Protest and Praise: What the Lament Psalms Teach Us About Suffering w/ Dr William Morrow

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. We're excited to have you back. Today we have a very special guest to talk about a much-needed topic, not just for the body of Christ but for understanding the Scriptures and the biblical text, and that is Dr. William Morrow. Dr. Morrow, thank you so much for your time today. I'm excited for our conversation.

Dr. William Morrow: I'm looking forward to it. Thank you for inviting me.

Johnny Ova: My pleasure. Let's get started with a little about you so I can introduce you to the audience. Tell us about yourself, your background, whether you grew up in a faith-centered home, and how you came into your studies.

Dr. William Morrow: Sure. I grew up in the Presbyterian Church in Canada, so we went to church pretty well every Sunday. But I wouldn't consider that I really came to faith until I was at university age. At that time I felt a call toward the ministry, so I actually studied for the ministry in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. I was out in the mission field, as it were, for two years. That's what they called it back then. But I came back because I had a number of questions about how to interpret the Scriptures. Eventually I got a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Toronto, and I've spent my academic career teaching biblical studies, especially Hebrew and Old Testament, at Queen's Theological College, a small seminary attached to the United Church of Canada here where I live in Kingston, Ontario. It was affiliated with Queen's University, which is a fairly large Canadian university.

Dr. William Morrow: Along the way I also made a certain transition. I was ordained as an Anglican priest in the Anglican Church of Canada in 2015, and since my retirement in 2019 I've been serving as an honorary associate in a local Anglican church. Throughout the time I've been teaching Scripture, I've often led Lenten Bible studies looking at various topics. In terms of what I've written, I've written three books: a rather technical book on Deuteronomy, the book we're probably going to be mentioning here, Protest Against God: The Eclipse of a Biblical Tradition, and more recently a book called An Introduction to Biblical Law.

Johnny Ova: That's great. All the materials I could find will be linked in the YouTube description and the podcast information. So if this conversation strikes your interest, definitely check out Dr. Morrow's work. It seems like the further you got into your academics, it strengthened your faith rather than taking away from it. Sometimes I see a lot of the opposite.

Dr. William Morrow: I think academics can go both ways. I need to be quite frank about this. I wasn't led to a stronger faith simply by studying the Bible. I also had to face my own existential problems. Around the mid-90s I fell into a pretty severe depression. Basically, a lot of stuff from my own childhood caught up with me. I needed to deal with that, and it also forced me into a dialogue not only with the Bible but with the biblical God. That certainly translated into some of what I've written, and it has continued to make me want to ensure that whatever I've done as a biblical scholar also interfaces with the faith of the church and with people's walk with Christ.

Johnny Ova: Experience is the greatest teacher, huh?

Dr. William Morrow: It sure is. That's right.

Johnny Ova: What drew you specifically into the Hebrew Scriptures, since we're going to talk about the Psalms and biblical protest? Were you just interested in the topic?

Dr. William Morrow: Well, first of all, I was raised as a Presbyterian, and Presbyterians have a sort of love affair with the Old Testament, so I came into that pretty naturally. That certainly brought me into dialogue with the Old Testament Scriptures. And I'd say my own personal faith journey really brought me into dialogue with the theology and practice of lament.

Johnny Ova: Let's transition right into that, because it grieves me at times. I pastor a church here on Long Island called the Sound of Heaven. The joke around our congregation is that it's filled with new converts or people who've been hurt by other churches and found their way over here. One of the common threads is blame. When bad things are going on in your life and you're suffering through a tough season, the church sometimes puts blame on people, almost like, what did you do to deserve this? So let's start here. You've written that the Bible allows space for three different views of suffering: punishment, transformation, and seemingly arbitrary pain. Could you break those down and show us where they show up in the Psalms?

Dr. William Morrow: Sure. Let's deal with each one. The first is the idea that suffering is the result of divine punishment. You certainly have that perspective expressed in a number of psalms. The psalm most people are probably most familiar with is Psalm 51, which is projected into the life of David. Here's somebody who believes he has sinned grievously against God, and he's pleading for God not to take the Holy Spirit from him. He's pleading for a renewal of life. Of course, this psalm is often read during the weeks leading up to Easter.

Dr. William Morrow: It's more difficult, I think, to find motifs of transformation. Yet even in Psalm 51 you can find it, because the psalmist pleads, if you only restore me, I will teach sinners your ways. There's a hope that the suffering will become transformative and enable the psalmist not only to be renewed but also to extend a kind of divine ministry. There are other psalms where you see the same thing. Psalm 22 is another really good example, a familiar psalm that starts out, why have you forsaken me? What happens in the middle of the psalm is a transition, and the psalmist finds himself or herself able to call on other people to praise God in anticipation that God will answer the prayer. In that sense there's transformation from protest to praise, and also transformation into a vision of God that can be shared with other people.

