Holy Shit

At the end of July I developed two of my previous posts on lamenting (Lament and The Lost Art of Lament) into a sermon. As part of the sermon I invited people to write down their laments on a piece of paper that was photocopied to look like a brick. The staff at church and I assembled the bricks into a “wailing wall” that is displayed at the entrance to our worship space.

I sat down at my desk the following Tuesday and began reading through all the laments that were emptied out onto the paper bricks in worship on that Sunday morning. There were laments about the state of our nation and the political process. There were laments about the civility of our society, random violence and even specific examples taken from the news. There were laments about the aging process, health concerns, illness, broken relationships, and personal failures. And of course, there were laments about the death.

When I finished reading the laments I sat quietly for a time marveling at the resiliency of the human spirit.
Sunday morning worship is frequently a time and place where people put on a happy face and greet one another with a smile. I know from personal experience that people don’t always feel like praising God when they come to worship. Instead we tend to bury the hurt and despair for the sake of the community and try to find a quiet space within the worship to struggle with whatever darkness or grief that we have brought in with us. We don’t want to be a “downer” when it seems like others have so much to be thankful for.

But this exercise in public lament makes me think that there is a whole lot more grief, sorrow, fear, anger, and anxiety within the people who come to worship than we are aware of. As I glued each brick of lament to the wailing wall all I could think of was how much pain we each carry around with us. Every few minutes I would stop and look at the growing collection of laments in amazement and say, “Holy shit.”

Then it dawned on me: This literally is holy shit. All this grief, all of these laments are indeed the excremental parts of life. They are the byproduct of living in this world. They stink. We wish we didn’t have to deal with them. But everyone does. Even when things are going the way we know they should (such as our children growing and becoming more independent) we still find ourselves lamenting the loss of what once was. We can tell ourselves it’s no big deal or that we should just get over it but it still aches, it’s still unpleasant and it won’t go away until we do something about it.

When we lament we hand all this shit over to God and it becomes holy. That surprises us because we assume that God only wants our best. It was always the best of the crops that were given as a sacrifice in Bible stories. It was always the unblemished lamb that was offered as a sacrifice at the temple.

When I was in my early teens I remember having an argument with my dad one Sunday morning. I was whining about having to wear “church clothes” to worship. My dad insisted that we always give our best to God. That sounded right to me at some level. But a part of me knew that it was dead wrong. God loves us the way we are. We don’t need to put our best foot forward or to impress God with our best clothes. Besides, doesn’t God see us every day and know what we are like already? Was it really God or someone else we were trying to impress by being our best on Sunday morning?

I don’t think I won the argument that day. But I stand by my assertion that God doesn’t only want our best. God always allows us to bring the messes, the hurts, the pains, the anger, the fear, the loneliness, the confusion, the frustration and whatever else we are carrying around with our grief. Getting it out in the presence of God makes it holy. God shares the ownership with us and if it is God-owned it is holy. It becomes holy shit.

Once it is holy it is redeemed. It can be used to teach us something about ourselves, about our world and about God. It can lead us to new growth. It can be used to make us stronger. We can use it to help someone else through a difficult time.

All those laments on the wall at the entrance to the place we worship are holy. We wouldn’t call them blessings. At least not today. But hopefully someday we will look back and be able to tell the story of the way that all that shit in our lives was made holy. Maybe then we will be able to count them as blessings.