Sermons

The Holy Tradition of Crying Out

Hear us when we cry, O God. O God, hear our prayer. Amen.

I’d like to begin with a scripture we didn’t hear in our lessons today, Psalm 77, because I think it speaks to this particular moment. Psalm 77 begins like this: “I will cry aloud to God. I will cry aloud and he *will* hear me.” 

What I hear in those opening words is a demand. It’s not simply that God is hearing the speaker because God knows our hearts, or because this is a murmured, half-hearted prayer.  This opening line is a demand to be listened to, to be paid attention to, to not only be heard but to be heeded. The author is saying “Hey God, you better listen up!” 

And that comes to mind because in so many places I have heard the voices of the faithful crying out these last days. 

Voices in Los Angeles crying out, “These are our neighbors, don’t deport them. Don’t militarize our streets.” 

Voices in the Middle East crying out, “End this cycle of violence. End these wars. Feed our children.”

Voices at World Pride are crying out, “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people are beloved children of God.” 

Voices protesting the president’s proposed Medicaid cuts, saying, “My life as a person with a disability is worth living in full. Don’t force me into a hospital bed by defunding my care.”

Voices in Minnesota are saying, “Melissa and Mark Hortman were good people. Their lives were cut short in an act of unspeakable political violence.” 

Voices across this nation, saying, “In this country, There. Is. No. King.” 

We are a people crying out. We want peace. We want accountability. We want to have enough, to know that our children and our grandchildren will be okay, that they will grow up in a world that is safe and stable. Our cries are fueled by both grief and hope, fear and longing, fury and love.

And in the middle of Psalm 77, the author writes questions that are imbued with the same feelings about the future that we have now.

Has God’s loving-kindness come to an end forever?

Has his promise failed forevermore?

When I feel afraid or lost, these are the questions I come back to. Because they remind me that Jews and Christians have been asking these same questions for thousands of years. We join them in the holy tradition of crying out to God. 

In the final section of the psalm, the author starts to tell themself the story of creation, to remember how God was faithful then, so that we can expect God to be faithful now. And it’s similar to what we have in our Proverbs reading today. In Proverbs, we hear Holy Wisdom saying, “When [the Creator] assigned to the sea its limit, I was there, so that the waters might not transgress his command.” In the psalm, “The waters saw you, O God; the waters saw you and trembled; the very depths were shaken.” Both are retellings of our primordial history. 

Telling our stories, the story of creation, of our forefathers and foremothers, the story of the prophets, the kings, the stories of Jesus, of the apostles, of our church history, these stories don’t take away the pain of what is happening now. But they do show us other times that we have struggled, that we have cried out, and other times that God has been with us in our struggles. 

In my final semester of seminary, I took a class called “Biblical Storytelling for Survival,” and I thought maybe the class would look at a few stories that I thought of as survival stories, Noah and the flood, for instance. But actually, the whole class was built around the idea that every story can be interpreted as a survival story. Because when we tell the stories of who we are, we are reminding ourselves and each other what we have been through, how we have persevered, how we can again. 

“…we have three ways to know…God. The Creator gave us the voice to cry out, Jesus taught us the words, and the Spirit inspires us to do so. “

Today, on the church calendar, we celebrate Trinity Sunday, typically an opportunity for the least experienced preacher on the rota to attempt to illuminate the Doctrine of the Trinity. Lucky for you, I won’t be attempting that today because there is so much else going on. But I do want to say that the Trinity is an integral part of our faith stories. We have one God, but we have three ways to know that God. The Creator gave us the voice to cry out, Jesus taught us the words, and the Spirit inspires us to do so. 

This community has and will continue to use our voice and our work to show up for those on the margins. More than a dozen of us stood on the Capitol steps for the Pentecost Witness for a Moral Budget this week to sing and to pray with faith leaders, including our own diocesan leader, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde. Later in the week, she wrote to the diocese about the challenges we are all experiencing and what she sees throughout our communities. 

She writes, “There is much that I do not know or understand about suffering. What I do know is that it can make us feel isolated and alone. Physical and emotional pain requires enormous amounts of internal energy, leaving us with diminished capacity for the rest of our lives. So, too, when we are concerned about the suffering of our loved ones. Their pain hovers in our consciousness all the time. 

We often don’t realize the toll suffering takes until exhaustion sets in. Rest is essential, yet how can we rest in the face of pain? 

When faced with the suffering of another, the kindest thing to do is to show up. When it is within our capacity to relieve or spare unnecessary suffering, it is always right to do so. Most of the time, however, we can’t alleviate the pain. But we can still show up, no matter how helpless we feel. Even the smallest gesture means more than we realize, for our presence assures those who suffer that they are not alone.”

My prayer for us today is that we will show up and cry out, and that God will be with us. 

Amen