In his book, The Happy Christian, David Murray asks these probing questions:
If someone who had never encountered Christianity before wandered into your church or your home, what would be the greatest impression made upon him? If he had to sum up in one word the mood of the worship, prayers, and sermons of your church or the conversation at your family meal table, what would that word be? What if he was asked to describe your church or faith with either a negative or a positive symbol? (Murray, xxiii)
If you are like the majority of believers Murray believes we’d have to confess that most would give our church and our faith a negative symbol. For Murray the problem is that believers aren’t exuding joy as we should.
After reading this quote from Murray my mind immediately went to one of my favorite Christopher Wright quotes:
…the language of lament is seriously neglected in the church. Many Christians seem to feel that somehow it can’t be right to complain to God in the context of corporate worship when we should all feel happy. There is an implicit pressure to stifle our real feelings because we are urged, by pious merchants of emotional denial, that we ought to have “faith” (as if the moaning psalmists didn’t). So we end up giving external voice to pretended emotions we do not really feel, while hiding the real emotions we are struggling with deep inside. Going to worship can become an exercise in pretence and concealment, neither of which can possibly be conducive for a real encounter with God. So, in reaction to some appalling disaster or tragedy, rather than cry out our true feelings to God, we prefer other ways of responding to it. –(Christopher J.H. Wright, The God I Don’t Understand, 52)
For Wright the problem is that we do not have an authentic language of lament. If Wright were answering Murray’s question I wonder how he would respond? Would he disagree with Murray’s assessment? Would he say that the problem isn’t that we have too little happiness in church but that we don’t have enough lament?
I don’t know Wright’s answer but I know my own. I believe both Murray and Wright are correct. When we lose the language of lament and happiness it is because we have lost a depth to our relationship with God.
Lament is not godless bickering. Neither is happiness a godless smile. True lament and true happiness are God-centered. It is out of the depths of my relationship with a loving God that the voice of lament rises up when things are not as they ought to be. And it is out of that same place where true happiness rises above our sorrowful circumstances.
When we move away from the God-centeredness of the Psalmists we also move away from their ability to experience the full range of healthy emotions. If you don’t have a place for lament in your Christianity then you are missing something in your understanding of the Lord. Likewise, if you don’t have a place for legit Christian happiness there is a hole in your gospel.
Therefore, let us draw near to God where we’ll find the confidence in Christ to lament and to smile.
