Psalm 31 answers the question “what do we do when we are filled with shame and despair?”
Lament is not a popular topic. The scriptures are full of it, but our culture, our Christian culture in particular, is not. We seek to “skip ahead” to the glory of the cross, over the pain, grief & humility of the cross.
Before Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he took time to grieve that death – “Jesus wept.” Lament is medicine for the soul and a check against injustice.
One of the key themes of the psalm is shame and disgrace. Benjamin Rush wrote, “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” and this is what David is facing in and through this psalm. His response is “Into your hands I commit my spirit,” the same words Jesus quoted as He faced the ultimate shame and despair on the cross.
In verse 15, God’s hands come into play again – David’s “times” are in His hands, the ordained moments of his very life.
The cornerstone of this relationship is the love of God, in Hebrew “hesed” – a covenantal, relational love that God lavishes on us and that He seeks from us in return.
And this is the answer to the question posed by the Psalm – when faced by shame and despair, our answer is to love God and to accept His love in return.
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
There is a tension between joy and lament in the Christian life. How do you celebrate and have joy when those around you are struggling? How do you “rejoice always” as Paul instructs when there is so much suffering, both in the world and even in our own lives?
If you grew up in the church, Philippians 4 is a very familiar passage. You see it on notecards, memorize it, hear it in words of encouragement – but often it is misapplied by what can be called “the Theology of the False Smile.” If we take the instruction from Paul to rejoice always as being focused on the outward appearance then we just end up papering over what is happening inside us.
Christmas is a season where this is felt most keenly. On the one hand, the whole world seems like it is focused on joy and cheer, but on the other hand it can be a very difficult time for many people – if we don’t have families we can celebrate with, don’t have resources to celebrate as is expected, if we suffer from the dark and cold of the season, Christmas can be a time of deep depression. If we have fallen into the Theology of the Fake Smile, we just ignore the pain and paper over with a false joy.
Verse 6 instructs us to “not be anxious about anything.” This, too, is misapplied through the “Hakuna Matata Theology”. No worries! A problem free philosophy that drives us to ignore all problems and avoid anxiety by avoiding responsibility and reality.
Paul also tells us to “let your gentleness be evident to all,” which also gets misapplied – this is the “Bless Your Heart” theology, where words and even deeds are only kind on the surface level, but underneath cut like a knife.
To properly follow Paul’s instructions, though, we need to be spiritually and emotionally healthy. Pretending to be joyful is not actually being joyful. We need to address the world, both inside of us she outside of it, the way that it actually is rather than how it is “supposed to be.”
We see this in a broader sense as well. When the American church falls into the trap of avoiding lament and only showing, discussing or allowing the positive, we perpetuate this Theology of the False Smile on a ecclesiastical level, and even on a social and political level as this bleeds into Christian Nationalism or other ways we paper over suffering and lament both in the present and the past.
To understand more about how to properly apply Paul’s words here, let’s look back at the opening of his letter. In chapter 1, he clearly acknowledges his suffering, but also the goodness that comes from his suffering. Through his suffering, many have come to see and know Jesus. We can’t show Jesus in our suffering if we ignore and downplay our suffering.
This is one of the reasons that we as a church value authenticity. We don’t want to be a place where people have to pretend to be doing well just to walk in the door. We don’t want to be a place where we ignore what is happening in the world outside. We do not need to protect God. It is not our job to make Christianity look good by pretending everything is going well when it isn’t. In fact, if we see how Paul does it, in fact we make Christianity look good by being authentic, by embracing our suffering just as Christ did, and embracing the suffering of others – just as Christ did.
An authentic community mourns with those who mourn, laments with those who lament, and allows all its members to mourn and lament authenticallyso that the community can come around them.
–Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, December 15, 2024
