Sometimes as Christians we shy away from lament and other strong emotions, especially more negative ones. But opening ourselves up to lament is a way to open ourselves up to the pain and tragedy around us, even when things are fine on our end. It’s a way to empathize with those around us who are suffering.
As we look at the Psalms, we can break them into five categories generally – Lament, Praise & Thanksgiving, Wisdom, Royal/Messianic and the Psalms of Ascent.
Psalm 42 is the first psalm of book two of the Psalms, out of five – correlated with Exodus from the Pentateuch. It is one of the first psalms of lament, as well.
It’s a psalm we can relate to, as the psalmist wrestles with the fact that he sees evil winning and his enemies triumphing – “where is your god?” It’s a question we have all wrestled with as we see horrible things happen. But we tend to wrestle with it individually, rather than corporately. In public we often paper over our challenges with an outward face of joy that does not match our heart. We take the calls to rejoice from scripture and turn them into a mask, rather than honestly responding to the calls elsewhere to lament.
Theologian Walter Bruggeman, in his writings on the Psalms, describes our lives as moving in one of two directions – into the pit or out of the pit. This means we are in one of three places – either Orientation, when we feel like things make sense and we understand the world and our place in our; Disorientation, the crisis point when everything that made sense previously no longer does; or Reorientation, where we are given a new way of understanding the world and our place within it.
Within that paradigm, Psalms of lament are there to serve as reflections of those times of Disorientation, to point us back to times of Orientation, and forward to times of Reorientation. In Psalm 42, the speaker is so downcast that his tears are his only food – but calls on himself to remember the better times when he did feel connection with God, but also allows himself to cry out in desperation, itself an act of worship. But ends with a call forward to what he knows of God and how he will respond – “yet I will praise him, my savior and my God.”
So when we look at the world and see pain and chaos and hypocrisy, we can, with the psalmist, “yet praise him.”
We are people of rhythms – day and night, the turning of the seasons, reminding us of times of death and sadness, of times of joy and rebirth. We can use the Psalms as we go through these seasons ourselves – we can pray the Psalms of lament both as we ourselves find ourselves lamenting, but also as a spiritual exercise to open ourselves up to the sorrow of others.
What are you lamenting in your personal life. What do you lament for your family? What about your workplace, school or neighborhood? In our nation? In our world?
— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, November 16, 2025