Daily Lesson for June 27, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson is from Psalm 102:

25 Of old you laid the foundation of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
26 They will perish, but you will remain;
they will all wear out like a garment.
You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away,
27 but you are the same, and your years have no end.
28 The children of your servants shall dwell secure;
their offspring shall be established before you.

When I was in 7th grade our junior high school gathered in the auditorium to watch a movie about the great Chicago Bears football player Gale Sayers and his teammate and best friend Brian Piccolo, who was stricken with cancer.  I remember what an impression the opening scene made on me with a quote from Hemingway.  "Hemingway said, 'Every true story ends in death.'  Well, this is a true story."

Life is a series of true stories.  There is in every friendship, marriage, enterprise, or institution a Spring which is full of hope and promise, followed by a Fall of when the color wanes and eventually the leaves fall.  Every leaf falls.

Psalm 102 is a psalm written by someone coming to terms with the Fall.  It begins with preface. "A prayer of one afflicted, when he is faint and pours out his complaint before the LORD," it says.  The affliction is the loss of his people's glory.  It is the destruction of the City of Zion.  It is the end of a world.  And there is grief. There is crying out.  There is complaint before the LORD.

The psalmist shows us the way through the grief of life's true stories.  It is the way called lamentation, which is the naming of our losses and the wailing over them.  It is, surprisingly, a God-blessed complaint to God.  All is not well.  There is rupture. There is Fall and a hastening Winter and it just ain't fair.

If we do not lament then we remain stuck in our pain and in our grief. We hold on to a yesterday that is no longer.  Nostalgia for a lost past cripples our future.  We become imprisoned by what was.  As the psalmist says, we hold onto stones which have been knocked down and pity the dust of what has been crushed.  The way of lamentation allows us to come to terms with the loss of yesterday and opens us to the possibility of a new tomorrow.  It is a necessary journey.

Every story is a true story.  Every institution and every relationship will have its end.  Heaven and earth will pass away.  Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

But out of the ashes of our lamentation comes then our future that is yet to be . . .