This week our church is beginning a new sermon series on the Psalms. The Psalms were primarily given to serve as a vehicle for the Church's corporate worship, giving varied and intimate expressions to our covenant relationship with God. The Psalms show us the kinds of sentiments God wants to hear as we pray, confess, and sing together on Sunday morning.

Surprisingly, the most common type of Psalm in the Bible is that of Lament. Psalms of Lament give voice to our suffering and remind us that we still live in a world marked by the consequences of sin and death. Tragically, such themes have all but fallen out of Christian worship. However, we still need these Psalms to make audible the inward groan all Christians experience as we wait for the redemption of our bodies (Rom 8:23).

For this reason, I believe it is appropriate for us to consider Psalms of Lament during the season of Lent (Feb 26–April 1). For some, the word “Lent” might feel foreign and unsettling. I sympathize. Like some of you, growing up I associated Lent with a medieval distortion where disciplines such as fasting were imposed by the church as a means of currying favor with God. Of course, that is completely counter to the gospel of grace, which is why I used to “give up” Lent for Lent.

In its undistorted version, however, the season of Lent is simply an opportunity to reflect more deeply upon the humiliation of Christ and to remember how God did not win our salvation from afar, “but made himself nothing, taking the form of a slave, … and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:7–8). Lent reminds us that Christ's victory came by way of his defeat; that death precedes resurrection.

The pattern holds true for Christians as well. To “know Christ”, Paul writes, is to “share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death …in order to attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil 3:10–11). Lament and Lent thus provide an opportunity to accept our mortality and acknowledge that we live in an age marked by suffering. Moreover, they also provide an opportunity to identify with the one who, through suffering and death, won our victory. My prayer is that through these Psalms we might better learn to lament, and in so doing better identify with the one who identified with us; that we might “suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom 8:17).