Psalms of Lament

Below is an approximate transcript of an interview with Damian Montez and Jeb Eischeid for ‘The Heart of the Psalm’ on Spirit Mornings LIVE, May 5, 2025.

Damian: Good morning Chad. As we continue our Heart of the Psalm series, tell us what psalm are we going to be exploring this morning?

I’d like to look at Psalm 142. It’s not the psalm from yesterday, or next Sunday, or actually any day this week. In fact, it’s not even included in our lectionary for psalms we say during the Mass. The only time you’ll hear this one is if you pray the Liturgy of the Hours, which we sometimes call the ‘Daily Office’. The Liturgy of the Hours is a set of prayers that priests and numerous religious orders pray throughout each day. (Not all of them pray all the prayers each day; I believe there are six . . . )

But it’s a structure for daily prayer that runs in a four-week cycle. And the second-to-last prayer of each day is called ‘Vespers’. And Psalm 142 is recited during Vespers on Saturday evening of the first week.

But Psalm 142 is also a sacred text in our Bible, and that means it has some kind of special message God has given to form our lives, so it’s worthy of our careful attention. It’s meant to be studied and learned from, not just used in prayer. So that’s what I thought we’d look at this morning.

Jeb: Fantastic. Chad, what draws you in particular to this psalm?

Well it’s not a happy one, as you might expect it to be given that we are in the Easter Season, and we’re in the mode of celebration. Psalm 142 is one in a group of about sixty-five that we call ‘Lament’ psalms—psalms of formal complaint toward God. It’s actually the largest category of psalms in the book [of Psalms], in the largest part of our Bible, the Old Testament. We can talk more about lament in a minute, but you ask what’s drawn me to this psalm . . . 

I don’t know about others listening today, of course, but it was a difficult Lent for me, and it’s sort of persisted into and through the resurrection (a close cousin of mine passed away suddenly Saturday, amidst a few other challenges that have arisen recently) and it occurred to me that I’m probably not alone; there are probably a number of folks among our listeners who are carrying crosses of one sort or another. And these burdens don’t step aside suddenly when the calendar says it’s time to celebrate Easter and the resurrection. We don’t get to push pause [on life] and resume later once we’re ready.

I also know—as you mentioned—that my colleague Josh Burks will be on later this morning to talk about the end of the book of Job—Job chapter 42—a book in which, after a series of speech-dialogues between Job and his friends, Job turns away from that conversation with them to face God directly and present a formal complaint. It’s a lament—like our Psalm 142—and God ends up complimenting the manner of Job’s confrontation behind Job’s back to one of the friends as he criticizes the friend [Eliphaz the Temanite] saying twice to Eliphaz, “You have not spoken to me rightly as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7, 8).

Ed. English translations typically have something like, “You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has,” as if it is the content (or ‘matter’) of what Job has said that it at issue. But the original Hebrew is unambiguous: in fact it is the manner or (‘form’) in which Job has approached the LORD in his speech that the LORD is complimenting.

Here’s God saying, in effect, “You see how Job has lamented to me? Not only am I not put off by this, but I sanction it—I promote this manner of speaking—as a legitimate way for the people of earth to address me in heaven.” And Psalm 142 is a good example of this way of speaking to God.

Damian: Tell us more about Lament psalms, and what their purpose is in Sacred Scripture. How do they work exactly?

Lament psalms are psalms of complaint, in which the psalmist turns away from other conversations or preoccupations and looks at God directly, “in the face,” to cry out to God in distress about something that, it’s implied, only God can resolve.

They are in fact a formal category of psalm. Much like there are poems that follow a structured pattern (think of a Sonnet that has fourteen lines of ten syllables each; or a Haiku has to be three lines only, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five again in the third, or it’s not a Haiku; and so on).

Well Lament psalms are like this. They’re not just examples of how to gripe or to vent your frustrations to God, or to get angry. They follow a formal pattern.

Ed. Other categories of psalms follow their own different patterns: psalms of ascent, for example, which are said in preparation to ‘go up’ to the temple to worship; or psalms of praise, which call attention to God’s various attributes.

1. A lament typically begins with some kind of invocation to God—a call to attention.
2. This is followed by a formal complaint about a life situation. These are cries of distress, like in Job’s case—and we also see this in psalms of lament, this cry can become quite aggressive at times. And again, God’s not put off by that.
3. Then comes a petition to God for help.
4. This is followed by some expression of trust or confidence in God’s ability to see to the situation and set it right where every other help has failed. So laments, we should say, aren’t examples of distrust in God. They’re not examples of God’s people losing faith. They’re exactly the opposite. The act of crying out to God implies that the crier believes God—and only God—can deliver, and is desperately pleading for him to show up and do it.
5. And then laments typically conclude formally with a vow by the lamenter that he/she will increase his/her praise of God following God’s deliverance.

And we should note again, this last component is not “bargaining,” like we sometimes do with God. It’s a realization that if God should deliver me, then I’m going to have yet another example of God’s faithfulness and power to mention in my praise.

But on the other hand, if he doesn’t, then there will be one less voice in the choir, so to speak, and the volume will go down, and the world won’t hear as well our efforts to tell them how great God is.

