Learning A New Song
Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893
We are taught there are various reasons to pray. I remember Tish Harrison Warren putting out a plea for “imprecatory prayer” during the early days of the bloody invasion of Ukraine. As we watched those first pictures of young mothers crouched down in subway corridors holding their babies, we wanted to invoke this ancient prayer: Lord, come now, banish the ruthless and violent in our midst. “Behold, the wicked man conceives evil,” the Psalmist cries out, “and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies. . . . His mischief returns upon his own head, and on his own skull his violence descends.’” (Psalm 7)
As we have watched and listened endlessly over these last days of the savagery of the Hamas invasion in southern Israel, this prayer, tragically, rises up to meet our needs once again. May God, yes our God of love, wreak havoc on the wicked, restore justice, and let people live in peace.
And then, through our own personal sufferings, we are taught to ask for help, for the restoration of health, whether physical or mental, for the pain of broken relationships, for the sadness of grief over the death of someone we love, for the unexpected disruptions of our dreams, for broken peace in our families, our churches, our organizations—please God, we pray, see us through our suffering and restore us once again to health.
All this is appropriate for our prayer, of course, but I am learning to pray another kind of prayer, perhaps a kind of prayer sometimes neglected. It is the prayer of thanksgiving, the prayer of gratitude, the prayer of praise for a majestic God who hovers over us listening as we cry out in our pain. When we see just even a glimmer of light, we need to shift then to praise and gratitude.
This morning I was reading Psalm 40. Here is a plea for deliverance from suffering, but here also is this pivot toward a song of thanksgiving.
1 PATIENTLY I waited for the LORD;
he bent down to me and listened to my cry.
2 He raised me out of the miry pit,
out of the mud and clay;
he set my feet on rock
and gave me a firm footing.
3 On my lips he put a new song,
a song of praise to our God.
Many will look with awe
and put their trust in the LORD.
4 Happy is he who puts his trust in the LORD
and does not look to the arrogant and treacherous.
5 LORD my God, great things you have done;
your wonders and your purposes are for our good;
none can compare with you.
I would proclaim them and speak of them,
but they are more than I can tell. Psalms 40:1-5
The first part is what we usually think of as prayer: Lord help us, give us patience while we wait on what you have in store for us. In the 1st verse there is that image that God has already “bent down to me and listened to my cry.” I am stunned by this image of God, who, even in his magnificence, stoops down to listen to our cry. He chooses to come very close to us in our pain.
But then the story shifts as he lifts us “out of the mud and clay” and sets us once again on solid ground. Wow, the Lord is answering our plea: “Happy is he who puts his trust in the Lord.”
It is then we must begin our praise: “Lord my God, great things you have done; / your wonders and your purposes are for our good.”
So what is the story of prayer here? Suffering will come, no doubt about it. And we are invited, always, to pray for deliverance from suffering, relief from pain, restoration of peace and health. But while we wait, sometimes tilting toward despair, God gives us hope that he will surprise us with new life. Something new is about to break out. And this is when we find that new prayer. This is when we find “a new song” on our lips, we learn “a song of praise to our God.”
Let us learn to sing this new song of gratitude and praise, for ourselves, to be sure, but as well for our tormented world. Through it all, the personal darkness and the pain, and even the violence and destruction, let us find that new song that “your wonders and your purposes are for our good.”