you know, I’m all alone here. It’s all terrible, darkness is my closest friend. But he says that to God, like perhaps in a marriage, things are going really badly. And you say to your partner, look, this is just not working, but you’re looking them in the eye and you say, look friend, this is just not working. Can we do something about it? And in a lament, you always ask God, you’re powerless. That’s why you do a lament. You don’t say, I’ve, I’ve got three books that we could read. You say, I don’t know what to do. Can you help me? And in this case, it’s, you know, what are we going to do about this? I, I’m, you know, I’m empty.

John Dickson:
Why do you reckon these lament Psalms are so important? I mean, obviously in the book of Psalms, whoever put it together thought, let’s have a whole bunch. You, I mean, you said a third, um, Let’s have a whole bunch of, you know, complaining to God, what’s going, like, what do you think that means?

Jill Firth:
I think the biggest thing is that God is really interested in everything that we want to say to him. Like in a real relationship, you know, if you only, if you’re good, good weather friend that only wants to hear when you’re having a good time and doesn’t want to hear that you’ve got cancer or that your sister’s died or that your dog is, you know, on its way out or that – this world poverty or something. Um, that’s a bit of a thin relationship. So I think the biggest takeaway is that God is really, really interested he, he doesn’t get offended. Even if you shout at God, there’s some really nasty things in some of the Laments. What are you doing? Are you asleep? You know, it’s been weeks since I asked the last time and you’re not doing anything. And he’s just open to that. Like he put it in his book. It’s not like we wrote them and he said, Oh, yuck. He said, let’s put them in the book. And you’re like, You know, it’s like not keeping the love letters, but keeping the angry hate letters. Yeah. And then not all hate, of course, but sometimes, sometimes people are very annoyed with God.

John Dickson:
Like theologically, those who believe this is the word of God actually think God put them there. He gave us words to complain. that is amazing.

Studio – John Dickson:

These words God gives us often go way further than we would expect. Take Job, for example; in the midst of his suffering – having lost his property, his career, his family, and his health – he delivers this alarming prayer:

Reading

“I cry out to you, God, but you do not answer;
    I stand up, but you merely look at me.

You turn on me ruthlessly;
    with the might of your hand, you attack me.

You snatch me up and drive me before the wind;
    you toss me about in the storm.

I know you will bring me down to death,
    to the place appointed for all the living.

Surely no one lays a hand on a broken man
    when he cries for help in his distress.

Have I not wept for those in trouble?
    Has not my soul grieved for the poor?

Yet when I hoped for good, evil came;
    when I looked for light, then came darkness.

Job, Chapter 30

Studio – John Dickson:

Not only is Job accusing God of ignoring him, but he’s openly likening God to a cosmic bully.

Yet it’s there in God’s Word.

God listens – and eventually, God responds to Job’s protests – again, I’d really recommend you check out our suffering episode in the show notes. We spend a lot of time on Job – it’s amazing! Sometimes the source of pain and disappointment is human evil. But, as we read in Job – and in many of the Laments in the Bible – often it’s not always that simple.

John Dickson:
You mention in the book that, um, often our sources of disappointment come from three places. Uh, the world, the flesh and the devil. Uh, now that sounds spooky and theological and, uh, some of our listeners might not be on that wavelength. Can you explain what you mean by those three categories?

Drew Hyun:
Yeah, again, from a Christian worldview, um, well, first of all, like the existence of evil. Even an atheist has to explain where does evil come from. If they believe, you know, if they challenge the premise that a good God would, how does pain and suffering and evil exist in a world of, that a good God created? And even if God were to be removed from that equation, I think the atheist, the agnostic, or anyone from any religious disposition would be left with the question of, ‘Where does this pain, suffering and evil come from’? And from a Christian worldview, uh, again, these three categories, the flesh, the world, and, uh, the devil, exist. Now, each of those categories, if the flesh is simply another word, it’s a metaphor that’s used for our innate proclivity towards sin or badness. So every single one of us has it. I think that the Christian kind of, um, view is, is very equalizing and that every single person, um, has this flesh or sin nature

John Dickson:
We all suck. People forget how liberating that is. People think we’re all down on ourselves, you know, by thinking this, but actually what you just said is so true that it’s a leveler because, you know, I think you suck too. So, um, I, I can, I can see in, in Drew myself and I can see in, in other people, it almost prepares you for disappointment. Is that, is that going too far?

