Wineskins Workshops May 18: Lamenting through the Psalms

For centuries the Psalms have provided people from the Abrahamic faith traditions words of comfort.

But they have also provided an outlet for lament…for crying out to God when things don’t seem to be right with the world.

In a recent Time Magazine article, former Anglican Bishop and biblical scholar N.T. Wright notes that while modern Christians often merely look to the scriptures to get answers, the psalms of lament remind us that answers may not be the point:

The point of lament, woven thus into the fabric of the biblical tradition, is not just that it’s an outlet for our frustration, sorrow, loneliness and sheer inability to understand what is happening or why. The mystery of the biblical story is that God also laments. Some Christians like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. That’s not the picture we get in the Bible.

N.T. Wright

In this time of tension between continued social distancing and economic & community restarting, many of us may feel the strain for which the psalms of lament give voice.

Join us in our New Wineskins Virtual Pub this Monday, May 8, as we look at some psalms of lament and see how they might both help us express our current state of angst and also give us a place to center ourselves in times of uncertainty.

If you have particular psalms you’d like to discuss, please bring them to the conversation!

Connection opens at 6:00pm
Conversation begins at 6:30pm