Lament Is Worship Too: The Psalms of Complaint and Why We Need Them

The most honest sentence in the Bible may be Psalm 88:14: "O LORD, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me?"

There is no resolution at the end of Psalm 88. It finishes in darkness: "darkness is my closest friend." No turnaround. No "but God." Just a man alone, in anguish, speaking to a God who appears to have gone silent.

This psalm was written for liturgical use in ancient Israel. Which means that at some point, a congregation chanted these words together on the temple grounds.

The Lament Psalms We Stopped Singing

Roughly a third of the 150 Psalms are laments — individual or communal. Psalm 22 opens with the cry Jesus himself quoted from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Psalm 137 expresses grief and rage so raw that most modern lectionaries quietly skip its final verses. Psalm 44 accuses God of sleeping: "Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself!"

These psalms have largely disappeared from contemporary Christian worship. Modern services, particularly in the West, tend toward an uninterrupted arc of praise. The implicit message is that the appropriate posture before God is always one of triumph and gratitude.

The result, as the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann argues in Spirituality of the Psalms (Fortress Press, 2002), is a "loss of voice" — a worship practice that has no language for suffering, and therefore abandons suffering people to silence inside the very community meant to hold them.

Why Lament Is an Act of Faith

Here is the theological logic of lament: you can only complain to someone you believe exists and is listening.

The stoic response to suffering is silent endurance. The response of unbelief is meaninglessness — there is no one to address. But lament — the direct, anguished address of God in the second person, "Why, O Lord?" — presupposes that God is there, that he hears, and that his character is such that injustice should trouble him. Lament is complaint rooted in covenant. It is the cry of someone who still believes.

Psalm 22 begins in desolation and ends in praise — not because the circumstances changed between the first and last verse, but because the act of crying out to God is itself the beginning of trust. Jesus' quotation of this psalm from the cross was not a moment of unbelief. It was a prayer. The most faithful prayer imaginable.

What Suppressed Lament Produces

When lament is absent from worship, two things happen. First, people whose lives do not feel triumphant begin to feel spiritually defective. If the only language the church offers is celebration, the grieving, the chronically ill, the doubting, and the depressed must either perform an emotion they do not feel or quietly stop coming.

Second, the church loses its prophetic capacity. Communal lament — "O Lord, how long?" — is the biblical form of protest against injustice. Amos, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk all lamented on behalf of the community. A church that cannot lament together cannot speak with moral urgency to the world.

Recovering the Language

The invitation is not to manufacture sadness or to wallow in it. It is to bring what is real to God — including confusion, anger, and divine silence. As the theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff writes in Lament for a Son (Eerdmans, 1987), a memoir of grief after his son's death: "God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers."

To bring suffering honestly before God is to treat him as real, present, and capable of bearing the weight of what we feel. That is not the opposite of faith. It is one of its deepest expressions.

Lament is worship that trusts God enough to be honest with him.

Helper

Step-by-Step Practice: Praying a Lament Psalm

1. Choose Psalm 22, 88, or 42 and read it slowly in full — do not skip the uncomfortable parts.
2. Identify the specific complaint: what is the psalmist saying God is doing, or failing to do?
3. Write your own version, beginning: "O God, where are you in..." — naming something real in your own life.
4. Do not rush to resolution. Sit with the complaint for several minutes before moving on.
5. Close with the question: "What do I still believe about God, even here?"