Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Last week my town celebrated the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Every day, the town was invited to attend a noon meal at one of the churches. These are always wonderful times of fellowship and prayer.

I had the honor of leading the Wednesday service at our church and it prompted me to look back at the sermon I shared a year ago. Reading over it now, a year later, I am able to recall the strong emotions that were running through me when I wrote it.

It's hard to believe my mother-in-law has been gone less than a year. In some ways it feel likes longer, and, in other ways, it feels like her passing was just yesterday. Grief is strange like that; it comes in waves and hits at random moments. She is missed.

Here is the sermonette from last year. The theme of the day was "walking with the broken" and the passage was Psalm 22, verses 1-8

1 

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
    Why are you so far from saving me,
    so far from my cries of anguish?

2 

My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
    by night, but I find no rest.

3 

Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One;
    you are the one Israel praises.

4 

In you our ancestors put their trust;
    they trusted and you delivered them.

5 

To you they cried out and were saved;
    in you they trusted and were not put to shame.

6 

But I am a worm and not a man,
    scorned by everyone, despised by the people.

7 

All who see me mock me;
    they hurl insults, shaking their heads.

8 

“He trusts in the Lord,” they say,
    “let the Lord rescue him.
Let him deliver him,
    since he delights in him.”

     In less than a month, my mother-in-law Janis will be dead. She’s 64 years old, and for a little over a year has been going through every imaginable treatment for lung cancer. And when I share that with people, most are extremely compassionate, kind, and loving -- but the truth is, they don’t know exactly what to say. I think emotionally they’re feeling, “Aw, feel better! Don’t worry!” and so it ends up popping out of their mouths in cliches. The truth is, it’s tough to walk alongside the broken, isn’t it?

I know it’s worse for Janis. When she first started losing her hair, it was like this social barrier went up around her. No one would come within 10 feet, and those who did break the barrier were really full of emotion. They’d say things like, “Janis, you are so brave! You are my hero.” And later she’d say, “Well that was ridiculous.”   When tumors started growing visibly on the outside of her skull, and on the neck, little kids would ask their parents, a little too loudly, “Mommy, what’s wrong with that lady?” And the parents would shush. See, it’s hard to walk alongside the broken.

I had the chance to spend a week with her back in October. She was going through radiation treatments at the time, so every day we’d bring her to the cancer center and wait in the waiting room. And day after day, my eyes kept getting drawn to this little green chalkboard that had been propped up on a table. Probably 8 1/2 by 11 inches. And when I got close, I saw there was a little card with it that gave instructions, “Every day we write an inspiring quote. If you know any, share them with us so we can post.”

I thought, great! I work in a church where a big part of my job is sharing hope. I’ve read countless books on theology, counseling, philosophy. Surely I can come up with something to lessen the fear and confusion that the patients around me were feeling! I mean, surely I could come up with one tiny phrase that wasn’t shallow or meaningless.

This little green chalkboard became my obsession. I stayed up late at night thinking, what words could explain cancer? What words would show these amazing people that they weren’t alone? At the end of the week I still only had one word that made sense for that board. Jesus. That’s it - nothing else made sense for that room, for that chalkboard.

In Psalm 22, David is facing his own little green chalkboard. He’s felt the fear of running from a madman that wants to kill him. He’s felt the tension of a nation that couldn’t seem to figure out what they really wanted. And so now he’s wrestling with the big questions, “Why, God!?” and doesn’t seem to be making much progress. He shouts out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Shocking words to read in our Bibles, if we think about it. I mean, imagine David has come to your small group Bible Study. And as the group starts to pray, you’re sitting there in the circle, and someone in the group cries out that God has forsaken them. 

See, it’s one thing to tell people to cast their burdens on Christ. It’s quite another to actually see it happen; when they don’t just give their best to God but they also give their worst -- anger, frustration. And if you’re like me, part of you would feel strange, after the prayer you’d want to walk up to him and defend God. You’d want to say, “God never forsakes us, don’t worry.” 

So what do those honest, raw, hurting prayers teach us about unity? What do we share? Well first, David’s prayer shows us that we all share in some level of doubt. In verse 2 he admits, “My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.” David has unanswered questions. And keep in mind, this is King David, a man after God’s own heart. He was a celebrity in his time. And to this day if you walk up to a Jewish believer and ask who the greatest king who ever lived was, they’d say King David, of course. So if it’s okay for King David to express his doubts, then maybe it’s okay for us to express our doubts as well.

Because as desperate as these first two verses get, notice they both begin the same way. “My God...” That’s important. David doesn’t allow his hurt to become a closed loop, self-focused, but instead invites God into the pain. “My God, my God.” And that’s the difference between a doubt that will take you closer to God, and a doubt that will take you further away. If your prayer begins by looking towards God, then no matter how ugly the words get, you’re showing that you want to be united with Christ.        This is a freeing truth -- it means we don’t just need a Savior that first day we believed, and then are expected to have all the answers forever after. Instead, it means we need to lean on our Savior every day: that’s why belief in Jesus is not about a concept, it’s about a relationship.

So David is staring into the blank emptiness of his own little green chalkboard. The first two verses show he’s got nothing. This tough season of his life has wiped away any answer he thought he had. So in verse 3 he falls back upon the one and only thing he knows to be 100% true and trustworthy. He says, “YET, you are enthroned as the Holy One.” That’s the thread he clings to. That’s the answer he writes on the chalkboard for all to see.   And immediately that connects him to the larger narrative. He remembers experiencing God’s goodness in his youth, when things weren’t so tough. He remembers God’s faithfulness to his ancestors. And in the final verses of the Psalm, he even looks ahead to the future, proclaiming, “Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!”

By giving his pain to God, and not keeping it for himself, he realizes he is part of a much larger story, and a much larger community. And truly, David learns to walk alongside the broken because he realizes God’s been walking alongside the broken this entire time. 

Which leads me to my final point. You may recognize this first line of David’s -- My God, My God, why have you forsaken me. -- from another part of the Bible. In Matthew 27:46, Jesus prays these words while dying on the cross. Why, in that moment, in that place, would Jesus quote this ancient poem full of pain and brokenness?

Some say Jesus was just fulfilling prophecies, showing his connection to the regal line of David. Others say Jesus was just saying it for our sakes -- like an object lesson, to show us it’s okay to feel awful sometimes. I think the truth is so much more powerful than that.

In crying out those words, Jesus revealed that He experiences David’s pain, the pain of the ancestors, and whatever questions or hurts you might be experiencing today. We’re united by the truth that Jesus walks with the broken.

Over the last year, as cancer took more and more of my mother-in-law, she didn’t want to talk about Jesus, or the meaning of life and death. She turned away from the chalkboard completely. Two days ago, while lying in bed in the intensive care unit, having just had a liter of fluid taken from around her heart, she turned to her son and said, “Don’t be sad when I’m gone. I’m not scared of death anymore, I believe and trust in Jesus.” We’ve waited a lot of years for those words. Praise Jesus, the Lord of Life, who walks with the broken until they’re broken no more.