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May 05, 2024

Prayer in Despair

Prayer in Despair

Passage: Psalms

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: Practice the Presence - Prayer

Keywords: salvation, darkness, faithfulness, deliverer, steadfast love, cry out

Psalm 88 is the bleakest of all the psalms. It shares the same sorrow as other psalms of lament, but it lacks any of the resolution or hope. What does such a darkened word of prayer have for us? From it we learn what we will all have the occasion for in this life: lament. More than mere venting it is longing. Longing for what?

Readings & Scriptures

PREPARATION: Based on Psalm 77:1-7, 11-12, 16, 19-20

LEADER: In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord;
in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying;
my soul refuses to be comforted.

ALL: When I remember God, I moan;
when I meditate, my spirit faints.
You hold my eyelids open;
I am so troubled that I cannot speak.

LEADER: I consider the days of old, the years long ago.

All: I said, “Let me remember my song in the night;
let me meditate in my heart.”
Then my spirit made a diligent search:

LEADER: “Will the Lord spurn forever,
and never again be favorable?

ALL: I will remember the deeds of the Lord;
yes, I will remember your wonders of old.
I will ponder all your work,
and meditate on your mighty deeds.

LEADER: When the waters saw you, O God,
when the waters saw you, they were afraid;
indeed, the deep trembled.

ALL: You led your people like a flock.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH/CREEDAL STATEMENT/SCRIPTURE READING: John 11:1-7, 17-21, 33-35

LEADER: John 11:1 Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill. 3 So the sisters sent to him, saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” 4 But when Jesus heard it he said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. . . .John 11:17 Now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. 18 Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, 19 and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. 20 So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house. 21 Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died…33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. 34 And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus wept.

CENTRAL TEXT: Psalm 88

Psa. 88:1 O LORD, God of my salvation,
I cry out day and night before you.
2 Let my prayer come before you;
incline your ear to my cry!

Psa. 88:3 For my soul is full of troubles,
and my life draws near to Sheol.
4 I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
I am a man who has no strength,
5 like one set loose among the dead,
like the slain that lie in the grave,
like those whom you remember no more,
for they are cut off from your hand.
6 You have put me in the depths of the pit,
in the regions dark and deep.
7 Your wrath lies heavy upon me,
and you overwhelm me with all your waves. Selah

Psa. 88:8 You have caused my companions to shun me;
you have made me a horror to them.
I am shut in so that I cannot escape;
9 my eye grows dim through sorrow.
Every day I call upon you, O LORD;
I spread out my hands to you.
10 Do you work wonders for the dead?
Do the departed rise up to praise you? Selah
11 Is your steadfast love declared in the grave,
or your faithfulness in Abaddon?
12 Are your wonders known in the darkness,
or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?

Psa. 88:13 But I, O LORD, cry to you;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
14 O LORD, why do you cast my soul away?
Why do you hide your face from me?
15 Afflicted and close to death from my youth up,
I suffer your terrors; I am helpless.
16 Your wrath has swept over me;
your dreadful assaults destroy me.
17 They surround me like a flood all day long;
they close in on me together.
18 You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me;
my companions have become darkness.

BENEDICTION: Habakkuk 3:17-19
LEADER: Though the fig tree should not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD;
I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
GOD, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the deer’s;
he makes me tread on my high places.

ALL: Amen

RELATED SCRIPTURES:

  • Psalm 13
  • Luke 13:1-8 
  • John 9
  • John 11

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. If you knew He would supply an answer, what one “why” question would you like to ask the Lord related to some sorrow in your life?
  2. Read the Psalm again in full. Summarize its substance in your own words. Does its tenor resonate with anything in your experience, even if the depths of despair it expresses are unfamiliar (or not)?
  3. Why is “venting” an incomplete view of what lamenting is, in light of this passage and sermon?
  4. Is the Psalmist faithless? Discuss.
  5. Why, for the circumstances he is struggling with,  might the Psalmist ascribe both cause and motive to God? When you have faced if not the same but similar despair what have your thoughts been about what God is “up to”? Why those?
  6. What might Jesus have said to this sufferer? In what ways might this sufferer have been pleasantly surprised and hopeful again?

ILLUSTRATIONS:  

 

 

QUOTES:

  • Any created good loved for the real goodness in it will lead eventually to an awareness of the creator of that good and to a love for God, if only the love for the good in that created thing is allowed to deepen. - Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness
  • I gazed into the universe of Wesley’s eyes almost every day for nineteen years. We communicated—spirit to spirit. I can’t really explain it, but things occurred to me when I “listened” to him, thoughts that were not my own. Perhaps he was as thoughtful as I, but in a way that I could never touch or understand; perhaps he understood and saw things that I can’t. When I would look into his relaxed, at-peace-with-himself eyes, I felt like I was looking into something inscrutable, unobtainable, deeper than we can possibly imagine, an old soul that reflected something bigger, ineffable, eternal. Even though I had been trained to exclude thoughts about spirits and unquantifiable, immeasurable feelings that could taint scientific conclusions, Wesley’s presence in my life influenced my thinking. Now I see that to exclude a certain kind of idea is itself creating a bias. What if the truth screams as loudly as a male barn owl crying for a mate, and we miss it because we have not allowed ourselves to listen to the channel it’s on—or we’ve tuned it out? Wesley helped me feel God—to “get” the idea of God and the soul in a way that I had not before and couldn’t get from a theological sermon. I’ve decided not to discount those feelings and the wonder and gratitude that comes with them. - Stacey O’Brien, Wesley the Owl, cited in Eleonore Stump’s Wandering in Darkness
  • …the deepest desire of the heart for God gives an added value to every other heart’s desire, because it turns into gifts other things on which a person has set his heart. - Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness
  • “When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at “the house of the dying” in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life. On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa. She asked, “And what can I do for you?” Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.“What do you want me to pray for?” she asked. He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: “Pray that I have clarity.” She said firmly, “No, I will not do that.” When he asked her why, she said, “Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.” When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, “I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.” --Brennan Manning
  • Behind the depressing silence of the sea, the silence of God …. the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent. - Shushaku Endo, Silence
  • Lord, I resented your silence. »
    « I was not silent. I suffered beside you. »” - Shushaku Endo, Silence
  • Our hope is in time interrupted, disrupted, abruptly altering from moment to moment. We don’t say that God’s in His heaven and all’s well with the world; not deep down. We say: all is not well with the world, but at least God is here in it, with us. We don’t have an argument that solves the problem of the cruel world, but we have a story. . . For a Christian the most essential thing God does in time, in all of human history, is to be [a] man in a crowd; a man under arrest, and on his way to our common catastrophe.  -Francis Spufford, Unapologetic

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