OMG – a common abbreviation used these days on social media and many users don’t know it, but it’s really a prayer, a lament. It means “O My God,” and in our Good Friday context the emphasis is on the little word “My.” Because even when we doubt and feel God is absent, we still own and affirm the relationship. My kids are still My kids even when they do stupid stuff I don’t agree with – same with friends, spouse, and colleagues. Real relationships and friendships have no expiration date, and certainly there is none with the eternal God of all creation who has been with us since the day we were born and will be with us for all eternity after our short sojourn on this earth is over.
Another common lament today is “Life sucks and then you die!” That one is not in the Bible, but it could be in the book of Lamentations. When Jesus says from the cross, “My God My God why?” Hear the My and not just the forsaken. And of course the lament of Psalm 22 is followed immediately in our Bible by the most familiar Psalm of the whole 150. Psalm 23 begins with “The Lord is MY shepherd.”
As we remember the brutal crucifixion of Jesus tonight I invite you to make that experience real. Feel it in your gut. Imagine or remember a time when you were in unbearable pain – either physical or emotional, and Jesus was certainly in both – a time when God feels as far away as the planet Pluto – at the death bed of someone you don’t think you can live without – when you hear a terminal diagnosis from a doctor – or your heartbreaks over a shattered relationship, or a job loss, or your financial security disappearing, or hearing on the news about unspeakable human cruelty.
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in his book “Night” relates an incident when he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp when a young man was hung and all the other prisoners forced to watch. Someone asks Wiesel, “Where is your God?” and his answer is, “Right there on the gallows.” Whatever and whenever we suffer God suffers right along with us.
One of my favorite descriptions about human lament is the one Brian and Barbara just sang for us, “Day is Done,” by Peter, Paul, and Mary. I asked for that song because of these lyrics which say, “Tell me why you’re crying my son; I know you’re frightened like everyone. Is it the thunder in the distance you fear? Will it help if I stay very near – I am here.” And if you take my hand my son, all will be well when the day is done.”
We really want to believe that “all will be well when the day is done,” but we don’t know how long that metaphorical day will last or if we can last that long. But what we do know is that it helps to have someone very near. It helps to be able to share out loud what our pain is with someone we trust and know will listen and just be present as long as we need them.
I just learned about a quote from Fred Rogers recently in our Books to Bridges book group. Mr. Rogers said, “What is mentionable is manageable.” “What is mentionable is manageable.”
Pain that we try to carry alone can suck the very life out of us, but if we can talk about it the power it has over us is shared and diminished – it becomes manageable.
Another lament in Psalm 13 begins with these plaintive words: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day long?” The point in sharing these cries for help is not to depress us but simply that it’s OK to lament, to doubt; those feelings are part of the human condition. No matter how strong your faith is it is hard when the foundations of your existence are shaken like an 8.0 earthquake. Even Jesus who had more faith than all of us put together cries out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” which is even more powerful in the Aramaic that Jesus would have spoken: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”
And as you heard in our scripture from Psalm 22 tonight we know where Jesus got those words. Jesus knew his Scriptures very well, and he knew his people for centuries had been no strangers to devastating loss. They were experts at lament. We even have a whole book called Lamentations in the Hebrew Scriptures, which is our Old Testament, devoted to nothing but laments. And part of the prophet Isaiah’s description of God’s Messiah is that he is a suffering servant who “… was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with grief.”
Ps 22 is typical of another source of laments the Hebrew people used in public worship. Do you know that there are more psalms of lament in the book of Psalms than any other type of Psalm? One of my favorites when I’m having a no good, terrible, awful day is Psalm 130. It’s called “De Profundis” in Latin and says, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!” Out of the depths loosely translated means “we are in deep do do.”
Psalm 63:1 echoes the same song: “O God, You are MY God; early will I seek you; my soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for you in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water.” I’ll bet most of us have been in such a dry and thirsty land or may even be there right now. That’s the message of Good Friday. I still remember vividly one such time in my youth. It was my Boy Scout Order of the Arrow initiation. I was maybe 13. I was led out along with my fellow scouts in total silence and darkness until I was tapped on the shoulder and told to stop and sleep right there, left alone in a strange, dark woods overnight with only a sleeping bag. I had no idea if anyone else was close by or where I was. It was the most alone I had ever been at that stage of my life
Kate Bowler, one of my go to devotional sources, wrote this blessing two years ago in 2023, but it is even more relevant today and is part of her Lenten devotions for 2025.
It’s called “A Blessing for when you need a little hope.” “These days feel heavy and dark, like hope packed up and left, and forgot to send a postcard. We cry: Where are the good things? And honestly, where are the good people— the sensible ones fighting for what matters? Why does it feel like bad stuff always elbows its way to the front, pushing everything good to the sidelines? We’re tired. Exhausted, really. Desperation is knocking, and it’s tempting to surrender. Blessed are you, who see the world as it is: the sickness and loneliness, the injustice that never seems to end, the greed and misuse of power, the violence and intimidation, the mockery of truth, and disdain for weakness, and worse— the seeming powerlessness of anyone trying to stop it. Blessed are you, worn down by hard-earned cynicism, running on fumes, with no promise of a destination. Maybe hope isn’t so distant. Maybe it’s there—small, persistent, and stubborn. May you grasp something in the heaviness. A glimmer of what could be, and walk, step by step, toward the possibility that goodness exists. Hope is an anchor dropped into the future pulling you forward, toward something better— even if it doesn’t feel like it right now.”
Yes, my friends, there is always hope somewhere. Even “O My God, My God” still claims God as ours.
This Good Friday feels more real to me because we are living in a time of great uncertainty in our country and our world. No matter what your politics you know these are unsettling times. But we aren’t the first to feel this way. The women at the foot of the cross and the other disciples hiding out somewhere had no idea what their future held – and neither do we. I invite you to put yourself in the crucifixion story – pretend we don’t know what happens on Sunday morning, and enter fully into the forsakenness of that moment with Jesus and his followers and friends.
What do we do when life seems hopeless, empty, dark, alien, and full of fear and uncertainty? Like Jesus we can call out “O My God, help us!” and God will answer. Maybe not immediately; we may have to go through a long Saturday of uncertainty, as long as that Saturday lasts, but there will be an answer because God does not forsake us, just as God did not forsake Jesus.
Even here in the darkness we remember that God so loved the world that God sent Jesus to love and save us. When all else fails it is that love that is eternal. God so loved the world, and as author Sarah Bessey says, we are called to love that world too and everyone in it, even, Sarah says, knowing that it will break our hearts – knowing it will break our hearts. To love means risking, being vulnerable, feeling pain — but a broken heart is so much better than not having a heart at all.
Good Friday 2025, Northwest UMC, Columbus, OH
The final scene of the excellent movie “Castaway” shows the star, Tom Hanks, in a barren landscape at the intersection of two deserted country roads. Hanks plays a FedEx pilot who is the sole survivor of a crash in the Pacific. He manages to stay alive on an island with no companionship except a volleyball he names Wilson. When he miraculously is rescued and returns to his former home after several years he discovers that it is sometimes true that you can never go home again. His wife having buried a symbolic empty casket after giving up hope of his survival has remarried and moved on with her life, leaving Hanks more adrift on land than he was at sea.
