2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33 NRSV
How many times have you been the object of misdirected grief and frustration? Maybe it came from a loved one, a close friend or perhaps a spouse. Out of nowhere they snap at you with this unprovoked ferocity to which you quizzically respond: “Why are you yelling at me?” “What on earth did I do?” To which they respond: “I am not mad at you. You just happen to be the only one in the room.”
Perhaps we have all been the victim of such misdirected grief. And perhaps all of us have expressed such misdirected grief and frustration. We’ve given it to our spouses. We’ve given it to our children. We’ve given it to our friends. We may have even given it to total strangers.
And then there are those times when we are so filled with pain and grief that our screams of pain are completely undirected. There are some experiences in this broken world which are so painful and so dreadful they cause us to scream out whenever, wherever, to whomever or whatever. Sometimes our screams are loud reverberations. And sometimes our screams are silent aches. They are the unavoidable, gut-wrenching responses to the frequent tragedies of life.
Sometimes it happens after a bitter argument with a loved one. It may occur after receiving a grim diagnosis. It could happen after a serious injury or during a prolonged illness. It might happen after visiting a loved one in the nursing home, or in the doctor’s office, or an ICU waiting room.
It could happen while listening to the outrageous lies from a presidential candidate during a press conference. Or listening to bigotry, racism and misogyny that sounds more like is coming from 1924 than 2024. Or when a white supremacist compares himself to Martin Luther King Jr.
And sometimes it just happens out of nowhere. We scream out in grief, sometimes aloud, sometimes silently—a scream of shock and disbelief, a scream of anger and frustration, a scream of anxiety and fear, a scream of bitterness and hopelessness. We scream out whenever, wherever, to whomever and whatever.
So, perhaps we can empathetically relate to the undirected and undeveloped cries of King David. When David learned that his son Absalom had been found slain, his body in a tree (and I love the way this is worded on our text) “hanging between heaven and earth,” David painfully and relentlessly laments aloud to no one in particular. Later we read in verse 33: “The king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!’”
The cries of David are like our cries when we have been overwhelmed with profound grief. They are fearful cries oftentimes addressed to the wind. They are angry cries. And they are hopeless cries. They are cries of utter despair. Walter Brueggemann calls the words of David “unformed, pathos-filled grief…addressed to no one in particular, surely not to the God of hope.”[1]
Like his son Absalom, David himself was hanging somewhere between heaven and earth.
David was not addressing God, as, at the time, he was probably questioning the very existence of God. He cried out like I suspect most parents would, whenever, wherever and to whomever. His cries were undirected and undeveloped.
And yet, I do not believe his cries were unheard. One of the greatest lies I hear from some evangelicals that is that God only hears the prayers of Christians.
Let me call your attention to a wonderful passage of scripture found in the second chapter of Exodus. We read that the Israelites in Egypt groaned under their slavery. The scripture tells us that they groaned and cried out. Much like King David, their cries of grief and frustration and despair were undirected and unformed. Yet, we read that “out of their slavery, their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning. God looked upon them and God took notice of them” (Exodus 2:24).
The cries of the Israelites, the cries of David and the cries of you and the cries of me may be undirected but they are never unheard. Our cries may be undeveloped groanings, but they are always understood.
The good news is that although David’s “primal scream” addressed into the wind is initially one of desperate despair, it can be interpreted as the first step to hope. God hears our undirected and undeveloped cries. God hears our loud reverberating cries and our silent aching cries. God sees us when we are hanging somewhere between heaven and earth. Although we may not address heaven, although we may doubt the very existence of heaven, heaven sees us and heaven hears us and heaven takes notice of us.