Drew Hyun:
Yeah, no, absolutely. So every relationship, every church community, every country, every, we all, we all carry this thing called sin and the flesh. And of course, if that means, if each of us individually carry this, then of course the world and the systems that these individuals inhabit would also, uh, be broken and flawed in many ways. 

John Dickson:
Some people don’t like that language, do they? Now, so it’s controversial to talk about systemic evil people, you know, for some people, that’s like a buzzword that you can’t say, but tease that out a bit because I think it’s irrefutable because isn’t it just flesh multiplied by how many humans there are?

Drew Hyun:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it, it, it makes sense in that, you know, one, uh, specific ideology might want to focus on the individuals and one might want to focus on the systems. And I think Christians are able to say, actually, it’s both. Both are deeply flawed and broken. Uh, and now the existence of the devil or the supernatural realm … I, I mean, I often say to people in New York, if people say, well, I don’t believe in this supernatural mumbo jumbo or the immature world. And I often tell them, well, would you believe that most of the world outside of the West actually does believe in a supernatural realm? And the reason why is because even today, even super rational people, there are things like superstition, or my lucky socks, or ways in which I, I think there’s something beyond this material world. And, uh, the scriptures actually present, the Christian scriptures present this world where there is a supernatural reality, and there is a devil at work. And when I think about how broken the flesh and the world are and even the ways in which I get tempted in various ways I do believe that there is a supernatural force i.e. the devil that is at work in life and in the systems of the world that continue to bring more divisiveness, hate, lie to not only me personally but to the world around us.

John Dickson:
And isn’t it interesting that the Bible doesn’t hyper-spiritualize, it doesn’t attribute everything to the devil, which I think maybe is the character, caricature that people have of Christians. But it, but it sort of divides it in that way that you very helpfully unpacked for us. You make a distinction between, uh, clean and dirty pain, um, I think of all pain is pretty dirty. So, so what are you talking about?

Drew Hyun:
Yeah, and this is a mentor of mine named Geri Scazzaro. She would often tell me about how there’s two kinds of pain and dirty pain is the pain that I experience, but much of the pain is because, uh, I’m at fault. So for instance, I could complain as much as I want about how, Oh my goodness, I got this, uh, reading on my health report that was unfavorable or told me that my cholesterol was high. I could blame that dirty pain. I could blame that pain on the devil or someone else when the reality is like I’ve lived with a diet of Cheetos and fried chicken, uh, for every meal and not exactly the healthiest option there. And so when it comes to dirty pain, dirty pain is the kind of pain that oftentimes, uh, is a result of me reaping what I’ve sown. And the tools that were given to, of grieving that kind of pain is basically the tools of confession and repentance of admitting where I’m wrong and hopefully wanting to make amends and try a different path. And so in, in one hand, on one hand, grieving looks like confession and repentance.

Reading

Have mercy on me, O God,
    according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
    blot out my transgressions.
Wash away all my iniquity
    and cleanse me from my sin
For I know my transgressions,
    and my sin is always before me.
Against you, you only, have I sinned
    and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
    and justified when you judge.
Surely I was sinful at birth,
    sinful from the time my mother conceived me.
Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb;
    you taught me wisdom in that secret place.
Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean;
    wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
Let me hear joy and gladness;
    let the bones you have crushed rejoice.
Hide your face from my sins
    and blot out all my iniquity.
Create in me a pure heart, O God,
    and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