Dr. William Morrow: But there are other psalms in which the motif of punishment and the motif of transformation are simply lacking. A really good example is Psalm 88, in which an individual is protesting his or her imminent death, and all that takes place at the end of the psalm is the claim that darkness is now my friend. You can find that articulated at the corporate level too, in a psalm like Psalm 44.

Dr. William Morrow: I've always insisted to my students that you need a kind of stool with three legs if you're going to talk about suffering from a biblical perspective. Yes, some kinds of suffering are caused by mistakes, and there's a certain punishment aspect to it. Sometimes suffering can cause or at least enable transformation. And at the same time, there's something that needs to be protested against. The analogy I often use is a little girl playing in the kitchen. Her mother tells her, don't touch the stove, it's really, really hot. She touches the stove anyway, and her finger is badly burned. How do we explain her suffering? In one sense it's explained because she made a mistake. Theologically, she sinned. From a transformational point of view, maybe that experience will allow her to help her little sister not to touch the stove. She'll say, listen, my experience will help you not do what I did.

Dr. William Morrow: But there's also a sense in which that same event can be protested, because the burn from the stove seems out of all proportion to what the little girl did. She made an innocent mistake, and now she's living with really severe pain. So these three motifs can go together, but I think it's also useful theologically to parse them out and treat them as three different approaches. What happens in a lot of Christian discourse is that we're fine with suffering as punishment. We're fine with suffering as transformational. We're suffering because these are the birth pangs of a new world, and we're involved in Christ's sufferings on earth because we know it will become transformative, maybe in the near future, bringing a new expression of faith or a new community, and of course in the far future. But I think Christians also often find themselves hurting in ways where those theological explanations don't work at all. At that point, what we need is some instrument that will allow us, in the experience of pain, to still find our way with God, to be with God in the pain, and not just assume our experience has put us out of communion with Christ.

Johnny Ova: Can you define the term biblical protest for our listeners? What do you mean by that?

Dr. William Morrow: Sure. When I talk about protest prayer, I'm talking about a phenomenon, especially in the Psalms but found elsewhere in Scripture, that goes by a number of labels. I've talked here about lament, but you'll also find literature that calls it complaint prayer. It has been described as the law court pattern of prayer. I've talked about it as protest prayer, and you can also call it the prayers of the righteous sufferer. All of those coalesce and work together.

Johnny Ova: It's a hard topic to discuss, because I feel like the Christian body, at least the way I see it, handles a lot of this very poorly. A time in my life just popped into my head when I was going through a really rough stretch. I've been married to my wife now for 14 years, but I was married before, and she had cheated on me. We ran ministry together. We were pouring our lives out to God, pouring into kids and high school teens. I remember being on the brink of suicide, lying face down on a street, going, why, God? Why are you doing this to me? I gave my life to you. I knew I wasn't perfect, of course, but I was trying the best I could.

Johnny Ova: Now, when I reflect on that time, I thought I was a good, loving, supportive husband, but I'm so much better a husband to my wife now. I didn't have kids in that marriage, and I have five kids now with my wife. I feel like it made me a better man, a better husband and a better father. My brother actually wrote a note and left it on my bed one night. All it said was, you may not know why you're going through what you're going through now, but when it's over, you'll know exactly why you needed to go through this. That made me stop, pause, reflect and think, and I can relate to that kind of experience.

Dr. William Morrow: That's a really moving story. But I think part of the problem is that sometimes we suffer and there's no why. Some young mother gets cancer. Where's the why in that? You're walking down the street and you get mugged. Do we blame the victim in that case? Or, God forbid, some little kid runs across the street and is hit by a car. Where's the why in that? I think part of the problem, and this was especially explored by the book of Job, is that at some point the why questions lose their effectiveness, and we need another way of being with God in pain.

Dr. William Morrow: When I explain this from the point of view of the psalms of lament, what I've often said is that in those psalms, God's omnipotence, God's ability to answer prayer, is always potential but not always actual. Especially in the book of Job: what does the Lord show Job in Job 38 to 41? He shows Job a world in which not everything operates just for the sake of human beings. Rain falls in places where you can't use it. There are wild animals that don't want to be tamed by human beings. There's a kind of freedom in the created world, and sometimes the way the created world uses that freedom won't operate in terms of human interests and human well-being.

