Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
2^nd of June, 2024

Psalm 88

Bruce and I, with the help of our cantor, Tom, are being a bit cheeky today. The psalm that Tom led us in this morning, Psalm 88, is not in the lectionary. There is no Sunday in the three-year cycle when we are advised to use Psalm 88 in worship. This is probably because, of all the psalms in the Psalter, Psalm 88 is the only lament that does not include praise of God. The last words Tom sang were ‘You have caused my friend and neighbour to shun me; my companions are in darkness’. There was no, ‘But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them ever sing for joy’ (Psalm 5:11) or ‘From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him’ (Psalm 22:25) or ‘The righteous will surround me, for you will deal bountifully with me’ (Psalm 142:7). Psalms of lament make up forty per cent of the psalms in the Psalter, but all the other laments end with praise at what God has done in the past, or with confidence that God has heard and will save the psalmist in the future. What do we do with a psalm which begins and ends in lament?

Calling out to God in situations of distress, sickness, or rejection, psalms of lament are deeply faithful responses to Israel’s experience of God in history. The entire basis of Israel’s relationship with God is the Exodus, Israel’s deliverance from Egypt after crying out to God in distress. Arising from this history, Israel assumes that God is the one who hears their cry and that the basic pattern of life is the ‘saving reversal’ from a situation of despair to one of rescue. The laments that pervade the entire Hebrew Scriptures suggest that while it is human nature to cry out to God, it is equally Divine nature to listen to those cries. When psalmists lament, they lament in hope, expecting that God will hear them and help them. Laments end in praise of the God who listens and acts. Except for Psalm 88. In Psalm 88 the psalmist is addressing an apparently ‘empty sky and an indifferent throne’.[1]

Psalm 88 begins, as do all psalms of lament, with an Address to the God who saves, ‘O Lord God of my salvation’. This address is then followed by a Petition: ‘When by night, I cry out in your presence, let my prayer come before you; O turn your ear to my cry’. So far Psalm 88 could be any lament. But then, unlike all the other laments, it contains no confession of trust, no words of assurance, no vow of praise and thanksgiving. From verse three to verse eighteen Psalm 88 is pure complaint; absolute lament. The God of salvation who is addressed does not seem to intervene, and the psalmist does not praise.

Usually, psalms of lament mention human ‘enemies’ who have caused the psalmist’s grief, persecutors who are too strong for them, or those who mock them, making mouths at them and shaking their heads. But in this Psalm there are no such enemies; instead, the one injuring the psalmist is God. Again and again, the psalmist accuses God: You have laid me in the lowest pit; Your anger weighs heavy upon me; You have caused my friends to shun me; Your fury has swept down upon me; Your terrors have utterly destroyed me; You; You; You. Not only has God abandoned the psalmist; God has also caused the psalmist’s companions to shun them. Twice the psalmist cries: ‘You have caused my companions/friend and neighbour to shun me’ and the psalm ends on this note of desolation: ‘My companions are in darkness’.

There is an authenticity in Psalm 88 that many lamenters will recognise. The psalmist cries out to the Lord and gets no answer. Their lament seems to go unheard. As Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, ‘There are unanswered prayers. There are unresolved situations. There are times when Yahweh’s hesed (loving-kindness) is not mobilized and is not operative.’[2] Psalm 88 is often interpreted as a lament caused by a terminal illness, but its metaphors mean that it is open to various interpretations and available for a variety of uses. Howard Wallace, who taught me the Psalms at Theological College, describes this as ‘a psalm to pray with or for those who feel absolutely abandoned by Yahweh and by companions for reasons of social stigma, disability, physical or mental disease.’[3] For me, this is the psalm that best describes what it feels like to have clinical depression. Anyone who, in any way, feels laid in the lowest pit will find in this psalm a cry they recognise and know that, however cut off and shut in they feel, someone else has felt the same.

Psalm 88 allows those who pray to be open about our feelings and lay our desperation at the Lord’s feet without feeling that we have lost our faith. It recognises humanity’s need to call out to the God who appears absent, to complain to God about God. In this psalm God is both problem and solution; the one whose wrath overwhelms the psalmist like the sea and yet also the one to whom the psalmist calls. In all their sorrow and pain, the psalmist says: ‘By night, I cry out in your presence … I call to you, O Lord, every day; To you I stretch out my hands … in the morning my prayer comes before you’. The psalmist continues to pray, morning and night, stretching out their hands in the traditional posture of prayer, even when they feel that God is ignoring them. Psalm 88 reminds us that we need not feel guilt when we experience a sense of unrelieved abandonment by God, while also reminding us that those who have gone before us have continued to call on God in their abandonment. In this psalm, the psalmist is making the same cry that Jesus made from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34)

Maybe crying out is all the psalmist needs. Maybe the fact that the psalmist does keep praying, even while feeling abandoned, means that at some level they do continue to believe that God hears their cry. And maybe the psalmist just needs someone, God, to listen, even if their situation remains as dark at the end of their prayer as it did at the beginning. Chaplains have used this psalm in pastoral care with people who have terminal illnesses, and because of the lines about the psalmist’s friends and neighbours shunning them it was found to be of particular help with people dying of AIDS in the 1980s and 90s. Maybe its focus on articulating despair without expecting a cure is the psalm’s greatest strength.

Often when we pray to God the answer seems to be silence. There are even times when God seems to be the guilty party in the situation about which we are praying. Why do we live in a world in which hundreds of people can be buried in landslides? Why do we live in a world in which those we love can be diagnosed with terminal cancer? Why do mental illnesses exist? Even if God does not seem to be immediately responsible, and we can see the human agency that has led to the situations of terror and despair, what does it mean that we live in a world in which people of one religion can slaughter children because they are of another faith? Why has God not torn open the heavens and come down (Isaiah 64:1) to challenge those who claim they are killing in God’s name? Psalm 88 does not provide an answer to these questions, but it does give us the language in which to cry out in all our pain and anger.

The paradox of Psalm 88 is that even isolated in utter darkness we do not stand alone. When we feel most deserted by God, the Psalter reminds us that other people of God have felt as we feel, and have continued to call out to God in their agony. We are united to the psalmist in our pain and, through the psalmist’s prayer, we are united with God. We are reassured that nothing can separate us from the love of God, not even the desperate feeling that God is overwhelming us with waves of wrath, not even the sense that God has put us in the depths of the Pit, not even the belief that God has left us in darkness. Others have been through this before us, and in the Psalter we have been given the gift of their companionship. Even as we cry out ‘You have caused my friend and neighbour to shun me; my companions are in darkness’ we are not alone. Amen.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, ‘The Psalms as Prayer’ in Patrick D. Miller ed., Psalms and the Life of Faith, p. 56.

[2] Brueggemann, ‘The Psalms as Prayer’, p. 56.

[3] Howard Neil Wallace, Words to God, Words from God: The Psalms in the Prayer and the Preaching of the Church, p. 120.