Psalm 51

Drew Hyun:
When it comes to grieving, grieving so much of it involves humility. So, um, confession and repentance involve a deep amount of humility and a groundedness. Clean pain is the kind of pain that comes to us when, um, it kind of comes out of nowhere. And it’s the mysterious feelings of loss that we experience. Um, when perhaps we’ve done everything right and still it feels like life is unraveling or there’s that medical diagnosis of someone that we love or even in our own lives. And we may not deserve it. We may not feel like we deserve it, but somehow it befalls us. And this happens to everyone. And it’s this kind of mysterious pain that we’re invited to, to grieve and somehow God has a mysterious way of using pain and brokenness and suffering in our lives. And like I mentioned, um, instead of hopefully being surprised by it, uh, if we can be a people who hopefully we expect disappointment, even clean pain as difficult as it might be, um, And we learn how to grieve. We learn how to lament. Um, there’s a way I know that one of the phrases that my mentor Pete Scazzaro uses is to enlarge our soul through grief and loss, that when we become a people who, when pain and difficulty, um, Confronts us that we’re people who our souls are enlarged by the ways we vulnerably and honestly bring this grief before God. We see this kind of modeled in the Hebrew scriptures and the Psalms, the songbook, which is full of both gratitude and grieving, um, grieving, both dirty pain. You just mentioned Psalm 51, but also clean pain of God. Where are you? Um, And what are you doing in my life and bringing those honest, visceral cries and prayers before God. And I think in both of those ways, somehow God begins to shape and change us and form us into hopefully being more well integrated as human beings. We’re able to, um, maintain a sturdy kind of spirituality in the midst of the turbulence of life.

John Dickson:
So much of our public culture is designed to deny or dispel any unhappy thoughts. You know, every advertisement, uh, most TV shows, you know, ending up with happiness. Um, what do you think it does to a soul, uh, not to be given the space that you’re talking about to feel disappointment?

Drew Hyun:
Yeah, well, I think we end up hiding quite a bit, and I think we end up, um, medicating that pain. Every single one of us experiences pain and difficulty at some point, and there are various different ways that people throughout history have amused ourselves to death, to, um, to take from the title of Neil Postman’s book, or,  you know, we medicate with different addictive behaviors. Or we just kind of consume things to somehow ignore our pain. Or, that, you know, that anger or sadness turns inward and it becomes depression. Or in the case of my parents, like my dad. as an immigrant to the United States who would constantly be ridiculed and made fun of for his accent, but he just absorbed it from the world around him. Just took in all this pain and put on a smiley face. Uh, and then he would basically unleash hell at home on us and he would displace that pain. So that pain ends up having to come out somewhere. And so unless that pain, um, is transformed, it actually gets transferred to other people. Or it gets transferred into, uh, behaviors that become, um, really harmful to us and those around us.

John Dickson:
And it isn’t just our secular world that does this. Actually, the church is sometimes terrible at allowing pain. I, I think of, you know, so many church services are designed to make you feel up, you know, and, and nine or maybe 90 out of a hundred praise songs, songs that we’d sing in church are upbeat. You know, you’re great Lord, I’m great Lord if I’m with you. Um, can you comment on that? I mean, do you worry that the church isn’t very good at this thing that really we should be awesome at?

Drew Hyun:
I think – and, and I can understand why – because I, you know, I, I grew up with phrases like, Hey, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it. Um, you know, like, praise God, rejoice always. And we can take scriptures like that and we can end up, um. Again, having a very one sided view of the Christian story, but, uh, what it ends up doing is it ends up not giving people the permission, uh, to feel and express a very real part of our lived experience. And that’s what I love about the scriptures, is that the scriptures are full of raw people who, uh, experience the lowliest of lows, the betrayal, the loneliness, the pain of the human experience. And if anything, we want a faith that’s not only for us when things are going well, or things are up. Hopefully, what we want is a faith that’s sturdy enough that can meet us in our, our moments of like deepest darkness, um, and allows us to actually come to God with our own tears, our rage, and yeah, and our sorrow and what I’ve experienced in church communities is that, um, churches that never kind of meet that level, especially within a community, um, we end up missing out on the kinds of depths of community, uh, that are found when vulnerably we’re able to share our deepest sorrows, not just our greatest joys, but our deepest sorrows.

John Dickson:
I have a good mate who’s written a bunch of, Very well known praise songs. I won’t, I won’t drop him in, but you, you would know many of his songs, um, and I’ve always said to him, write a sad song. Give us an awesome sad song. And he just says, the churches won’t pick it up. Maybe I’ll, uh, I’ll text him after this and say, Drew Hunn says, you must write a sad song.

Studio – John Dickson:

Church music wasn’t always exclusively “joyful”. In fact, some of the very best church songs do a really good job of expressing grief! Before the contemporary worship music boom of the 1960s, sacred music was full of hymns that – in addition to praise – expressed lament. Think of the classic ‘Abide with Me’ by Henry Francis Lyte (1847).

“Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away”

I was a bit naughty earlier today. I asked Buff to remind me how to sing ‘Abide with Me’ — and I recorded us:

If you just heard that, it’s because I did eventually tell her that I recorded us and she gave me permission to play it!! We’ll see. 

But the Bible doesn’t just give us the words for pain – it helps with the pain.

Stay with us.

Content warning:

Hey – in the next part of the show, we discuss veteran trauma, PTSD, and abuse. If you’re working through that kind of raw pain, the next 20 min may prove a help. But it may not. We’ve put a timecode in the episode description so you can skip forward if you want.

Be safe.

Media – Iraq War veterans

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s a clip by the New York Times, released last year, interviewing Iraq war veterans two decades on from the conflict. Following the events of 9/11, a quarter of a million recruits signed up for the American Army – many of whom were deployed two years later in the invasion of Iraq. Two decades on, many veterans are still coming to terms with what they were a part of.

Media – same clip

Studio – John Dickson:

It’s well documented that many returning veterans struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – or PTSD – caused by the awful things these men and women saw in the war zones. In 2002, psychiatrist Jonathan Shay coined another term: “moral injury”. It’s the inner conflict someone feels after a profound betrayal of one’s moral code. Here’s how the US Department of Veterans Affairs describes moral injury:

Reading

“In traumatic or unusually stressful circumstances, people may perpetrate, fail to prevent, or witness events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs and expectations … moral injury is the distressing psychological, behavioural, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of exposure to such events. A moral injury can occur in response to acting or witnessing behaviours that go against an individual’s values and moral beliefs.”

Studio – John Dickson:

While there’s a lot of overlap between the causes of moral injury and PTSD, moral injury differs in that the after-effects aren’t necessarily fear-based (as is common with PTSD). People with moral injury commonly experience guilt and self-blame. They’re also at increased risk of suicidal ideation, even after treatment for other underlying conditions like PTSD or depression. It’s not limited to veterans either; cases have been found in healthcare workers, first responders, journalists, and victims of emotional and physical abuse. Moral injury is a relatively recent term in psychology, but the experience itself has been around as long as humans have had moral frameworks—consciences shaped by values, beliefs, and social norms. Outside the Bible, some of the great 5th-century BC Greek tragedies wrestled with this kind of inner wound. Euripides, in particular, explored the idea of miasma—literally, “a stain”—a kind of ritual and spiritual contamination that results from things like unjust killing (especially of kin), violating sacred norms, or offending the gods. The plots of these plays often turn on the question: can this stain be removed? And Euripides doesn’t always give a clear answer. In his tragedy The Madness of Herakles (same character the Romans called Hercules), the hero is struck with divinely-induced madness. He murders his own wife and children, then wakes to the horror of what he’s done. His friend consoles him and offers him retirement in Athens, but we’re left uncertain—can he ever recover from this? The miasma remains. The injury is moral, and it’s deep. Jill Firth has done loads of work in this space – and she reckons we have a clear example of moral injury ocurring in the Old Testament book Jeremiah – which predates Euripides by more than a century.

John Dickson:
You’ve done some work on the field of moral injury. So I want to ask you a little about, you know, what is moral injury and how does it relate to the topic that we’re, uh, we’re discussing?

Jill Firth:
Yeah, so, um, everybody would probably be familiar with PTSD, you know, in the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War and, and, and the Iraq War. Um, the, the soldiers were coming back and they were pretty smashed up and people worked out. That, you know, it was like the sounds triggering them and, you know, flashbacks and things like that. So they did a lot of work on that, but then they found that some people were not, that wasn’t their problem. Perhaps it was a bit of their problem, but they were still very, um, in a disabled by the, by the warfare. And they sort of had this, um, sort of recognition that it was something to do with the inner person and particularly the person’s ethical, um, expectation of the world. Like the world is a good place. God should have helped me. My mates should have been with me. My boss should not have sent me to go and kill those women in the war, whatever. And at the same time, there were people working with (victims of) incest and rape, and the same thing, um, was happening there, that people who’d been, you know, assaulted in a very humiliating kind of way, lost their feeling of safety in the world, um, so moral injury is when the world is not how you wanted it to be, and you haven’t behaved like, if you were a soldier that killed women or something like that, you, you did stuff that didn’t fit your own, um, expectations. But also it can be actually just seeing a violent crime or a. Being a reporter, the reporters all got morally injured of those wars because they were seeing things that were so terrible and then they sure came home fractured as well. We’ve actually got a hospital in Melbourne that does a lot of work with moral injury and part of it was reporters who’d been in these wars and just seen the awful things and came back. like devastated.

