A Lament for Dark Days – 1 Samuel 1:1-2:11, Preview

“Hello darkness, my old friend.”  

Can you imagine singing that lyric during a worship service?  No?  Me neither.  It’s the start of the Simon & Garfunkel song “The Sound of Silence.”  Great song, but we probably wouldn’t sing it as a praise to God in a worship service.

What about this line:

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

Not a lyric you’d expect to sing either.  Here’s another one:

“Lord you have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths.”

Grim.  Depressing, isn’t it?  We want our worship songs to cheer us up, give us hope, point us to God.  Not the other way around!  Yet, these are all lines from Psalm 88 (see verse 18 for Simon & Garfunkel’s source material!). The Psalms were ancient Israel’s songbook, and they are sung in many church worship services across the globe still today.  The Psalms include pained laments like Psalm 88. While most of the laments start with anguished complaints, they eventually get around to proclamations of faith in God’s love and power (see Psalm 13 for a classic lament).  But not Psalm 88.  From verse 1 through the darkness of verse 18, Psalm 88 is a nonstop frustrated prayer of despair.  

And I am glad for that.  I am thankful Psalm 88 is in the Bible because life can often feel confusing, complex, irrational, and just as empty as the psalmist describes.  I am thankful that God wants us to bring all our real-world muck to him, even if we don’t get around to the hopeful, trusting, grateful parts of prayer.  In fact, this week on the blog, we’re going to meet someone who prays a prayer that sounds like Psalm 88.  

If you’re struggling with the junk of life, if you’re wondering why God seems like he’s fallen asleep on the job, if you’re desperate, then I believe this person’s prayer will resonate with you.  But really, the prayer, and the theme of the sermon, applies to all of us because we are all human, and that means we all have pain and problems from time to time.  

I look forward to starting this blog series on the Life of David, following the account in the Old Testament books of 1^st and 2^nd Samuel.  It will be a few weeks until David enters the story, so we first meet the people that provide the background for David.  This week we learn about a woman named Hannah, who as I mentioned above, is walking through her own valley of darkness. 

Photo by Scott Szarapka on Unsplash