Language of Pain

      "It was the time of the preacher when the story began... of the choice of a lady and the love of a man. How he loved her so dearly he went out of his mind... an' he cried like a baby. He screamed like a panther... in the middle of the night, but he could not forgive her, though he tried and tried and tried... and the halls of his memories... still echo her lies." As some of you know, our daughter and grandson were with us last week. We took in a family reunion, played air hockey, gathered together to bury my mother... and Kendra shared a Willie Nelson song with me. It's called the "Time of the Preacher," and it describes a pain too deep for words. It describes a loss that cannot be expressed... except in guttural cries. He cried like a baby because he could do no other, and he screamed like a panther because he had no words... for the empty darkness that was all around. In the course of our lives, if we have a soul at all, our hearts will be shattered. Our child will die. Mother, dad, baby brother, little sister. Our lover will betray us, our dreams will mock us. If we live long enough, if we care deeply enough, death will laugh in our face and run off with our heart, and we will be left without words... just sobs, and screams, and waving our fists at the air... like the primitive creature we've never quite outgrown.
     Pastor Benno Pattison writes of his father's passing. He and his brother were prepared for the inevitable, but his grandmother was overwhelmed with grief. She covered her son's dead body and made frightening sounds. "Her keening came from the depths," the Pattison wrote, "I'd never heard a sound like it, nor have I heard a sound like it since. She wailed, a deep primordial call to God, to the ancients, to her child, to the still, cold body, She called from her depths. It was an awesome auditory experience... To hear my grandmother's wailing over my dad's body was to hear an ancient tongue speak the mysteries of life. It silenced us all... but the psalmist gives us permission to wail out to God from our deepest place of grief, anger, fear, frustration. There is a human truth embedded in the voice of the psalm, the aggrieved, the marginalized. It is the truth that there is a place in us that speaks in an ineffable tongue, a sighing and groaning...that is at once transcendent and imminent. It speaks of the mystery of creation itself, of an earth caught in bondage, of a world calling out for redemption, freedom, release... (and salvation.) When my dad died, Pattison goes on, we were sitting in another room adjacent to where dad had spent the last two years of his life slowly dying.  The nurse came out with a shocked look on her face. We walked into the room and stood observing the end of a life. The prayer was mumbled into the silence of our terror, our fear, prayed out of the depths of our tradition, an echo of David's cry to God from the depths, this holy place of deep truth, deep emotion, deep reality.  From this place we stand in our depths and ask, wail, lament, complain, weep, hope--God, are your there?  God, are you listening?"
      Have you ever cried to God from a holy place of deep truth? Have you ever shaken your fist at the wind? Have you ever had a holy conversation with God? Have you ever cried for an Absalom in your own life? Has there ever been anyone you would've died for to save... or taken their place... at any cost? Well, David did, and as the time of this preacher draws to a close, I will turn once again to Frederick Buechner. Listen to his words: "Almost from the start, Absalom had a number of strikes against him. For one thing, he was much too handsome for his own good... For another thing, his father...was...either spoiling him rotten or reading him the riot act. This did not promote stability of character. He murdered his lecherous brother Amnon for fooling around with their sister, Tamar, and when...Joab wouldn't help him patch things up with David...he set fire to his hay field. Israel found this kind of derring-do irresistible, of course, and when he eventually led a revolt against his father, a lot of them joined up. On the eve of the crucial battle, David was a wreck. If he was afraid he might lose his throne, he was even more afraid he might lose Absalom. The boy was the thorn in his flesh, but he was also the apple of his eye, and before the fighting started, he told the chiefs that, if Absalom fell into their clutches, they must promise to go easy on him. Remembering what had happened to his hay field, old Joab kept his fingers crossed, and when he found Absalom caught in the branches of an oak tree by his beautiful hair, he ran him through without blinking an eye. When they broke the news to David, it broke his heart, just as simple as that, and he cried out in words that have echoed down the centuries ever since. '0 my son Absalom, my son, my son;' he said. "Would I had died instead of you, 0 Absalom, my son, my son.' He meant it, of course. If he could have done the boy's dying for him, he would have done it. If he could have paid the price for the boy's betrayal of him, he would have paid it. If he could have given his own life to make the boy alive again, he would have given it. But even a king can't do things like that. It takes a God."
      Indeed. It takes a God- a God who understands our pain-filled groans... and our fear-filled screams- a God who will die for us! As you know, I like words (too many, too often, I know)... but the most holy ground I've ever stood on... has been filled with silence, sobs, guttural cries... and hope! My mother died on July 3rd. We buried her last Saturday... and in between, I uttered a thousand words. But there was a night in the middle of it all- when I sat my glasses down on my desk in the office... and sobbed out loud. It only lasted for a minute or so because I am not a cry baby... but it was the most honest conversation that I had with God about the matter. Once, Jesus cried out, Eli, Eli lama sabachthani- my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" as he hung on his cross... and from time to time, I scream like a panther... in the middle of the night. Amen.