John Dickson:
And do you think these lament psalms have something, not everything, but something to offer people who experience moral injury?

Jill Firth:
Yeah, I do. I’ve thought about it more in, uh, about Jeremiah. I do, you know,

John Dickson:
Yeah, I want to, that was my very question Jill

Jill Firth:
So, so let’s go there next. God, you promised to do X, Y, Z, you know, we’re in a covenant relationship and you don’t seem to be doing your part. We’ve got a better picture now because of Jesus, like our God’s been to the cross. So we are like, wow, maybe suffering’s in the picture. And they, they knew it was in the picture, but they didn’t have such a helpful framework, which doesn’t take our pain away. But I think we’re not so shocked when we suffer because, you know, the whole New Testament tells you you’re going to suffer. Whereas that’s not, you know, the main message of the Old Testament, even though all the good people do suffer.

Studio – John Dickson:

Jeremiah is one of the four major prophetic books of the Old Testament, alongside Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. It records the messages of Jeremiah, delivered in the lead-up to – and in the aftermath of – the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians. The book itself is thought to have been compiled – from Jeremiah’s actual oracles – a decade or so after his death – so around 560-550 BC, before the Persians allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem.  Jeremiah makes it clear that the pain the Israelites experience in exile is “dirty pain” – a direct judgement for centuries of their own idolatry, sin, and state-sponsored evil. There is also hope in Jeremiah; it promises that although Jerusalem is a ruin, a future King descended from David will eventually restore all things.

Reading

“Woe to the shepherds who are destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture!” declares the Lord. Therefore this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says to the shepherds who tend my people: “Because you have scattered my flock and driven them away and have not bestowed care on them, I will bestow punishment on you for the evil you have done,” declares the Lord. “I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them and will bring them back to their pasture, where they will be fruitful and increase in number. I will place shepherds over them who will tend them, and they will no longer be afraid or terrified, nor will any be missing,” declares the Lord”

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
    “when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch,
a King who will reign wisely
    and do what is just and right in the land.

In his days Judah will be saved
    and Israel will live in safety.
This is the name by which he will be called:
    The Lord Our Righteous Savior.

Jeremiah Chapter 23

John Dickson:
So let’s move to Jeremiah, you mentioned him. Um, his, his reputation is that he’s  always complaining. In fact, I looked up the Oxford English Dictionary. For Jeremiah, and it’s actually used as a quote, “person who can complains continually”. Uh, so is this fair?

Jill Firth:
A jeremiad is when you, you know, go and shout at people like you horrible John Dickson, blah, blah, blah, blah, I hate your show, a jeremiad. So yeah, it happens all the time, doesn’t it? So, actually that’s only part of the book, the shouting part. So there is, there are very strong, um, judgments because they’re getting right near, I mean, Babylon actually comes, and Jerusalem actually falls in Jeremiah’s time. So you’ve got Isaiah and those guys, but in their time, the Assyrians come, but God drives them away. So they’re like, well, that was bad, but it turned out all right. And then in the Jeremiah time, they say, well, God helped us last time. So why are you whinging at us? And he’s like, look, it’s coming. It’s coming, you know, very soon. They say, you’ve been preaching for so long, just go away, you know, 23 years, you’re wasting our time. And then it happens and they’re like, ‘Oh he is strong, but it’s because the nuclear missiles are actually passing overhead, and he’s very concerned’. But, um, you’ve got like the confessions, which is chapters 11 to 20, which are just his own agony with God. Like they’re all trying to kill me. What are you doing? I’m supposed to be your prophet, you know, come on and do something. And in the first three, um, he he complains and God about his own situation and God responds, but then the next ones, we don’t get God’s response. So it’s different from the Psalms where we never hear what God thinks. But then we have these ones where I think Jeremiah moves to a place where he doesn’t need to hear back from God or the editor of Jeremiah didn’t bother to put God’s responses in. I don’t know whether God was answering, but, and then you’ve got the book of consolation, which is every evangelical’s favorite bit of Jeremiah, apart from the letter to Babylon where I’ll give you a future and a hope and pray for the city, which is good, and then you’ve got like, um, just wonderful stories. I mean, they’re painful, but from chapter 36 onwards, there’s just a lot of narrative, and it, or 34 really, 33, 32, you know, half the book, nearly, is, is narratives mostly about how terrible the people were.

