Assignment | Lesson Three | Writings: Wisdom and Belonging

We live in complex and painful times, or to use the word that Dr. Wiser said at the beginning of this week’s video, “uncertain” times. The use of that word is appropriate, as I think it conveys not just the complexity or pain many of us experience, but the fragility and… well, uncertainty… of living today. 

I think that’s a blanket description of what all of us are experiencing, even if there are a few of us with privileges that mitigate that to some extent. But that description of pain and uncertainty definitely applies to people who experience violence, poverty, and discrimination, from here in the U.S. to Gaza to Iran to Ukraine and beyond. 

In such dire circumstances, the resources available through the Hebrew scriptures can, at the surface, seem wildly insufficient, and yet people have historically leaned on them for sustenance in soul, if not in body. Certainly, I think the prayer, lament, and wisdom of the Writings make a significant contribution, but I think, at least for me, the big story that is scripture, made up of smaller stories, is at the heart of how scripture sustains us. 

We are “story” people. We take our reality and create a narrative that makes sense to us, that helps us cope, that guides us through life. Whether it’s deciding that someone has had a bad day and that’s why they snapped at me in the grocery store line, to telling myself that my grandfather struggled with addiction throughout his life because of his own difficult upbringing… we make up stories to help us grasp what is happening around us. 

I think that’s why Jesus told stories. I think of Jesus as an artist, and his medium was storytelling. Like all good stories, his parables were steeped in particular details, and through that expressed universal truths that we are still learning. The same goes for the power of story in the Hebrew scriptures. It is in their particularity that they somehow also convey universal truth. Good songwriters know this “trick”: being detailed in the lyrics makes the song more universal. 

The particulars of the stories in the Hebrew scripture may seem very “foreign” to us, and we need to do some research and digging to understand better the nuances of the text, but there are truths to be learned that can sustain us.

One of the things I found interesting about the scripture readings assigned this week was the contrast between Nehemiah, who called the people to send foreign wives and children away, including Moabites, and the story of Ruth, the Moabite, who was the ancestral mother of David. That particular detail and contrast conveys the complexity of scripture and its worldview that is too often lost, I think.

That detail alone lets me know that our world’s complexity and uncertainty isn’t necessarily unique (even if it feels overwhelming at times), and that faithfulness is possible. That faithfulness, however, might look different to different people at different times.

The scripture readings remind us that the Israelites experienced a rollercoaster of both good times and bad times, both joy and suffering, yet they endured and continued in faith. There were surely times when they felt abandoned and questioned why God would allow such heartache and grief. Job raises that same question: why do bad things happen to good people?

So how do prayer, lament, wisdom, and story sustain faith when life is complex or painful? I do not recall God ever promising that life would be perfect or that our personal definition of justice would always prevail. In many ways, scripture suggests the opposite. Life can be difficult and unfair, but God provides us with tools to endure it.

I believe prayer is one of those tools. Prayer is our way of communicating with God (the OG helpline), especially in moments when we feel the full spectrum of emotions: fear, gratitude, grief, and love, to name of few.

Lament, or grief, is another gift. Grief reminds us of the depth of love. We grieve because we loved. It is hard to imagine one without the other. Lament gives us permission to bring pain honestly before God rather than pretending everything is fine. To take it another step, how would we know what love feels like, if we have never felt the loss?

Wisdom helps guide us through difficult choices and calls us to live faithfully. It also teaches humility. He gives us the wisdom to know that our wisdom does not compare. Humans cannot comprehend the fullness of God’s perspective. I’ve heard “you know just enough to be dangerous,” which is applicable to this situation.

Stories also sustain faith. We use stories to preserve memories, pass on lessons, and inspire hope. Biblical stories remind us that people before us also struggled, doubted, failed, and persevered. They show that suffering is never the whole story. Sometimes, we just need a feel-good story to change the trajectory of our day or lives.

The larger message is that life will bring both the lowest lows and the highest highs. God does not remove every hardship but gives us a toolbox for times when the rollercoaster needs adjusting.

I very much appreciated this lesson this week. I’ve been spending time thinking about this course and its journey into the Old Testament, and it’s given me a different perspective than what I had before. Thinking about prayer, lament, wisdom, and story and tying them all together into the readings this week, has given me some time to reflect on how I use them in my own life. 

I am reliant on prayer to get me through all things. Some days I am better at intentional prayer than others, but I do feel that most of our lives we are in constant communication with God in all different levels and ways. Keeping that communication open with God keeps that relationship open, which in turn allows for faith to grow. During challenging times, that relationship and faith are the safe, soft place for me to land when I need it most. What I realized as I was reading through stories of lament is that I am terrible about going to God with my own grief. I spend time in prayer over others' grief, but not my own. This is a practice that I will take away from this week’s lesson. There is so much sadness and grief in today’s world, and I need to do a better job of taking mine to God.

