Resurrection Lutheran Church, St Catharines

Have you ever come home after a hard day at work and your spouse asks you, “How was your day?” and then they are sorry they asked? “You will not believe the day that I have had!” begins a long tirade of one distress after another with barely space enough to inhale between them. Your spouse listens patiently and quietly while you go on and on and on about all of the horrible things that happened from the moment you left the house in the morning until you walked in the door again.

 

And the response to it all is silence. “Well, are’nt you going to say anything?” finishes the string of complaints. “I didn’t know if you were finished” is the hesitant response. The underlying meaning being “Will anything I say make things better or just add to the long list of distresses and hurts that have been inflicted this day?”

 

When we are exasperated, there is not much anyone can say to make us feel better. And although everyone has experienced one of those days, we have not yet mastered the proper response to someone else’s complaint. We might prefer to remain silent, but a response is called for, and oftentimes it is little help. For what can we do to fix things that have gone wrong over the course of the day? It is too late to prevent them from happening or to intervene and diffuse a hot situation. Everyone involved has gone to their respective corners and are not going to come out until tomorrow. And that means it is a long night ahead for those who are the only ears around to listen.

 

But they are not the only ears around. In our psalm today, the writer seems to have had one of those days at the very least, but probably more like one of those months or years or even a lifetime of bearing the burden of hurts and attacks. They may not have all come at once, but their cumulative effect has become unbearable. “My spirit faints... they have hidden a trap for me... no one takes notice of me... no refuge remains... no one cares” (Psalm 142:3-4).

 

It could be the voice of someone like the man born blind in today’s Gospel reading. Can you imagine what his life was like? Cruel tricksters placing things in his path for him to trip over; groping around to get back on track and no one noticing that he needs help; and the people who see his struggle but don’t care enough to lend a hand. Even after he was healed, the Scripture tells us how people treated him. He was taken for interrogation, he was kicked out of the synagogue community, not even his parents would speak up for him (John 9).

 

But there was one who heard his cries and pleas and complaints. Jesus found him. He found him when he was blind and provided healing, and then He found him again after he had been cast out of the community. Both times, somehow Jesus knew that this man needed someone to hear his complaints, someone who could do something about them, someone who would know what to say and what to do.

 

“With my voice I cry out to the LORD; with my voice I plead for mercy to the LORD. I pour out my complaint before Him; I tell my trouble before Him” (Psalm 142:1-2). That is what prayer is all about. There is one who hears your complaints. And it is not just you speaking them out loud in an autonomous cathartic action. For the psalm emphasizes not only the speaking of the voice but also the presence of the LORD to hear your voice.

 

“I pour out my complaint before Him.” God is present to hear your complaints because He is present with His children. He has promised His presence in His Word and Sacraments and that is where His children gather and in what His children live. As long as you have not cut yourself off from where He has promised to be, you can be sure that He is present with you to hear you.

 

But as a spouse may be present when you get home from a hard day, or comes home when you have been left there for a long and hard day and is silent, the LORD is never at a loss for words for you. He is never struggling to understand why things have you so upset. He knows what you have been through and how it has affected your spirit. He knows how people have sinned against you and how you have responded with sin against others. He knows the path that you have had to walk and exactly how you walked it.

 

Most of all He knows that you have felt attacked and cornered and abandoned. He knows that you have felt there was no avoiding the pain, no escape from the hurt, and no one on your side. So His response to you is to say that you are not alone, that someone does care for you, and that you are safe in His care. It is because you know that He has said these things to you that you feel able to lay it all out in front of Him. And sometimes in doing just that with your voice crying out, you find yourself restating His own promises back to you. Like the writer in today’s psalm, “I cry to You, O LORD; I say, ‘You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living’” (Psalm 142:5). Aha. So there is an escape, a safe place, a refuge. It is the LORD.

 

Spouses would do well to take a cue from the Bridegroom of the Church, here. Instead of responding to the cries and pleas and complaints with a helpless, “Well, what do you want me to do about that?”, you can be a place of refuge and provide security and warmth and love; a place to harbour throughout the storms of life; a place where your family member knows that they are loved. You are not going to try to trap them into saying or doing something wrong. You are not going to ignore their need. You are not going to carelessly leave them to deal with it all themselves. Rather, you are going to be a safe place where complaints may not be solved but are heard with compassion and responded to with care.

 

Yet, whereas a spouse or trusted friend or family member may not be able to do anything to directly solve the problem, the Lord has done something. When Jesus found the blind man, He was not only compassionate and empathetic, He healed the man’s blindness. He spit and made mud and put it on the man’s eyes. He told him where to go and wash to receive His sight. And he did as Jesus said and his sight came to him.

 

Jesus has done something for each and every one of us in response to our cries and complaints. He walked into the trap that the traitor, Judas, had set for Him. All of the disciples forsook Him and fled when He was arrested. He didn’t spit and make mud, but He was spit upon and He collapsed in the mud carrying the weight of our sins as He dragged the cross up the hill of Golgotha. His spirit fainted under the duress of what He suffered. And His dead body was put into the ground.

 

This is what He did for us in order to deliver us from the sins that others have inflicted upon us, and also from the sins that we ourselves have committed. He took all of our iniquity and guilt upon Himself, giving His holy body into death as the payment for it all. And the blood that He shed from the cross poured out of His wounds to cleanse us from all unrighteousness and shame. He suffered it all to an agonizing death in order that we might have an end to injustices inflicted upon us and also the just sufferings that we have deserved.

 

He rose from the dead on the third day, delivering not only Himself from death and the grave but also delivering us from despair and despondency. He will come again to judge the living and the dead, to mete out justice upon those who have been unjust toward us and to declare innocent and righteous all who repent of their sins and put their trust for salvation in Him alone.

 

He is the One to whom we can cry and plead and complain. For He not only knows full well what it is that we suffer, but He has done something about it so that our sufferings and sins will have an end. And so we see that Jesus did not just come to the man born blind in order to heal him, but Jesus also sought him out afterward when he was cast off and abandoned and alone. It was not only that Jesus wanted to solve the problem, but He wanted to let the man know that He was there to be with Him throughout this life and for eternal life.

 

Spouses and friends and family members cannot die for your sins or give you the gift of eternal life, but they can offer you comfort and safety by reminding you of what Jesus has accomplished for you. They can do that by providing a loving response to your hurts and complaints, such that you never forget that the LORD is always there even when your loved one cannot be there; that the LORD always hears even when you feel all alone in this world. Someone is paying attention to your cry. Someone is able to stand up to your persecutors when they are too strong for you. Someone will bring you out of the trap and into a fortress.

 

You are not alone. You are surrounded by people who love and care for you. You have a whole family in heaven and on earth who are the family of God, your brothers and sisters in Christ. They may not know every reason why you cry or every complaint that you have or every way in which people are against you, but they pray for you as we do “for the whole people of God in Christ Jesus and for all people according to their needs.”

 

The heights of heaven are filled with saints and angels who may not know what you are going through, but they are singing of your Saviour and leading the praises of the Church throughout the world singing songs of deliverance, of your Deliverer. They pray, “O Lord God, holy and true, how long before You will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6:10).

 

You are in the arms of the Church. You are a member of the Bride of Christ. His love is always there for you. His ears are ever open to your cry. He is your shelter and your fortress. He has provided for your salvation. “He will hide me in His shelter in the day of trouble; He will conceal me under the cover of His tent; He will lift me high upon a rock. And now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me” (Introit Ps 27:5-6).