John Dickson:
Jeremiah being thrown in and out of prison, thrown down a hole. Lots of fun stuff. It was my Bible reading this morning, actually, Jill, just, just coincidentally.

Jill Firth:
But God is so faithful. They do something terrible. He says, ‘Oh, I’m going to smash you’ and then He says, ‘well, actually, I’ll give you one more chance’. I think five times He says, ‘that’s the end friends’ and then he says, ‘oh, no, not really. I’ll do this for you’. You know, one time they assassinate the governor and the Babylonian garrison, right? And I mean, then they run away because they think  we’re going to get reprisals. I mean, we know Australian history and You know, Americans would know American history, if the native people kill the garrison, you know, the troops are going to come, but, um, Jeremiah says, God says, don’t panic. I’ll look after it. You can stay in the land. You’ll be fine. It’s amazing. It’s so that’s not shouting. That’s a huge hope.

Studio – John Dickson:

The book Lamentations follows Jeremiah in the Bible (well, in the Catholic and Protestant Bible—our Jewish friends place it elsewhere; same content, just a different position in the Scriptures. The Jewish Tanakh has it in the section called Ketuvim, the Writings, nestled amongst Song of Songs, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, and the gang. Anyway, both Lamentations and Jeremiah have elements of moral injury running through them:

 Reading 

You deceived me, Lord, and I was deceived;
you overpowered me and prevailed.
I am ridiculed all day long;
everyone mocks me.
Whenever I speak, I cry out
proclaiming violence and destruction.
So the word of the Lord has brought me
insult and reproach all day long.
But if I say, “I will not mention his word
or speak anymore in his name,”
his word is in my heart like a fire,
a fire shut up in my bones.
I am weary of holding it in;
indeed, I cannot.
I hear many whispering,
“Terror on every side!
Denounce him! Let’s denounce him!”
All my friends
are waiting for me to slip, saying,
“Perhaps he will be deceived;
then we will prevail over him
and take our revenge on him.”

Jeremiah Chapter 20

Studio – John Dickson:

The devastation is clear. But Jeremiah and Lamentations also speak of healing. Professor Debra Kaminer – an expert on the psychological effects of trauma and violence at the University of Cape Town – noted back in 2006 that narrative retelling of events can actually help trauma survivors. Complaints and expressions of anguish are crucial. Old Testament scholar Leslie Allen recognised this, writing that books like Lamentations are “the script of a liturgy intended as a therapeutic ritual”. The complaints of the Bible don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re to be used by others to help face the ongoing disappointments of life.

Drew Hyun:
The most powerful kind of, uh, I think explanation of how Christians deal with pain is that we believe in a God who actually enters our pain, uh, in a savior who actually takes on flesh and dwells among us. And the reason why Jesus dies, I mean, who would even think of a story where the God, we would think of this God rescuing us, that a God, you know, and even Christians today, I mean, even as a pastor, I often have this temptation to say to people, Oh, God bless you. God is with you, especially if you got that promotion, if you got that job, if that healing or that miracle came, but the incredible thing of the Christian story, and we see this in the person of Jesus, even the way he comes into the world. As a baby to a marginalized people group, uh, to parents who are refugees is he comes to us and he’s with us in the pain and he dies on the cross and he suffers vulnerably naked on a cross to show us that he is with us in our moments of deepest darkness, sadness and loss, and that this God is a God who humbles himself and dies on our behalf and loss. Um, showing that he’s with us in the valley of the shadow of death, as the psalmist says. And, I think to believe in a God like that, not a God who’s aloof, or a God who is distant, Um, or who, a God who is against us, but a God who is actually with us. in the darkest moments of our lives. And of course, this God gives us each other the church to be with one another, to be a healing community, to experience that pain together. And we find solidarity in a Savior who died on our behalf. And so, in many ways, I, I think that the Christian witness, um, gives a compelling view of God and a compelling invitation for each one of us to enter into, uh, the darkness with clinging to the hope of who our God is, a God of love who is with us in our pain, and a God who also is a God of resurrection, who one day will wipe away every tear, um, and make every unjust thing, uh, just again. So that’s what I find so compelling is that this is a God who just doesn’t tell us, Hey, ignore your pain or detach from your pain. It’s actually enter your pain and I’m right there with you and I’m going to die for you, but I’m also going to resurrect from the grave and one day I’m going to make all things right again.