Dr. William Morrow: Another metaphor I use is that God is like the king of a kingdom. But just because you're the king doesn't mean robbers can't raid in from the outside. You'll have marauders and bandits, and they can cause a lot of chaos. You present your case to God and hope there will be some kind of redress. But that doesn't mean damage hasn't taken place, and it's certainly not necessarily damage the divine king willed to take place.

Johnny Ova: I was going to say, this is why I think we need to be very careful how we touch this topic. Like you said, the marauders and the damage are there. And you bring up a really good point: sometimes there is no why. It just happens. When our mindset automatically triggers, what did I do wrong, with self-blame and self-sabotage, I think it does a lot of damage to the body of Christ.

Dr. William Morrow: I certainly agree. One of the effects of the Psalms is actually to address that situation, especially the psalms sometimes called psalms of individual lament, because they assume a community. Something has happened to the person making the lament. A woman or a man has fallen into bad times. Maybe they're mortally ill, or they've had a significant economic failure. The community's impulse is to stand away from that person and say, he or she is a sinner, he or she has been cursed by God. In a sense, the Psalms of Lament are just as much about pleading for the support of the community as they are pleading for God to intervene.

Dr. William Morrow: So an important part of many psalms of lament is the declaration of innocence: I am a worshiper of the Lord. I have not violated the Lord's commandments. The one who needs to hear that isn't simply God. After all, God already knows it. The community needs to hear it, so they understand that whatever has happened to this person, it's not just a judgment of God they need to distance themselves from. This is a person who needs support, who needs people to come around him or her and be with them in a moment of suffering and, for lack of a better word, bad luck.

Johnny Ova: There's a message in your work, and I wrote this phrase down while reading it. It's kind of a double question, because I think they tie together. The phrase was raw honesty. You've said the Psalms create space for raw honesty, and you've also argued that over time Scripture shows a shift where open protest becomes less acceptable. I think those tie together. Sometimes when you're struggling, it's, let me just say the Our Father three times and go my way. No. Sometimes you just have to lock yourself in a room and say, God, what the heck is going on right now? And God is okay with that. God is okay with our frustration and aggravation with him, or when it seems like a delay. I think churches teaching that raw honesty would do church members a better service by teaching them a more honest way of praying.

Dr. William Morrow: All right, let's deal with that. There's a kind of theology out there suggesting that if we don't mind our P's and Q's, we might actually hurt God's feelings. At the same time, it's very important to understand the context in which protest prayer or complaint prayer takes place. There's no suggestion that you're going to walk into the Old Testament's equivalent of Sunday morning worship and spill your guts out. That's not the appropriate place for it, and it was never considered the appropriate place. If you look at the liturgical context in which the psalms of lament were used, you'll find that to some extent they are pastoral prayers administered outside the communal context of worship. Where communal worship comes in is in thanksgiving, after you've experienced deliverance.

Dr. William Morrow: So what we need in terms of lament is pastors who are comfortable letting people protest in private and semi-private situations of various kinds. And then we want places of testimony, where in public people can say, God answered my prayer. I was in a bad place, and now I'm feeling more healed. Public worship on a Sunday morning or a midweek gathering is probably not the place for huge amounts of lament, nor should it be. But there is a place for it.

Dr. William Morrow: The question we have to ask ourselves is why that place for raw honesty disappeared from the church's repertoire as it developed. That development was already taking place at the end of the Second Temple period, even before the New Testament. People wanted a God who was really in control, and by the time we get to the Christian era that need is very important. Calvin, for example, who has been so influential in Protestantism, certainly the Protestantism I grew up in, suggests that the true response to tribulation is patience, not complaint. I think there's a three-dimensionality to the biblical God, especially reflected in the Old Testament, that we need to continue to honor, recover and incorporate into our worship.

Johnny Ova: And I think there's a fine line of context. If you're walking around complaining every day about every little thing, that's probably not the best attitude. But when you're under extreme pressure and things are building up and you're at your breaking point, you lock yourself in your closet and just break in the presence of God. I don't know if you've seen the movie Luther with Joseph Fiennes. One thing that stood out when I was reading and listening to you on this topic was a moment in that movie. They ask Luther to recant his work, and he asks for 24 hours. The movie shows him locked in a cell, sprawled on his face in the presence of God, almost mocking the devil, saying, Satan, you love seeing me mute, don't you? You love seeing me cower. He's breaking, and it ends with him saying, Lord, I'm yours. It reminded me of a psalm: frustrated, overwhelmed, embarrassed, but in that breaking moment he was restored to make his declaration.

Dr. William Morrow: That's right. We need to come to understand that those breakdowns are part and parcel of the life of faith. We all grow up with certain understandings of how God relates to us and to the world, and at a certain point those understandings, which are often naive and not very well thought through, break down. Suffering is one of the ways those constructs break down. What we need to discover is not only the God in our suffering, but the God beyond our suffering and the God who can embrace our suffering.