The wonderful truth is that God hears our pain. As Paul Duke has said, we can “pray our pain.”[2] Isn’t that wonderful? We can pray our pain. In fact, I believe our pain might be our best prayers in that they are probably our most honest prayers. Our most disjointed and incoherent groans into the wind may be our most articulate and eloquent prayers to the God of hope. The good news is that some of our best communication to God, some of our best talks with our creator may be what Fred Craddock calls “praying through clenched teeth.”[3]
Dr. Ernie White, one of my seminary professors who was stricken with cancer while I was a student, shaped my theology when one day he told the class, that although he could not explain it, somehow, someway, the sicker he got, the more pain he experienced, the more hopeful he became. He said that it was in his weakest moments when he felt the closest to God.
The Psalmist proclaims: “When we cry out from the depths, the Lord hears our voices. Let us wait for the Lord, and hope in God’s word” (Psalm 130).
Hanging between heaven and earth, crying out from the depths whenever, wherever, and to whomever, God hears us. And if we will wait for the Lord, I believe we will hear wonderful words of life and hope. As the psalmist proclaims, we will know a steadfast love which has great power to redeem.
Hanging between heaven and earth, Jesus to say to us:
I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry… I am the bread that came down from heaven.” “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.
God, the holy Creator of all that is, is even now lovingly emptying God’s self and pouring God’s self out for us. Revealing to us that God is here with us, not away from us; God is here for us and not against us. God is here meeting us in the depths of our pain, offering us the very best gift God has to offer, the gift of God’s holy self.
God is working in this fragmented world recreating and resurrecting, working all things together for the good, doing all that God can do to “wring whatever good can be wrung out” of the tragedies of life.[4] Although we can never go back before the injury, before the illness, before the diagnosis, before the argument, before our job was lost, before our relationship ended, although we cannot go back to the good old days, we can go forward with God into good new days.
Although our screams may be undirected, they are never unheard. Although our cries may be undeveloped, they are divinely and empathetically understood. We can pray our pain. And if we wait and hold on somewhere between heaven and earth, God, the bread of life, comes down to meet us in our pain and to envelope us with God’s steadfast love which has the power to redeem our deepest despair into our highest hope.
We will then be compelled to share this hope. For we each know someone who is even now hanging somewhere between heaven and earth—hanging and crying out aimlessly and hopelessly.
They may be a member of this congregation: awaiting test results that are a matter of life and death; dropping of their child off at a university far away from home, sitting alone grieving the loss of their loved one. They may be a family member, a neighbor or a co-worker, facing the most difficult days of their lives.
The cries come from parents of school children in Gaza crying out in the grief after losing their children to indiscriminate bombs. They come from parents in Israel who still have no word from their kidnapped loved ones. They come from our southern border, from asylum seekers, many who are LGBTQ, seeking a life free of violence and oppression. They come from hospitals in states where women are denied healthcare. They come from people right in here in Lynchburg who are denied a living wage by their employers. They come from parents of children going back to a school where their child bullied by students and the administration. They come from cities and communities who have experienced devastating flooding, gun violence, and polluted drinking water.
We need to demonstrate with our steadfast love, with our words and our deeds, with our voices and our votes that God hears them, and God loves them. Although at the time it may be difficult for them to believe that God even exists, God hears them and God understands. We are being called to wrap our arms around them and feed them bread—bread not to merely get them by until their next meal, but bread from heaven which has about it what New Testament Scholar Charles Cousar calls “the tang of eternity.”[5] With all that we are and all that we have, we are called to empty ourselves, pour ourselves out to feed them the bread of hope which satisfies now and forevermore.
[1]Walter Brueggeman, Charles B. Cousar, Beverly Gaventa, James D. Newsome. Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV—Year B. (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993) 460.
[2]Paul Duke, “First Prayer from the Ashes” Review and Expositor 4 (1992): 618.
[3]“Praying Through Clenched Teeth” is the title of a sermon by Fred B. Craddock included in The Twentieth Century Pulpit, Vol. 2, ed. James W. Cox (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1981) 47-52.
[4]This quotation is from sermons by John Claypool that I have been privileged to hear at various conferences.
[5]Brueggeman, Cousar, Gaventa, and Newsome. Texts for Preaching, 463.
Just Love 