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Ashes To Glory
Michael Card says Christians need to learn how to lament before God
By: Warren Smith
Editor’s Note: Regular readers of The Charlotte World know that Michael Card is a favorite of ours. His long career of making great music, and his thoughtful and challenging books, have left a lasting mark on the Christian music scene and American evangelicalism. This is our third published conversation with him, the result of sitting down with him prior to his concert last month at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, which drew nearly 1000 people. Card’s latest book is “A Sacred Sorrow,” published in March by NavPress.
Warren Smith: The first time we chatted, we were at the Evangelical Press Association meeting in Atlanta, and you were in the formative stages of talking about Lamentations. You said, “I don’t quite have my hands around it yet, but I think this idea of lamentations, of being in lament before God, is somehow crucial.” In the intervening three years, that idea has come to fruition.
Michael Card: I took a couple of hard years on this topic. Took more than 280 pages of very technical notes. Then I saw that it could be organized biographically, in the lives of Job, David, Jeremiah, and Jesus. When I passed my ideas through their stories, their lives, it all came together. And now I can see that lamentations are absolutely crucial. Most of the Psalms are laments. They’re not a part of our worship, not even lamenting for our own sins, as we are clearly told to do. People who are suffering, who are angry with God – we don’t make a place for them in our congregations. But clearly the Bible makes a place for them. The Bible gives them words. In general, we don’t understand how suffering works, and how God uses suffering. Or maybe we don’t want to understand. But it connects with evangelism, with missions, with who God is.
WS: Given that, is it going too far to say that the evangelical church today, which ignores suffering and lamentations, is in danger of worshipping a false god?
MC: I don’t know if I would go so far as to say we worship a false god, but certainly an incomplete god. You could make a case that an incomplete god is a false god. And incomplete in one of God’s most essential attributes or qualities. God used suffering to save the world. When Adam and Eve got kicked out of the Garden of Eden, that’s when lament begins. If we don’t have that integrated into our understanding of God and into our worship and in how we live as Christians, we’re missing something important.
I have a friend who was in Jakarta. He came upon a Muslim man who lost his whole family [in the tsunami]. And my friend sits down and weeps with him. And the Muslim man says, “You must be a Christian.” My friend says he is. And the Muslim says, “I knew that because you were willing to weep with me.” That’s a huge thing. That real ministry.
The laments teach us that we take our confusion, our disappointment with God, our hurt, and our anger, and even our hatred, and we offer that to God as an act of worship.
WS: The last time we were together we talked about worship. One of the things you said that stuck with me is this: “Since when did worship become an industry? Worship is not supposed to generate profits, not is supposed to be a sacrifice.”
MC: I said that? That’s brilliant! But thank God more and more people seem to be getting it. God is raising missionaries from the Third World and sending them here. They know suffering, and the redemptive power that suffering has.
American Christianity, on the other hand, is all about getting fixed. It’s all about what can church, or God, do for me. That’s American Christianity. Power. Comfort. Healing. I want all my diseases healed. And, let’s face it, the Bible makes promises like that. Jesus says if you ask anything in my name. You can take all those verses and build what has been built by the prosperity gospel movement, which all of American Christianity has bought into, even those who roll their eyes at it. We still think God is here to make our lives better and to take suffering out of our lives, instead of bring meaning to the suffering that is in our lives.
That’s American Christianity. Power and money. But when you look at the Gospel, what do you see everyone do? Everyone lets go of power. Jesus, though he could have grasped equality with God, doesn’t do that. Peter, clearly the head of the church, becomes a missionary and disappears. They all let go. That’s the opposite of American Christianity. We have tactics and we strategize. And we think bigger is better. The Gospel almost tells us the opposite is true. That woundedness is where power comes from, the kind of power the Gospel talks about. What’s Jesus doing at the point when God is doing the most? When He’s on the cross, he’s lamenting. Psalm 22: “Why have you forsaken me?” Jesus has submitted, and God has put Him in the place where He’s suffering. That suffering saves the world. Is there anyone in America who wants that for himself?
WS: A couple of years ago you had some tough times. A bus wreck. Physical problems. Was your own suffering the genesis of your interest in these matters?
MC: There were times when I got hurt when my wife said, “Why do you have to study suffering and lamentations?” She had made the connection. There was a parallel. Sometimes I say, “What have I gotten myself into?” It’s a fallen world. We don’t adequately appreciate that. We don’t appreciate how devastating the Fall is. We’ve cleaned it up, and patched it up and built nice, big churches. But we live in a death impregnated world. You and I are going to die. All of us, or most of us, carry around in us a reservoir of real pain that comes from the knowledge of this truth. It either gets pushed down, or scarred over. But I want to be really clear that the purpose of what I’m doing is not therapy. “You work this out and then you can be healthy and wealthy.” The purpose is not therapeutic; the purpose of it is worship. So you can truly worship God with all your heart, and all your mind.
WS: So the condition of suffering is something that you can or should go through if you continue to live in this awareness of the fallenness of the world and the holiness of God?
MC: That’s right. And indeed the suffering will, or can, get worse, not better. Let’s say something happens in your life that causes you to see the redemptiveness of suffering. Cancer, or something. And let’s say you do come out the other side. I’m not saying that God doesn’t heal people. He does. But then what happens? We want to say, “God healed me and he will heal you, too.” But I believe that God calls you to enter into the suffering of other people, the way Jesus did. Suffering becomes a school that uniquely qualifies you.
I had a good friend who died of stomach cancer. When he first found out he had it, he had a big smile on his face. I looked at him like he was an idiot. But he said, “No, you don’t understand. People listen to me now like they would never listen to you.” And till the day he died he would say to people, “I have victory over cancer.”
What is the incarnation? Jesus becomes familiar with our sorrows.
That’s where I am now. I’m trying to understand what entering into the suffering of other people looks like. Not to be therapeutic. But because it is what Jesus did, and what God requires.
WS: It sounds to me that you’re proposing living “off the grid” in a significant way, like a John the Baptist or a Jeremiah. Is that possible?
MC: There’s something to be said for that. But I’m not really a prophet. I don’t have the call of the prophet on my life. I’m sort of a gadfly. I’m a person who thinks out loud, and lets people in on what I’m struggling with. (5/24/2005)
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