Three Contemporary Laments

Posted on January 13, 2025 by J Richard Middleton

I’ve been reflecting on the value of lament prayer ever since I went through a particularly dark time in my life many years ago. After not praying for some months, I found the lament psalms in the Bible as the door to hope, which opened me up to praying again.

These psalms are also known as protest or complaint psalms, and for good reason.

Lament as the Door to Hope

Lament psalms (like my own lament prayers) are not decorous and “proper”; they do not conform to the way that many Christians think we ought to pray. They are utterly honest, and thus often abrasive, attempts to grapple with God over situations that do not seem right.

Although there are approximately fifty psalms in the Bible that are typically regarded as laments (that is, about a third of the Psalter), the psalm that meant the most to me at the time was Psalm 88, arguably the darkest and most despairing of them all. I was particularly struck by the translation of Mitchell Dahood in his Psalms commentary in the Anchor Bible series.

To know that such honest prayers were canonized in the Bible (as models for our prayer) and to be able to articulate my own pain (no holds barred) to the Creator of the universe—that is what reawakened my faith. I gained a sense through lament prayer that God was willing to take my suffering seriously. That was the kind of God I could trust.

So it led to a deeper commitment to God on my part—in response to God’s own commitment to take suffering seriously. Indeed, God took it so seriously that it led to the cross.

Lament in Popular Music

Over the years, as I have come to value lament prayer, I noticed that there were some profound lyrics by various contemporary artists that articulated lament or protest to God, which people of faith could learn from.

Three pieces that have particularly impacted me are “Bartender” by the Dave Matthews Band (2002), “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” by the Smashing Pumpkins (1995), and “Dear God” by XTC (1986). All three songs are formulated as prayers, addressing God with complaints or questions, and calling on God for help.

“Bartender” moves generally from petition to complaint. Intertwined with verses that address first “brother of mine” then “sister of mine” and then “mother of mine,” we find two verses where the singer pleads directly to God (the Bartender) to fill his glass “With the wine you gave Jesus that set him free / After three days in the ground.” Also interspersed between various verses is the cry: “I’m on bended knees / Oh, Bartender, please!” And once, “Oh, Father, please!”

In the second half of the song, complaint dominates, with the admission that the singer is overcome by another drink, which seems stronger than the one he’s been asking for. In counterpoint to the plea for resurrection life in the first half of the song, we find (also stated in two verses) this deathly admission: “The wine that’s drinking me / Came from the vine that strung Judas from the Devil’s tree / Its roots deep, deep in the ground.” Yet perhaps complaint doesn’t quite have the final word, since the song ends with the passionate cry: “I’m on bended knees / Oh, Bartender, please!”

You can find the lyrics here to a haunting acoustic solo version of “Bartender” sung by Dave Matthews (without the band). This is the original version (with the band).

The complaint in “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” is that “the world is a vampire, sent to drain” and speaks of “betrayed desires,” while the chorus articulates the singer’s experience that “despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.” In the midst of repeating this line over an over, there is an external voice saying, “What is lost can never be saved.” Yet the singer yearns to be significant to God, almost screaming the line: “Jesus was an only son for you!” The song ends seemingly without hope, with the refrain, “I still believe that I cannot be saved”; the external voice has been internalized.

Warning: This song is in the “metal” genre. The music is especially abrasive (which makes it even more powerful). I’ve had some older church people ask me to turn it down (or even off!). However, I used to play this song in the car on my way to band practice at church. My kids, who would often accompany me, came to call it “the church song”!

“Dear God” also contains petitions, asking God to “make it better down here” and pleading: “we need a big reduction in amount of tears.” Specific problems are cited in the first two verses, including poverty and war, which afflict “all the people that you made in your image.” And in each case God is indicted as the cause of the problem. Starvation is because “they don’t get enough to eat / From God” and war is because “they can’t make opinions meet / About God.” And each verse ends by saying “I can’t believe in you.”

Then the third verse turns to the “crazy” things written in the Bible (“Your name is on a lot of quotes in this book”) and those people made in God’s image “Still believing that junk is true / Well I know it ain’t and so do you / Dear God.” The musical variations, from gentle to insistent, with violins at one point, make the lyrics especially poignant.

Then comes the bridge, where the music first pulls back, then increases in dynamic intensity to a climax. This section juxtaposes various elements of Christian theology (which the singer refuses to believe) with a list of wrongs in the world, followed by this declaration: “The hurt I see helps to compound/ That Father, Son and Holy Ghost / Is just somebody’s unholy hoax.”

But the song ends with a highly paradoxical statement: “And if you’re up there you’d perceive / That my heart’s here upon my sleeve / If there’s one thing I don’t believe in / It’s you / Dear God.” The question is why someone who doesn’t believe in God would tell this to God. Indeed, why they would write an entire song addressed to a God they don’t believe in? Because (and that’s the point of “my heart’s here upon my sleeve”) they desperately want to believe.

