At a time when my life had fallen apart, it was the grinchy psalms that helped me know that God loved me. They put to words exactly what I was feeling—anger, despair, vengeance. And they must have been written by some holy writer, otherwise, why were they in the Bible? That they had been left in the Bible, gave me comfort, as if to say I didn’t need to hide my misery from God. The state of my life was not what I had signed on for, and these psalms said, “I’m a good person! I don’t deserve this!” In fact, I had been praying to avoid the very things I was experiencing, using all the right Bible phrases in my prayer. Which meant God was to blame. But nice girls don’t chew out God.

My pastor at the time gave me the gift of an hour with him every week. When I finally told him how afraid I was to admit I was angry with God, he asked, “What are you protecting God from?” Put that way, I had to admit that God probably could handle my anger. That was how I found out that the psalms said what I was feeling. In the spirit of claiming those grinchy psalms as faithful, as psalms that express the reality of life as we experience it, I read a couple of my favorites today.

Because, if we are honest, there are seasons in our lives when praise is not as easy as complaint. If God is merely our fair weather friend, there are whole seasons of our lives during which we are not be on speaking terms. Which is too bad, because stormy weather is precisely the time when we are most likely to respond to God’s invitation to trust. As we move from what we had thought was a settled, guaranteed way of life, through hurt or loneliness or sense of abandonment, we tend to be more open to alternative explanations for life’s pain.

I’m here to tell you, faithful people have sung these grinchy psalms without being struck by lightening. Faithful people have expressed to God rebellion at the way things are and lived to tell of it. Perhaps the very singing of these songs that say, “I don’t like the way things are right now”—perhaps their very singing is what helps to bring about change. And change at God’s hand is called “transformation.” It’s a good thing. These are songs that affirm, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God, even disasters and setbacks.” They tell the truth—no frightened denial, no wishful optimism, no cover up. In telling that truth, they become songs that change the world by changing one’s faith. When we don’t try to move toward God from a position of strength, therefore we can let God be powerful. When we bring to God’s attention the pain of our lives, we discover that God is present and participates in it, is attentive to our darkness and weakness. Suddenly, our faith is not about how unchangeable God is, it is about how faithful God is. Not majestic immovable Mt Hood out there on the horizon, but the intimate landscape of my own yard and garden abundantly bearing food and beauty on my behalf.

But these are not polite psalms. They are excessive, ferocious, and boy do they have an attitude. My mother would not allow me to talk like this. You know which ones I mean. The ones about hurting children and wishing horrendous vengeance on enemies. The ones about ashes in our teeth, our bodies wasting away, friends shunning us. But extravagant as these psalms are, they have a pattern. They begin with pleading and demanding. “God, you gotta fix this.” They assume the problem, whatever it is, is God’s problem. Things are desperate. As if to reason with God, they give good reasons why God ought to act, what’s in it for God—appeals to God’s honor or reminders that dead people can’t praise. That is so presumptuous. I just love it.

Then something happens. Circumstances, attitude—something changes and the urgency becomes joy. God heard! Just being heard is “enough,” since it’s inconceivable that God would hear and not act. Everything is downhill from here. Praise for the intervention, promises that previous bargains will be kept, extravagant generosity out of sheer gratitude. Yeah, God! So much relief about “this is how God really is,” that the earlier stuff—accusations about God’s lack of attention—that was just misunderstanding.

Friends, this is relationship. This is faith. As if the complaint is what gets God to act. Because of this risky honesty with God—telling the truth about how bad things are—the relationship can move to new possibilities of faithfulness.

What made this movement possible? Something invisible takes place between the complaint and the praise. Scholars say that, when these psalms were written, they were part of Israel’s liturgy, what they sang when they got together. The Gideons weren’t giving out pocket-sized psalm books. Pockets hadn’t been invented. People knew these psalms because they read and sang them together during worship or prayer. Imagine using the complaint psalms during corporate worship. Maybe the “something” that happens between the complaint and the praise is something that takes place only in community. Maybe this was like group therapy—faith group therapy. The sufferer comes to worship, picks up Psalm 13 for instance and reads, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” Then maybe someone in the congregation witnesses to how God helped them with their child died or when they lost their job or when they were on Food Stamps and their dad got sick and they couldn’t afford to fill the prescription. Ah. Then the words of assurance can be read in truthful detail, “But I trusted in God’s steadfast love.” If it worked for me, it will work for you. This is when we need each other.

The daily lectionary has been reading the book of Job lately. You remember Job—the pious guy who becomes the subject of a bet between God and Satan, so that he loses everything, and his friends come by to offer comfort. Their comfort is conventional religious wisdom. “You must have done something bad, or God wouldn’t be punishing you.” Job objects that he has done nothing to deserve this, and the friends point to the unchangeable nature of God—the Mt Hood theory of God. God is just and righteous, you must deserve this, or it wouldn’t be happening. Duh. Instead of rolling over and admitting his guilt, Job complains. He laments. He rails at God, pointing out the unfairness of the whole thing, objecting to the way God has been treating him. He wishes he had never been born. And God hears Job. God takes Job seriously.

Which is what we want. All we want is to be heard. All we want is to be believed. Don’t you hate it when you tell your symptoms to the doctor, and the doctor responds with “It’s all in your head.” My pain exists! To hear that you’re making it up is much worse than to hear that the cure hasn’t been discovered yet. Job is heard, he is vindicated. The so-called friends are not. Theodicy wins—the willingness to ask where God is in the pain, the willingness to engage God in the hard questions of life and death—that is seen as faithful.

Christians can read the disorientation psalms and see Jesus in the suffering of an innocent one. Life moving to death, then moving from death to resurrection. Do you remember your baptismal vows? The ones that promise to try to be like Jesus? We can read these psalms of disorientation and identify with the innocent sufferer, we can move through death to resurrection, and know that we are keeping our baptismal vows, that we are “trying to be like Jesus.” These psalms confess our shortcomings to God, and they ask God to change things.

Might this change how you pray? Might this change what you think is effective prayer? Thank God for the example of these psalms that reassure us when the going gets tough. God hears us and is present in our pain. We can be assured that as God hears us as God’s own people, God is also transforming us. Thanks be to God.