John Dickson:
What do you think doubters can gain from this whole biblical tradition of lament, complaint, you know, the writing of the ugly, uh, that is so apparent in the old Testament scriptures?

Jill Firth:
In places, some church traditions give the idea that it’s all got to be, you know, happy Pollyanna stuff, you know, life is good, don’t complain. Um, so the, the simple message to people who are doubters or Christians is that God is interested in the whole of life, what, what is really happening for you right now. And I think that is amazing when you look at Jeremiah, I mean, there’s other books as well as the Psalms and Jeremiah that do this. You can bring your doubt and just say, I don’t really believe in you. To God, not, I don’t believe in God, but to God, I believe in you. You know, I’m really angry about what you did this, you know, I’ve got people who’ve had very terrible family tragedies and they’re like, I can’t believe in a God who let that happen. You just tell God, you know, you could, I don’t believe in you. Because you made such a mess of my family or whatever it is. And you don’t get an answer usually in the Psalms, you do in Jeremiah, but you don’t in Psalms. But often people move to a point, as you said, not always of praise. In fact, it’s seldom praise. What they say is, ‘If you do something about this, I will praise you later’. I think that is really different from in 10 verses going from, I’m angry and upset and my life is terrible to “I’ll pursue Jesus!” You know, that whose life is like that? Whereas I’m still really upset. But when you do what you’ve promised, which in the Old Testament often they were actually expecting rescue from enemies or something like that, but we might expect, you know, some help of real help, but also that God would draw near to us and, you know, make himself known. But you’re not going to get any praise until you do it. It’s like, you know, put that down by deposit. And when you come through with your part, you’ll get the rest of the money. I love that. Whereas the lament to praise thing in every Psalm, even if it’s only got five verses, so painful, whereas I’ll praise you,you know, if it comes or sometimes they just say, well, I’m trusting you, but you know, it’s taking a long time. It doesn’t have to be that quick movement. You can just stay with you, especially Pslam 88, because you just tell God how terrible it is and then you’d go away and you don’t have to cheer yourself up or, you know, fix yourself. Tell the truth and, and that’s it. 

Studio – John Dickson:

“Tell the truth, and that’s it.” 

I love the Bible. I know that sounds cliched, or perhaps the thing I’m meant to say, etc.  But I mean there is nothing like the Bible when it comes to the invitation to be brutally honest with the Almighty.  As my mate Ben Shaw was dying, he asked me–insisted really–to preach the sermon at his funeral. He set the text, too. John chapter 11, Jesus raising Lazarus from death. As I was preparing that sermon I took a look at Ben’s personal Bible, which he’d had from when we’d both become Christians back in the 1980s. And he’d scribbled notes all over these pages. There are many things to notice about that passage – the fact that Jesus seems to have a best friend (“see how he loved him”, the crowd says), the miracle itself, of course, but also the shortest verse in the Bible, v.35: ‘Jesus wept’. The words are underlined in Ben’s Bible. It couldn’t be clearer in John’s Gospel that this Jesus is God incarnate – the opening lines of the book are “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God … The word became flesh and dwelt among us.” And yet here we are in John chapter 11, Jesus at a funeral weeping in love and sorrow at the death of his friend. It’s not just that God has given us words of lament to say back to him. He knows Lament, in a direct way. Think of this—whether you believe or not–think of this: In the Bible, and only the Bible, God Laments.

Undeceptions theme