It was my engagement with lament prayer that led to my book, Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). Here I addressed examples of vigorous prayer in the Bible, including the lament psalms, prophetic intercession in the tradition of Moses, and the book of Job. These examples prodded me to ask why Abraham didn’t lament or protest when God asked him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The book ends with a theology of lament prayer applicable to Christians in a world of pain and suffering. You can take a look at the Table of Contents and read the Introduction to Abraham’s Silence here.

In a follow-up post, I will note some of the other things I’ve written on lament.

A version of this blog is posted on the Northeastern Seminary website.

The Contrast between Job and Abraham—From Vigorous Protest to Unquestioning Silence

Posted on August 14, 2021 by J Richard Middleton

This is the third in a series of blog posts where I’ll outline the argument of my new book, Abraham’s Silence: The Binding of Isaac, the Suffering of Job, and How to Talk Back to God, which is scheduled to be published by Baker Academic this fall (November 2021).

This is a follow-up to my second post called, The Importance of Lament for Understanding Genesis 22.

Making Sense of the Book of Job

Some years after discovering the lament psalms, with their validation of vigorous prayer to God, I began teaching a unit on the book of Job as part of a course on the Old Testament.

William Blake – Job rebuked by his friends

Job is usually understood as raising (but never quite answering) the problem of suffering. Since it is not clear that the book was intended to answer this problem, many different, even contradictory, interpretations have been proposed.

However, one thing most interpreters (whether in the church or in academia) agree on is that God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind was a slap in his face for daring to question divine providence.

But the more I studied Job, the more I began to realize that this interpretation is fundamentally wrongheaded.

God did, indeed, criticize Job’s faulty theology (his assumptions that God micromanaged the cosmos) in the first speech from the whirlwind.

After this speech, Job was reduced to silence. So if God wanted to shut Job up, why is there a second speech?

I suggest that the point of God’s second speech was actually to encourage Job, by affirming the validity of his lament. This is why Job is praised for having “spoken rightly” of God (Job 42:7). In fact, one of the details of Job 42:7 that is usually lost in translation is that the Hebrew says that Job has spoken rightly to God. His direct complaints to the Creator are here validated.

I first presented an academic paper on this topic in 2004, with various iterations over the years. I finally wrote it up into a journal article, “Does God Come to Bury Job or to Praise Him? The Significance of YHWH’s Second Speech from the Whirlwind” (2017).

This article is the basis for an expanded chapter in Abraham’s Silence on God’s two speeches from the whirlwind, where I clarify the difference between the two speeches (something not usually explained in commentaries).

Abraham’s Silence has two chapters on Job, which together take the reader through the entire drama of the book—both the narrative frame and the poetic dialogues—with a focus on the sort of vigorous speech that God desires.

Abraham in Genesis 22

Then we come to Abraham.

Ever since I came to value the honesty of the lament psalms and discerned that God was validating Job’s bold complaints, Abraham has been a puzzle to me.

In fact, Abraham himself vigorously challenged God in Genesis 18 (and God accepted his challenge). So why did Abraham draw back from doing this in Genesis 22?

In my next blog post, I’ll examine this shift between Genesis 18 and Genesis 22.

Biblical Interpretation for Caribbean Renewal—Call for Papers Closes in Two Weeks

Posted on July 1, 2017 by J Richard Middleton

This is a reminder of the upcoming theology conference that I am helping to organize in Kingston, Jamaica, on Friday–Saturday, September 8–9, 2017.

The conference is sponsored by the Jamaica Theological Seminary (and will take place on their campus).

The conference is co-sponsored by the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology and the United Theological College of the West Indies.

This interdisciplinary theology conference celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Jamaica Association of Evangelicals and the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

Keynote Speaker—Dr. Steed Davidson

The keynote speaker will be Dr. Steed Davidson, Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible / Old Testament at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago.

Dr. Davidson, who is a Trinidadian (technically, from Tobago), will kick off the conference with a programmatic lecture on Friday evening entitled “The Hazards and Opportunities of Sola Scriptura for Caribbean Biblical Interpretation”; then on Saturday there will be papers on a variety of topics related to the conference theme: “Biblical Interpretation for Caribbean Renewal.”

Paper Proposals Welcome—For Two More Weeks

With two weeks till the deadline, there is still time to propose a paper.

Proposals are invited from established scholars and practitioners in all theological disciplines, as well as from graduate students, post-docs, and non-tenured faculty.

Both Caribbean residents and others with an interest in the Caribbean are invited to propose papers.

The Conference Theme—From Many Angles

We encourage high quality papers on any topic relevant to the theme of “Biblical Interpretation for Caribbean Renewal.”

We welcome papers from all theological disciplines, including biblical, historical, systematic, philosophical, moral, pastoral theology, and theology that engages culture, the church, or other academic fields.

We especially encourage papers that:

propose priorities for biblical interpretation in the Caribbean
address current practices of biblical interpretation in the Caribbean
engage particular biblical texts in light of Caribbean realities

The due date for receiving proposals is July 15, 2017.

You may access the Call for Papers, which contains further information on submitting proposals.

As we get closer to the conference date, the conference page on the website of the Jamaica Theological Seminary will be updated with information about registration and the conference schedule.