Dr. William Morrow: Another way I've described this in an article is that we tend to want to focus on the resurrection, on Easter Sunday, to the exclusion of Good Friday. But for many Christians there are Good Friday moments in our lives as well as Easter Sunday moments. There are times we feel like we're on the cross, and times when we have walked out of the empty tomb. I think it's very important to embrace the cross as a testimony to what Christian experience can be, as well as the resurrection. Because, like it or not, there are people in our world getting crucified, just like Jesus, through no fault of their own. Maybe for economic reasons, poverty, maybe for health reasons, who knows. But it happens. We need a kind of prayerful experience that allows people to say, in the appropriate circumstances, I really feel crucified right now.

Johnny Ova: I want to take this back to Job, which you spoke on a little earlier. In your interpretation of Job, you suggest God's response wasn't just a power play. It was pastoral, aimed at healing Job from toxic religious thinking. Can you expand on that? You just mentioned suffering being a necessary part of the walk of faith, with benefits that come from it. I think this is an important topic.

Dr. William Morrow: Yes. I wrote about this more than 20 years ago in an article called "Toxic Religion and the Daughters of Job." I feel quite strongly that commentators who look at God's response to Job in chapters 38 to 41 and see him as a kind of tyrant who just shouts Job down are missing the point. On the contrary, Job needed his own theology, as well as his friends' theology, challenged by the divine reality, even though it was communicated in a very forceful way. When I think about Job, three things come to mind. One I've already mentioned.

Dr. William Morrow: One of the pastoral effects of God's reply is to say, Job, this is not all about you. One tendency we have when we suffer, especially as people of faith, is to assume automatically that it's all about me. You said it earlier when you talked about our tendency toward self-blame. We also tend to feel ashamed because we're suffering, and too often there are theologies in the church that simply reinforce that. But we know from the beginning of Job that Job hasn't done anything wrong. Yet he spends his entire dialogue with his friends fighting off the implication that this is really about him: Job, you messed up, so you're being punished. So the first thing God does is say, this isn't about you. Look at the world you live in. Where does the rain fall? Does it only fall where human beings want it? Do animals just accommodate themselves to human interests? God even claims in his response that, to some extent, he feeds the lions.

Dr. William Morrow: The second thing God says is that Job has an erroneous idea about the relationship between order and chaos. Job and his friends want to live in a world where order equals God and chaos equals the negation of God. But for the world to work as it does, there needs to be some chaos as well as order. What Job discovers in his encounter with God is that his theological categories, with their neat divisions between chaos and order, have to be abandoned. The world is more complicated than that. There's a complexity to it that's beyond human beings to fully understand or comprehend. Within that complexity, there's room to claim that some suffering is illegitimate as well as to say there are legitimate forms of suffering. I think it's very important to see those pastoral implications of what God is saying to Job.

Johnny Ova: Why do you think the church doesn't know how to lament well?

Dr. William Morrow: I think it's because lament is to some extent a chaotic experience, and like any other institution, I don't think the church handles chaos very well. Part of the chaos implicit in lament is rage, and to some extent we don't know what to do with anger in the church. We're afraid of it because we're afraid of how divisive it is, and of course it is divisive. That's why it's important to understand that lament as a liturgical practice is also a contained practice. No one is supposed to call out on Sunday morning and just let it all hang out with God or anybody else. That's simply inappropriate. The other problem is that we place so much emphasis on faith that we often don't allow enough room for doubt. If you want your faith to mature, you need to have the room to doubt as well as to believe.

Dr. William Morrow: If you want to go a little further, there's a certain degree to which the church as an institution profits from infantilizing its people. Let's keep them in a place of control. We don't want to hear their doubts too much, because if they grow in faith, they might start asking some pretty serious questions about how the institution itself is organized.

Johnny Ova: That's a deep topic, but you're right. This is a broad statement, but I think it applies in general: do you think church leadership as a whole is equipped to answer these questions without experiencing lament or allowing themselves to lament?

Dr. William Morrow: I think we all have a tremendous need to feel in control, and the problem with lament is that it takes us to a place where we have to say we're out of control. One of the great places to find lament in the modern world is actually in twelve-step groups: AA, Narcotics Anonymous, Neurotics Anonymous, you name it. What's the first of the twelve steps? We admitted we were powerless, that our lives had become unmanageable. Then the second step: we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Yes, that higher power exists, but it won't manifest itself until we start admitting that our lives have become unmanageable. That's what lament does. Lament lets people say, listen, God, I'm in a place where my life, or our lives, are unmanageable.