In Proverbs 1, it says, “Let the wise listen.” Wisdom comes from listening and learning, which all lead to understanding. Knowing that I first must listen to God and take that wisdom out into the world, so that I can better listen, learn, and understand others, will better prepare me to lead when called. I loved the video on the story of Job this week. Job was like so many of us, not understanding why things were so hard for him, and felt enough so that he was ready to go toe-to-toe with God over it. This is a story of perspective for me. I don’t know everything and have to remind myself that God has a plan AND a promise. The stories in the bible will help place things into a larger narrative for us, as will the stories of those in our world. Taking the time to listen, learn, grieve, share, and pray will get us through these times.

When life is difficult and overwhelming it certainly helps to have resources at hand that can bring comfort, offer clarity, or give permission to exist in messy spaces. If faith in God depends upon a careful balance of enduring justice in the world - it’s easy to see how that faith is fragile and in imminent danger of crumbling. There hasn’t been a time in human history (that I know of!) in which all people were fed, free of disease, had ample resources to thrive and got along peacefully with one another. 

If faith in God is to survive we have to allow ourselves to engage with God from our lowest moments in addition to the times when praise is effortless. So it makes sense to me that texts that serve to direct, comfort, explain, prevent, and wrestle with suffering and belonging are important elements of a community cannon.

These texts give people something to reach for when they cannot find words on their own. They can become guides for how to understand the complexity of living as a human or remind us that we can’t see the whole picture and are not in control - and maybe God isn’t always, either! But God is always present with us and can see us into the future, even if we’re hurting or need someone to blame. I appreciate that fundamental presence of God that is strong enough to hear my cries and even cries with me at times.

What’s hard for me to read in our modern context are the places where cultural mixing is so taboo. I understand that it was important for the Israelites to maintain a clear cultural identity, but why would God require that? How do we teach and preach about these passages when our values seem to be the opposite? 

Prayer and lament play an important role in our continued growth and help to sustain our faith. As a practice, it reminds us that God is there, and through that practice, hopefully we can feel the presence and comfort of God, even if it doesn’t solve all our problems. Psalm 27 stands out as an example of approaching our relationship with God with hope, expectation, and an optimism that hopefully can help us through hard times. At times in my life, like Ruth, I am shown grace by God, through other people, in ways that I may not immediately notice, or expect. A great example of this came this year, as my daughter has been sick and in and out of hospitals and doctors’ offices (she’s okay, by the way). People from all walks of my life have stepped up to offer support, prayer, practical considerations (meals, pet sitting, errand running). Only when I look back or zoom out do I see that this has God’s hands all over it. People have worked together to help carry us through this time. Perhaps this is one of the truest forms of fellowship, just being present as an act of obedience to God and love for one another.

I will say, multiple of this week’s passages spoke to keeping God’s laws (Psalm 1, Psalm 137, and Nehemiah), and I bristled at statements about mixed marriages, and violence. I’m not entirely sure what to say about this, other than flag that it made me uncomfortable.

As this course concludes, I’m thinking about this big story that we are a part of. I can see myself in aspects of stories like Job and Ruth. In American culture, we often are discouraged from talking about hard things, our struggles, and the traumas that we have experienced. But sharing these stories, both joyful and challenging ones from our lives, can be a testimony to others, the way these writings are to us. 

I struggled with the readings this week because it seems like we have to do so much interpretive contortion to make so much of the writings a “good thing.” Do these stories sustain faith when life is hard? Many of these passages seemed more like stories of faithlessness. Certainly, we can look at the extreme and violent racism portrayed in Ezra and Nehemiah and understand that is an honest reflection of one response to a fear of cultural disappearance as Dr. Wiser put it. But faith? Only in the sense that they were claiming to enact that ethnic cleansing because God wanted it so.

While I appreciated the way The Bible Project framed Job, helping us find comfort in the humble posture Job finds his way to in the face of God’s majesty, there are still unanswered questions. At some level, all of God’s boasting of the things God could do and does that Job cannot do seems like deflection to avoid the question of why God allowed the satan to test Job’s faith with such extreme suffering. It’s like we’re supposed to forget how this story began; the narrator never returns to the original scene of the crime.

In the end, I find it more helpful to understand these prayers, laments, and wisdom stories as descriptive, rather than explicative or prescriptive. They are a mess of contradictions because that is how life is. They illustrate faithfulness and lack thereof because that is how humanity is. Their sustaining power is perhaps reflected best by the attitude of Ecclesiastes: “It was ever thus.” We are not alone in our suffering, nor are we so wretched as to believe ourselves more abandoned by God than anyone else has ever felt. Just as Dr. Wiser reminds us that “hybridity is past and future,” so are racism and ethnic cleansing and our struggle to understand why bad things happen to good people and our occasional wonderings about whether we’re being punished. I’m not sure this comfort is comforting enough for what most people expect from scripture, but it feels more honest to me than what some people claim to find there.