The way this works for Job, and for the psalmist, and for you and me as we learn the skill of lamenting to God in prayer according to the way this is modeled for us in the Scriptures, like in Psalm 142, is that as we come to the limit of our relationship with God—right to the breaking point, where we’re struggling even to trust God any longer—we turn to lament as the break-through point into another level of intimacy in our relationship with God that we won’t experience if we don’t lament. That’s the message of Scripture: Lament is like a gateway to a revelation that God performs, whereby he reveals himself in our lives and in the situation we find overwhelming.

But that revelation of himself waits on our willingness to face God in lament.

Ed. It’s only after Job turns to the LORD in lament that the LORD takes him into a deeper fellowship and unveils to Job his Lordship over the mysteries of the universe, at which point Job “claps his hand over his mouth,” so to speak, and turns from lament to toe-scuffing in 42:3.

“I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ⁴ Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me. ⁵ I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee; ⁶ therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

Jeb: Chad I’d never really thought about lamenting as a skill. That’s pretty interesting to actually dwell upon. Can you take us into Psalm 42 [Ed. actually 142] and show us how lament unfolds in this psalm?

Sure, and a little bit of back story: it’s a psalm David wrote after he defeats Goliath with his slingshot—everybody knows that story. He receives the accolades of Israel, and this makes King Saul really jealous, and he begins to persecute David. So David flees and he takes refuge in a cave in Adullam (1 Sam 21-22), and the lament of this psalm arises out of that situation.

Here in our psalm 142, in verse 1, following the structure of lament we mapped out above, we have:

(1) The invocation—David cries out to God, and he calls on God by his proper name, Yahweh (in English, ‘LORD’—all caps). And he announces, David does, that he’s about to pour out his complaint.
And he smuggles in a statement of faith before he begins the complaint, in the first part of verse 3: “When my spirit is faint,” he says, “thou knowest my way.”
(2) Then the formal complaint begins in the second part of v. 3: “In the path where I walk they have hidden a trap for me. ⁴ I look to the right and watch, but there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me, no man cares for me.”

Now I think it’s important for us to see this not merely as a description of human adversaries, but of spiritual ones. We might not be hiding from our coworkers or supervisors or people who are out to get us. We may just feel very alone and under attack by the adversary and his minions.

(3) Then David petitions Yahweh, the LORD, in v. 6: “Give heed to my cry, for I am brought very low. Deliver me from my persecutors for they are too strong for me”—and again, whether those are human adversaries or spiritual forces, we need to be delivered.
(4) David can’t deliver himself. God has to do it. There’s his expression of trust.
(5) Finally comes the statement of intent to praise in verse 7: “Bring me out of the prison that I may give thanks to thy name!” And then there’s one more profession of trust: “The righteous will surround me; for thou wilt deal bountifully with me.”

And that’s the whole psalm. It’s a nice short one to get us going. Gives us a relatively digestable example of how lament looks in prayer. I hope that will be helpful for us, as we think about developing that skill.

Damian: Now, as we think about the heart of Psalm 142, you made a few comments earlier about the value of learning to lament. Can you summarize that one more time for us?

Lament is a crucial mode of relating to God and communicating with God. It’s—I said the word ‘gateway’, I believe, earlier—it’s a gateway that enables us to travel through a kind of impasse in our relationship with God; when we’re stuck, and feeling hopeless and defeated and overwhelmed. Or maybe we’re just feeling despondent.

I was talking with Jeff Schinstock—some of you will know who that is—here in Lincoln yesterday. We had just heard our kids in a band concert, and they played a song called “Choose Joy.” And I told Jeff after the concert, “I needed to hear that.” And he asked me, “Why? Are you not choosing joy?” And I said, “You know, I hope I’m humble enough to admit that I haven’t been choosing joy as consistently as I should . . . just feeling despondent.”

To lament is for us to speak perfectly openly with God, and to invite God to do in us and around us what only he can do. And then to wait on God to unveil himself to us. It’s not that he’s not there. He’s present. But we won’t see him until we lament. That’s the huge value of lament and I think that’s the heart of Psalm 142.

Ed. There’s something about this particular form of communication–and this particular genre of biblical literature–that opens up a “field” in our relationship with God that is unavailable via other modes of speaking or other literary genres in the Bible.

Jeb: Wow. This is really insightful, Chad. I wanna go back to covering lamenting as a skill. Is that something that—I mean, because it’s a skill, I assume that we can improve upon it. How do we do that exactly, Chad?

I think one of the best ways is to read books like Job. Or if that’s maybe too big of a chunk to pull off, you could do a search, and just start reading down through those sixty-five-or-so psalms I mentioned that are all in this category of ‘lament’. And just take note of the structure of each one.

Maybe later today I’ll try to put up on our website a quick blog post that captures this, and I’ll put the structure out there. And you can go down through each of these psalms, and just look at the structure, and think about how you would use your own words in your situation to pray according to this structure. You become good at something by imitating the masters, and that’s what Scripture presents to us: David and others—Job of course—masters of lament.

And once again, I think I mentioned this earlier, it’s the largest category in the Psalms. So clearly God has in mind for this to be a deeply shaping, deeply forming kind of scripture for our lives.