Dr. William Morrow: And lament almost never leaves people there. If you look at the pattern of lament, it inevitably goes from complaint to praise. We still believe God is able to respond to us. We still believe there's a higher power, that Christ is available to us. But for many people, that availability of Christ only becomes real after they admit they're in a place where life, first, doesn't make sense, and second, has become unmanageable. The church, like any other bureaucracy, likes to manage things. Managing things and hearing that life in the church is unmanageable are two perceptions that don't go together all that well.

Johnny Ova: I've got just a few more questions before we take this home, if you have a few more minutes. I know you've explored how the exilic prophets like Isaiah helped a traumatized community rebuild faith. How did lament serve the process of healing, and of resilience? In my opinion, suffering builds resilience the more you work through it.

Dr. William Morrow: I agree with that. In the case of Isaiah, the Isaiah who was addressing the exiled people of Judah, so chapters 40 to 55 especially, he needed to find a way to promote the resilience of a very dispirited and discouraged community. But he didn't do it by negating their complaints. He didn't just say, you've got no right to that. He did something else. Look at the very first chapter of that section: comfort, comfort my people, because Israel has paid double for its sins. The Isaiah of the exile admits there is excess suffering going on. What he has to do is find a way to account for that excess suffering, and he does it brilliantly in the servant songs, especially ending with Isaiah 53. There we find that the servant, who is to some extent also a symbol of exiled Israel, is suffering not only for the past but for future generations. So he's able to suggest that a redemptive experience is possible in suffering.

Dr. William Morrow: We can certainly grow through our experiences of suffering, but we won't grow if we start by denying their intensity, their complexity or their reality. That has to come first. Second Isaiah is brilliant as a pastoral theologian because he doesn't sidestep where he finds his people.

Johnny Ova: Does this change at all with the transition from the old to the new covenant, where we believe Christ is the fulfillment of everything? On this side of the cross, for lack of a better term, how do these lament traditions still serve us today?

Dr. William Morrow: So that's the question: just how far are we on this side of the cross? You'll get theologies suggesting we're so far on the other side of the cross that it's no longer possible to lament. Why would you complain? After all, we're children of the heavenly Jerusalem. We're going to a place where there will be no tears, where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. That has often been used in a certain way, and I've met people who understood that theology in a way that led to the suppression of legitimate grief and loss. How can I grieve the loss of my father or mother? After all, they've gone to a better place. If I grieve, aren't I simply testifying to my doubt in God? It seems to me we need a theology of the cross and the resurrection that affirms both continue to be potent experiences and expressions of the life of faith in this world.

Dr. William Morrow: Again, you often find churches with a mentality of victorious living. If you're living victoriously, how can you possibly admit that things aren't going well? In certain Christian settings where the emphasis is on success, if you're a Christian you should be living the successful life, right? So where is the permission to say to fellow believers, actually, my life is not much of a success right now at all? Yes, we have Christ risen and reigning in the heavenly places. That's right. But when God was a human being, he suffered illegitimately and painfully. We need to understand that when God enters this life, the cross is a continuing reality just as much as the resurrection is.

Johnny Ova: Powerful. Real deep, Dr. Morrow. This is going to be a real blessing. My last question for you today: for the listener going through something painful, feeling abandoned by God, wrestling with deep doubt, what can the lament Psalms offer that maybe other parts of the Bible can't, and what would be your words of encouragement to them?

Dr. William Morrow: My encouragement is to read them aloud. You can do that together with another sympathetic person. And my encouragement to anyone who finds themselves in that situation is to let the psalmists minister to them by legitimating their pain as well as their hope.

Johnny Ova: Amen. Dr. Morrow, thank you so much for your time. Again, this is a much-needed topic. There are so many Christians who have faith in God and believe God but are struggling and even confused about why they're going through what they're going through. Understanding these things on a deeper level, like what we've touched on today, is going to be very valuable to them.

Dr. William Morrow: It's been my pleasure talking with you, Johnny. Thank you.

Johnny Ova: I had a great time. Is there anything you have coming up, anything you're working on that you want to shout out, or a way people can get a hold of you?

Dr. William Morrow: If you ever want to hear me preach, I do preach occasionally, and St. James Anglican Church in Kingston, Ontario has a YouTube feed. You can find it on YouTube. I'll be preaching on July 13th and July 20th in the Sunday morning service. So if you want to hear what I'm working on now in terms of Bible and proclamation, you're more than welcome to tune in.

Johnny Ova: Wonderful. Again, Dr. Morrow, thank you for your time and for being our guest on the Dig In Podcast.

Dr. William Morrow: My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.